The Free Market Manifesto

For Bob

My wife's cousin, Bob, a loyal union man and Democrat whether he admits it or not, has a new talking point. It's actually the same old talking point from the last election that says conservatives only complain and that they have no "solutions". He concludes by suggesting that "you (that's me) spend less time on points indicating you are well read and pose solutions to the ills and maladies that you think are holding us back as a nation."  I keep quoting people who also have good points. He seems to find that troubling. Apparently I shouldn't appropriate the ideas of others, but rely only on original thoughts. Sorry, but I don't get talking points from the RNC or some George Soros sponsored media advisory nonprofit. I get my opinions and ideas from original sources and it's my habit to give credit where credit is due when I can. That's just my style. Not trying to show off.

Bob demands I pose solutions to the ills and maladies that are holding us back as a nation. Okay here's my manifesto on the subjects he suggests:

1. Healthcare - Get the government out of it as far as possible. Put Medicaid and Medicare on a more business-like basis.
2. Taxes - Reduce the size of government and reduce taxes accordingly so as to stop punishing economic risk takers who are the builders of a healthy economy.
3. The environment - Make whoever makes a mess, clean up after themselves. Stop using the EPA to punish political opponents or to suppress economic development.
4. Minimum wage increases - Quit artificially jacking up the minimum wage. It's an entry level wage. The economy will be healthier if we quit trying to solve income inequity. Workers will learn skills and go get better jobs and the shortage of minimum wage workers will inevitably raise wages for entry level jobs because employers will have to compete for entry level workers. Shut off illegal immigration so we don't have a fear-based slave worker population which keeps entry level wages for unskilled labor artificially low.
5. Public works - Interstate highways are crucial to the movement of troops so is part of the defense responsibility of the federal government. Ports are essential to defense. Air traffic control and airports are crucial to defense. Parks and wilderness preservation is essential to helping maintain a healthy environment. That's a federal responsibility. Protecting interstate commerce is a public work. That's about it.
6. Education - None of the federal government's business. States and local communities need to keep their tax dollars for education and handle education there instead of sending a hundred bucks to Washington and getting less than 50 bucks back for education.
7. National security - We have too many bloated, self-important security agencies. Stop creating new ones but combine and reduce the size of them and have them actually enforce the law instead of deciding what we will tolerate for political reasons and what we'll enforce.  Make it cost less and work more efficiently.
8. Worker protections - It's a state job, not a federal one. Workers are quite capable of protecting themselves. States are far more effective at protecting workers. Quit spending money on feel good programs, cut the DOL down to bare bones and let states handle their own business.
9. Civil rights - The federal government has the duty through law enforcement to protect the rights of citizens under the constitution. Just enforce the law for crying out loud. 
10. Untreated mental illness - Get the federal government out of it. Back in the 80s the Democrat congress passed a law making it virtually impossible for families to hospitalize their mentally ill family members. You practically have to kill someone to be committed anymore. This federal approach to mental health, backfired badly and resulted in millions of seriously mentally ill people signing themselves out of treatment centers and creating a massive homeless problem almost overnight.  
11. Defense - (I added this one to Bob's list) This is a federal government responsibility. The military is to protect us from foreign and domestic enemies. This does not include American citizens unless those citizens attack their fellow citizens. They are not to be used for law enforcement in general. They are strictly here to protect American interests and security from foreign enemies and to protect Americans in the world. It's one of the few things the government does well, although politicians have used military funding to provide pork for their home districts. That needs to be dealt with. Reducing the size and scope of government will help the media and government watchdogs to spend more energy on those kinds of abuses of power.
    
12. The economy/unemployment - (I also added this one to his list).  Quit diddling with the economy. Keynesian economic theories have resulted in more than half a century of economic meddling by government, often with disastrous results. Nixon's price fixing intervention threw us into a recession. Carter inherited a  recession when taking office and proceeded to try various Keynesian style government interventions and only succeeded in making the whole thing worse. Inflation and interest rates soon reached their highest levels since the second world war. GHW Bush went along with Democrats on taxes and triggered a recession. Fortunately, Clinton had the good sense to not mess with Republican avoidance of meddling and tax reductions and saw the recession end and an extension of the Reagan boom for another 6 years. GW Bush allowed his Democrat congress to meddle with the economy in order to preserve funding for the war on terror and got a nasty recession for his troubles. Obama took over with a Democrat congress and proceeded to go full Keyensian, trying stimulus, taking over industries like healthcare, and increasing taxes on the rich. Unlike Clinton, he failed to cooperate with a Republican senate and house and extended his inherited recession by another 4 years. He proceeded to declare that five million unemployed had actually left the workforce on their own accord in order to create the illusion that unemployment was reduced. The solution to the economy is for the feds to quit diddling with it. I don't think they can do that. 

Basically, the solution for all of this is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and make it more effective. I don't have a lot of hope that that will happen. Power attracts the corruptible and the federal government has become very powerful. We may have reached the tipping point to totalitarianism.

© 2017 by Tom King

 

Little Faces Looking Up - The Urge to Leave the Earth

From: Trader to the Stars

• ....tools settle the possibilities: you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to one planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with all its basic machines of commerce and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

- Poul Anderson

Upcoming Dragon X rendevouz with the ISS

I admit it, the idea of commercial space travel makes me happy.  Since the turn of the century when it became apparent that NASA was losing its drive (not to mention its funding) for space travel, innovators in the private sector have stepped forward, apparently eager to pour their fortunes into efforts to find new an innovative ways to claw our way off this ragged planet and to make the effort pay. 

With only a stingy bit of encouragement, spaceships began to be built and successfully flown. Burt Rutan reached the edges of space to win the X-Prize and is pressing hard to build a fleet of reliable space planes to carry ordinary people into orbit soon.  Space-X has already successfully flown orbital vehicles of their own design. Others ideas are on the drawing board and even the big guys like Boeing and Lockheed who have already built spacecraft for NASA are looking at joining the commercial space industry on their own hook.

We seem to know that the Earth is too small a place for mankind to remain trapped here much longer - not without very bad things happening. We see the signs of what Poul Anderson predicted in the quote above. Concentrated here on Earth, we tend toward collectivism (socialism, communism, progressivism, call it what you will).

God, in His wisdom, decided to give us free will and let us choose what we did with it. In many instances, we have chosen poorly. In others circumstances, we have chosen bravely and well.  When we lift our eyes to that which is greater than ourselves, we tend to choose unselfishly and it is well for humanity. When we surrender to despair and decide that what we see is all there is, we tend to choose selfishly and humanity finds itself under the thumb of one more would-be god who thinks that by accumulating power over others, he can somehow forestall the death and oblivion beyond which he cannot see.

We are born creatures of an infinite universe and designed for immortality. It is why we hate death and it is why we look to the stars with such longing. We do not like being cooped up in one place. It is why as children we long to run free in fields and woods. It is why we climb trees and mountains and jungle gyms. When our eyes are lifted up we are fearless and free.

But, when we turn our gaze downward, our eyes on our feet, our hearts embracing fear, our vision becomes so constricted we cannot see beyond the walls that hem us in and hold us to the ground. When the Earth and this one life become all there is for us; when we cannot imagine that we will ever move out among the stars; it makes us mean and ill-tempered.  

Tom King