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

 

Retail Workers, Dishwashers and Ditch Diggers, Oh My!

I get stuff like this (right) all the time from, to borrow a phrase from Tom Paxton, the "smart alecs" out there who believe they are part of the hereditary ruling elite. As you know I blame Walt Disney for promoting the idea of hereditary nobility long after the idea wore out its usefulness. Too many impressionable kids grew up believing that they were, in fact, the long lost princess (even some of the boys). But really. That's a fairy tale (which also may further explain a few things).

Did you read what you just wrote people? You start out with the standard false assumption in order to make a point that has no real basis in logical thought. The false assumption - that retail workers, dishwashers, ditch diggers and laborers are pretty much too stupid to get training or, at least, shouldn't have to be bothered to make any effort to improve their job situation. They are saying that somehow, just because these jobs exist, we should subsidize them in order to insure they don't get all riotous and mess up the elistists' front lawns.

The assumption is that if you subsidize these positions at rates of pay considerably above what the market offers, that somehow everybody will be happy and peace and joy and choruses of Kumbayah will break out. This is based on Maslow's Heirarchy of Need and idea socialists have seized on to justify placing all governance in the hands of a few elite smart people. The theory goes that if you give people assurance of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and some sort of busywork to do, they will spontaneously want to move up the heirarchy and want to be productive, creative and useful citizens to the collective that gives them the basics. The Russians discovered, for instance, that when you took the farms away from the farmers and paid them what farm hands get paid, they weren't interested in managing their farms and doing all the extra hard work that farm owners do. They wound up with everybody on the farm doing the minimum and everybody began to starve (except the farmers that were growing stuff for themselves off the books).

Unfortunately for Marxist theory, Maslow was wrong. People without adequate food, shelter, clothing and healthcare do self-actuated, highly productive and creative things all the time - whether because they just are that sort of people or because they are hoping for a reward or payoff as a result of what they are doing. The theory is balderdash. If you pay people a lot of money who have no skills, then they have no motivation to learn any new skills or even the bare bones requirements of their jobs. They just sit around drawing a paycheck and doing as little as possible.

I have been an employer. I took over one small company that was losing $5000 a quarter. The staff was demoralized. Nobody had had a raise in ages because there was no money to give them raises. I came in and worked for six weeks without pay, Found a grant to cover my paycheck and began overhauling the organization. Instead of raises being given by time served, I looked around, found a couple of people who werer still working hard and trying to do a good job and gave each a small raise (remember we were still losing money). I visited my people and asked for their input as to how we could improve things and make their lives easier on the job. I acted promptly to get them what I could and gave them timelines for when we would get the rest. I stayed there late at night painting and fixing things up working hours I was not paid for. I got us some nice carpet for the rooms they worked in. We organized their equipment and made it easier for them to get to without having to run begging to the bosses for what they needed. Even got them some equipment they needed. 

In the first quarter we broke even and had a 20% growth in customers. By the end of the year we had cleared $19,000 above operating expenses and had a cash reserve. I gave more raises and worker performance improved except in two or three cases where the employees continued to do the minimum possible and grumbled because they weren't getting raises. As they began to get the idea, they began to do extra and to put more energy into their work. As they did so, we made more money and I was able to give more raises.

Most employers do that kind of thing. If they don't, you shouldn't work for them. If people didn't tolerate bad employers, they would have to pay far more than the good employers for help. Then bad employees could take the jobs with the bad employers, make more money for putting up with lousy working conditions and everybody would be happy. Right?

No, of course, not. If people stopped working for a bad employer who didn't give them a fair wage, the employer would have to improve working conditions and give a fair wage in order to have an adequate number of employees to conduct business. Bad employees, no matter how well paid, drive away customers, so the owner, in order to make more profits would have to pay an increased market price in order to get good employees.

That's how free market capitalism works. Artificially bumping up wages of entry level workers does nothing to improve their working conditions, their performance on the job or the way they take care of a business's customers. Mostly it just gets minimum effort employees replaced by higher paid people who can do the slacker's job and their own or the operation gets roboticized.

Now stick out your tongue and say "nyuh-uh!" That always works. Maybe call me, what was it? Oh, yeah, "mean-spirited and ignorant." Well I turned a losing business into a profitable one with a healthy cash reserve, 30% customer increase, improved facilities, better program and better-paid employees in 9 months. And I raised my entire first year's salary from outside sources. Years later after we ended the project, I still have former employees on my Friends List on Facebook.

So tell me, what have you done, oh great expert on how business should run, that gives you expertise in this matter?

Sheesh!© 2015 by Tom King

An Open Letter to the Federal Election Commission

Dear FEC Commissioners,

The right of free speech, especially that of free "political" speech is enshrined in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I am, therefore concerned that the FEC is considering ways to further increase the FEC's power to regulate political speech online. The federal government has already over-stepped its bounds in regulating the messages I am able to see and hear on television, radio and other public forums. The FEC already regulates the paid placement of political advertisements on the Internet. We do NOT need to give the government power to further regulate free speech by individual Americans.

Existing regulations already suppress a robust debate over our nation's futureis. Increasing government meddling with the sacred American right to voice his opinions in the public square is a very very BAD idea, I don't care whether you are on the political left or the hard right. Regulating what can appear on blogs, social media, video platforms and other places online is a clear violation of the First Amendment. The Internet IS the modern public square. We have the right to assemble there, to speak there and to worship there if we wish and no politician has the right to take those sacred rights from us in order to protect his or her cushy government job.

We know who to turn our backs on without our nannies in government having to tell us what is worthy to see and hear and what is not. Handing to a government agency the power to control what we see and hear opens the door to abuse by those who disagree with what is being said by American citizens. The problem with bureaucracies with too much power is that eventually they seek, not to protect the rights of the citizens they serve, but instead to protect their own jobs in government "service". If you wish to "serve" do so by protecting the citizens you represent. We can decide for ourselves what we believe. We are not a stupid people. We realize that there are liars in the public square. You do not need to point them out to us. There are frauds and phonies out there raising their voices and demanding our attention. We know that already. Leave us be to deal with them ourselves.

As a citizen I should be able to say what I wish in the open forum of the Internet so long as I do not harm others or suppress the speech of others. Remember this. Just because a majority of opinions being expressed in the public square disagree with your own, does not mean that those opionions are wrong or that they need to be suppressed. Sometimes, you simply lose the debate. Sometimes even, if the citizens dislike what you're doing, you may lose your job if you do not act in good faith to represent those citizens. That is one of the great checks and balances we citizens reserve as a way to limit the power of government to oppress us.

Placing increased power to regulate speech on the Internet in the hands of any government agency is not only dangerous, but also hands the Commission the kind of power to suppress that almost inevitably expands to suppress economic activity and screw up whole economies. The Internet is the last bastion of free market capitalism we have left. We tamper with that at our peril. Like the market for goods and services, the market of ideas and beliefs has made America strong for almost a quarter of a millenium. We do well to continue to protect what has made us strong.

The Internet is the the most democratized marketplace we have in this rapidly changing world. It is given to you to protect that marketplace for the free exchange of goods, services and ideas. You are not called to shape that marketplace to your own ideas of what is fair and just and right, only to keep it open and free. Let us decide what we want to listen to and who we want to ignore. We are grownups. Please do not arrogantly treat us like dim-witted children. In doing so you insult all Americans.

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully,

Tom King

Top Five Reasons Obamacare Won't Save Us From Big Pharma

"It'll save money. Yeah, lot's of money. It'll save, uh
TRILLIONS of dollars. Yeah, that's the ticket!"

Obamacare is supposed to save us from evil corporate medical corporations, Big Insurance and Big Pharma!  Here's why it won't.

1. The Locus of Evil:  If big medical, big insurance and big pharmaceuticals are all evil, why is big government miraculously not evil.
2. Depantsing the Consumer:  In one stroke Obamacare turns the consumer from a customer into a commodity. By removing free market forces the government takes away the only tool consumers have to control prices (voting with their feet) and replaces free markets with top down price controls.  Historically that never works. Nixon tried it and nearly killed the economy. Carter tried it and did!
3. Empowering the Big Guys:  It is far easier to bribe government officials than it is to bribe 300 million consumers.  Now that we are being forced by the government to buy a product (medical insurance), the giant corporations that are supposed to be so evil don't have to do marketing studies or offer deals to attract customers.  They merely have to offer trips to Tahiti and all expense paid conferences in Las Vegas to the right government officials to get the price protections they want.
4. DeCapitalizing Healthcare:  By killing free market forces altogether, medical providers no longer have to make their customers happy.  Their customers have to make the medical providers and their government handlers happy in order to get services.  This was explained to me once by a public transit official as the difference between private and public transportation. The same principle applies to "public" healthcare.
5. A Falling Tide Sinks All Boats:  The idea that forcing everyone to pay for medical "insurance" will cover anecdotal problems like pre-existing conditions and unusual medical problems is simplistic and wrong.  Forcing everyone into the insurance market merely covers the cost of all that government supervision that will be added on to the cost of medical care.  The continued problem of unusual and expensive medical conditions will merely force reductions in the quality of care of all consumers.  Socialism's great strength is in its ability to share misery equally among everyone (except of course for the leaders who get a better deal because they are smarter and wiser and we couldn't get along without them or at least that's their story and they're sticking to it.

And like this post which promises ten reasons in the link, but delivers half what it promised, Obamacare is pretty well guaranteed to deliver far less than it promises too.

© 2013 by Tom King