Thursday, July 22, 2010

Cops Crush Small Business

In the Seattle area we have a kid who managed to elude the cops for 2 years, living off the land and occasionally burglarizing a store for food and necessities, or firing up a stove in a restaurant to make a meal, when it was closed.  he also figured out how to pilot a plane, making it as far as Bermuda before the law caught him.

Another kid from Seattle a few years back could not be bothered with tickets and security to travel so he easily foiled the TSA and airline security to get from Seattle To Dallas.  Oh, I forgot, the nine year old stole a car in Lakewood to get to SeaTac airport, picking up a police chase on the way, which he eluded.  Of course, it was an airline clerk, not the be-badged TSA that eventually caught the wee stowaway.  (If you want airline security, let the airlines do it. )

Now comes a story out of Valencia California where a transient cracked open an abandoned bar and grill and began serving drinks.  Business was good for four days until a cop became suspicious and arrested the entrepreneur on several state offenses.

Why do we arrest such people?  I'd love to hire all three, although I am sure none will ever work for anyone else.  What brilliance, moxie, and inspiration.  Someone should add an good education to that native intelligence, and get out of the way.  Instead, they will be trained in prison how to be a real predator.


Stupid Government Warning Labels

From advising pregnant women not to get drunk, to warning us cigarettes are bad for us, and remember to wash wool in cold water, the government employs tens of thousands of people to make sure we are reminded of what we already know.  The cost of these labelling requirements in direct money outlays can be calculated, but the cost in management time and creativity is inestimable. It is just one of many reasons USA is not as competitive as it could be.  Now someone has pushed back, with a label that could apply to any president since R. Reagan, (but not Jimmy Carter, since he s the best president since Grover Cleveland.)


Thanks to Dennis for this ti...


Tuesday, July 20, 2010

African Development

Jeffrey D. Sachs has one of those glowing academic histories and is now tenured at Columbia.  he was in the middle of the tectonic economic shift in South America, Soviet Union and Africa in the last 25 years.   He is advisor to top people everywhere, Time calls him one of the most 100 influential people, and he writes books such as The End of Poverty.  Sachs cares enough to drop his voice an octave when he speaks, like Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger, to add a touch of gravity to what he has to say. His views on economics and development you will find parroted by any college freshman, a tribute to his ubiquity.  Sachs heads up something called the Earth Institute, I guess just in case if Jesus returns He will know who to contact.

In Europe Sachs advised the formerly communist countries to accept shock therapy into capitalist systems.  It largely worked.  What was once a mess of communist waste fraud and abuse is now a capitalist mess of waste fraud and abuse.  Some people long for the good old days of communism.  Many Russians became billionaires, and many more became quite wealthy in this time, Sachs included.  Many Russians were sent into dire poverty, and suicides increased terribly.  We we learned is what we already knew, the people who run the old rotten system are the ones who will run the new rotten system.  WE also see that if a socialist system is dismantled without a people ready to accept relative freedom, the result is catastrophe.  Those calling for an end to the federal reserve bank do not see that the likely result of the resultant disarray would be widespread poverty.

Since those days Sachs has moved on to Africa.  He no longer calls for capitalism. In spite of the hash the West has made of its own economies, in spite of the fact aid programs institutionalize poverty, Sachs advises massive aid to solve Africa’s problems.  

One of Sachs students, the lovely Dambisa Moyo is perplexed to see although she learned studying under Sachs at Harvard that development came through free markets, for Africa it is aid, aid, aid.  It’s curious to her that the program changes when the subjects are black. Moyo calls for foreign investment and development, and is thus the darling of China and Forbes magazine.

Here is what everyone in the commanding heights avoids:  there can be no peace and prosperity without freedom: freedom from interference to contract, and freedom to pursue economic goals.  This freedom, naturally, is constrained by property rights.  Africa must be one of the toughest places on earth to start a business, not for lack of initiative on the part of the people of Africa, but for the interference of those western trained elites who do the bidding of their foreign tutors.

Africa is constrained by degenerate systems imposed from the west.  The rest of the world is denied the good of African ingenuity as long as Africans are suppressed by Western ministrations.  The best move we Americans could make is to cease all aid immediately, cut all agriculture subsidies in USA (which translate directly, in part, into war in Africa) and then let the slow steady positive progress of economic development, one small business to one small business, proceed unabated.