Clever... from Wall Street Journal
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Advice On Controlling Government Spending
1. Does govt activity compete with private enterprise? Then stop doing it. If private enterprise can provide it, let the market work it out. Eliminate the activity and cut the spending by that much.
2. Does govt farm out an activity to private enterprise to execute? Then just stop doing it. Calculate the govt cost of decision making, tax collecting and administration of the activity, and cut spending by that much.
3. Does govt actually provide the goods or service? Then corporatize the activity and eliminate the monopoly on the service, and end the spending on the activity.
Example #1: The government has the securities and exchange commission to regulate the financial markets. Short sellers are necessary and sufficient to the task. Eliminate govt oversight and bring spontaneous order out of the chaos govt introduced. Short sellers spotted Enron, Madoff, Countrywide and every crisis where govt regulators could see no harm. Not only do shortsellers spot the problem, they effect the correction. You and I pay if the govt is wrong. Shortselllers pay if they are wrong.
Example #2: Road building. Govt is in the biz of road building, but it has no equipment or such, so it contracts it out to road builders. Just get out of the biz.. what roads get built, where and when is not up to govt. Let property rights and real estate markets decide what roads get built where and when. Most paved roadwork in USA by far is laid without any government association. Think shopng parking lots, access roads, driveways. Government participation is very low, and what they do can be done without them, at a much lower cost. Calculate the govt cost of decision making, tax collecting and administration of the activity, and cut spending by that much. (When trying imagine govt out of roads, think what happened when govt got out of the internet, to a degree.)
Example #3: Where the govt actually provides the service, eg, fire, police, education - corporatize (not privatize) the service and end the state monopoly. The government delivers the mail, and has a monopoly on the delivery of first class mail. Corporatize the post office: take all of the assets: land, equipment, rolling stock, goodwill, pensions, etc, and divide it up among the workers, management and pensioners and issue stock thereof to all concerned. Then eliminate their monopoly. Cut tax collection and spending associated with the the activity.
Like road building, state provision of police, fire and education pales in comparison if what private industry provides in many ways: proportion, cost, efficacy, and satisfaction. Most states demand all communities put themselves under police control, so there would have to be legal changes for this.
But once the changes came, we would not have the problem of govt workers deciding whose houses are saved and whose burn down, for lack of $75 fee. In a free market, volunteer firemen let no house burn down. Lucky for USA, most firefighters, by perhaps 10 to 1, are volunteer.
Where the state provides the service, and no free market provision is extant, then the govt can do that. I can't think of anything. Ribbon cutting at a new private enterprise park? I dunno...
Give me a tough one: immigration. The solution is to let the market handle it. Get rid of passports and border patrol. Anyone crossing the border has to go somewhere, meaning arrive on someone's property. That immigrant is either welcome or not. Not welcome, life is harder than in say, Mexico. back to Mexico go the unwelcome. The welcome stay as a guest of the farmer or hotel who desires the immigrant to stay.
Why should everyone else pay for an activity that should be up to property owners? Why should you pay to maintain a passport service that issues me a passport for when I want to travel to Hong Kong or Moscow? Really it should be a problem for me and Moscow, not you, and certainly you should not have to pay for my elite activity.
Coming back to USA, (or is it Union of Soviet American Republics, USAR, now?) I have the same problem as the Mexican immigrant: does anyone welcome me, or do I have my own property to go too? if I am not a property owner, or loved, I am out of here.
Charities thrive in free markets, and they dispense love where markets have no business. Charities are property owners too. Let the Salvation Army and Catholic Church decide how many immigrants it wants to support on its property.
Austrian economics has worked all of this out. It is rationally and well formed (although there are raging debates within the community of free market adherents.) Proper order comes out of the markets spontaneously.
Right now USA is bombing and bombing our allies and paying our enemies to protect our troops in Afghanistan. We have more than lost that war, it is more than over, we are just destroying ourselves harder and faster. Our generals, who are promoted by congress, are unworthy of our soldiers.
When this Hamiltonian madness falls, will we embrace Jeffersonian freedom? Or will when one demon is cast out, seven come to take its place?
Lennono on Overpopulation
Rockwell featured this clip in honor of John Lennon's 70th birthday...
Lennon was hated by the powers that be for his effective antiwar stance... those same powers wish you to believe there are shortages, which require your fear and government intervention... the last 5 seconds of the 90 second clip are wonderfully compact...
Ono: Distribution problem, not overpopulation problem (right on)
Lennon: Problem of distribution, and problem of diversion of attention from real problem of war to contrived problem of overpopulation.
Dick Cavett: You see it as a distribution problem... I think you're wrong.
Lennon (in Liverpudlian): O, I don't care...
Give Peace a Chance.
Competition is Not Elimination
Competition is to "strive with" and combat is to "fight with." Competition leads to more excellent division of labor, were people ever more specialize for the benefit of consumers. Combat leads to destruction. In a boom and bust economy, the distorted market signals sent by currency and interest manipulation result in mis-allocation of resources and malinvestment, for which there is no adjustment except bankruptcy and re-purposing assets on what excess capacity is formed. In a free market there is rarely creative destructionism.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Research Technique - Now You Know
Sometimes legal cases can tip you off to the name of a big supplier, in this case a lined school paper supplier.
U.S. Coalitions Charge
Antidumping Fraud
Meanwhile, another coalition, the
Committee to Support U.S. Trade Laws, was
recently rebuffed in an effort to appear as amicus
curiae in a challenge to an antidumping
administrative review. In Association of
American School Paper Suppliers v. United
States, Slip Op 10-22 (March 3, 2010), domestic
producers challenged the final results of the first
review of an antidumping order against Certain
Lined Paper Products from the People’s
Republic of China. A Chinese manufacturer,
Shanghai Lian Li Paper Products Co. (“Lian Li”)
intervened to oppose the action.
I was researching something else when this case was mentioned, and I noted the suppliers name. This source has long beena good one for trends and info re US Customs and govt policy.
ObamaCare Repealed!
If you are McDonalds. Or 29 other companies. Big Biz can be free of the govt, the crushing of small business will continue as planned. A federal judge is seeing to it. Now this does not mean the cost is going away. It just means the cost of the McDonald's portion of the plan you will pay. The reason McDonald's never objected to the plan is because they know they would be exempt. I haven't eaten in a McDonalds in 40 yeas because there food is bad. People should avoid it now because of the hidden costs to you of McDonald's being in business.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
It All Goes to The Landfill
Well not all, but almost all of it does. As you get on your hands and knees to sort garbage to appease the recycle gods each week, under the state religion, you should know most of your work ends up in the landfill anyway. How come? Because the govt told you there was a problem, and then told you they could handle the solution. Govt tends to solve problems that don't exist. I am not saying there is not a lot of excess trash, just that if you feel good about recycling, you do not feel bad about over packaging. Over packaging is good for big biz. Recycling is a great way to increase costs of govt and then spread that money around on govt minions. The solution is to end all recycling that is govt offered and subsidized, and watch the trash yield drop like crazy.
I learned that almost all recycling ends up in the landfill when I was dealing in glass, and visited the recyclers. They made no bones about it, most of what they processed got shipped over to the hole in the ground eventually.
When my daughters were required by the govt to "learn" about recycling in grade school, and "do a report." I told them to call the recycling provider for our neighborhood and ask to speak to the PR person, and ask about where it goes. First daughter said the receptionist who answered the phone confirmed most of it (almost all) goes to the dump. My daughter did not feel free to report the truth, so she went along like a good Bush Youth and towed the party line. The other a few years later had a similar experience.
When California was paying the highest for recycled glass, entrepreneurs from Nevada and Mexico were shipping in fully loaded containers of the stuff to locations at the borders. Expenditures went through the roof... serious money made until California backed off.
George Soros says he is a billionaire taking advantage of stupid government policy. Why not?
See The Beauty In Ruins
As the elite who preyed upon the mundanes during the real estate boom fly over we who are to be ruled, they are able to take in the absolute beauty of the ruins they created. Ruling over ruins has its benefits. Thanks to Sash for this link.
Microsoft Wants To Be the TSA of the Internet
Microsoft always was a creature of government. If you trace the growth of govt from 1980 to now and microsoft sales, they track remarkably similar.
Something like 60% of Microsoft sales come out of one box, Office... a software program that governments actually buy, and issue to every govt worker so those legions of non-essential workers can surf the web for somethign to do while at work.
Pernicious disease outbreak is associated with war. You can inoculate and vaccinate all you like, but if there is war, something else, one of the billions of available nasties in our systems that you have not prepared for, will take over our war-weakened immune systems. Death to countless noncombatants! The public health model pretends it fights disease by loading people up with chemicals when in fact it is just a free rider on the peace movement.
Disease is a big factor making people anti-war. If warmongering politicians want to lessen objection to war, then setting up a pretend prophylactic system makes citizens less resistant to war.
If there are not enough disesases then public health officials will spread them around, such as the Centers For Disease Control (or its predecessor) in USA did in Tuskegee and South America, to name two known events. The flu hoaxes of the last couple of years were compliments of the CDC.
As Microsoft fails with big govt (live by big govt....) Microsoft has come up with a plan that matches all of the above. First make a software product that invites disease by designing software that has no protections against it. (Hey, on a PC no one is really doing any work anyway... it's not like people who use Apple Computers.) Then when the problem is real bad, propose to grab more control by solving the problem you made.
Microsoft proposes to set up a public health style system to control who goes on the web. You have to let the govt search your computer before you connect to see if you have any viruses. They won't say it that way, but when the govt goes into your computer, you have no more of an idea what they are doing than when they load you up with chemicals, for your own good.
If there is a problem, then let the people who suffer, the customers of the ISPs, buy a solution that the free market offers. Just as the airlines are better equipped and more motivated to keep their planes safe than the TSA, so are the ISPs than Microsoft and the govt regarding virii.
And just like the people who believe themselves otherwise unemployable and take a job looking through other people's things in a country where it is unconstitutional to do so, Microsoft finds itself otherwise unemployable, so suggests it becomes the TSA of the internet.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Burning Down The House IN Tennesee
Big story a fire department let a house burn for lack of payment of the $75 fee. The firemen standing by doing nothing, were just doing their job, like most city firefighters most of the time: nothing.
People are saying this is what would happen if we did not force people to pay for government services. What is missing is what would happen if there was competition. Would the free market provide fire service at $2 a year? Would the insurance company covering the house pay the fee? What we cannot know is what would happen if we did have freedom to contract, and freedom from govt monopoly.
Most firefighters in USA are hardworking men and women. And volunteers. The vast majority covering most of the USA territory work for nothing except the honor of serving their community. Firefighting was something one did, like a charity or the Red Cross, helping out in a disaster. No volunteer firefighter would stand by and watch a house burn because he did not get his $75. Only a government worker could do something so cold. Perhaps police and fire could be returned to volunteer status.
Food Fight
Lew Rockwell has a good article at his sight on food in USA. I was speaking with a colleague from way back when last week, lamenting the paucity of young people starting businesses. She said, "they are... it is all related to food." I had to stop and reflect... of my 3 kids, each is somehow anchored in food.. one a cook, another writing, a third is into the science. I am not objecting, in fact, I sit down to some very fine meals when we get together.
Before I return to food, I do think my colleague is right, but in our day, the movement was not limited to one aspect... fashion, architecture, entertainment and indeed food were all apart of the changes. Bur maybe the emphasis is more focussed in complement to the viciousness of government intervention in the food supply. As long ago freedom from war and to pursue happiness stimulated the economy, perhaps now freedom from frankenfoods and freedom to eat healthy will spread into other fields. In any event, good food seems to be where the ramparts are, where the trade leads are.
A gaffe is defined as when a government official speaks the truth. Earl Butz was Nixon's ag sec and in 1972 he made famous the line "get big or get out," and pushed fencerow to fencerow planting. Of course govt policy has ruined small farmers, and fencerow to fencerow planting destroys the habitat of the myriad bees and moths that pollinate crops. With monoculture bees, we have a crisis in the one pollination bee left we see disease destroying their numbers, threatening our food supply. He also exemplified the raw Darwinian racism of those given to government office. Nice work, Earl.
Not that Earl was an aberration. He only spoke put of school. The entire system hates freedon, as this Obama administration lawsuit pleading states, in part:
a. There is No Absolute Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food.
Although “[t]wo of the earliest right to privacy cases,” Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), “established the existence of a fundamental right to make child rearing decisions free from unwarranted governmental intrusion,” these cases do not “establish an absolute parental right to make decisions relating to children free from government regulation.”b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health.
Plaintiffs’ assertion of a “fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families” is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.c. There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract.
Understand that A, B and C above is not the law, it is just what the Obama administration is arguing how the law should be understood. If you read the Transformation of American Law by Morton Horvitz, you'll anticipate that the courts will eventually agree.
The movement is gathering the left against big business and the right against big government, and showing the two are actually one. This is an important advance.
Thomas Jefferson had views on this topic:
“If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” ~Thomas Jefferson
Monday, October 4, 2010
How America Works
Martha Stewart was tricked by federal prosecutors into a meeting, in which her statements to the feds were eventually the basis of a conviction. Never mind a Secret Service agent lied on the stand giving evidence against her, Martha Stewart went to prison. Here is how our government works:
At the federal prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity—say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."
Games are where we learn the rules and patterns of cooperation. Here senior prosecutors are teaching the junior prosecutors how the game is played. There are alternatives to this system, ones entrepreneur can fashion. It is yet another trade lead open to all.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
China Buying Resources Worldwide
But with what money? I have yet to read or hear anywhere how China is paying for these massive purchases of world resources: oil, copper, timber. China is the #1 or #2 holder of USA debt instruments, which are liquid and negotiable. It would be fascinating to learn if China was unloading these instruments in exchange for resources. It would at once unwind their position, and spread the USA debt worldwide, further undermining USA reputation worldwide, if and when (necessarily when) the debt goes bad.
What is wonderfully bad about this as well, USA taxpayers are on the hook for $2 billion in loans to Brazil to transfer USA technology to Petrobras to help Brazil make these sales to China. (The story is only controversial in that the right wing press is blaming Obama for the loans, when he was about as involved as I was. But then, if we blame Obama enough, we'll forget the Bush policies.)
It is clear to me our system serves up strictly third, fourth, fifth rate talent into power... whereas the Chinese are fielding first stringers. We are relentlessly stupid in trade and policies, but then, perhaps, results reveal intentions. Like the Soviet Union, the game is over, now it is a question of just stealing what is not nailed down on your way out. Sigh.
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