Posted on 07/31/2011 8:25:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
What’s more important: the wellbeing of each individual citizen in America, or the wellbeing of government?
One of the reasons that the United States occupies a distinguished place in the world is because the American founders prioritized the wellbeing of the individual person. Government, the founders believed, should be the servant of individual people. This was a rather significant departure from the view that individual people should be the servant of their all-important government.
Unfortunately, many Americans today prioritize the wellbeing of government above all else. Take for example our President, Barack Obama.
Throughout the debate over our nation’s debt and deficit, President Obama has made it clear that politicians and bureaucrats must be permitted to go on spending money as they see fit. Any limitations on government borrowing or government’s ability to collect taxes will result in calamity, whereas borrowing and taxing will enable all the societal goodness that can exist.
The President’s vision defies historical fact. But here’s a quote from a press conference on July 16th, where he addressed the public pressure to curb government spending, that he and the Congress have been facing:
“….Some of these decisions are tough…but they don’t require us to gut Medicare or Social Security…they don’t require us to stop helpin’ young people go to college…they don’t require us to stop, you know, helpin’ families that have got a disabled child…they don’t require us to violate our obligations to our veterans…and they don’t require quote-un-quote job killing tax cuts…”
Much of this is simply rhetorical. Nobody has proposed “gutting” Medicare or Social Security. Nobody in Congress has suggested that college students or parents of disabled children should be abandoned.
But notice President Obama’s choice of words about taxation – “job killing tax cuts.” Nobody who has even a remote acquaintance with basic economic concepts actually believes that allowing private individuals to retain more of their own wealth decreases “job creation.” Indeed it’s just the opposite – the more wealth that individuals can keep for themselves, the more likely it is that they will invest money in business enterprises that will lead to employment opportunities. Yet, there he is, the leader of the free world, fussing over alleged “job killing tax cuts.”
This “government is everything” mindset doesn’t begin and end in Washington. Last week I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh engaged in conversation with “Carl,” a 24 year old caller to his talk show who was arguing that we all must sacrifice more (especially “rich” people) to keep the government goodness flowing. A portion of the conversation went like this: Carl: A tax cut depletes necessary revenue needed to keep the government operational and functioning.
RUSH: Carl, that's not what a tax cut is. A tax cut is you work for a living, and you are paid X. At the present, you have a tax rate -- let's just pick one, may not be accurate -- of 30%. Which means that 30% of every dollar you earn goes to Washington, but the money starts with you. It's yours. You earned it. You did what was necessary to be paid that money.
Carl: Exactly.
RUSH: If a tax cut happens, and your tax rate goes to 20%, then all of a sudden you get to keep 80¢ of every dollar you earned rather than 70¢ of every dollar you earned. How in the world is that spending?
Carl: Because when I spend that money out of my own paycheck, that's money that I spend on my own life. When the government spends my tax dollars, they're spending it on necessary infrastructure that's to keep the entire government running, to keep schools running…
RUSH: No... Wait a minute. So are you telling me that you believe that it is more important for government to spend whatever money it has than it is for you to spend whatever money you earn?
Carl: The government spending tax dollars benefits everybody, whereas me spending my own money benefits me…
Apparently Carl hasn’t been taught that when he spends his own money, it benefits the person who grows his food, manufactures his clothes, and so forth.
Rush’s conversation reminds me of a question I recently encountered while serving as a panelist at a university forum on economic growth. As a student took to the microphone and noted that she had read my bio on my website, she stated “your degrees are in literature and philosophy, and you’re not even an economist, so why do you think you have the right to speak about economics?”
I reminded the woman that in America, I have the right to speak about nearly anything; the university had the right to not invite me; and she had the right to not listen. I also suggested that the question about which is more important – individual people, or the government – is really a philosophical question more than anything else, so as a trained philosopher I was probably qualified to participate in the event.
President Obama will likely never embrace this “people before government” philosophy. But will America ever return to it?
Thursday, July 28, 2011
The Worstest Generation: Hope They Die Before I Get Old!
"....Obama is simply the final fruition of that retrograde impulse. If he prevails in 2012, it certainly won't be a result of the post-boomers whom he treats as his personal piggy bank. Rather, he'll need widespread support of the greedy and entitled Worstest Generation. ....."
I heard that call.
As a student took to the microphone and noted that she had read my bio on my website, she stated “your degrees are in literature and philosophy, and you’re not even an economist, so why do you think you have the right to speak about economics?”
Typical liberal drone. Their first inclination is to reserach the person making the statement or position they diagree with, versus researching the assertions and facts offered to support it. Their uniformly perverse unwillingness or inability to consider, let alone listen, to a viewpoint contrary to their vile ideology and worldview demonstrates that they are in fact devoid of reason or intelligence.
The reply of the author to the lunatic was perfect.
Not this “blame the baby boomers” crap again. We are the ones paying the most in SS taxes and who will receive little, if anything, in return.
I agree with a comment made by j.argese on another thread; these arbitrary groupings of people based on when they were born are just used to pit people against one another and have no meaning:
“I was born in 1961. When I first became aware of term “Baby Boomers”, I was probably 11 or 12. It was defined between the years of 1946-1960 and maintained that span through the 1980s up until the early ‘90s.
It was about 1993 or 1994 when the date span started to creep to 1961, then ‘62 to ‘63 and ended at the current 1964. My age group 1961-1964 were considered “Tweeners”, not Boomers, not Gen-X.
These terms are nothing more than sociological claptrap designed to pigeonhole.”
Keerect!. He was born, raised, educated and pampered as a Marxist all his life. He cannot and will not ever change. An Elite Marxist to the core.
BTTT
The collective = good, the individual = bad. This guy is just repeating the Meaning of Life as he was taught in government schools.
That idea is dead. I specifically remember when Bill Clinton promoted government to full "partner".
They are on the cutting edge. They are consistent in their principles. They have the rare skill in putting words together that are understandable....and most of all, right on target.
I never fail to read their output..and I'm much more informed for it.
Thanks to Kaslin for posting these articles.
Leni
We are all living in the age of the American version of fascism and have been from nearly the beginning of the 20th century.
We're all just serfs to the vaunted progressive elites who created and continue this system for their own advantage.
I just hope that sometime in my lifetime, we'd actually give capitalism and freedom a chance so we can all see how it works.
Yet it points out the larger problem of getting the multitude of young people who have been nourished by the efforts/sweat of older working people to understand that one should not be living off the sweat of others if at all possible. By personal experience I went through a time in my life believing it was necessary for all people to share in the misery of others though I knew there were rich, very rich, poor, very poor and those lucky ones in between. I since have come to believe that it is mostly individual choice as to what I deserve and in which category as compared to others.
Is that what Obama is talking about when he tells us to eat our peas?
It’s a simple of extension of liberal statist thinking, you must have the right credentials; bestowed by liberal colleges, before you can speak.
Never mind that the idiot asking the question didn’t have their degree either.
The famous Laffer Curve shows that when government has a zero tax rate, it gets zero revenue. When it has a 100% tax rate, it gets 100% of nothing and thus has zero revenue. The curve bulges in the middle to show that there is a rate of taxation that produces the greatest amount of revenue to government.
Conservatives argue that when tax rates are too high, lowering the rate will increase government revenues. This implies that tax rates had been above those that produced the bulge. Lowering the rate moves us down towards the bulge in revenues.
Liberals argue that if only we could increase tax rates, we could have more revenue to spend on “vital programs”. They assume that tax rates place us below the bulge.
But both of these positions miss a fundamental point. Consider that when there is zero government, the resulting anarchy makes society unlivable and thus destroys liberty. But when government takes over every single function of life, there cannot be any liberty at all. The preamble of the Constitution tells us that we form a government to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. The Constitution then goes on to describe a structure of limited and enumerated powers. Too little government as well as too much both destroy liberty. So, obviously there is an optimum level of government, a bulge in the middle, of optimum liberty. I call this the Liberty Curve.
In advocating lower tax rates, Conservatives are advancing the wrong aspect of government. Our obligation to ourselves and our Posterity is not to optimize the amount of money the government has to spend by optimizing tax rates, but to optimize the level of liberty that each citizen has by optimizing the level of government! As government grows, our liberty must retreat. But for our own protection, we must have some level of government. I know that level is far less than we have today.
We would not be in the mess we are currently in if our focus had been on liberty as compared to spending. Even the idea of running a perpetual deficit destroys liberty, for it places all future taxpayers in a form of debt-servitude from which we cannot allow escape, lest government be unable to service the debt incurred by those long dead. We can start down the Liberty Curve by spending less than we take in. We are not anywhere near doing that with the current debt and budget debate going on in Washington at this very moment.
Futher, the Rahn Curve shows us that when tax rates get above about 20%, people who do have some measure of control over how they structure their financial affairs take active steps to decline to pay more in taxes. It is just a fact of life that any politician attempting to increase revenues by raising taxes will be disappointed, and any plans and budgets that depend on those higher revenues will fail.
see: The Rahn Curve and the Growth-Maximizing Level of Government
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj6lRFXC5rA
The only way out is to spend less and shrink the size of government. The only way out of the debt morass is to boost wealth creation. The only way to boost wealth creation is by giving entrepreneurs more liberty to create more wealth and jobs. But government cannot pick and choose who will start the next Apple or Microsoft. But it can pollute the risk-taking environment so that nobody will be willing to invest their time or money in new ideas. When government tells such people beforehand that you can only deduct $3,000 of your losses, the more government tells us that it will take of any gains, the fewer people there will who will try. And right now, we cannot have too many people starting up or funding new business ventures! So, apart from cutting government spending, we need to do something that big government types just refuse to do: give people more liberty.
Allow me to add that putting government before people must put funding of government before private property rights. Apart from the wreckage that happens when government mucks around in the economy, socialism is based on the denial of property rights.
Property rights are essential for the following reasons:
Without property rights, there cannot be a free market in the exchange of goods and services.
Without a free market, without a willing buyer and a willing seller, it is IMPOSSIBLE to know the real price of anything.
Without the price, it is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to make the necessary economic calculation, that is to know when the inputs to an activity (labor or raw materials) costs more or less than the output of an activity (the value of the thing produced or service performed).
Without the economic calculation, it is IMPOSSIBLE for an economic activity to make a profit and thus be sustainable. Conversely, it is IMPOSSIBLE for an unprofitable economic activity to be sustainable.
Without profit, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have resources from which to feed, clothe and house those who are involved in the activity.
Without profit, it is IMPOSSIBLE, to have excess resources to set aside in the form of savings.
Without savings, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have capital to invest in new economic activities.
Without the ability to have property rights to those savings, it is IMPOSSIBLE to evaluate all of the other possible economic activities to find the ones that carries the least risk when compared to their anticipated return, and to properly allocate savings to the most promising investments.
Without new economic activity and without the ability for others to invest as it suits the saver, the economy cannot have the opportunity nor the resources with which to adapt to changing circumstances, let alone to provide jobs and resources for the next generation.
Without honest money, government is free to destroy the very means of accounting for, saving and exchanging wealth. Without the assurance that money will retain its value, people will not save but instead will either consume excess wealth or will store it in forms like fixed assets that preclude investment in new economic activity.
In other words, without property rights, a free market, price information that allows economic calculation of profit, the ability to save with the assurance those savings are free to be invested when and where the saver sees fit, and without honest money, a sustainable economy is IMPOSSIBLE.
Without a sustainable economy, it is IMPOSSIBLE for humans enjoy any level of prosperity. This is exactly the reason that North Koreans are reduced to foraging for bark and grass to fill their empty stomachs. Their government forbids property rights, forbids a free market, destroys price information, confiscates savings, forbids investment and has no economic growth.
Liberty, property, profit, investment, capital and honest money are the only means of creating a sustainable economy. All other ways have been tried and have failed utterly. Yet, somehow, property rights, profit, capital and honest money are still considered to be evil, particularly in the thinking of people still yearning for the perfect socialist Utopia. Socialism is in reality the economy of death.
So, apart from cutting government spending, we need to do something that big government types just refuse to do: give people more liberty.
NOBODY "gives" anyone else liberty, least of all those in charge. Hence, yours is a terrible remedial conclusion.
Liberty is a function of individual self-control, paradoxically a self-imposed restriction of latitude, whether to impose on others or to ask of them. It originates in moral choices, hence its direct dependence upon a direct relationship with God. When we vote, we select an agent to exercise those choices. It is the only direct means we possess to correct this mess, those indirect being the exercise of influence over our neighbors in their voting choices.
The real problem we face is that self-restraint is opposed by every institution of public education, from kindergarten through post-graduate, from mass media to commercial advertising, all of which are the nearly exclusive province of the left. Why? Because to control public opinion is to control the use of property, effectively, to eliminate a culture of self-restraint is to control the individual.
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