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>>That’s how you end up with burdensome mandates that deter businesses from operating efficiently at all. It’s also how you end up with massive numbers of people employed by government.

The “burdensome mandate” argument would have some actual weight if the stock market did not reach a new record level a couple times a year. The decision makers in the board room and in DC all know that they are creating profits without jobs, so the government creates fiat currency to prop up the economy that the little people live in through direct payments and an inflated bureaucracy that employs a huge number of people in the only good paying, secure jobs that are available to working Americans.

We had a functioning economy before personal computers and automation and we built things that lasted many years and were repairable. Everyone acts like a small decrease in economic efficiency will doom the economy. When your only metric is the value of the stock market, I guess that’s true. But if your metric is the economic health of the American people, then the picture begins to change.

The stock market reached new highs over the last few years even as profits have stagnated. Check out the P/E ratios on the major stock indexes, and you'll see that they're trading at very high levels right now. It's not profits that is driving Wall Street -- it's a lack of alternative investments that offer any yields at all.

I agree with a lot of this, but keep in mind that our economy is driven by consumers, not employers. If one contractor offered to replace the roof on your house for $10,000 and the other offered to do the same job for $9,000, would you even think of hiring the more expensive guy to do the same project? Maybe a tiny fraction of Americans would, but most people would not -- even if the more expensive contractor had 10 people working on the job and the less expensive one had only 5.