Until Further Titling – Week 2; Covenantal Love
As expressed in a post yesterday, the Occupy Wall Street people seem to be missing the point, as most are Obama-y, class-warfare types. Money isn’t the problem, at least not in itself. The state is. Let’s take a systematic look at on member’s proposed demands, which my dad sent me today…
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Too funny. Why not just raise the living wage to $100/hr? Or $1000/hr? Or $1000000000/hr????? What would it do to legally raise the wage without a rise in production levels? It would increase unemployment, for one, as an employer would no longer be able to afford to employ as many people as they do at the current rates. Next, it would, as a result of the employment being lower at any firm, lower production… See where this type of thinking leads us? Everyone is poorer as a result of legislated policies like these… Bastiat has much to say about the assertion about trade tariffs (I will address this soon, as I have been meaning to), but here is the baseline: tariffs make everyone poorer, for the fact that the people may be buying from abroad, but they have to spend more of their money to buy goods. All around, people suffer for tariffs…
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Instead of creating a monopoly, how about removing some of the government-created barriers to health insurance working, such as interstate competition, the AMA’s legal monopoly over licensing, risk-pooling requirements such as forcing companies to include those who smoke cigarettes in the same category as those who do not, etc. Medicare, massive in funds as it is, also creates a virtual monopoly of payment by which the consumer does not care about the cost of care or what he is getting versus what he is paying. End it. Decouple insurance from private employment. Do whatever you can to insurance to ensure that it is INSURANCE and not post-hoc socialist medical expense (which is what is the problem in the first place)…
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Who will pay for people to sit on their asses all day and never add anything to society? This would subsidize unemployment completely, which would give no one any reason to get or keep a job. Why not just be communist and pay everyone the same no matter how productive or lazy they are?
Demand four: Free college education.
Again, who will pay for this? And what will it do for education to let everyone in?
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
I agree with this one in part, but it is not the government’s job. The market will do this when the cost of oil and other resources becomes such that it is better financially to develop new sources of energy. Which is coming soon…
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
A trillion dollars… Which would need to be borrowed, effectively surpassing our ability OVERNIGHT to pay back any of the debt, as the interest on the debt would be more than the budget for all of next year. Next step is printing the money quickly to pay for the trillion dollar infrastructure plan. But doing that would most definitely cause hyperinflation. Sure, these things might eventually pay themselves off (do government projects ever?), but there will be millions of people with worthless money who won’t be able to afford food or gas.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.
Until something better is found, nuclear power is by far the most efficient and also one of the safest ways of generating energy. Again with the trillion dollars? Does this person even realize how large that number is and what it does to our economy when the money supply grows by that much?
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
Define rights first. Positive rights? Absolutely not. Negative rights? I’m all for it. But only if it applies to governmental agents. Anyone in the private market should be able to treat whoever however. Racism is despicable. But it is not the job of the government to tell me how I can discriminate. Next thing, they will be telling me I am discriminating by marrying an Asian.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Not possible with the current welfare state, unless we want hyperinflation to pay for it.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
This one is complicated, because democracy is inherently flawed. More on that in posts with the tag “democracy”.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
This would destroy all wealth on earth overnight. How many things exist or are being produced because of money financed by loans? In fact, one might argue that all money is in itself a form of debt. How would we wipe out money? Would a barter system be more convenient? Further, this absolutely discourages personal responsibility. Why should anyone ever want to loan another person money? I would love to hear the justification behind this one, because frankly I am dumbfounded…
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
How will I know what someone’s credit rating is and extend them a loan without risk? How would credit function at all?
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.
They already can. But the Wagner Act gives unions too much power, because it allows people to use force to ensure higher wages. It is not fair to the producer or employer, as it gives an unfair advantage to employees, who are not coordinating production…
These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.
Again, jobs are not an end in themselves. If we lived in the Garden of Eden and all of our wants were instantly satisfied, what would be the point of people demanding full employment? Consumption and employment are not the ends that an economy should push toward. Production is. There are huge differences in the two, as one the numbers of the former two can be manipulated and falsified and do not lead to wealth. Production necessarily leads to wealth.
This guy gets it:
I’d vote for him.
I don’t think I need to remind anyone who reads this blog – the problem is not capitalism. It is corporate-government alliance. The Federal Reserve is a criminal enterprise that counterfeits money and steals the value of everyone’s money. The cost of it is just beginning to mount. I believe anything else is misled…
What is the better way? To tax everyone who holds U.S. dollars by inflating the money supply while simultaneously spending the money of future generations, or to allow even poor men to grow richer by holding onto that which grows in value over time? The answer is very clear to those who have not been seduced by the power fiat money gives rich men over poor. But macroeconometrics will fail, and if we continue down this path our economy will too… “Applying macroeconometric models to questions of fiscal policy is the equivalent of using pre-Copernican astronomy to launch a satellite.”…