There is absolutely zero real reduction in spending in DC which means lots of borrowing and printing – er – I mean QUANTITATIVE EASING coming our way.

No one can really predict when the fecal matter will strike the cooling device but when it does we would be wise to have a system of hard money in place. A collapse of the dollar resulting in a return to barter would be absolutely devastating and the best buffer against it is to begin now establishing a real monetary system that will survive hyperinflation.

The video below shows how several states are doing this and I highly recommend your state get on the bandwagon.  This is a wonderful, prescient and necessary step for State Legislators to take in protecting their citizens from the utter disregard for economic reality displayed by the lunatics running the asylum that is the Nation’s Capitol.  I would recommend one shift from the proposed legislation and that is to allow all gold, silver, and copper to be legal tender not just that issued by the Federal Government.  It is only competition among mints that keeps the value of the coinage stable.

If you live in one of the states shown in this video call your State Rep and Senator and support the bill.  If your state isn’t already on this call and ask why!?

I’m talking to you, Texas!

From the Mises Daily:

The Myth of Free-Market Healthcare

Mises Daily: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 by Kel Kelly

[The Case for Legalizing Capitalism (2010).]

The AMA Monopoly

While most people believe that our healthcare industry is one comprised of free markets, it is anything but. The industry is completely distorted by government manipulation.[1]

To start with, the American Medical Association (AMA) has had a government-granted monopoly on the healthcare system for over 100 years. It has intentionally restricted the number of doctors allowed to practice medicine so as to raise physician incomes artificially. The primary way it does this is by using the coercive power of the state to restrict the number of approved medical schools in operation. After the AMA created its Council on Medical Education in 1904, state medical boards complied with the AMA’s recommendation to close down medical schools.

Within three years, 25 schools had been shut down, and the number of students at remaining schools was reduced by 50 percent. After three more years, 10 more schools were closed. Since that time, the US population has increased by 284 percent, while the number of medical schools has declined by 26 percent to 123.[2] In 1996, the peak year for applications, only 16,500 candidates were accepted out of 47,000. While high rejection rates can be common in many schools, applicants to medical schools are usually among the brightest and highest-quality students and have put themselves through a very costly admissions process.

High rejection rates are why so many aspiring doctors attend medical schools in the Caribbean, where they are prepared to be American doctors. The medical monopoly also marginalizes or outlaws alternative or slightly alternative (i.e., competing) medical practices, along with nurses and midwives, who could perform many of the tasks doctors do today.

The AMA also has monopoly power over the state boards, which issue licenses. A physician can practice only by having a state license (licenses in general exist primarily to prevent competition). Each state has licensing boards consisting of AMA members who decide which applicants, according to them, are competent and morally fit. The boards also have police and enforcement powers to monitor their own kind and keep as many nasty incidents as possible out of the public eye.

The state medical boards masquerade as consumer-protection agencies. Instead of revealing competition to the public as something that lowers doctors’ incomes, the AMA and medical boards present it as something that must be stopped in the name of keeping patients safe.

As a further understanding of the intertwining of government and our healthcare system, consider the following summary by Henry E. Jones, MD:

Most members of the state medical boards are appointed by the governor. State and county medical associations, medical specialty societies, large medical group practices, HMO’s, health insurance companies, chain and wholesale pharmacies, and large hospital chains contribute heavily to the campaigns of candidates for governor and attorney general. Thus, the governor appoints to the state medical board those desired by the medical monopoly. Doctors selected by the medical monopoly for appointment to the state medical board can be counted on to cooperate. And it works the same way with the State Board of Pharmacy. The medical monopoly contributes heavily to congressmen and maintains one of the best-financed and most effective lobbying programs in Washington, D.C. It is important that the AMA, the state medical board, and the state attorney general in each state work hand-in-glove to further the interest of the medical monopoly.

Do We Need to Be Protected?

One might retort that restricting the supply of doctors is good, because only the smartest, most knowledgeable, and safest people should be responsible for our very lives. But under this argument, we could ask, “why stop at the doctor-limiting threshold at which we currently operate?” Why not restrict the supply further so that we have only the top thousand or even the top ten doctors in the nation to take care of us? In that case, having only the most qualified doctors, even more people would die each year for lack of affordability as well as lack of opportunity to actually get in to see the doctor.

Look at it another way: what if we limited the number of automobiles in the same way? What if we were only allowed to produce cars with the quality and safety of the top Mercedes, BMWs, and Rolls Royces?

In terms of assigning grades to the quality and capability of the doctors, what if we should restrict the number of doctors to those who are grade B and above, but we have already placed restrictions at a higher level, such that we only accept A+ doctors? Just as a Saturn Astra or a used Ford Escort delivers a valuable service to many, so would a B or even a C doctor, particularly for non-life-threatening issues. There are many of us who would pay, say, $30 to visit a C-grade doctor for a cold, versus $100 to visit an A-grade doctor.

In a free market, any doctor could practice medicine. But would we then have any and every shingle-hanger calling himself a doctor only to kill someone due to misdiagnosis or by removing the heart instead of the spleen? No, we wouldn’t, as I explain shortly.

But even if that did happen on a rare occasion, the number of deaths resulting from such an event would likely be much less than the number who die currently from current doctors’ mistakes (see below), or from the number of those who die from a lack of affordable healthcare (I know of one person who, because he couldn’t afford treatment for his Parkinson’s disease, committed suicide last year). Besides, in those terrible rare cases, individuals would have at least had the opportunity to choose what they thought was best for them.

In reality, the doctors who would practice would be those educated to do so. Besides, any unqualified doctor who did bad work would lose clients and go out of business as word got around. Above all, there would be private ratings agencies comparable to other consumer-reports services telling us how various doctors rank, and which doctors have high accident or casualty rates.

At the least, why not allow competing medical associations? We could have four or five other associations with the same criteria of competency as the AMA. We could allow an absolute rather than a rank-ordered threshold to be met in order to practice medicine. Or, why not permit many fewer qualified people to practice medicine, and then let individuals choose between higher-priced AMA-certified and lower-priced non-AMA-certified doctors?

Healthcare “Insurance”

The other major problem with our healthcare system is our third-party payer system, where we rely on someone else to pay most of our bills, i.e., we use “insurance” that is funded mostly by corporations and the government. Though this system originated with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield entities early last century (which obtained government-supported advantages over competing private systems), the third-party payer system really took hold with the advent of government regulation during WWII. Because economy-wide prices were rising due to the government’s printing of money that paid for the war, politicians imposed universal price and wage controls. Because businesses could not compete for labor by bidding up wages, they began to compete by offering special benefits, including paying employees’ healthcare costs (which socialists now see as something incumbent on large companies).

When something is free or mostly free, people demand more of it. With someone else paying their bills, people make more trips to the doctor, they don’t negotiate against increasing prices they face, and they don’t balk at more and more superfluous tests and more specialist visits being required of them. This constitutes more demand for healthcare services and equipment, the owners of which raise prices in response, not only to take advantage of their increased pricing power, but to try to reduce their workload, because more people start to demand healthcare than providers have the time and resources to address. Prices are used to equate supply with demand. With the supply of doctors restricted by the AMA, and increasing demand for relatively free healthcare on the part of consumers, prices began to rise rapidly, and waiting times to see doctors became longer.

Because healthcare then became unaffordable to many (whereas previously it was not), politicians, in the name of helping people in order to get votes, set up government agencies to offer Medicare and Medicaid to pay for the healthcare costs of those who could not afford it. With the government spending additional billions of dollars to compete for the limited amount of healthcare services, prices began to increase all the more. With every new instance of government payment for citizens’ healthcare, such as the Medicare Part D program enacted in 2003 to pay for prescription drugs, healthcare costs rise still further.

Had the companies facing price controls in the 1940s chosen to pay for employees’ food instead of their healthcare, we would likely have grocery prices rising at phenomenal rates today, causing a “foodcare” crisis supposedly brought about by free-market failures. It is very important to understand that, because the government funds one of every two healthcare dollars spent, and because much of the government’s spending comes from the printing press, a substantial portion of the demand for healthcare consists of money being printed — much of the credit creation by the central bank goes directly into raising healthcare costs.

Each year, as costs rise due to increased spending on healthcare, private insurance companies simply raise the costs of premiums so as to cover these increased expenditures they pay on our behalf. The more we spend, the higher are our premiums. But as prices rise, fewer people can afford premiums, and those paying premiums for others, such as employers, cannot afford to cover as many treatments.[3] Just to prove that insurance companies are not simply raising their profits at our expense, as both individuals and politicians alike claim, consider in this figure their profits, which are lower than the average company. Profits — and costs — in the industry would be lower still if government did not restrict competition among insurance companies.

Figure 1

The Quality and Cost of Our Regulated Healthcare

With all this regulation and expensive healthcare, Americans receive only a mediocre quality of care. The United States is far from achieving the lowest world infant mortality and death rates. Fatalities from incorrect healthcare treatment are the third-leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer. Over 225,000 people die each year from doctors’ mistakes: 12,000 deaths occur each year due to unnecessary surgery; 7,000 deaths are due to medication errors in hospitals; 20,000 deaths are due to other hospital errors; 80,000 are due to infections in hospitals; and 106,000 due to the negative effects of drugs.[4]

And for this level of quality, we pay about $6,000 per person each year. How is it that we are unaware that we are paying this much? We don’t see that amount subtracted from our checking accounts because individuals, on average, fund only about 20 percent of their annual healthcare costs, with employers and governments paying the rest. But in truth, we all still pay the remaining amount, because all money eventually comes from individuals (or at least those who work and produce). The dollar amount of healthcare that employers pay on our behalf is in fact subtracted directly from our paychecks.

Obviously, if companies did not have to pay healthcare costs, those monies would instead be paid to workers, or to machines that would increase the productivity and thus the paycheck of workers. The dollar amount of healthcare that government pays for on our behalf is taken directly from our paychecks in the form of taxes and indirectly through inflation. Additionally, the Cato Institute estimates that the cost per household of medical providers’ compliance with health-services regulation was $1,546 in 2002. It also estimated that roughly one out of every six uninsured persons was uninsured because of the cost of regulations.[5]

All of this regulation exists, yet most people still believe we have a free market in healthcare and that that is the root of our problems. On top of the two primary issues discussed above, doctors and hospitals are subjected to unbelievable amounts of burdensome oversight and enforcement agencies, bureaus, and commissions. As Jones states,

Rules, regulations, and laws are duplicated, redundant, multiplied, magnified, and contradictory. Laws and regulations covering doctors and hospitals plus all the other parts of our healthcare system now account for over half of all the words, sentences, and paragraphs in our entire body of law.

Socialized Medicine

Socialists want us to turn to nationalized healthcare, where the state will pay for our healthcare (as though we will not still be paying for it). But this will not work either.[6] When medical care is free, people consume more of it. The costs would continually rise, as they currently do in the United States. Because national governments have limited budgets, governments with socialized medicine impose cost controls and limit spending to a particular amount. But because nothing limits individuals from going to the doctor, waiting lines grow longer and longer.

At this point governments limit doctor visits or limit the types of procedures that can be done. For example, a particular treatment might only be authorized given the existence of a particular set of other symptoms. Or surgery might be restricted to patients who are under a given age. After getting sick, famed British record-label owner, radio and TV presenter, nightclub owner, and journalist Tony Wilson (about whom the film 24 Hour Party People was made) faced death due to the fact that Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) refused to fund an expensive cancer drug he needed to stay alive. He stated, “I’ve never paid for private health care because I’m a socialist. Now I find you can get tummy tucks and cosmetic surgery on the NHS but not the drugs I need to stay alive. It is a scandal.” Wilson died not long after in 2007.[7]

In England’s state-run system, the waiting list is nearly 800,000 people. This is in addition to those denied medical attention: 7,000 for hip replacements; between 4,000 and 20,000 for coronary bypass surgery; 10,000 to 15,000 for cancer chemotherapy. Even with our current, screwed-up system one can get treatment if they, or their friends or charities, can pay the price. Under socialized medicine, where many are prevented by the government from getting care, the socialist’s “right” to healthcare certainly goes out the window.

Additionally, in countries with socialized medicine, physicians’ and researchers’ incomes are limited, thus taking away their incentive to compete or to be innovative with new forms of technology or treatments. Such is inherently the case under a government bureaucracy.[8] For these very reasons, Canada’s healthcare system has taken the first step towards privatization, due to Quebec’s lifting a ban on private health insurance. As the New York Times stated,

The Supreme Court decision ruled that long waits for various medical procedures in the province had violated patients’ “life and personal security, inviolability and freedom,” and that prohibition of private health insurance was unconstitutional when the public health system did not deliver “reasonable services.”[9]

The quality of service also diminishes with reduced incentives. Soviet hospitals were characterized by widespread apathy and disregard for lives: AIDS was contracted in Russia primarily through dirty needles at state hospitals; patients had to pay bribes in order to receive minimal attention (anesthesia was often withheld until bribes were paid); patients were routinely taken from their deathbed and shoved out the door in order to improve success-rate statistics; X-rays were denied in order to save the expensive film.

“If we all believe we have a right to have as much as we want of the limited amount of healthcare available, from whom will we take it?”

Socialists believe we have a “right” to healthcare. They simultaneously refuse to believe that having the right to something that is necessarily taken from others against their will constitutes theft; they believe that to associate “theft” with taxes is nutty, no matter how accurate it is in reality.

Suppose that you were one of the first settlers of this country — at Plymouth Rock, for example — where a majority of the settlers starved to death because the leaders had implemented communism.[10] When the settlers were spending their day working the land with the few tools they had, exactly what healthcare did they have a right to? Did they have a right to take their neighbors bandages? Did they have a right to take their neighbor’s alcohol to pour on their wounds? Real healthcare did not exist then and there. It was later created and produced in this country.

If we all believe we have a right to have as much as we want of the limited amount of healthcare available, from whom will we take it? And do we also have a right to food? The first settlers at Plymouth Rock indeed relied on each other to produce food for them, thus producing little themselves. The food was put into a common pile where everyone came to take what they wanted. Soon, the food was gone and the settlers were starving. A system based on positive “rights” leads to poverty.

Only Free Markets Can Solve the Healthcare Crisis

Every election cycle, we hear politicians talk only of cost controls, electronic medical records, and preventing lawsuits in order to solve our medical crisis. We do not hear from them discussions of the real problems of government-paid insurance, the third-party-payer system, and medical boards.

Some pundits argue that technology increases medical costs. Though technology lowers costs in other industries, people think that it somehow increases costs in the healthcare industry. Indeed, Paul Krugman claims that healthcare costs rise simply “because of medical progress.”[11] With these kinds of backward notions, our “leaders” set out to implement yet more regulation and price controls, which will only exacerbate the problem.

What we need are truly free markets in healthcare, which would bring about an increased supply of doctors and healthcare facilities, and drastically lower costs. By bringing free-market profits to the industry, the quality of care would improve due to the competition of providers to make the most money by trying to please the most consumers.

Healthcare costs used to represent 5 percent of national income, and now it is 17 percent.[12] Each year, due to increased demand paid for by companies and the government, a greater proportion of our incomes is funneled into healthcare expenditures and a smaller proportion into other goods. Under free markets, healthcare prices would fall in real terms (if not also nominal terms), and the cost of staying in a hospital would approximate the costs of staying in a hotel plus the additional marginal costs of the labor services of nurses and doctors, and the costs of the use of the tools and technology.

If we all paid for our own healthcare, instead of having others pay, it would be mathematically impossible for costs to be at a level above what each of us could afford; doctors and hospitals could not make as much money if they charged more than people could afford to pay. This is why we can afford things in other industries — because goods are priced at a level commensurate with our incomes. The key is to pay for our own healthcare as needed. Costs of healthcare would be affordable to everyone in the same way that food, televisions, and tools at Home Depot are; they would be just another average cost that we pay.

$25 $20

For those who still doubt such an argument, think seriously about whether the supposed high costs that would occur in a free market would really outweigh the costs we incur today where healthcare costs rise at two to three times the rate of inflation. And consider whether the supposed physical harm that would occur would outweigh the deaths and physical suffering that occur today due to the fact that millions cannot afford access to healthcare.

Additionally, if licensing is so important in order to guarantee competent and qualified service providers, shouldn’t we, in the same vein, require all politicians to go through years of training in the areas of philosophy, history, economics (including free-market economics), industrial production, accounting, and management before they are permitted to pass laws that affect the economy and our lives? Shouldn’t they be licensed?

Kel Kelly has spent over 13 years as a Wall Street trader, a corporate finance analyst, and a research director for a Fortune 500 management consulting firm. Results of his financial analyses have been presented on CNBC Europe and in the online editions of CNN, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and the Wall Street Journal. Kel holds a degree in economics from the University of Tennessee, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an MS in economics from Florida State University. He lives in Atlanta. Send him mail. See Kel Kelly’s article archives.

This article is excerpted from The Case for Legalizing Capitalism (2010).

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Notes

[1] The introductory paragraphs that follow, and most historical facts and figures are taken from the following authors and papers: Dale Steinreich, “100 Years of Medical Robbery,” and “Real Medical Freedom“; Henry E. Jones, “How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care”

[2] This actually understates continual declines. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), p. 421, reports that in 1965 only 88 schools existed, meaning that the council almost reached its goal of a more than 50 percent closure of schools.

[3] People can’t afford the premiums and smaller businesses can’t afford to cover their employees. And because government does not cover everyone, and does not always cover all the costs incurred for those who need healthcare insurance, many are left out in the cold.

[4] Barbara Starfield, “Is U.S. Health Really the Best in the World?” The Journal of the

American Medical Association 284 (July 26, 2000).

[5] Robert Longley, “Cato Claims FDA Denies Health Coverage to Over 7 Million.”"

[6] The explanations in this section on nationalized healthcare are patterned after the explanation given by Professor George Reisman, “Papiere, Bitte (Papers, Please).”

[7] James McIntyre, “Tony Wilson, founder of ‘Madchester’, dies after battle with kidney cancer,” The Independent UK (August 11, 2007).

[8] For an excellent exposition of this fact, see Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944).

[9] Clifford Krauss, “Ruling Has Canada Planting Seeds of Private Health Care,” The New York Times (February 20, 2006).

[10] On this, see: Richard J. Maybury, “The Great Thanksgiving Hoax,” and Gary Galles, “Property and the First Thanksgiving.”

[11] Paul Krugman, “Bad Medicine,” The New York Times (March 19, 2002).

[12] As an aside, those same statistics are even more dramatic for the financial services industry.

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Yesterday I asked rhetorically why we aren’t so angry at D.C. anymore. We’d better be angry. We’d better stay angry and ready to throw out every bum – regardless of party – who fails to support even the most unpopular budget cuts.  This is not a time for games and compromises or sitting back and waiting to see if people come around. We are facing a genuine crisis: The utter and total collapse of our financial structure. If it happens, we will literally bring down the world as we know it. If we can’t get a Congress in the wake of the Tea Party uprisings to make deep, drastic, painful cuts to the budget then we sure as hell aren’t going to get them in a Presidential election year; or any year thereafter for that matter. No more of this “Let’s see how it goes” attitude because if it isn’t going full steam toward the complete dismantling of a significant chunk of the Leviathan Federal Government then it isn’t going well.

Of course some of the most influential voices in “conservative” politics could care less. They might talk a good game to sell their books and ensure a talking-head spot on FOX News but their only real goal is making sure Republicans stay powerful and popular.

Speaking of Dick Morris and Karl Rove, they have been sending out the not-so-subtle message to Republicans in office that the campaign is over and it’s time to “get real.” If by “get real” you mean “betray every professed principle that got you elected” that is. Let’s take a look at the evolution of some of our congressional rhetoric as well as some of what Dick and Karl have been putting out there.

I’ll start with Karl, who this week opined the following in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled: “Message to the GOP: Austerity is not Enough:”

Still, dangers lurk for Republicans. If they focus only on austerity and neglect to offer a pro-growth message, their attempt to tame the budget will be of limited appeal and could prove to be their undoing…

It is surely essential that Republicans justify spending cuts on fiscal and moral grounds. It is also essential to make the case for restoring robust growth and job creation…

To prevail in 2012, the GOP needs a pro-growth candidate who represents a pro-growth party. Republicans must put front and center political leaders who can speak in compelling terms about opportunity as well as sacrifice…

In other words, Republicans need to focus on Big Government schemes to grow the economy. Let’s be clear: Jobs don’t need to be created, encouraged, or restored by any action of government. In fact the exact opposite is true: Inaction of the government will allow jobs to be created in the places most valuable to the economy by people with better things to do than spend their lives dreaming up rules for the rest of us to follow.

Not to be outdone, Dick is promoting his new book Revolt! How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs! which, if his latest newsletter is any indication, ought to be called Rearrange!  Where the Deck Chairs on the Titanic would Best be Placed! In what purports to be just a sampling of the revolutionary wisdom attainable thorough purchasing his book, Dick includes the following in laying out his  plan for cutting our budget by a laughably-less-than $100 billion:

Republicans should not simply shut down the government to achieve the multiple cuts in their proffered package of $61 billion in reductions. They need to scrap that agenda after the negotiations fail. Such a broad based package of cuts is fine for negotiations, but it makes a poor message when the actual shutdown comes.

Instead, Republicans must do the opposite: concentrate their cuts on two or three vulnerable programs or agencies while leaving all the others totally untouched. Such a strategy will let the Party explain its cuts and phrase them in a broadly popular way.

For example, the federal government spends $40 billion a year on highway construction. About one-quarter of that amount is for highway repair and maintenance, necessary for safety. But the other three-quarters ($30 billion a year) are for new highways. The Republicans should zero fund new construction and say that America needs a three year moratorium on new highway construction. Repair and maintain what we have, but we will have to do without new federal roads for the next year to save $30 billion. It’s a tradeoff, they should say, but we need deficit reduction more than we need the new roads.

Other prominent candidates for zero funding are Obama’s National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund a pork barrel construction project ($4 billion a year) and his Build America Bonds which provide for a federal subsidy to states and localities to pay the interest and principal on their bonds for infrastructure ($11.5 billion a year).

Together, these three programs cost us $45.5 billion a year, close to the GOP spending reduction goals. Nobody is going to bleed if they are cut and most voters will accept the necessity of zero funding them for at least a year and possibly for three years.

For additional political advantage, Republicans should zero fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($500 million a year) and the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities ($500 million a year).

And, for political cover, the House should propose rolling back the Congressional budget to 2008 levels saving $500 million a year).

Add in $4 billion cuts already agreed to and $6.5 just proposed by the White House and you come to $57.5 billion, very close to the $61 billion the GOP proposed.

Then the Republicans should leave all other federal agencies in tact with no cuts. They should present the Democrats with bills for continuing funding for the other agencies that are identical to those which would have passed the Senate. Then, if the Democrats choose to vote against the funding for these other agencies, it is they who will have held the country hostage and closed down the government. Republicans would be perfectly willing to keep all the other agencies open.

Of course we can leave all of those other agencies and budgets untouched if we cut a pathetic $57 billion. Hell that’s like a week’s worth of interest at this point. Wasn’t he telling us last year how massive the trillion dollar spending increases were? How can he talk about $57 billion as if that cut has any realistic affect on our fiscal future?

The immediate lesson we need to take away is that no matter what hat they don when they get on FOX or title their books, these men and many like them have no interest in seeing government truly reformed. They are strategists first and foremost and at the end of the day their goal is to see movements like the Tea Party harnessed, bridled, saddled and ready to be ridden to victory.

And what happens when that victory comes? Unfortunately we are finding out that compromise and equivocation quickly replaced principled determination. Take for example this “Tea Party” Congresswoman’s explanation of how they are going to “unleash” the market. After paying terrific lip-service to getting government out of the way of private enterprise she brags that one of the ways the new Republican Majority is attacking these problems is with a committee to examine every regulation out there and determine which ones should go. For example, they have already identified that a provision in Obamacare requiring the filing of a 1099 form should go!

Pardon my French but is she freaking KIDDING?

The Federal Register is over 80,000 pages long and there are literally thousands of rule-making entities compounding the regulatory regime every single day. To claim they are going to examine all of the regulations is worse than a lie; it’s a crappy lie that doesn’t even pay our intelligence the minimal respect of sounding remotely convincing. As I pointed out previously, the only effective answer to the regulatory Leviathan is a Right to Work Amendment to the U.S. and State Constitutions stating that government cannot put up any barriers to our natural right to labor at whatever we want, for whomever we choose, and at any price mutually agreed upon.

Of course the lunacy of pretending Congressional Republicans are examining every regulation out there conveniently distracts from the real bombshell which is the fact that there is no indication whatsoever in this weekly address that they will be repealing such legislative gems as Obamacare and the Frank-Dodd financial bill. No, they will simply pick through and identify the “bad” parts and introduce a separate bill based on each part they think is “bad” (as opposed to all of the good parts) and vote to repeal one at a time. At this rate nothing of substance will ever get accomplished but they will all get to author lots of attractive though meaningless bills which will look great on a campaign pushcard and either they are well aware of that fact or they are far too stupid to be running a nation.

We have got to stop listening to talking heads and quit being so gullible about what leaders in both parties are up to. We need leadership not lame excuses and we need to remain vigilant.

A recent poll suggests that the Tea Party, as skeptics predicted, is losing steam in the wake of the Republican sweep of the House. Compared to a year ago the numbers among Republicans, independents, and Tea Partiers who profess to be “angry with the Federal Government” have plummeted; in many categories they have fallen to half their previous levels. The question is, “Why?”

Can someone please point me toward the accomplishments of this new band of Republicans? Not one of them stood with Senator Rand Paul when he came out with a budget that would have put a legitimate dint in the increased spending they denounced so powerfully in their campaigns.  The deficit has been tripled and they come out with cutting it by 6%. After riding a tide of fury directed at Barack Obama’s suggested $1.6 trillion spending increase, they respond with a $1.5 trillion increase. Are we really such suckers that half of us are no longer angry at Washington?

Using images provided courtesy of PageTutor.com let me demonstrate what we are facing and what the celebrated response of republicans looks like in comparison:

Republicans just cut this much:

Notice the size of the pallets of hundred dollar bills in relation to the size of the man.

Out of this much:

Compared to the size of the man compared to the pallets of hundreds dollar bills here.

We should be angry. We should be every bit as angry with Washington now as we were the day TARP passed. That those who forget history are doomed to repeat it is bad enough. In this case, with our “conservative champions” cutting less than our debt increases due to interest each and every day; well if we forget how they did us under Bush, this time around we’ll just be plain old doomed.

Big Brother will be sure broadcasting serves the 'Public Interest'

With everyone so alert to any efforts to implement the infamous “Fairness Doctrine” it should come as no surprise that the Federal Communications Commission is hard at work finding other, less obvious ways to stifle free speech. Like many of the most successful assaults on our liberty, this one involves an act that is sort of boring and technical at first glance; something that will hardly raise any suspicions in the general public. Ostensibly this is an effort to get internet access to more remote areas and increase the availability and quality of existing mobile broadband. In practice it may become the forced redistribution of broadcast capabilities from thousands of smaller, local and national competitors to a handful of gargantuan D.C. patrons like At&t and Google.

Basically what we have is a limited amount of air-space in which to transmit signals and the FCC hands out licenses to particular “channels” which represent a portion of the total available spectrum. When the TVs all went digital over the past couple of years, thousands of broadcasters who had operated on certain channels were “repackaged” into lower ones to move a huge part of the spectrum to digital TV. Now the FCC wants to take even more, every remaining channel above 31, and auction it off to the highest bidder; rumored to most likely be Google or At&t.

It’s important to understand that airspace, spectrum, channels-however you want to look at it- are not owned. In a scheme that would have made Brer Rabbit proud, Herbert Hoover forced a sort of “run” on frequencies by over-permitting when the Federal Court denied him regulatory powers over broadcasters. What ensued was a manufactured “Tragedy of the Commons,” whereby the airwaves were over-run because anyone could use them but no one owned them. In 1926 an Illinois court ruling correctly compared rights in airwaves as analogous to rights in land, water, or other scarce natural resources. The court ruled in Tribune Company V. Oak Leaves Broadcasting Station that the airwaves were subject to being homesteaded and brought into the realm of private property whereupon they could be sold as property of the original appropriator. This landmark decision would have put an end to the overrun of the airwaves but in 1927 Congress rendered it effectively moot by claiming the fact that the airwaves are scarce makes them a public good which the selfless government should ration to people who will best serve you and me.

Flash forward to this past week when the FCC, hard at work doing what’s best for us, denied the application of a low-powered broadcast station to employ an experimental technology created by Spectrum Evolution. The technology addresses one of The FCC’s key allegations: That broadcasters need to be moved off of a significant spectrum to make room for more broadband. The technology would free up space by broadcasting-on a single stream-the top 10% of the internet. So if you want to go to Yahoo like a hundred thousand other people you can do it just like you do now. Only Yahoo is being broadcast to you and all of these other users on one broadcast stream rather than each of you using another additional stream.

Much as the Congress of 1927 saw the need to rush through legislation to control the radio (and later television) just when freedom was about to prove capable of solving a problem, their Frankenstein’s monster, the FCC of today seems bound and determined to stop the free market and individual ingenuity from giving us more and better services without the heavy hand of Government. If the goal is-as the FCC claims-to create more space why deny this technology the ability to be tested in this market? Look, it isn’t heart transplants we’re talking about here; it’s a method of delivering internet. As for the claim that the FCC needs to take this space to allocate to rural areas so they, too can have broadband internet and mobile access, this is already happening in the free market.

Local broadcasters are happy to use a portion of their available airspace to cash in on a lucrative and growing market for internet service, if only the FCC will allow them to use their licensed spectrum this way. The alternative to allowing small, local broadcasters to provide these services is the FCC’s current plan: Give a near-monopoly to the highest bidder. Which do you think will better serve the sparsely populated rural America?

When a local broadcaster capitalizes on his spectrum by allocating some of it to internet he has every reason to serve the needs of the local population however small, since they are his customer base. What happens when At&t is faced with choosing to allocate more airspace to New York City by pushing East Nowhere, Texas onto ever-smaller Spectrum Plantations? You better believe that diverse and local providers are a boon to the smaller markets.

Bottom Line? The FCC is an affront to Liberty, a danger to free speech, a suppressor of technology and a drag on innovation. This scheme to redistribute airspace from thousands of decentralized broadcasters – each vested in serving his own particular market- into the well-connected hands of one or two industry giants will mean nothing short of the destruction of local programming. Talk, ethnic, and Christian radio may well become a thing of the past, and considering the perpetrator: A tyrannical Federal Bureaucracy, one wonders if that is not the real goal in all of this.

A child holds a sign saying "Why enslave people? We are born free!"

With all of the unrest in the Middle East, Americans are understandably concerned with what the future will bring, but we must remember that the recent eruptions have been long in the making.  It is not ‘blaming America’ to recognize that since WWII people in every administration and from both major parties have used hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to pursue activities that seem very questionable coming from a nation that was founded on liberty and individual self-determination.  Activities like overthrowing democratically elected leaders of other nations and installing despotic but ‘cooperative’ tyrants who imprison, torture, and kill innocent people.  While this may seem out of the purview of the Tea Party movement, the response of our government to the Middle East affects the very foundations of our cause: Liberty and fiscal responsibility.  Will the Middle East be used to sell us the lie that we can have all the guns and butter we want or to continue with civil liberty atrocities like  the recently renewed PATRIOT Act?  These are important concerns and the way the Tea Party feels about what is happening over there will greatly influence what happens over here in Congress.

So what next?  Every conservative I know will readily admit – even adamantly argue – that the idea of planning even the education system of our country from the halls of Washington, D.C. is a doomed pursuit because we all know central planners cannot have the depth and breadth of information necessary to avoid all of the unforeseen consequences.  Yet somehow, many of these same people who laugh at the thought of them planning our education system without disastrous results think it is a no-brainer that D.C. bureaucrats should be planning the governance of every nation on the planet.  No doubt with crazies like Osama bin Laden on the loose it is easy to feel that the possibility of another 9/11 justifies our interference in another country’s domestic policy because, of course, we all want to be safe.  But if the goal is to be safe, shouldn’t we be looking for a proven method of peacemaking rather than advocating more of the same failed policies of the past six decades?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were something that just naturally inspired people to quit with the war-making and get along despite their differences?  Well as it happens there is, and every Tea Partier out there should support its spread throughout the Middle East and the world; after all it is one of the key pillars of the Tea Party movement:  The Free Market.

In 1776, Adam Smith posited in his economic tome On the Wealth of Nations that humans were naturally social beings with a propensity for cooperation which led us to divide labor and trade with one another, creating an increase in overall wealth and living standards.  In the early 20^th Century Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who inspired F.A. Hayek, pointed out that Smith had the causation backwards.  It is for the purpose of better enriching ourselves that we overcome our selfishness to a sufficient degree that we can trade with one another in peace and mutual benefit; and it is this necessity of cooperation for personal gain that drives the naturally arising peaceful interdependence we know as civil society.

It is important to note that none of the recent uprisings have been precipitated by fundamentalism.  For all of the fear over the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the fact remains that the uprisings spawned in large part from economic dissatisfaction and if economic freedom remains a goal, peace may be one of its beautiful side effects.  An example of this was provided by Raymond Barrett in his recently published book, Dubai Dreams: Inside the Kingdom of Bling. Describing the function of Dubai as a sort of trade laundering operation which allows international business to be conducted in the most forbidding (or forbidden) of markets, Barrett contrasts the “insincere veneers of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran” with the cooperation and friendship between an Iranian and an American who were engaged in business with one another:

…[T]he genuine good cheer between Ahmad and Lincoln was an uplifting lesson in Persian-American relations.  Here was a space where people could ignore the malfeasance and rhetoric of their governments, in keeping with Dubai’s image as a place where Middle Eastern swords get tempered into plowshares; somewhere where concord, rather than conflict, is given a chance to take flight.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Barrett last week in Washington, D.C. where he was observing the goings on at CPAC.  An Irishman writing for the U.K. Guardian, his style of journalism is immersive in the extreme and I highly recommend Dubai Dreams if you have any desire to understand the people of the Middle East as more than the recruitment grounds for terrorism.  As he had lived there for years, Barrett struck me as an ideal candidate for an unbiased opinion on the future of Egypt.  He has no dog in the race so to speak, and would seem to be somewhat more accurately versed in the day to day lives and desires of your average Middle Eastern resident than say, Dick Morris, who has been sending warnings of an impending World Caliphate if we fail to put yet another puppet in place of Mubarak.  What, I asked, did he think would come of it considering the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood?  His answer is the most measured I have yet received, neither ignorantly optimistic nor panic-inducingly pessimistic:

The default setting of so many American policy makers when it comes to the Middle East is fear; fear that real democracy in Cairo means a staunch US ally will be replaced by a government that is both extremist in its religious views and anti-American in its political stance.

But Saudi Arabia has been a staunch ally of the US since the founding of the House of Saud yet practices a far more fundamentalist form of Islam than the Muslim Brotherhood espouses. The Muslim Brotherhood is a broad church. No doubt there are some who see a more moderate Turkey as a role model, others who see Salafist Saudi Arabia as something to aspire to;  the majority practice an Egyptian version of Islam which is somewhere in the middle.

The longer the aspirations of all people in the Middle East are repressed — be they religious or secular, moderate or extremist — the greater the likelihood that radical political elements become the only organistions capable of confronting the various autocratic regimes you find in the region, such as the one led by the deposed Hosni Mubarak. You only have to look to Iran to see what happens when a dictator is propped up by outside power and a nation’s desire for freedom is suffocated — the people will embrace whoever offers them a chance to breathe.

While there is surely a surfeit of problems in the Middle East having nothing to do with the United States, it serves no one but those radicals for us to support the expensive and immoral continuance of sixty failed years of intervention in their business.  It has not kept us safe, it has not helped the people of those nations, and it has cost us the precious lives of American troops deployed to put out one fire after another, and that is to say nothing of the Pentagon’s own estimate that over one hundred thousand civilians have been killed since we entered Iraq and Afghanistan.

I was particularly struck by one Arab commentator in the early days of the Egyptian protests, when he remarked that the people of the Middle East see Americans as separate from their government and perhaps this would be a good time for us to distance ourselves from the policies that have enabled the oppression of our fellow man by supporting their desire for Liberty, something they see as a distinctly American virtue.

I agree.  Let us follow the wise words of Thomas Jefferson and pursue “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.”  Let us prepare for defense of our own homeland as well as we can and cheer on the concept of freedom for all of the people of the world.  Especially that unique freedom of exchange which has tamed the human race since the dawn of specialization, when man first realized that people who were different from himself need not be the enemy, but rather could be the very parties capable of enriching him through division of labor and peaceful, cooperative, free trade.

A protest sign proclaims "Thank you Mubarak, for bringing us together. Now Leave!"

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. – Joseph Goebbels, Chief Nazi Propagandist

Dick Morris and Tea Party Nation should be ashamed of themselves.  In what can be described only as an Orwellian attempt to distort history as it unfolds, they have ceaselessly promoted the lie that President Obama has allowed Egypt to be “lost” in the same way Carter lost China.  This is so blatantly untrue that even the Jewish World Review has reported on Obama’s increased support of the Mubarak Regime.  He has cut the funds spent to promote democracy in Egypt by half and treated our own State Department reports of rape, torture, and political imprisonments with a blasé disregard that makes Marie Antoinette look like a paragon of empathy.  Hillary Clinton said of the reports: “[W]e all have room for improvement,”  a shockingly heartless statement considering highlights like this:

Principal methods of torture reportedly employed by the police and the SSIS included stripping and blindfolding victims; suspending victims from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beating victims with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; using electrical shocks; and dousing victims with cold water. Victims frequently reported being subjected to threats and forced to sign blank papers for use against themselves or their families should they in the future complain about the torture. Some victims, including male and female detainees and children, reported sexual assaults or threats of rape against themselves or family members. While the law requires security authorities to keep written records of detentions, human rights groups reported that the lack of such records often effectively blocked investigations.

What is the purpose of such lies?  Is it simply to hang a failure around the neck of an already admittedly defeated Obama?  Or have I the causation reversed?  Perhaps in an effort to keep the fear-mongering alive and well so we continue submitting to the most heinous assaults on our basic dignity, it is a convenient tactic to pretend Obama’s failings precipitated the eruptions in the Middle East; after all, if Obama had anything to do with it, it must be bad for us.

The presence of Coptic Christians in Tahrir Square standing side-by-side with their Muslim neighbors, both bearing signs declaring “Muslim, Christian, We’re all Egyptian” have been roundly ignored, and taken to its logical conclusion it would seem what Dick and TPN want us to believe is that no country that is populated by Muslims can be trusted to run itself.

More and more the tone has shifted from the danger being terrorists to the danger being Islam itself and it is frequently asserted that there can never be a true Muslim who is also moderate.  Please take a moment to consider the ramifications of accepting such a premise.  It is estimated that one-fifth of the planet is Muslim.  For all of the talk that high percentages of Muslims support suicide bombing, the numbers willing to actually be a suicide bomber are obviously significantly smaller.  Such attacks are nearly impossible to prevent.  Anyone could strap on a bomb that they could make from instructions they located on Google and wander into a mall any time but it almost never happens.  As tragic as the events of September 11^th were, in twenty years terrorists have not managed to kill as many Americans as cars kill every year, and that includes the loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We have not banned cars because we understand life involves some risk and the cost of banning cars would be greater than the gain.

So you see it isn’t true that “If just one life is saved it is worth any cost!”  The question of the moment is, “What price are we willing to pay to micromanage the governments of the entire Middle East, and more importantly, will such a course make us safer?”  Well so far we have spent hundreds of billions to micromanage the region for six decades and counting.  For our efforts we have seen the slow but frightening growth of more and more radical opposition to our government’s policies.  Now, while Dick Morris is reporting that Obama “lost” Egypt by refusing to support the Mubarak regime, Wikileaks is making it clear that this is a blatant lie.  The Obama administration has carried on the same policies of funding and propping up this dictator that have been in place for 30 years.  Is it not even a little bit possible that the Egyptian people got sick of it?

A protester holds a sign declaring "Muslim+Christian=Egypt"

Where are our Tea Party members?  Where is the great love of Natural Rights to which they pay tribute in rallies?  Natural Rights come from the Creator, not the Constitution.  This may come as a shock to some, but Egyptians are also human beings.  To advocate the suppression of their freedom, the subjugation of innocent people to a murderous thug who is paid for with our tax money – all because we are afraid that radicals might take a hold in their government – is a shameful hypocrisy and may I submit to my Christian brethren: a sin.  Those who advocate this path of imposing cooperative despots upon those who are not lucky enough to be Americans are trying to paint this as a clear cut issue of self-defense: We must control them or they will kill us.  Such propagandists would compare this to the moral quandary, “If  you could go back in time to 1932 and kill Hitler before he took power, would you?”  They want us to see the modern policies of preemptive warfare in this light but this is a false analogy.  For one thing, we don’t know for certain that any evil will arise from the self-determination of these Middle Eastern nations.  And even if we did know, we have no idea who the perpetrators of the evil will be so we are not discussing the execution of a known quantity (Hitler) but rather the oppression and murder-by-proxy of people whose guilt or innocence remains unknown to us.  A better analogy for pre-emptive war and puppet dictators would go thusly:

If you had a pretty good idea that some trouble was going to come out of Germany at some point but you knew not from whom or when or even for certain if it would happen, and you could travel back in time to 1932 would you be willing to indiscriminately bomb the men, women, and children of Germany just in case?  Would you be willing to pay your hard-earned money to thugs who would rape, imprison, murder, and oppress random civilians because in their sweeping tyranny they might also be cracking down on some guilty parties?  This is the false choice we are being offered by those like Tim Pawlenty who shout to mad applause that “Might makes right” when it comes to bullies.  What about the might and right of the Egyptian people standing up to the bully Mubarak?  Is bullying only bad when it is aimed at us as Americans?

We as conservatives and especially in the Tea Party have been rallying for two years in opposition to what we perceive and label as socialism.  Whether or not it is articulated thus, our struggle is against collectivism and for individual rights; the right to keep the fruit of our labor, to educate our children, and to control our own destiny so long as we are not interfering with the destiny of another.  If we can claim that those same rights should be violently denied to entire nations of fellow human beings because of the chance they will not do with it what we want then we have no moral ground whatsoever for demanding those rights for ourselves.  Why should our own rights not be subjugated to the common good of whatever segment of American society holds the political might of the day?  If our rights come from our Constitution and our government and our citizenship then those in power have every right to rob us of them at their will.  If – as I thought we believed – we are endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights then those same rights accord to every man, woman, and child living regardless of their nation; and it is high time we stopped thinking like the collectivists we claim to disdain and started thinking about the fact that the world – even the Middle East – is populated with individuals.  Mothers, fathers and children just like you and I are being violated and imprisoned under these ‘friendly’ regimes and I for one cannot support the continued funding of such atrocities.

Some time ago I was obeying all traffic laws as I returned from work, when I was ordered to the side of the road by the insistent flashing lights of a police cruiser behind me.  The officer was a picture of professionalism and kindly gave me a warning that my inspection sticker was expired.  Silly me.

My car was in compliance with the law in every way but one:  I had not paid someone to witness and attest via sticker, the virtue of my Chevy Malibu.  I can understand the dangers of driving an unsafe vehicle; certainly if you injure someone or damage their property, you should pay for it.  But I have a real problem with laws requiring me to sacrifice my cash and time in order to properly advertise my righteousness before said laws.

In a preemptive strike against potentially crappy cars, the State commands that each year we must drive to an inspection station and pay a fee to have our auto approved as acceptable and road worthy.  Like a tribal bride being examined for purity, we display our vehicle to the authorities; flashing the brake lights, beeping the horn, and exhausting only the proper mix of waste.  Yes, sir!  We are in compliance!  We receive our badge of innocence and stick it on the windshield to show the world that on at least one day a year all of our necessities were functional and we committed no crime of driving without turn signals.

The 2002 movie Minority Report, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story, posits a world where crime is punished before it is committed.  Led by the visions of three precogs, authorities burst into private homes and arrest people who, we are told, will commit a crime though as of yet they are innocent of wrongdoing.

All hell breaks loose when one of these authorities finds out that the system may not be as foolproof as people are led to believe.  It turns out the precogs don’t always agree on what is going to happen, and in such a case, one of the visions is simply dismissed.  The ‘Minority Report’ (of one) is ignored since it deviates from the massive agreement of – um – the other two.

This idea is disturbing enough before we introduce the concept of the fallibility of the precogs.  The fact is none of the people being punished has actually committed a crime, and to incarcerate someone for something they supposedly will do is problematic to say the least for anyone who respects liberty and the rule of law.  Once the fallibility angle also comes into play, we have a situation where a human being’s natural rights are violated by the state because two out of three people think it is likely this person will do something wrong.  And this situation far more closely resembles the status of a citizen in America today.

All government regulation involves the violation of the liberty of individuals, and in almost every case also involves the confiscation of property; all in the name of protecting some people from the malice or negligence of other people. Only no malice or negligence has taken place and is being punished.  This liberty is violated and this property confiscated for some potential future crime that may be committed by the regulated individual.

I say individual, because contrary to popular belief, industries are not regulated, individuals are.  Just as there is no mysterious entity called ‘Society’ which arises from the cooperation of individuals, there is no mysterious entity called ‘Automobile Manufacturing’ which pays permit fees, fills out compliance forms, or gets fined for not meeting the correct criteria.  Every industry no matter how big or small is made up of individual persons, all entitled to the same rights to Life, Liberty, and Property that we all expect to enjoy.

When our leaders say they will regulate the Auto Repair Industry by requiring that mechanics be certified by a state-approved school, what they are really saying is they will take away the right of a man to labor for pay if that labor involves car repair.  That right, recognized in days gone by as a right granted by God that no government could take away, will be withheld unless he sacrifices a portion of his life to taking the state-approved classes, and sacrifices a portion of his property to pay for the privilege.  Once the appropriate hoops have been paid for and jumped through the denizens of the State will graciously restore the right to labor until such a time as they decide to take it away again.

Their certificate is not different from my inspection sticker.  It is a testament that the powers that be approve of us; that we are innocent as yet of wrongdoing, for if we had committed some crime in our field we would not have this special piece of paper with the insignia of the government stamped upon it.  Only mark this: we have been forced to sacrifice some of our limited lifespan as well as our private property (in the form of money) in order to acquire this approval.  And the justification for this is the protection of ‘others’ from misdeeds that two out of three bureaucrats think we are likely to commit in the absence of such oversight and its resultant punitive confiscation and violation.

“But,” you say, “If you really believed two out of three precogs were correct and a crime would be committed, wouldn’t it be your duty to do something to stop it?”  I suppose it would.  I am not a heartless person, only one who loves my liberty and balks at sacrificing it for light and transient reasons.  There is an alternative to arresting the potential criminal: Warn the potential victim.  Give them notice of possible danger so they can make an informed decision about their own life.

In the same way, let consumers inform themselves of the potential rip-offs.  Let them network with one another.  Let professional guilds be resurrected in their original and untainted form, as groups voluntarily holding one another to certain standards and absent the forceful hand of the State.  Let the courts protect private property by holding frauds and cheats responsible to their victims when there actually are victims.  Let the State cease swelling our unemployment numbers with those who could make a living doing something like fixing cars, cutting hair, painting nails, arranging bouquets, opening a lunch truck, or landscaping lawns, if only they had the wherewithal to navigate the regulatory labyrinth.

And finally, let the Minority Report be heeded:  Not everyone is a crook, not everyone is a criminal, and not everyone is looking to rip someone off.  People who defraud or harm others should be punished.

But the rest of us should be free.

Vacation Home of Mme. CJ Walker, neighboring the Rockefeller Estate. Under today's regulatory climate she would have remained in poverty.

My very favorite rags to riches story has always been that of Madame C.J. Walker.  Here is a woman born to slaves on a plantation in Louisiana, who is both a widow and a mother by the age of twenty.  In today’s society we would count her as one among many single black mothers struggling to make her way.  But in 1887 there were no foodstamps or welfare or WIC or unemployment or Earned Income Credit or the multitudinous other social programs that supposedly help the poor today.  There was not even a Civil Rights Act designed to clear the way of institutionalized racism.  Yet this woman, born Sarah Breedlove, created a hair tonic which gained such popularity that by the time she died she had created an empire employing thousands of women across the nation and even into the Caribbean.  She built a mansion on the same street as Rockefeller and her philanthropy was responsible for the Harlem Renaissance; a triumph of the black middle class which would later be destroyed by Johnson’s Great Society.  She is credited as being the first American woman ever to earn a million dollars.  It begs the question:  What obstacles can a similarly poor single mother today possibly cite for preventing her from pulling herself out of poverty when this black woman did it in an era when lynchings were hardly frowned upon?  What has really changed since Sarah Breedlove escaped the plantation and remade herself into Madame C.J. Walker, Millionaire?  The answer is simple.  The government has almost entirely abolished the right to work or innovate.

As I detail in my book, REVOLT: A Mandate to Restore the Constitution, for over a century the Supreme Court struck down laws on the state and federal level which regulated wages and work conditions.  The right to labor, buy, or sell voluntarily and at whatever price was mutually agreed upon was held as an unalienable, natural right that no government could abridge through minimum wages, overtime laws, or OSHA rules.  Because I was raised in a poor household where the general sentiment was that the rich owed it to the poor to ‘help’ I felt it was important to show in great detail how destructive such policies have really been to those they purport to save.

It is essential that we understand first that wages are prices just like the price of milk or bread.  They are the price you can command for your labor or services.  Do you consider milk a necessity?  Most people do and they pay for it readily but only up to a certain price. At some point the milk price can and will become prohibitively high and you will spend that money on something you consider more suitably valued.  Maybe you will substitute with Almond Milk or Soy Milk.  Maybe you will give up milk drinking altogether; but at some price you will stop buying milk and that point will always come when you perceive that the benefit you will receive by utilizing the milk is less than the benefit you will receive by spending the money elsewhere.

Labor is no different.

There is a degree of benefit created by any person’s labor to a particular employer.  The price (wage) they would naturally receive for such labor is related to this degree of benefit.  So perhaps a young, unskilled teen is only capable of benefiting an employer to the extent that he will gladly pay $5 per hour to have that teen’s labor.  No one is being compelled to enter the agreement.  The teen is free to accept or reject the price offered.  How does a minimum wage law change this reality?

Well the general belief is that it forces the employer to pay the teen a ‘living wage’ of perhaps $7 per hour; but is this true?  No.  Imagine the entire population of willing workers in a table, organized by the number of workers and the price their labor would command in a free market as illustrated below:

In a free market we see in this hypothetical there are 2 million and 900 thousand workers who can only offer labor worth up to $2 an hour.  This may be because they are young or unskilled or even disabled in some way, but they are free to choose whether or not they wish to accept this wage.  They are free to work and gain further skills and move up to a higher wage as their value increases through experience and acquired knowledge.  Now the popular wisdom says that we can simply legislate a minimum of $3.00 per hour and nearly 3 million workers will get an instant raise.  But this is patently false.  No employer can be unequivocally  forced (yet) to contract with someone for labor at a price he is unwilling to pay.  He always has the choice to simply hire those who already belong to the next level up the chart: Those whose labor naturally commands $3.00.  All the government can do is prohibit activity through force, in this case prohibiting anyone from voluntarily working for less than $3.00 per hour.

Now imagine the fallout.  Government policy has rendered nearly 3 million workers unemployable.  They are forbidden by law from contracting with an employer at a wage of $2.00 per hour even if to do so is – to them – preferable to the alternative which is likely making zero dollars per hour.  Industries that previously spent $1.00 per hour on certain payroll are forced to triple their expenses or lay off workers and replace them with greater mechanization et cetera.  The things they produce will become concurrently more expensive and over time the previously acceptable $3.00 per hour is no longer a ‘living wage’ at all.  In the meantime taxes are increased to pay for programs like unemployment insurance, government-subsidized ‘retraining’ and welfare to tend to all of the people who are forbidden to work at their natural rate of pay and cannot find someone to pay them more.

As prices increase along with taxation it is presented to the public as a simple matter of human decency to continue raising the minimum wage and the entire cycle moves progressively higher and higher into the labor market, forcing an ever-greater portion of the population into government dependency.

It’s almost like that was the plan all along.

One way to make a low wage cover expenses used to be working longer hours at that low wage, but that too is illegal.  Overtime laws may help the very skilled and union members but they destroy the ability of low-skilled workers to make ends meet.  The market is flush with people who can do unskilled jobs, so why bother paying time and a half when you can just hire a second or third employee at regular wages?  Now the fellow who was willing to work an extra ten hours a week to pay the electric has been forbidden to do so.  Strangely you could always work three jobs for a total of 120 hours per week and no one has to pay overtime there so one wonders what the point of such a law is at all.

The final insult in this assault on the right to work is regulation.  Licensing fees, required degrees, inspection costs and more red tape than any upstart can afford to navigate serves only one purpose:  To keep smaller companies and poorer people from competing with well-heeled and established entities.  Want to cut hair in Texas?  You must have a Cosmologist Operator License to open a Salon.  Here are some of the requirements of your salon:

Required floor space shall be a minimum of 150 square feet for the first
licensee and not less than 30 square feet for each additional licensee.
(Storage areas, reception areas, restrooms, utility, heating and/or cooling
facilities, and retail floor space are not included as working floor space.)

Carpeting is not allowed except in reception or offices.

A sink with hot and cold running water is required.

A restroom must be made available to the public within the facility or on
an adjoining property.

An identifiable sign with the salon’s name must be displayed.

Closed container(s) for clean towels/linen are required.

Partially closed container(s) for soiled towels/linen are required.

One wet disinfectant soaking container is required.

A minimum of one dry storage container is required.

A minimum of one covered trash container is required.

The salon must be properly ventilated with an exhaust fan or air filtering
device extracting fumes and gases.

A salon shall not be operated in conjunction with an establishment selling
food or drink, and shall be separated by a solid wall and have a separate
entrance if located in the same building.

A salon must be completely separate from rooms used wholly or in part
for residential or sleeping purposes by a solid wall or by a wall with a
solid door which shall remain locked during business hours.

And don’t get confused.  A Salon is different than a Barber Shop and you better not have a Barber Pole or anything resembling one near your Salon:

No cosmetology establishment shall, in any manner, represent or permit
representation to be made in its behalf that it is a barber shop, whether
made by use of a display or device similar to a barber pole or otherwise. It
may, however, advertise that services for males are available, with the
exception of trimming and/or shaving beards or mustaches.

Of course all of this is in place to help the moron customers who cannot decide for themselves whether or not they are comfortable getting their hair cut in a place with no bathroom open to the public, right?  Then why is it that when a couple of guys cutting hair at a Flea Market in San Antonio got busted last September for running an ‘Illegal Hair-cutting Operation’ (no, seriously, that’s what the news called it) it wasn’t disgusted customers that turned them in, but rather a ticked off local salon owner?  The salon owner tipped off the local news which contacted the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.  Investigators found two unlicensed men cutting hair with <gasp!> no running water!  And worse:  According to the complainant who will only give her first name (possibly to avoid retribution from all those men who can no longer get a cheap haircut at the Flea Market thanks to her) the hair was falling right into the dirt as it was cut!  As these vigilant consumer advocates tell the tale:

The KSAT Defenders were first tipped off about the activity by a salon owner who witnessed some potentially serious sanitation problems at the Mission Flea Market.

“Defenders?” Oh my.  What were these barbers doing?  Molesting people in the seats?  Do we really need to be ‘defended’ from our own choices to this extent?  But tellingly, Marie – the rat responsible for shutting down this apocalyptic public health threat – let her greedy little truth seep through:

She also said it is unfair to those who are licensed cosmetologists.”They’re getting away with it and we want it to stop,” Marie said.

I want it to stop too!  I want the forced licensing of cosmologists to stop!  If I want to get my hair cut in the dirt for five bucks rather than spend thirty at Marie’s Salon I should have every right to do so.  And if someone can attract customers willing to have their hair cut in the kitchen he should be free to cut their hair.  Look, for a decade I had my hair cut by Craig, the world’s greatest stylist (in my opinion.)  He served wine and humor and usually something delicious to eat.  This was in New Jersey, arguably a more expensive place to live than East Texas.  I am willing to bet he violated half a dozen regulations.  But for six years I haven’t been able to find anyone to match his talents at twice the price in the nicest salons in town.  How many ‘Craig’s will never open a salon or make a living cutting hair due to the onerous bureaucracy designed to keep them out?  And how many other things in other areas are we missing out on – or overpaying for – because of government-enforced cartels in every possible field of labor and services?

What about food and drugs?  Consumer products?  Lead-filled children’s toys?  Like everything else government does regulation of such things is completely outdated.  If I want to know whether some product is safe, I certainly don’t waste any time looking for Uncle Sam’s seal of approval.  After all, these are the folks who change their mind every year about whether or not eggs are good for you.  No, if I want to know whether something is safe or of any quality I type it into Google and I guarantee you if one guy in Iowa got diarrhea from taking some vitamin supplement I’m going to know in .006 seconds.  What if a new medication comes out and I want to try it and there is nothing on Google about it yet?  Well I have the choice to either become a human guinea pig or not.  Freedom – ain’t it great?  The age of the internet has made word of mouth something that travels from one continent to another in minutes not years.  There is no excuse for the nanny state to continue restricting our medications, drugs, foods, products, or career decisions.

There are countless little regulations that serve only two purposes: to employ state workers and close the market to competition.  There are so many it would take thousands of bills to eradicate them all.  I would like to humbly propose an alternative.  We should amend both the U.S. and the individual state Constitutions to ensure the right to work and return the responsibility for ensuring personal safety to individuals and the courts.  If you get a staph infection through a flea market haircut you should take the individual responsible for the infection to court and be awarded restitution.  As in ‘be paid for whatever it costs you to rectify the problem’.  If the guy at the flea market can’t pay, you are out of luck.  That’s the risk you take by getting a flea market trim.

If we want to restore the ingenuity and hard work that made America prosperous, we must immediately cease protecting people from themselves and we must cease subsidizing their poor decisions.  The market should be freed and the shackles of political slavery that constrain the poor, the uneducated, and the unskilled – because these are the very people who are denied self-sufficiency by these laws – should fall away under a simple and clear amendment to restore the right of individuals to work, hire, and open businesses.  I am no legal scholar but I would start with something like this:

Notwithstanding any prior or future state or federal code, statute, or order to the contrary; the unalienable right of one party, individual, corporation or combination thereof to willingly contract for labor, product, or services with another party, individual, corporation or combination thereof at a price or wage mutually agreed upon shall not be infringed.

Such an amendment would mean a drop in some wages, yes.  But it would also mean the cheapening of everything you buy.  The real wealth created by the freeing of the labor market would be astounding and once again we would see people using their own judgment and taking responsibility for their own decisions.  The right of the poor to seek relief from poverty through ingenuity rather than indenture to Uncle Sam’s Plantation would perhaps be the greatest blessing of all.