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Vin Suprynowicz
Mostly, government should do nothing
Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration's anti-freedom, anti-capitalist agenda.
When a political leader snidely characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of "greedy insurance executives," "big bankers," and the like, I don't see how anyone can argue he's not against the free market.
In fact, they don't. Mr. Obama's champions respond by citing all the injustices which they believe are wrought by the free market.
Therefore, by their own words, their agenda is anti-freedom.
Their fall-back position appears to be, "It had to be done or things would have gotten much worse."
But the huge government economic interventions of the past three years -- under Bush and Obama both -- have done far more harm than good. Angela Merkel in Germany resisted calls for huge government "stimulus" spending on the Bush-Obama-McCain model. Left to their own devices, German employment and that country's modest economic recovery are now doing better than ours.
Every Obama promise about how "stimulus" spending would limit unemployment and other signs of the deepening recession has been proved wrong. But who would expect otherwise? I doubt there's been an administration in history whose members have so little cumulative experience running real, for-profit businesses in the free market. Who but a permanent prisoner of the ivory tower would expect any benefit for the private sector from a policy of government soaking up all the nation's available credit and channeling it to protect existing government bureaucrat jobs?
The leftists cackle that non-Democrats "offer no solution" except to "do nothing."
Precisely. Faced with a serious depression in 1921 as the American economy corrected from its wartime footing, Warren G. Harding did little to block the necessary deflation, instead slashing government expenditures while advising that the bankruptcy courts were there for those who needed them. Once it was obvious Washington was not going to step in to prop up wages or prices or anything else, the free market made its adjustments, and the correction of 1921 was over in 18 months, setting the stage for the boom of the 1920s.
The shrieking harpies of the left condemn the free market, saying it leads to greedy CEOs like those of Enron "ripping everybody off."
In fact, the vast majority of private businesses offer good value and honest service. They can't (unlike government) force you at gunpoint to buy their products, and the chiefs of the few that commit fraud usually go to prison.
How many Washington politicians have gone to prison for violating their oath to "protect and defend" a Constitution that grants them only sharply limited powers?
In his 1956 book, "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality," the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises tackled the puzzle of why the biggest vilifiers of capitalism here in the West tend to be not oppressed, low-wage proletarians, but rather members of the academic, entertainment and/or political elites.
Von Mises submits -- and you could hardly have ordered up a more convincing example than "Nevada's depravity," by UNLV professors William Epstein and William Thompson, which ran on the cover of the Review-Journal's May 2 Viewpoints section -- that these elites object to capitalism and the free market precisely because they give the mass of people what they want, and reward those who provide it.
Even though these professors, elected officials and entertainment "personalities" are hardly starving, they're horrified to see the bigger mansions and the fancier cars going to people who, in their minds, are a bunch of quasi-literate "dese and dose" numbskulls who make their millions catering to the common folk's lowest, self-destructive desires, providing them with taverns and casinos, racetracks and stock cars, girlie bars and "action films" and professional wrestling.
This offends them! The obvious answer is to prevent the idiot mob from wasting their excess income on such base pursuits. Instead, all they earn beyond their needs for food and clothing must be seized through taxation and given to us! After all, are we not the elite of the elite, the tiny percentage who have been awarded Ph.D.s, who have been elected to high public office?
Give the money to us and we will see it's spent providing the peasants with things they should want -- opera, ballet, thoughtful French films, all manner of things that will elevate the popular taste, not cater to its lowest common denominator.
Down with Wal-Mart!
The free market -- "allowing" people to exchange goods and labor voluntarily -- has given America the greatest level of wealth known to history. The socialists actually contend that's bad, complaining that wealth is "unevenly distributed."
So are energy and talent. Blame God.
Even the "poor" in America are vastly better off than 90 percent of the world, and vastly better off than our grandparents. Whereas in every experiment in which men with guns were allowed to grab the wealth and "redistribute it," everyone ended up poorer -- including the poor.
A limited government, concerning itself primarily with protecting our freedoms, has given us the greatest prosperity, the most effective division of labor, ever seen. Compulsion systems, on the other hand -- like those of eastern Europe from 1917 and especially from 1940 to 1990 -- have created widespread poverty, desperation, starvation and slavery.
Those have been the universal outcomes of the repeal of freedom and the free market.
If you doubt it, get back to me in a year or two, and let me know what two or three full years of our current, hell-for-leather, Obama-Reid leftist agenda have wrought.
Because I think there are going to be some foreclosures. Some commercial loan defaults. Some Asians refusing to buy any more of our debt unless we sign over some of the smaller states and territories as collateral. A bit of inflation. A boycott of America by foreign tourists tired of being groped and prodded by the TSA.
Mr. Obama says the economy is "recovering." I suspect he's either lying or a shocking economic naif -- or both.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow."
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Vin you are way too intelligent for this town and this newspaper...You need to get your own radio show and/or run for political office!!!! I love the article and I personally believe that there are two major forces which drive liberals...One is envy and the other is sheer laziness! The enviousness is best illustrated by the occupy movement (which was fueled by the corrupt community organizer Obummer and other dumbocrats).....They use envy of successful people to stir up the passions of the lazy folks who are their number one constituency...The demoncratic party would be out of business were it not for lazy folks...Take away the leeches and all you got left is a few whining malcontents and some fairies who want to marry other fairies!
The government should "do nothing" only when it has reached the point of staying strictly within its constitutional limits, and then some.
Until then, there is plenty to do.
The first thing to do is to move to a system of honest money: a one hundred percent gold and silver standard. There need be no legal tender laws; a private mint's one-ounce silver coin is just as good as the government's.
Then, there's cutting back government spending by about 90 percent.
The Constitution itself needs some fine-tuning. Get rid of the power to establish post offices. Get rid of the power to regulate interstate commerce. Repeal the 16th amendment, getting rid of the income tax.
Strengthen the 10th amendment by creating a citizen's panel to review all laws passed by Congress, and overturn those not strictly allowed by the Constitution. Give them the power to punish politicians who exceed such authority, either by making them ineligible to hold public office, or giving them an appropriate jail term. Such a panel's only authority, of course, would be to review and overturn laws, not create new ones.
Repeal the 12th amendment, giving the second-place finisher in presidential elections the vice-presidency, where he or she could be an important counter-balance against the president, in his or her role as president of the Senate.
Repeal the 17th amendment, which provides for popular election of senators. The system worked better when senators were beholden to state legislatures.
This is just a start. So, as much as I respect Vin, there is plenty to do to reach the point of being a free society. After that, doing nothing is indeed appropriate 99 percent of the time.
How is it that otherwise intelligent people can assert that a definition that they arrive at, which defines something out of existence to suit themselves, is the only definition of something?
If I define "war" as a state of total peace, and then assert that therefore war has never existed, is there a reasonable person who would agree with me?
And how is it that libertarians can argue that this country has existed as a "socialist" country since at least 1936 if not before, but then use the wealth held by citizens of this country today, as some evidence that "capitalism" has resulted in "poor" people owning so much stuff?
You can't have it both ways can you? I mean, if don't have a capitalist system today, and haven't for a very long time, it is impossible to argue, rationally, that the obvious result of capitalism is that the "poor" have lots of stuff.
The fact that poor people have a lot of stuff, in a "socialist" economy, can only mean that socialism is the reason why and not otherwise.
Has it ever struck you how absurd it is for government to complain about alleged "monopolies" in the free market?
Of course, such monopolies, where they do exist, do so only because they have been granted an exclusive charter from the GOVERNMENT. In a true, free market, monopolies (in any meaningful sense) cannot exist.
Why? because in a free market, the entire force of the price system is brought against anyone who tries to charge arbitrarily high (or low) prices.
Von Mises put forth this unanswerable argument in the 1920's. It still took another 70 years for the socialist systems in Russia and China to fold.
Etymologically, "monopoly" means "an exclusive franchise granted by the government." That is the ONLY way such a creature can come into existence. In a free market, monopoly is an impossibility.
Observe that socialists of all stripes argue out of both sides of their mouths when they criticize capitalism.
First, they say that capitalism leads to the general impoverishment of everyone. When you point out--correctly--that even the alleged "poor" in capitalist societies are fabulously wealthy, in comparison with the "poor" anywhere else, they change their tune.
At this point, they criticize capitalism for "mindless materialism." The real crime of capitalism, they claim, is the fact that it gives the poor, demented lower classes contentment in the forms of low-brow entertainment, shopping malls, and cheap consumer goods.
In other words, capitalism is guilty of whatever crime you choose, even if the crimes are contradictory.
Either capitalism IMPOVERISHES everyone, or it ENRICHES everyone; it cannot do both. Either the poor are made richer, or they are made poorer; it cannot be both.
Except, of course, in the mind of a socialist, who blames capitalism for whatever ailment he chooses.
Years ago, the primary target was shopping malls, which allegedly charged HIGH prices for cheap, worthless goods. Now, the primary target is Walmart, whose crime is providing quality goods at LOW prices the long-suffering "Mom and Pop" store (in the leftist's very flatfooted imagination) cannot match.
So, which is the crime: high prices, or low prices?
In the view of a leftist, the answer is: BOTH!
If you are a player in the free market, you are guilty from the moment you go into business, for whatever you do, whatever prices you charge, whatever goods you offer. You are GUILTY!
What are you guilty of? Of not doing what the socialist WANTS you to do.
No better definition of tyranny was ever imagined.