There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
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Author: Redactor
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was criticized for telling business folks “You didn’t get there on your own. . . . You didn’t build that.”
He meant something more than the truism that a successful businessperson functions not in splendid isolation but in cooperation with others, like employees and vendors (presumably compensated). He meant that successful people shouldn’t be so proud of their virtues. Also they must pay more taxes.
Surrogates yipped that Obama’s denigration of individual achievement wasn’t what it sounded like. But his inaugural address was more of the same. Charles Krauthammer calls the speech “an ode to collectivity,” with its stress not on voluntary associations but on coercive orchestration by the state. According to Obama, for example, “No single person can” do all the good things like build research labs and train teachers that we supposedly must do “as one people.”
Sounds like a glaring false alternative. David Boaz observes that “property rights, limited government and the rule of law”—under assault by Obama—are what we need to safeguard the voluntary cooperation critical to our progress and individual flourishing. I would add that we necessarily pay our own way as we engage in voluntary trade. We do “build that,” and so does the other guy.
Government can confine itself to protecting our rights in trade and otherwise leave us alone, or it can actively plunder our achievements. If the latter, we have less of what we built. Even though we did build that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Albert Gallatin
The whole of the Bill is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals… It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.
When you make it harder to hire people—as Obamacare does by imposing penalties on companies that fail to provide specified health insurance—you make it more unlikely that persons will be hired.
Consider the case of Automation Systems Inc., reported at National Review Online. After the economy went into a nose dive a few years back, the only way owner Carl Schanstra could keep the company alive was by slashing staff.
Automation Systems has managed to bounce back, and business is improving. Currently, Schanstra employs 37 people. He would like to hire lots more. But as soon his company employs more than 50, he’ll be socked with $40,000 in penalties and $2,000 for each additional employee. Even firms that already provide health care to employees will have to pay such penalties if they have 50+ workers and their insurance plans don’t offer as much coverage as Obamacare deems necessary.
When you must shell out $40,000 to the government—$40,000 more than all hitherto expected payout of salary and benefits—to hire your very next employee, you have a strong incentive to keep your company smaller than you might have liked. And workarounds like contracting consultants, as discussed last week, are not options for every company.
This reality may seem obvious to anyone with even modest knowledge of what it takes to create wealth and make a living. But somehow the obvious escapes the central planners in Washington.
Or maybe they just don’t care about the hardships their policies impose upon us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The aptly named decision Loving v. IRS—it’s so true, you know—provides a modest victory in the war of tax-takers versus everybody else.
The ruling, brought to our attention by the Institute for Justice, a party to the lawsuit, concerns IRS regulation of tax preparers. The IRS wants to force non-attorney, non-CPA tax preparers to take an exam, pay annual fees, and take hours of courses every year. District Judge James Boasberg has ruled the regs unlawful.
The regulations govern people hired by others. It would be really crazy if every non-credentialed taxpayer had to pass an exam, pay fees, and take courses every year just for the pleasure of filling out the forms we must complete in order to give IRS our money.
But the regulations are really crazy anyway. They violate the freedom of professional tax preparers. Also, by making it more expensive to be a tax preparer, they reduce the taxpayers’ tax-preparation choices and/or increase the costs of preparation services.
If judges regularly consulted such desiderata as our freedoms and rights when assessing assaults on them, many more regulations would be voided—say, 99.9 to 100 percent or thereabouts. Boasberg’s ruling hinges more narrowly on the important fact that Congress never gave IRS authority to regulate tax preparers.
The IRS has moved that the ruling be suspended pending its appeal. Let them lose the motion and lose the appeal, and I’ll be loving it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The State of War is in absolute opposition to the right of free choice of nationality, of accession or secession.
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Townhall: The Debt Star We’re Building
This weekend, at Townhall.com, Yours Truly notes the flair with which Washington insiders chuckle as they send the nation further into a sovereign debt crisis. Click on over, then click back here for further reading:
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.
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Video: Antifragility
An interesting interview with the author of the new book, Antifragile:
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Destutt de Tracy
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.