Category: too much government

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Attacking Wage Employment

I don’t know what the optimum ratio of employees to independent contractors would be. No one does. But we can be pretty certain that the current skewing of the economy towards less wage employment and more independent contracting by Obamacare is not a good thing.

You see, “one consequence” of the health reform package, writes economist David Henderson on EconLog, “is an increase in contracting out to avoid the 50-person threshold.”

Now, if there were a general shift towards part-time employment and professional contracting as a result of businesspeople and workers appraising their advantages on the open market, we’d just note this with interest or a shrug and say, “whatever the market decides.”

After all, people might substitute wage contracts for performance contracts (or vice versa) for reasons given by Nobel Laureate R.H. Coase, who figured out why firms exist at all: contracting out isn’t costless. It takes time to negotiate each deal, each task, etc. My friend Dr. Henderson will correct me, I hope, if I’m wrong, but employing labor full-time — by bundling numerous tasks together — is usually easier and cheaper than seeking out specialists and consultants for each task you want done.

In recent years we’ve seen a rise in consulting professionals, in part because the Internet has reduced the costs associated with working from a distance. But today’s switch to independent contractors (as well as to part-time employment) is a result of Obamacare raising the cost of keeping full-time employees. Of course businesses will seek to . . . economize.

And we know such substitution is suboptimal because people are doing it under duress, the threat of force behind Obamacare.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Seize the Epoch

President Obama was sworn in for a second term on Sunday, re-enacting the rite on Monday so he could leverage the attention of a traditional news day.

Obama makes a good speech. He intones “We, the People,” with a pause in the middle: “We . . . the People.” He tells us to seize the moment.

But I’m not at all sure he’s seizing — or sizing up — the facts. He says, “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” As I understand it, those who do very well have increased in number. Many folks have moved out of the middle-income earning category into the upper regions. We’ve more millionaires now than ever — even adjusted for inflation. Their ranks aren’t exactly shrinking.

Many of us are struggling, though. And we struggle under the watch of a general “progressive” mindset. You can’t blame income trends on the “free market.” Though some sectors of the economy are pretty free — the important new technology sector, for instance, and much of consumer retail — the medical and financial sectors are heavily regulated and managed by government, and the housing market has been transformed by multiple government policy initiatives. And here, with these three institutions, is where we’ve taken the biggest hits.

And where some of the worst effects on the poorer amongst us can be felt — and where the biggest pro-rich policies can be seen. Think bailouts, for starters.

The Progressives long ago seized the epoch. The necessity of the moment is to seize it back from them. Their policies of government intrusion and management have rigged the game to get us where we are now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political challengers too much government

Fiscal Brinksmanship

“America,” President Obama insists, “is not a deadbeat nation.” Mounting evidence to the contrary.

He chastises Republicans for even contemplating a default on the debt. At a news conference this week, he called any attempt to use the debt limit authorization issue to negotiate federal spending down “absurd,” and akin to a hostage situation. Refusing to raise the ceiling, you see, would “crash the economy”:

He demanded that Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives approve a rise in the federal government’s authority to borrow money to pay existing obligations — without seeking policy concessions in return.

The BBC goes on to quote the president, who clarifies his stance. “While I’m willing to compromise and find common ground over how to reduce our deficits,” said the president, he insists that he will definitely not “have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people.”

It’s an interesting approach: accuse Republicans of dangerous brinksmanship, while continuing to overspend and increase debt to the very brink of insolvency.

What Obama won’t recognize is that fiscal conservatives, today, play the same role as a parents cutting up their college kid’s credit cards after the young spendthrift had racked up an extraordinary debt. Obama plays the role of the kid saying: I’ve already budgeted spending, you can’t cut up the credit card — that’d be irresponsible!

It was different in 2006, when Senator Obama opposed raising the debt ceiling and called the increasing debt levels a sign of “a failure of leadership.”

Now that he — and not a despicable Republican — has the leadership role, he’s changed his tune. He says his former cry of “irresponsibility!” was itself irresponsible.

The very best thing we can say about this? The president has been captured completely by the forces he once opposed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

P.S.Soon after the last period of the above squib was struck, I turned on Fox. And there was Sean Hannity, leading his nightly political opinion show with the president’s remonstrance of Republicans for daring to fix tight the debt ceiling. Hannity noticed what I noticed — indeed, what it turns out a lot of people noticed: Obama’s repudiation of a practice that he himself had engaged in in 2006.

But notice what Hannity is trying to prove: “how reckless, irresponsible and fundamentally dishonest a man [Obama] is.” Hannity sees Obama’s press conference performance as indicative of the president’s hypocrisy, demagoguery, and slipperiness-with-facts.

The case can be made, and Hannity has made it. The trouble is, the way Hannity makes it, to his audience, just skips over precisely this kind of behavior from Republicans. For, remember, Republicans repeatedly voted to increase the debt limit while their guy, Bush, was in charge. Another person to notice the differences between Junior Senator Obama and Second-Term President Obama, young Ms. Julie Borowski (“Token Libertarian Girl”), showed more savvy on Facebook than Hannity does on his primetime program:

Most Republicans are against raising the debt ceiling under Obama. But most were all for it during the George W. Bush administration.

Most Democrats are for raising the debt ceiling under Obama. But most were all against it during the George W. Bush administration.

Pssh, here’s a better idea. Dramatically cut spending. Stop manufacturing fake crises and raising the debt ceiling almost every year to finance drunken spending sprees. And why they are at it, members of Congress should pass a budget for the first time in over three years. It’s no wonder that a recent Public Policy Polling survey finds that cockroaches are more popular than Congress.

No doubt, since insecticide is cheaper and more effective than politics.

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government transparency too much government

Nothing But Blue Skies

It was the thirteenth day of the century’s thirteenth year, yesterday, and the worst I got was a cold.

Meanwhile, the Russian government is trying to stop a triskaidekaphobic panic. Russian media folk have been making much of Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid that will come within spitting distance on a Friday the 13th in 2029, and which will return for a closer, more dangerous fly-by on another Friday the 13th, April 2036.

Russian media had dubbed Apophis the “space threat of the century.” But the Russian emergency experts — government officials, charged with calming things down — have countered paranoia with statements like, “In 2013, none of the known asteroids will pass by the Earth at a dangerous distance.”

Well, nice to know. But this year had never been a worry to scientists. The crucial years were 2029 and 2036. The folks at Goldstone say they have ruled out any impact in 2036, and scientists had already determined the earlier date non-hazardous.

Good. But, if you are like me, when government officials all agree that the sky is blue, you’ll call it “cerulean.”

But maybe it’s only about budgets, taxes, and special ops that governments lie.

Take Jerry Brown, California’s governor and a most interesting fellow. He insists that his state’s deficit problems are nearly over. Great! Well, he bases his cheery picture on future growth projections, and he’s just so optimistic that he’s advocating still more spending! Now.

I once defined pessimism as the lazy stepchild of vigilance. Brown’s optimism has no vigilance in it. I don’t believe him.

I hope the government-paid scientists charting Apophis’s transits are more rigorous and trustworthy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement too much government

None of Us Are Angels

An old thought: Were we all angels, we wouldn’t need government. Indeed, were we angels, it wouldn’t matter what kind of government we had.

But we’re not angels. We have limitations. Each one of us judges according to our own context-ridden conception of advantage and value, bound by our differing perspectives and situations. Despite our love for others, that love isn’t infinite and it doesn’t often trump our perceived self-interests, and it certainly isn’t angelically unlimited.

So we need something very much like government, and that government needs limits.

We need protection from criminals, but we also need protection from those who would protect us, who can — with “government power” — usurp their roles and become criminal themselves.

This is, I repeat, a very old thought.

Yet it seemed new when James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock advanced something very much like it with their book The Calculus of Consent, and in the many great contributions of their separate careers.

James M. Buchanan died this Wednesday. Before his contributions, economists typically assumed that public servants would swoop in like saving angels, setting the world aright according to the latest mathematical models, disinterestedly, without partisan passion or individual error.

Naive in the extreme.

Thanks to Buchanan, economists today occasionally go so far to confess that though markets often “fail,” merely appointing government to “fix” markets can put us in a bigger fix, since government failure is rampant. Government isn’t magic. It doesn’t change our natures for the better merely by being instituted, or by being called “government.” Power still corrupts, and economists now have to deal with that ugly but unavoidable fact.

By showing us that we’re no angels, Buchanan put himself on the side of the angels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The Great Evasion

From the earliest moments of the current, ongoing economic depression, our leaders signaled their fear by hastily concocting programs that postponed the reckoning that had to come.

Douglas French, writing about housing finance today, says a lot simply with his title: “Markets Stagnate Until They Clear.” Government policy has kept mortgages in a weird limbo, and market prices at unnatural highs. Our geniuses in power have even moved heaven and earth to reinflate the old housing boom.

Better to have let it crash and recover rather than keep it unworkably hobbling along.

But the clearing of markets scares politicians silly.

Right after the 2008 implosion, our leaders increased unemployment insurance and offered many new cushions for workers. Humanitarian? Or just another way to avoid new, lower wage rates to match the monetary collapse? I’m not sure about the latter, since the “wages” of not working proved so effective that many workers stayed unemployed voluntarily.

The cost? An extended, lengthy depression.

But that’s not all, of course. By putting more people onto the rolls of the federal government’s dependents list, the burden on taxpayers and on the debt system increases.

Meanwhile, politicians still cannot imagine a way to do what a few other countries, including Canada, have done: cut back on spending and balance budgets.

Our politicians will do anything to avoid that!

Some folks are calling the current period “The Great Recession.” I suggest a better term: “The Great Evasion.” And what’s being evaded is responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

A Symbolic Threat

“Medicare’s trustees estimate that the hospital insurance fund supported by the payroll tax will run out of cash by 2024,” informs a Washington Post editorial, “but this is mainly a symbolic threat: The government will draw on general revenues to keep Medicare going.”

So, what exactly does this “symbolic threat” symbolize?

It shows that Medicare — like Social Security — was set up and run in an unsustainable, even fraudulent, way. Politicians promised benefits without collecting the taxes to pay for those benefits. This left “today’s voters” getting unpaid for bennies and future voters being handed a hefty bill.

The only question is: how hefty? That depends on how quickly the imbalance gets addressed.

Already, Medicare represents 15 percent of total federal government spending, last year costing taxpayers $555 billion. Worse yet, the cost is expected to double in the next decade — in large part, because the number of seniors on the program is expected to explode, from 50 million today to 78 million by 2030.

“No structural solution is,” the editorial bemoans, “for the moment, politically possible.” Instead, the Post endorses a number of small cuts — all making seniors pay more and/or get less — that add up to slightly over $40 billion a year. That drop in the bucket would, in a decade, account for less than 4 percent of Medicare’s projected yearly cost.

Frankly, the unavoidable first step in any honest fix of Medicare’s big, structural problems, is for those in Congress and the White House to fully admit the rotten fraud they have perpetrated against us for their personal political gain.

Acknowledging their deception would be more than symbolic.

You can’t change your ways until you first repent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

We’re All Bond Fans Now

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is so well liked that there’s even Oscar buzz about it. But it’s not just moviegoers who feel like they’ve entered a new era.

In the new flick, M, played by Judi Dench, argues before a parliamentary board that, because “the enemy” can be just about anybody these days, now’s really the time for some good old-fashioned espionage, James Bond-style. You know, with casual murders committed by men given a “license to kill.”

But things have changed. The old Bond skirmished with Russkies while fighting rich criminals who dreamed of destroying or ruling the world. Today’s Bond fights an ex-agent who wants to hurt the higher-ups in the spy biz who had hurt him.

In reality, it’s the U.S. President — Felix Leiter’s boss — who has the license to kill, exercising it by overseeing multiple drone programs, the practice of rendition, and a developing program called a “disposition matrix,” which aims to target people who are up-and-comers in the America-hating (and thus) terrorist game.

Many critics have noted that the recent Bond films starring the brilliant Daniel Craig have become more personal and less gadgety. Maybe that’s the way real-life spying plays in Britain (I doubt it) but from the American perspective, the current reality of drone strikes overseas, unregulated-by-law rendition tribunals, and database management geared to determining terrorist psychology is positively science-fictional.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

This is not a Brave New World or a 1984, I realize. But it still frightens.

Indeed, for people in the targeted regions it must be pure horror. America’s ruling classes have upped the game. And we can expect to reap a . . . skyfall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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links too much government

Townhall: Want Milk?

This weekend’s contribution to Townhall.com by Yours Truly concerns another one of those automated congressional time bombs. You know, like the “fiscal cliff” but less cliffy and more bomby. Head on over, and then back here, for a few links:

  • Thomas Jefferson’s pithy contribution to the socialist calculation debate, here.
  • The Washington Post’s “dairy cliff” article, here.
  • What Jia Lynn Yang said, here.

 

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Cold as Ice

Well, it’s a few days after the much-ballyhooed End of the World, wherein the magnetic poles were (according to some less-than-astute prognosticators) supposed to flip — North would go negative, and South, positive — causing volcanoes, tidal waves, and all sorts of havoc.

But Christmas Eve has arrived on schedule, the Mayan calendar goes back to being as irrelevant as Isaac Asimov’s idea of a quarterly calendar that would “abolish the months,” and we can return to thinking about the upcoming magnetic pole flip in a scientific way, sans Apocalypse.

Indeed, on Christmas Eve, the only talk about poles is about Santa’s storied connection with the North.

But hey: don’t think Arctic, think Antarctic. The big story, today, is that Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee monarch of America’s “Mother Country” (sorry, Mother), is getting a plot of land on the Frozen Continent named after her.

Yes, to celebrate her 60 years on the throne, she attended a cabinet meeting, and received 60 place mats, one for each year of “service.”

“Can’t have too many place mats,” somebody said. Or must’ve.

Then she was chauffeured over to the Foreign Office where she received the “fitting tribute” of a big triangle of forbidding land south of the Ronne Ice Shelf, which will be called Queen Elizabeth Land. I’m assuming it’s a tribute to her warmth of personality.

Frankly, I’d prefer the place mats. But then, having a stretch of land you will never visit named after you is its own kind of place mat. Just goes to show you that giving gifts is not easy. What do you give the Person who has everything?

That is, everything but relevance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.