Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Laboring for Unemployment

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.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies tax policy

In the Name of Loving

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.

Categories
Thought

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow (1899)

The State of War is in absolute opposition to the right of free choice of nationality, of accession or secession.

Categories
links

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:

Categories
Thought

Stendhal

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.

Categories
video

Video: Antifragility

An interesting interview with the author of the new book, Antifragile:

Categories
Thought

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.

Categories
nannyism too much government

Rationing Pain Relief

If you doubt that ever-expanding government control over medicine hurts people, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is eager to disabuse you. How else to explain his new requirement that city-controlled emergency rooms restrict supplies of painkillers in the name of the war on drugs?

The idea is that if emergency rooms shrink supplies below what medical practitioners think reasonable, then it’s harder for addicts to get their fix.

Have personnel known that certain patients were addicted to painkillers and treated them with painkillers anyway? Or are painkiller addicts stealing the supplies? Whatever the rationalizations, it’s evident that substandard supplies will make it harder to help non-addicts in serious pain.

What about days when demand is especially high? Or when delivery of new supplies is disrupted?

Like any central planner confident in his own omniscience, Bloomberg is sure that limiting the supply of painkillers below the level judged adequate by hospitals could never make it harder to help persons in pain. He also says, if so, so what? “[So] you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. . . . There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer. . . .”

His rationale, here, would “justify” making it harder to obtain anything whatever that enhances our lives if that thing might also be used destructively. A counsel to impair life in the name of saving it.

Bloomberg adds callousness to his hubris, topping it off with absurdity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

If censorship reigns, there cannot be sincere flattery, and only small men are afraid of small writings.

Categories
too much government

The Budget Math Deficit

The White House once promised to answer any petition posted at its .gov site that garnered at least 25,000 signatures. (It has since increased the minimum.) Facetious persons urged it to build a Death Star like the planet-destroyer in Star Wars.

Well, the petition got the necessary signatures, and the Obama administration responded: No, we shan’t build a Death Star. One reason given? Paul Shawcross, a budget official, noted the prohibitive cost.

“We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it,” he says.

Really?

Now consider a widely reprinted lesson in accounting offered a little more than a year ago by Laurie Newsom of the Gainesville Tea Party. Newsom suggested that to better understand the government’s spending antics, drop eight zeros from the budget numbers. Newsom cited annual tax revenue of $2,170,000,000,000, a federal budget of $3,820,000,000,000, new debt of $1,650,000,000,000, national debt of $14,271,000,000,000. And “budget cuts” of $38,500,000,000.

Delete eight zeros and pretend that the national government is just one household. So instead of federal revenue of $2.17 trillion, we have one household bringing in $21,700. But in the same year, its residents are spending $38,200 and adding $16,500 to a credit card with an outstanding balance of $142,710. One the other hand, the family has “cut” $385 from its spending.

Sound like a very disciplined effort to get the fiscal house in order?

Things that can’t continue forever, don’t.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.