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.
I force myself to laugh at everything, for fear of having to cry.
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.
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.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci, Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original minds borrowed from one another. Michel Cervantes makes his Don Quixote a fool; but pray is Orlando any other? It would puzzle one to decide whether knight errantry has been made more ridiculous by the grotesque painting of Cervantes, than by the luxuriant imagination of Ariosto. Metastasio has taken the greatest part of his operas from our French tragedies. Several English writers have copied us without saying one word of the matter. It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.
There’s apparently more than one way to mess up money.
Canada’s new plastic banknotes don’t work in all vending machines, I hear . . . and there’s a less practical problem with the new C$20 note: It has the “wrong” maple leaf on it.
Some botanists are complaining that the stylized leaf logo is not Canada’s native species, but one hailing from Norway.
I’ve not seen one of these bills up close (donations would be appreciated, though), but from the photo, the thing I’d be worrying about is that the Queen, on the basis of her appearances on bank notes, looks more like Dwight D. Eisenhower every year.
Here in America, our Washington insiders mess up money both symbolically and substantively.
In the old days, before president-worship had become something of the country’s official religion, Liberty was represented by female representatives or Indians. (The fact that the U.S. government killed off and hounded remaining populations of native Americans in that time put the latter practice into some cognitive dissonance.) Now, both coins and notes feature dead presidents. Frankly, I think we should junk the presidents and go back to stylized, classical representations of Liberty.
The biggest symbolic problem is having Andrew Jackson, America’s most successful and vehement anti-central banking president, placed on our central bank’s $20 note.
That’s an insult, not an honor.
Another way to mess up money is to devaluate it by over-printing.
Or creating too much credit. Or good old-fashioned seignorage. With the Quantitative Easing and “trillion dollar coin,” we’ve got these last two covered. Alas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
All the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; That they refer to the physical object of man’s preservation; That nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; That we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; That it only requires to be developed; That we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; And that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization:
Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; Live for thy fellow citizens, that they may live for thee.
The looming debt load will some day come a-crashing. But politicians are doing nothing — or nest to nothing — to stop the growth of the debt, and thus keep on piling on the extent and severity of debt.
So click on over to Townhall.com, to read this weekend’s column by Yours Truly, the purveyor of Common Sense, and then come back here for further reading.
Gathering children to his “against guns” cause, the president continues to kill children — including American children — with his drone program. And his supporters continue to support their man and his murderous and self-contradictory stance: