If you won't believe me, will you believe a Harvard professor?
Click the link below for an excellent short video.
LearnLiberty.org: Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism
Monday, September 12, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Remembering 9/11: Capitalism under attack
Capitalism is not the same thing as large-scale heavy industry or tall, glorious skyscrapers. It is the everyday voluntary cooperation of free people in the marketplace; trade among friends, neighbors, suppliers and customers from the neighborhood to the world. Yet only capitalism in its most avanced form could produce the United States of America as we know it and everything that it has built, including one of capitalism's greatest testaments: the World Trade Center.
It is no random chance therefore that the fascist islamists chose to vent their rage on the twin towers. They represent everything that a backward, tribal, intolerant and ignorant mindset could hate: individual liberty, tolerance of differences, freedom of religion, interest understood as an exchange of different money values across time, equality of the sexes, private property and rule of law in the Western tradition.
The terrorists hate us for who and what we are. Capitalism works and offers hope to millions who flock to the shores of capitalist nations. Communism, fascism and fundamentalist islamic Sharia law offer only physical and mental prisons, torture chambers, privations and death to all but the most privileged elite.
The innocent victims of 9/11 died for living, and thereby defending, freedom and capitalism. Among the honors we give to them, let us continue to defend the same principles.
It is no random chance therefore that the fascist islamists chose to vent their rage on the twin towers. They represent everything that a backward, tribal, intolerant and ignorant mindset could hate: individual liberty, tolerance of differences, freedom of religion, interest understood as an exchange of different money values across time, equality of the sexes, private property and rule of law in the Western tradition.
The terrorists hate us for who and what we are. Capitalism works and offers hope to millions who flock to the shores of capitalist nations. Communism, fascism and fundamentalist islamic Sharia law offer only physical and mental prisons, torture chambers, privations and death to all but the most privileged elite.
The innocent victims of 9/11 died for living, and thereby defending, freedom and capitalism. Among the honors we give to them, let us continue to defend the same principles.
Friday, September 09, 2011
Top Articles
- Remembering 9/11: Capitalism under attack
The innocent victims of 9/11 died for living, and thereby defending, freedom and capitalism. Among the honors we give to them, let us continue to defend the same principles.
- Nothing To Do About Jobs
The one thing the government hasn't tried for at least 3 years is to get out of the way.
- Hispanic Voters, Immigration and the Republican Party
The Hard Right and Extreme Left both need to give way to the Sober Center
- A Well-Deserved Defeat for Leftism
The Left cannot admit that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
- It's the Over-regulation, Stupid!
God help you if you don't do with your money what the Left thinks you ought.
- The Left’s Secret Debating Weapon: Shallowness
While the conservative assembles focused logic and facts, the Leftist sprays vacuous clichés in all directions.
- Is There Hope for Califrancia?
The Left kept California in 2010, so they own the bankruptcy.
- Republicans and the Immigration Trap
The next elections are too important to sacrifice over illegal gardeners.
- Environmental Hoaxes and Immigration
Human beings living under liberty and the rule of law are the ultimate resource.
- 121 Reasons to Reject Obama-Reid-PelosiCare
It's Unnecessary, it's destructive and it won't work.
- Bozo Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace committee humiliated the president. Does he know it?
- Public Billionaires vs. Private Millionaires
Why do politicians who command billions want us to envy and resent people who earn 1/20,000th as much?
- Illegal Immigration, 1806 -2006
The Homestead Act of 1862 demonstrates how law can eventually catch up with reality.
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Nothing To Do About Jobs
The one thing the government hasn't tried for at least 3 years is to get out of the way.
Now that President Obama’s hope-and-change green job-creating juggernaut has flatlined (with 0% job growth in August and downward revisions for prior months), a reasonable question to ask is, what can governments do now?
The answer is that perhaps they can do the one thing they haven’t tried in at least 3 years, if not more: nothing. That is, governments can minimize their footprint on the economy, lighten regulations, cut tax rates (permanently), stop threatening ‘millionaires and billionaires’, banks, oil companies, non-union workers and the private sector in general and basically get out of the way of the people who would otherwise be creating the jobs.
For the fact is, governments and politicians, no matter how wise or worthy, don’t create jobs, on net balance. Even big, established business corporations don’t do it; they’ve lost almost 3 million net jobs in the US over the past decade.
Real job creation is the role of startup entrepreneurs: businessmen and women, investors and speculators with an assist from venture capitalists and private insurance companies. That’s right, the people most reviled on the Left as undeserving rich, racist polluting exploiters are in fact the ones from whom all prosperity flows (prosperity that has to be created before it may be distributed). The pudding is that Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Waters & Co. are at the top of their game in crushing and suppressing these fatcat scum of the Earth, and the logical and inevitable outcome has come to pass, among which the worst spike in black teen unemployment in a generation: 47%.
Entrepreneurs put together business projects on their own account, without subsidies, privileges or prejudice, hoping to enjoy profits (which arrive years or decades after everyone else, including workers, have been paid) but having no guarantee against losses for failing to provide the optimum mix of high-quality low-priced products and services and well-compensated JOBS most urgently needed in the marketplace. When they fail, entrepreneurs lose their own money, not yours and mine, and they don’t indenture our grandchildren.
All the undue laws, regulations, taxes, red tape, lawsuits, threats, monetary manipulations and hostility toward profits that governments slap on the private sector, can only have the effect of raising the cost and risk of hiring people to prohibitive heights, resulting in the unemployment that we are suffering.
By ‘undue’ is meant those interventions which do not derive from governments’ legitimate role of preventing and punishing murder, robbery, theft, fraud, assault, rape, persecution and/or conspiracy. Does it really take tens of thousands of pages of laws, hundreds of agencies and 8 million unionized public-sector employees to do that?
Entrepreneurship doesn’t need to take direction from government in order to do the right thing for the economy. Whether the subject is food, clothing, shelter, minerals, energy, clean air, medicine, university faculty parking spaces or JOBS, the same entrepreneurial cycle pattern emerges: Scarcity leads to rising market prices, which signal entrepreneurial opportunity; there’s money to be made (‘there’s gold in them thar hills!’). Investors and speculators advance their own savings to fund research and development to invent new ways to extract and produce more, to drill deeper under the ocean floor using only one tower where five had been required before, to design new industrial and technological processes, to genetically engineer seeds that multiply crop yields, to discover new life-prolonging and enhancing miracle drugs, etc. Many entrepreneurs fail, at their own expense (not the taxpayer’s) but others succeed, and the result is profits for them and abundant products and services at prices for you and I that are lower than before the ‘crisis’ that started the cycle.
The only force capable of stopping this virtuous cycle is… force: Prohibiting the market to function; controlling wages and/or prices so that signals and information about the true relative abundance and scarcity do not get transmitted properly; awarding contracts and employment positions based on political favoritism, nepotism or ethnic preferences rather than objective competence and qualifications; forbiding an aerospace company from opening a new plant in a right-to-work state because it doesn’t please the Big Labor bosses; barring the exploitation of available resources (EPA); destroying the U.S. IPO market via Sarbanes-Oxley; forcing taxpayers to prop up firms that have failed; failing to enforce the rule of law consistently and fairly; bringing criminal charges against oil companies over the death of a few birds while giving the windmill industry a free slaughter pass; paying people increasingly generous benefits for not working, out of the pockets of those that are; wasting taxpayer money on ‘bridges to nowhere’ on the ludicrous principle that government spending somehow multiplies economic benefits above what that same money would accomplish in private hands from which it was taken…and on and on. Instead of being the custodian of individual liberty and private property rights, government has metastasized into a giant job-killing machine.
The great economic revolutions that began in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and were carried forward in the United States in the 19th and 20th , were the result of liberty, of government permitting it to happen, not interfering, not doing what most governments to this day still do, which is to stomp on and crush any force or individual that competes with their power and status. The sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner the jobs engine will be revived.
To quote Rich Karlgaard of Forbes Magazine: “Entrepreneurs are not just a cute little sub sector of the American economy. They are the whole game”. Or Tim Kane of the Kaufman Foundation: “When it comes to U.S. job growth, start-up companies aren’t everything. They’re the only thing.” Government has a whole lot of nothing to do about it. May it get started right away.
Now that President Obama’s hope-and-change green job-creating juggernaut has flatlined (with 0% job growth in August and downward revisions for prior months), a reasonable question to ask is, what can governments do now?
The answer is that perhaps they can do the one thing they haven’t tried in at least 3 years, if not more: nothing. That is, governments can minimize their footprint on the economy, lighten regulations, cut tax rates (permanently), stop threatening ‘millionaires and billionaires’, banks, oil companies, non-union workers and the private sector in general and basically get out of the way of the people who would otherwise be creating the jobs.
For the fact is, governments and politicians, no matter how wise or worthy, don’t create jobs, on net balance. Even big, established business corporations don’t do it; they’ve lost almost 3 million net jobs in the US over the past decade.
Real job creation is the role of startup entrepreneurs: businessmen and women, investors and speculators with an assist from venture capitalists and private insurance companies. That’s right, the people most reviled on the Left as undeserving rich, racist polluting exploiters are in fact the ones from whom all prosperity flows (prosperity that has to be created before it may be distributed). The pudding is that Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Waters & Co. are at the top of their game in crushing and suppressing these fatcat scum of the Earth, and the logical and inevitable outcome has come to pass, among which the worst spike in black teen unemployment in a generation: 47%.
Entrepreneurs put together business projects on their own account, without subsidies, privileges or prejudice, hoping to enjoy profits (which arrive years or decades after everyone else, including workers, have been paid) but having no guarantee against losses for failing to provide the optimum mix of high-quality low-priced products and services and well-compensated JOBS most urgently needed in the marketplace. When they fail, entrepreneurs lose their own money, not yours and mine, and they don’t indenture our grandchildren.
All the undue laws, regulations, taxes, red tape, lawsuits, threats, monetary manipulations and hostility toward profits that governments slap on the private sector, can only have the effect of raising the cost and risk of hiring people to prohibitive heights, resulting in the unemployment that we are suffering.
By ‘undue’ is meant those interventions which do not derive from governments’ legitimate role of preventing and punishing murder, robbery, theft, fraud, assault, rape, persecution and/or conspiracy. Does it really take tens of thousands of pages of laws, hundreds of agencies and 8 million unionized public-sector employees to do that?
Entrepreneurship doesn’t need to take direction from government in order to do the right thing for the economy. Whether the subject is food, clothing, shelter, minerals, energy, clean air, medicine, university faculty parking spaces or JOBS, the same entrepreneurial cycle pattern emerges: Scarcity leads to rising market prices, which signal entrepreneurial opportunity; there’s money to be made (‘there’s gold in them thar hills!’). Investors and speculators advance their own savings to fund research and development to invent new ways to extract and produce more, to drill deeper under the ocean floor using only one tower where five had been required before, to design new industrial and technological processes, to genetically engineer seeds that multiply crop yields, to discover new life-prolonging and enhancing miracle drugs, etc. Many entrepreneurs fail, at their own expense (not the taxpayer’s) but others succeed, and the result is profits for them and abundant products and services at prices for you and I that are lower than before the ‘crisis’ that started the cycle.
The only force capable of stopping this virtuous cycle is… force: Prohibiting the market to function; controlling wages and/or prices so that signals and information about the true relative abundance and scarcity do not get transmitted properly; awarding contracts and employment positions based on political favoritism, nepotism or ethnic preferences rather than objective competence and qualifications; forbiding an aerospace company from opening a new plant in a right-to-work state because it doesn’t please the Big Labor bosses; barring the exploitation of available resources (EPA); destroying the U.S. IPO market via Sarbanes-Oxley; forcing taxpayers to prop up firms that have failed; failing to enforce the rule of law consistently and fairly; bringing criminal charges against oil companies over the death of a few birds while giving the windmill industry a free slaughter pass; paying people increasingly generous benefits for not working, out of the pockets of those that are; wasting taxpayer money on ‘bridges to nowhere’ on the ludicrous principle that government spending somehow multiplies economic benefits above what that same money would accomplish in private hands from which it was taken…and on and on. Instead of being the custodian of individual liberty and private property rights, government has metastasized into a giant job-killing machine.
The great economic revolutions that began in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and were carried forward in the United States in the 19th and 20th , were the result of liberty, of government permitting it to happen, not interfering, not doing what most governments to this day still do, which is to stomp on and crush any force or individual that competes with their power and status. The sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner the jobs engine will be revived.
To quote Rich Karlgaard of Forbes Magazine: “Entrepreneurs are not just a cute little sub sector of the American economy. They are the whole game”. Or Tim Kane of the Kaufman Foundation: “When it comes to U.S. job growth, start-up companies aren’t everything. They’re the only thing.” Government has a whole lot of nothing to do about it. May it get started right away.
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