EHEHHEEMM...Now that’s out of the way, hello and welcome. Here is the disclaimer:
This is my blog, therefore, you will see my opinions here, most of them placed very soundly on a bed of facts and a foundation of economic principles, all of which I believe to be correct. While I respect your right to have an opinion, I don’t have to respect your opinion. So while I will try to respond to as many rebuttals filled with half baked “ideas” and accusations of my belonging to one political party or the other, I’ll probably ignore a lot of them. If you have read this far and I haven’t pissed you off, hold on; we’ll get there.
I want to start this thing off by outlining where it is I stand, you know, on the issues. I am not a Republican or a Democrat, I’m also not a Libertarian. More so, the fact that I ever fell victim to the jersey-wearing political game “they” want us all to play sickens me and is probably my underlining reason for doing this blog...thingy. I consider myself to be a constitutionalist. Generally speaking a constitutionalist favors limited government, as prescribed by the Constitution. In the beliefs of the constitutionalist, such a government should be small not only in size but also in scope and in power. Government has no business telling individuals they can or can’t get married, where they can or can’t smoke, how much money they can make, how to drive their car,or to wear a helmet, a seat belt, or underwear for that matter. More specifically I know in order for a society to have the maximum amount of individual freedom and liberty for everyone, the government has three roles, and only three: dealing with and mediating externalities, operating technical monopolies, and upholding contractual agreements. That’s it.
If that list is nothing more than big words to you, let me help. I believe upholding contracts is pretty self-explanatory: You sign a contract, someone breaks said contract, you need an impartial third party to mediate the dispute. Very similar are externalities, only these are things that we didn’t enter into a legal contract for. Externalities deal with the unwritten contract of trying to get along, and to generally be civil human beings. In a more Merriam-Webster sense, externalities are any decisions made by a party that negatively affects another party or other parties that were uninvolved in the decision-making process. While at first this may seem open-ended, it’s pretty cut and dried. Things like murder, rape, theft and all the other big crimes obviously fall under this category. If someone decided to shoot you, you probably weren’t at the meeting, and if you had shown up I doubt they would have given you a vote. Externalities are also things such as, a meth lab in a populated neighborhood, a Ponzi scheme, or even something like the BP oil spill (if actual property damage or substantial pollution is done). In bringing up the BP oil spill I think it’s important to also outline How the government handles these situations. The point is not for government to demand a massive fund of money from the “offending” company, only to dole it out to special interest groups that will in turn help the politicians’ campaigns. Rather it is to directly prove guilt or innocence in any legal actions brought on by the negatively affected parties. So if the oil spill had ruined your beach-shore property, or threw off your hotel’s business, you would sue BP for damages and the government would make sure (if BP were found guilty) that BP would be held accountable. If the affected parties were, say, dolphins which can’t find a good lawyer, then the government's responsibility is A) to clean up the mess, and give BP the bill or B) to just make sure BP is actually taking care of it. It is not, however, the job of government to arbitrarily point the finger of blame at a party, blame him for a disaster, and use the situation (whether it be real or one that they have created) to manipulate people into going along with their political agenda. ( I’m looking at you too Iraq war.)*
That brings us to technical monopolies, which are not the kind of Monopolies your teachers in school taught you about. (Those don’t actually exist). Technical monopolies do things that have to be done, regardless of the normal economic parameters that make a business idea viable. These include things such as the military, a space program, the sheriff’s dept., and interstates and highways. (Notice I didn’t just say roads.) It’s also important to understand that just because something is at one point in time a technical monopoly, does not mean it forever remains one. Take for instance the space program, right now it is not cost-effective, there is little demand in the private sector Because of time, safety, and generally nowhere to go. Regardless, it is still extremely important that we maintain a space program. In the distant future, however, when space travel is faster, maybe we will have colonized the moon and some planets, and maybe formed a nice trade agreement with some Twi’leks. You now have an environment that businesses could compete in, allowing space travel to be self-sustainable. Therefore, it would have gone from a technical monopoly to operating in the free market (if one still exists then), which by the way is the only way this can evolve. If something can successfully exist in the free market, it will never have a reason to become a technical monopoly (other than politicians wanting to use it to buy votes). Lots of things are currently being treated as technical monopolies that aren’t, and in every case their private sector counter parts operate more efficiently on less money. The USPS and public schools come to mind, and I could write entirely separate entries about them. Maybe on a off week when not too much is happening, I will.**
Most of the time when I explain this to someone, they have one question left: “What about the poor? We have social programs to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, where would those fall into your government?” There is a very simple answer: Our social programs are always touted by the politicians who support them as exactly what they should be, but aren’t: charity. Private charities, again, operate with higher success rates on less denaro than any government social program. Eliminating government social programs would also get rid of a lot of unneeded animosities in our society, as people would then be freely giving to charity instead of being forced.*** So, there we are. That wasn’t so bad was it? Thanks for reading. Keep coming back, and maybe we can continue to learn together. You may have seen asterisks here and there, for some additional clarification if you didn’t understand my reference or point. You don’t have to read them as they are just there to clarify, and I felt they were generally not needed to get my point across
-D
*Side note on the Iraq war: I support our troops and, generally speaking, what we were doing over there. Saddam was an asshat, an asshat that we put into power. Therefore he was probably our mess to clean up. He was oppressing people and overall was a tyrant who needed to be taken out of power. THAT being said, the way the Bush administration just sorta popped that in, piggybacked on the fear and ultimately “patriotism” that culminated from 911 was disingenuous to say the least. We already had a war that needed to be fought, one, I think, we will ultimately be unsuccessful with due to the nine years the Taliban and other terrorist organizations have had to organize and plan. In short, taking Saddam out needed to happen sooner than later. However, following 911 was just the wrong time and more importantly the wrong way to finish Daddy’s laundry.
**Like I said, I could right a whole entry on public schools alone, this, however, is not it. Public schools are a great example of something that started off as a technical monopoly and no longer is. When formal school houses started popping up, cars didn’t exist, roads weren’t good and people were spread far out. If the government had not have facilitated this process the majority of people would not have gone to school, the schools would have went out of business, and we would have been a lesser civilization for it. However, that is no longer the case. We have better transportation and higher population density now. Generally speaking, we could have three times as many schools in certain areas than we do. It’s high time government gets out, stops taking our money, and lets us choose the schools we want our children to attend. Along with that, we would end the debate on prayer in school, busing, overcrowding, teacher wages, and almost everything. Don’t want your kid to pray in school? Send them to a school that doesn’t pray or vice versa. Underpaid teacher? You’d have a bargaining chip in your students. You could take students with you. If you were good, students would follow you, much like people follow a good hair dresser to a new salon. Schools would compete to have the best teachers, ultimately getting good teachers paid what they were worth. (Not such great news for the bad teachers. Sorry.)
***The tax structure as it stands is essentially theft. Then the stolen money is being given to people who did not earn it. To better explain this we can take the government out of the equation. If Paul is carrying a brown bag of money that has 100 bucks in it, and I knock it out of his hands, take 50 dollars really quick, and hand it to a homeless guy three doors down, the homeless guy is going to like me. In fact, if I were to run for mayor he and all his homeless buddies might vote for me. But Paul is probably pretty pissed, not only at me, but also at the homeless guy who saw me steal the money but took it because he really needed it. Now I have created animosity between the two people, who without my intervention would have either had no feelings, or possibly even positive ones if Paul would have thrown the homeless dude a couple of bucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment