Voice For Liberty

Category: Role of government

  • Small and weak government?

    Small and weak government?

    Do corporations prefer the marketplace or a large and powerful government?

    A letter in the Wichita Eagle criticized the marketplace and the power that corporations purportedly hold over it. (Government needed, February 28, 2016). This letter refers to an op-ed by Charles Koch (Charles G. Koch: Sanders and I agree on a few issues, February 19, 2016, originally published in the Washington Post)

    A few remarks:

    The letter-writer states: “It was also no surprise to read that his solution is very small and weak government.” Reading the Koch op-ed to which the letter-writer refers, I didn’t see a call for weak government. Generally, libertarians favor a limited government that is strong in protecting our rights and liberties and exercising the enumerated powers outlined in the Constitution. A limited government is very different from a weak government.

    The letter-writer states: “The very, very rich people and corporations do not check themselves. The marketplace system they embrace as the sole solution encourages the accumulation of more and more wealth and power — and using that power to accumulate more wealth.” With a few exceptions, corporations do not embrace the marketplace, if by marketplace the writer means a system of free markets. Instead, as Charles Koch correctly notes, most corporations seek to constrain and limit the power of free markets. Milton Friedman diagnosed the situation correctly: “The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.”

    It’s difficult to do the things that Friedman says business must do in a market economy — innovate, be customer-focused, and be efficient. It’s far easier to hire lobbyists at the federal, state, and local levels to gain an advantage over your competitors. The harm of this system of cronyism is explained by Koch: “Perversely, this regulatory burden falls hardest on small companies, innovators and the poor, while benefiting many large companies like ours. This unfairly benefits established firms and penalizes new entrants, contributing to a two-tiered society.” It is government, not markets, that are creating two tiers of society.

    Another complaint of the writer is that the rich “fund the multitude of foundations and university professors to pitch their philosophy attacking public schools and other public services.” Well, some rich people do, and thank goodness for them. If not for the generosity of Koch and a few others in founding organizations like The Cato Institute, there might be few sources of information besides a self-serving government or those who benefit from an expansive, meddling government. The latter are the corporations that the letter-writer complains use the marketplace to gain more wealth and power, but in reality are using government to do this.

    As far as funding university professors, this serves as a useful and valuable check to the multitudes of taxpayer-funded public university professors who indoctrinate and condition students to embrace more government. Shouldn’t college students be exposed to a variety of views? That doesn’t seem to be what students are receiving: “Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction. Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as ‘far left’ or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined.” (Moving Further to the Left, Inside Higher Ed, October 24, 2012)

  • If you can’t get a cop in Wichita

    It could be that the officers are busy protecting the city from the illegal playing of poker.

    This is an area ripe for reform. Why is playing poker for money on east Kellogg illegal? At one time the state thought it had to protect us from gambling because it was sinful. That argument has faded as states across the nation have sanctioned casinos. Kansas is unique — at least at the time of the start of non-Indian casino gambling in the state — in that the casinos are actually owned by the state.

    So if the state of Kansas owns casinos, and if the state profits from casinos, how can the state object to gambling on any moral ground? It can’t. Whatever the merits of the arguments against gambling, the state discarded them in exchange for money. Now the state continues to prohibit non-casino gambling because it is competition to Kansas state sanctioned gambling.

    See KWCH News: Seven arrested following investigation at SE Wichita poker room.

  • Friedman: Laws that do harm

    Friedman: Laws that do harm

    As we approach another birthday of Milton Friedman, here’s his column from Newsweek in 1982 that explains that despite good intentions, the result of government intervention often harms those it is intended to help.

    There is a sure-fire way to predict the consequences of a government social program adopted to achieve worthy ends. Find out what the well-meaning, public-interested persons who advocated its adoption expected it to accomplish. Then reverse those expectations. You will have an accurate prediction of actual results.

    To illustrate on the broadest level, idealists from Marx to Lenin and the subsequent fellow travelers claimed that communism would enhance both freedom and prosperity and lead to the “withering away of the state.” We all know the results in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China: misery, slavery and a more powerful and all-encompassing government than the world had ever seen.

    (more…)

  • Franklin Roosevelt, contributor to modern nanny state

    If you’ve wondered what was the genesis of the modern nanny state, listen to this speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s part of his State of the Union Address from 1944.

    The purpose of the original Bill of Rights is to protect our freedoms from government. But to provide the things Roosevelt calls for — food, clothing, a decent home, adequate medical care, and a good education — requires an expansive government. These rights are called positive rights because they require action by the government, in contrast to the negative rights found in the Bill of Rights. Richard A. Epstein explains the consequences of the “Roosevelt Rights”:

    All of these are positive rights, which means necessarily that some unidentified individuals or groups have the duty to provide decent wages, home, health, and education to the people. The individual so taxed can discharge that duty only by forfeiting his own right to reap the fruits of his own labor. Yet the incidence and size of these hefty correlative duties are left unaddressed by Roosevelt.

    We are witnessing today a modern rerun of Roosevelt’s incomplete strategy. Obama’s healthcare plan, for instance, designates a generous set of “essential health benefits” to a large number of individuals entitled to affordable care on the newly created government exchanges. But these benefits cannot be funded with higher taxes on the “millionaires and billionaires,” whose combined wealth falls short of what is needed. So what duty will undergird the new right?

    This sort of funding crisis could never arise under the Bill of Rights 1.0, whose correlative duties are negative — or, put another way, they impose a “keep off” sign on other people. If I have the freedom of speech, your duty is to forbear from disrupting the speech with force, and vice versa. Each of us can demand forbearance from the use of force by all others.

    David Kelley elaborates further in a chapter from The Morality of Capitalism:

    By contrast, welfare rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy certain goods, regardless of one’s actions; they are rights to have the goods provided by others if one cannot earn them oneself. Accordingly, welfare rights impose positive obligations on others. If I have a right to food, someone has an obligation to grow it. If I cannot pay for it, someone has an obligation to buy it for me. Welfarists sometimes argue that the obligation is imposed on society as a whole, not on any specific individual. But society is not an entity, much less a moral agent, over and above its individual members, so any such obligation falls upon us as individuals. Insofar as welfare rights are implemented through government programs, for example, the obligation is distributed over all taxpayers.

    From an ethical standpoint, then, the essence of welfarism is the premise that the need of one individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim may run only as far as the town or the nation. It may not embrace all of humanity. But in all versions of the doctrine, the claim does not depend on your personal relationship to the claimant, or your choice to help, or your evaluation of him as worthy of your help. It is an unchosen obligation arising from the sheer fact of his need.

    Here is an excerpt from Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address, January 1944.

    It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.

    This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

    As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

    We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

    In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

    Among these are:

    The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

    The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

    The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

    The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

    The right of every family to a decent home;

    The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

    The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

    The right to a good education.

    All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

  • Like it or not, we’re coming to plan for you

    Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
    — H.L. Mencken

    thinktomorrowtoday-website-2013-09-16

    We’ve learned that the government planners will plan for you, whether or not you want it. Despite having voted against participation, two Kansas counties are still listed as members of a regional planning consortium. Further, a month after the Butler County Commission sent a letter asking that references to its participation be removed, its name still appears.

    The new website thinktomorrowtoday.org promotes and supports the sustainable communities government planning process in South-Central Kansas. The planning effort has been rebranded as “South Central Kansas Prosperity.”

    reap-website-partners-2013-09-16

    In the logo, on a map, and in narrative, Butler and Sumner counties are listed as participants. But these newspaper headlines say something else about what the elected officials in these counties thought about joining the plan:

    Sumner County isn’t on board with fed’s sustainable communities planning grant

    Sumner County isn’t on board with fed’s sustainable communities planning grant (Wichita Eagle, July 30, 2012): “One of the counties served by a sustainable communities planning grant recently declined to be a partner in the effort, expressing concerns about federal intrusion in local government.”

    Butler County decides not to support REAP planning grant

    Butler County decides not to support REAP planning grant (El Dorado Times, August 23, 2012): “The issue at the center of the Butler County Commission’s discussion about a sustainable communities planning grant was local control.”

    I can understand why these counties decided to opt out of the planning process and why two Sedgwick County Commissioners voted against participation.

    Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole, in his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future, explains the danger and harm of government plans. I remember two passages in particular:

    Somewhere in the United States today, government officials are writing a plan that will profoundly affect other people’s lives, incomes, and property. Though it may be written with the best intentions, the plan will go horribly wrong. The costs will be far higher than anticipated, the benefits will prove far smaller, and various unintended consequences will turn out to be worse than even the plan’s critics predicted.

    And this:

    The worst thing about having a vision is that it confers upon the visionary a moral absolutism: only highly prescriptive regulation can ensure that the vision overcomes an uncaring populace responding to a free market that planners do not really trust. But the more prescriptive the plan, the more likely it is that the plan will be wrong, and such errors will prove extremely costly for the city or region that tries to implement the plan.

    We see the vision of moral absolutism on display: Despite two counties voting against participation, their overseers will, nonetheless, create a plan for them.

    It’s for their own good, after all.

  • Round table: Role of government in society

    In this episode of Kansas Living, Rick Laurino hosts a round table discussion with Kansas representatives Ed Trimmer, Marc Rhoades, and Bob Weeks of WichitaLiberty.org about the role of government in society. View the second part next weekend.

  • A second Bill of Rights, by Franklin Roosevelt

    If we wonder what was the genesis of the modern nanny state, listen to this speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s part of his State of the Union Address from 1944.

    The purpose of the original Bill of Rights is to protect our freedoms from government. But to provide the things Roosevelt calls for — food, clothing, a decent home, adequate medical care, and a good education — requires an expansive government. These rights are called positive rights because they require action by the government, in contrast to the negative rights found in the Bill of Rights. Richard A. Epstein explains the consequences of the “Roosevelt Rights”:

    All of these are positive rights, which means necessarily that some unidentified individuals or groups have the duty to provide decent wages, home, health, and education to the people. The individual so taxed can discharge that duty only by forfeiting his own right to reap the fruits of his own labor. Yet the incidence and size of these hefty correlative duties are left unaddressed by Roosevelt.

    We are witnessing today a modern rerun of Roosevelt’s incomplete strategy. Obama’s healthcare plan, for instance, designates a generous set of “essential health benefits” to a large number of individuals entitled to affordable care on the newly created government exchanges. But these benefits cannot be funded with higher taxes on the “millionaires and billionaires,” whose combined wealth falls short of what is needed. So what duty will undergird the new right?

    This sort of funding crisis could never arise under the Bill of Rights 1.0, whose correlative duties are negative — or, put another way, they impose a “keep off” sign on other people. If I have the freedom of speech, your duty is to forbear from disrupting the speech with force, and vice versa. Each of us can demand forbearance from the use of force by all others.

    David Kelley elaborates further in a chapter from The Morality of Capitalism:

    By contrast, welfare rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy certain goods, regardless of one’s actions; they are rights to have the goods provided by others if one cannot earn them oneself. Accordingly, welfare rights impose positive obligations on others. If I have a right to food, someone has an obligation to grow it. If I cannot pay for it, someone has an obligation to buy it for me. Welfarists sometimes argue that the obligation is imposed on society as a whole, not on any specifi c individual. But society is not an entity, much less a moral agent, over and above its individual members, so any such obligation falls upon us as individuals. Insofar as welfare rights are implemented through government programs, for example, the obligation is distributed over all taxpayers.

    From an ethical standpoint, then, the essence of welfarism is the premise that the need of one individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim may run only as far as the town or the nation. It may not embrace all of humanity. But in all versions of the doctrine, the claim does not depend on your personal relationship to the claimant, or your choice to help, or your evaluation of him as worthy of your help. It is an unchosen obligation arising from the sheer fact of his need.

  • Things have changed at Social Security Administration

    Remember when your Social Security card stated that it was not to be used for identification purposes?

    You’d have to be of at least a certain age to remember this, according to SSA: “The first Social Security cards were issued starting in 1936, they did not have this legend. Beginning with the sixth design version of the card, issued starting in 1946, SSA added a legend to the bottom of the card reading “FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES — NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.” This legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972. The legend has not been on any new cards issued since 1972.”

    As with many government programs, Social Security has grown exponentially, and its identification number has become a de facto national identity number. It’s so important and used in so many ways that it is the prime target for thieves who would steal your identity.

    Social security card

  • The effect of government grants

    Trackside is a column written occasionally by John D’Aloia Jr. He lives in St. Marys, Kansas.

    TRACKSIDE © by John D’Aloia Jr.
    February 5, 2012 AD

    How do you view government grants? Are they “free” money handed out by a caring and beneficent government? My view is that government grants are funded by a forced redistribution of the resources from many people for the benefit of a few. Such grants are a means by which the grantor achieves control over the grantee. Such grants are morally and politically unacceptable.

    “The Eighth Commandment does not say ‘Thou shalt not steal … except by a majority vote or unless it’s for a park swing set.’” (A paraphrase of a line from Mark Hendrickson’s article “Our National Blind Spot,” American Thinker, 6 February 2010.) Those who accept government grants for projects that they cannot fund from local tax sources are stealing resources from others, and in so-doing, are no better than the Occupy Wall Street gang which wants government to extract dollars from everyone else to give them what they want. (I am conflicted on grants that fund what would otherwise be an unfunded federal mandate — if the feds mandate X, then the feds should provide the dollars and take the budget hit, not the government unit needing the dollars to comply — but what if only some governments get a grant to pay for X, setting up an environment for favoritism? or the feds give a grant only to the governments that accept all the attached strings? As I said, conflicted.)

    The only real beneficiaries of this government-forced redistribution of resources are the politicians who buy “good” press by making the grants available (look what we are doing for you), crowing that they have “brought-home-the-bacon” for their constituents, the Clerks in the myriad agencies who administer the grants, and those companies to which some of the dollars ultimately trickle down.

    The willing accomplices in the grant process ignore Frederic Bastiat’s concern for the unforeseen consequences, particularly the impact of grants on the national fiscal mess, the inability of the citizens whose resources have been taken (higher taxes, inflation) to use those resources for their own benefit, and the impact of grants on future tax demands. Grants do put a long term tax burden on communities. In their report titled “Do Intergovernmental Grants Create Ratchets in State and Local Taxes — Testing the Friedman-Sanford Hypothesis,” Russell Sobel and George Crowley wrote: “Our findings confirm that grants indeed result in future state and local tax increases of roughly 40 cents for every dollar in grant money received in prior years.” The report is cited as Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 10-51, West Virginia University, August 2010.

    For immediate satisfaction, grantees are placing the financial burden on others and on future generations. Grant dollars come from three sources: taxpayers at large, deficit spending (insane, obscene borrowing), and the Fed’s printing presses creating phony money out of thin air (inflation). All three sources extract resources in one way or the other from citizens who cannot, will not, benefit from the grant, nor even ever receive a thank-you note.

    Bastiat said that “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” In The Law, published in 1850, (which should be mandatory reading for all legislators and voters), Bastiat used the term “plunder” to describe the “legal” appropriation of the fruits of one person’s labor for the benefit of another. If he were alive today, he would be applying it to grants, recognizing that specific organizations and local governments are using the grant process to obtain the resources of others for their specific benefit and enjoyment.

    Grants are not an economic development plus — at best neutral (dollars not spent by X are spent by Y) — but most likely they have a negative economic impact, directly because the grantor government agencies extract a “shipping and handling fee” out of the economy to keep themselves employed, and indirectly because grants provide an impetus for a sprawling, out-of-control Leviathan.

    Accepting grants also place the grantee under the thumb of the grantor, as grants impose requirements that detract from the authority and sovereignty of the grantee. People look in glee at the line in the grant contract that has a dollar sign and a bunch of numbers after it but neglect to read the fine print that requires them to do this and that for eternity. The federal government uses grants to bribe states to pass laws that the feds want but don’t have the authority to impose. In all too many situations, federal grants are unconstitutional in that they are for purposes that are not within the enumerated powers given to Congress by the Constitution.

    The ends (accomplishment of a project that local groups want but will not fund locally) do not justify the means (stealing now, and in the future, from all citizens).

    See you Trackside.