1)
This may be my favorite article of the bunch.
2) My general disposition
on Paul Ryan is cautiously optimistic. He is much too establishment for
my taste but not the worst of the bunch. Him calling Trump's win a mandate
from the people is WRONG.
3) Let that sink in. Only 22% of eligible voters chose to elect Trump. Less than ¼ of legal adults in the US.
And yet somehow this is a mandate? I disagree. Beyond the staggeringly low 22% (which is not low
with respect to most elections), we should consider that many people were
coerced into voting for Trump via the primary process and our two-party system.
I also contend that a vote as a simple yay or nay is never a mandate on
implementing all of a candidate’s policies. In every election many people
vote just to stop the other side from winning. This can hardly be taken
as an affirmative to the winner to enact his 'mandated' policies. The quote below
from the article says it all:
"The act of casting a vote tells us
nothing about motivation or enthusiasm, so it remains possible to know what
message, exactly, the voter wished to send to the candidate. It is also
impossible to infer from a vote what aspects of the candidate's platform meet
each voter’s approval, or which aspects are a priority. An unemployed auto worker
from Ohio is likely to vote for Trump for very different reasons than a college
educated suburbanite from Colorado. Claims that both of these votes can be combined
to fashion a single ‘mandate’ for the candidate strains the bounds of
credibility."
This is a fun thought experiment. Over
time government grows and grows and grows. It is not all at once but
rather in tiny executive actions and gradual increments. Hey if Obama
could do X I'm sure Donald wants to Trump that executive privilege.
"The state never stays ‘limited’ in
the long or even medium run, as we've seen for ourselves, and before long it
worms its way throughout civil society. Once it becomes entrenched in some area
of social life that had previously been managed by voluntary means, people grow
accustomed to the state's new role, even coming to view it as
indispensable."
"Contrast
this with the state's so-called social contract. Here, nobody signs anything.
You are assumed to consent to the state's rule because you happen to live
within its territorial jurisdiction. According to this morally grotesque
principle, you have to pack up and leave in order to demonstrate your lack of
consent. The state's authority over you is simply assumed (or it takes the form
of a contract nobody ever signed), with the burden of proof on you, rather than
— more sensibly — on the institution claiming the right to help itself to your
life and property."
"We may
test the hypothesis that the state is largely interested in protecting itself
rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the state
pursue and punish most intensely — those against private citizens or those
against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably
not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment,
for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register
for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers
and such economic crimes against the state as counterfeiting its money or
evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing
the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the
assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the state's openly assigned
priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as
inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre."
Let’s
take the issue of LGBT equality, for example, which is arguably a Constitutionally
just cause. It may even be a cause that most people in America agree
with. I tend to think this is the case but the more important fact equality
is an inalienable right. Any MANDATE for
equality is inherently a dangerous thing. It gives power to the ruling
class, and in so doing removes power from the common folk. Admittedly, leaving
LGBT equality to the average person is not always perfect equality, but giving
the ruling elite the power to mandate it is just the beginning of a very
slippery slope. Over time, government can extend its reach. We have
seen it with the Obama administration and thus we are left shocked and afraid
of what Trump may be able to get away with. If we never went down the
path of granting increasing power to the ruling class, the election of a bozo
such as Trump would not matter so much because he is powerless.
Written in 2000, but this article couldn't be
more applicable today. Everyone looks at every negative occurrence as a
chance to sue. I burned my finger today, should I sue the people that made my
stove? With this line of thinking, there is no clear end. The rules for
whom you can and can't sue and for what reason will be arbitrarily written.
Tort law was not developed to provide insurance if you took on risk in a
unilateral manner.
"Here’s a basic principle
of good government: Don’t endorse a government power that you wouldn’t want
wielded by your worst political enemy. Democrats will soon be learning that
painful lesson."
"Obama also used
congressional inaction as a justification for claiming the power to decide
whether the Senate was in session. After his nominees to the NLRB and CFPB were
blocked by the Senate, President Obama used his recess appointment power—which
gives the president the ability to appoint executive officers during Senate
recesses—to push his nominees through. In so doing, he essentially declared
that the Senate’s pro forma sessions, which were sham sessions first used by
Harry Reid to block President George W. Bush’s nominees, were not “real”
sessions of the Senate. It was a bold, reckless, unprecedented, and dangerous
move that was struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court. On many types of
executive overreaches, however, the Court will not be able to similarly
intervene. If Obama had the temerity to push through those appointments,
imagine how far Trump might go on other matters."
I hope we make it through the next four years but
if we don't equal blame should be put on Trump and those that came before him
and extended the powers of the executive branch un-Constitutionally.
This point has been beaten to death but needs to
continue to be made because it is SO important that the left
understands the risk. Trump may be a worse person than Obama but what is scary
is not the level of goodness of an elected official but rather
the power this person has to implement things that affect your daily life.
The author goes on to say:
"But now that same power rests in the hands of a man who may use
it to persecute them. It's scary. The liberties we trade for security and the
powers we grant government are never returned. We, as a people, must be
vigilant in ensuring that we are not tricked into trading away our individual
liberties for the promise of a benevolent government, because one day that
government may turn tyrannical and dictatorial."
ISSUES
Government officials may have your best interest
in mind (probably not but maybe). Even so, they can't be experts on you
as an individual.
"Consider bureaucrats at the
Food and Drug Administration. They don't know you. None has any earthly idea of
your preference for risk — say, how willing you are to risk possible death
today to take a drug that might cure you of cancer that will otherwise surely
kill you tomorrow. And yet these bureaucrats are commonly called “experts” on
drug safety. What they have is expert knowledge of the various possible
consequences, good and ill, of different drugs. But none of them has expert
knowledge of the preferences and circumstances of each of the millions of
individuals whose lives are governed by bureaucrats' decisions on whether to
approve a drug for public use."
We don't live in anything that even remotely
resembles a true free market society. It is crony to its core. Take
a look at the article for a better understanding of cronyism.
"...cronyism is when politicians create
“privileges that governments give to particular businesses and industries.”
Please read this one Mr. Trump. You could make a
lot of people a lot worse off with your ignorant protectionist policy plans.
While I issue this warning, I have a feeling Trump is smarter than
we think. I think he knows how negative those policies could be and only
promoted them because he wanted to play the voters. Will be interesting
to see where his heart really lies!
"If the argument for the prohibition or
restrictions of trade with tariffs and trade barriers at the national level is
accepted, there is no logical stopping place at the level of the state, the
city, the neighborhood, the street, or the block. The only stopping place is
the individual, because the individual is the smallest possible unit. Premises
which lead ineluctably to an absurd conclusion are themselves absurd. Thus,
however convincing the protectionist, anti-trade arguments advanced by Trump
might seem on the surface, there is something terribly wrong with them."
The logical extension of Trump’s protectionist
policies say, ‘Well, I don’t want to give away my potential job of building a
house and of producing my own steak so I am not going to employ a contractor to
build me a home or buy a steak at the grocery store.’
Why do we endorse to foolishness. The more specialization the more I can
consume for a cheaper price. Exports are
what we have to pay for imports in a way.
The less we produce and ship to other countries the more we can consume
domestically. The more we import the
more we consume domestically. You must change the frame with which you view
economics and it all becomes immensely clearer.
"Sen. Elizabeth Warren supports those who oppose school choice (“Progressive
Values on the Ballot,” Nov. 10), presumably because she believes that competition causes
suppliers (in this case K-12 schools) to worsen their service to customers.
Yet Sen. Warren also supports – because she thinks that it will intensify
competition throughout the economy – active
antitrust enforcement, presumably because she believes that competition causes suppliers
to improve their
service to customers.
Is it too much to ask Sen. Warren to decide one way or another if she
believes that competition for customers worsens or improves suppliers’ performance
– or, alternatively, to ask her to explain why K-12 schooling is an exception
to the well-established rule that competition doesn’t worsen, but improves, the
performance of its suppliers?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism
at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030"
Couple interesting quotes....
"Look at Wisconsin, for example – a largely blue state that shocked
everyone by going for Trump. The exit polls show no greater consensus on any
issue than the question of whether Obamacare went too far. Only 17% said it was
fine as is. Fully 45% of those surveyed after the vote said that it had gone
too far. Among that 45%, 81% voted for Trump. That alone was enough to turn
Wisconsin from blue to red and provide a turning point in the electoral
count."
"The months and years
ahead are going to be all about an endless stream of confusing proposals,
complexities, and regulatory tweaks. People need to ask themselves a simple
question: why is it that our access to and pricing of food, clothing, car
rides, home repairs, auto insurance, and every manner of digital service, have
improved vastly in the last decade, while healthcare has become ever
worse? Is there something structurally
different about medical services that make them unlike anything else, such that
government must rule their delivery? No. If you put the service in the hands of
government to manage, you subject a judgement on its merits to the democratic
process. The truth is unavoidable: the only path toward fixing this
problem is through ever less government and ever more market competition."
"MY FELLOW-ECONOMIST WALTER WILLIAMS
has for years kept track of how much money it would take to lift every American
man, woman and child in poverty above the official poverty level. That sum has
consistently been some fraction of the money actually spent in
"anti-poverty" programs. In other words, if you gave every poor
person enough money to stop being poor, that would cost a fraction of what our
welfare state programs and bureaucracies cost."
This was
written in 1998. I am going to search
for the #s today but I am guessing they are worse. Literally we could
give every man woman and child the dollar amount in cash to get them to the
poverty line and it would cost a fraction of what we spend on benefits. I
would love to hear the best rebuttal on this you efficient government folks.
Borrowing (debt) works
because one person is willing to lend money to another person or institution. The
borrower then uses the proceeds in his chosen endeavor, presumably to earn more
money with which to pay himself a profit and also eventually repay the lender,
including some interest. But, by definition, government has no capacity to earn
profits. So in order to obtain funds for it’s programs, government has to
either steal from the producers of wealth (the citizens of the country) or
print money. But printing money only
devalues the money that producers have earned by reducing what can be purchased
with the same amount of money (inflation).
So printing money acts essentially as a tax and a regressive one, which hurts
the poor disproportionately. With this framework we see that it isn't
necessarily the deficit that is negative for the US economy - it is the very
spending of unearned money by the government.
"To speak exactly,
therefore, the effect of a protective tariff is to increase the amount of labor
for which certain commodities will exchange. Hence it reduces the value of
labor just as it increases the value of commodities."
As much as politicians would have you believe, you cannot simply change
one variable and have the rest not automatically rebalance to an
equilibrium. A tariff simply reduces the
value of an equivalent amount of labor. But if we just reduced the value of
labor can't we fix that by just increasing the price of labor (minimum wage).
Of course not. The left just constantly thinks increasing government
interventions is the way to go.
