The government causes unemployment

American government enforces the unnatural conditions of unemployment and homelessness. Most people are unaware of this and can not even imagine how the government would do such a thing. Today I will attempt to explain unemployment.

Let us begin with the fact that long term unemployment is a new phenomenon:

Read any account of economic history from the late Middle Ages through the 19th century and try to find any evidence of the existence of unemployment. You won’t find it. Why is that? Because long-term unemployment is a fixture of the modern world created by the interventionist state. “We” tried to cure it and “we” ended up doing the opposite. ~ Lew Rockwell

We live in a world where there are always many more things that need to be done than there is time to do them. I could hire 100 men today and keep them busy for a month just getting me caught up if I could afford them.

It has always been true that there were more things to be done that we have people and time to do them —  and it will always be so. This means that there will always be jobs. Unemployment is a problem of getting those who need things done together with those who would like to work.

The essential problem is affordability. The government makes it very expensive for a business to hire new workers. In fact, it is so expensive to have workers that business is letting people go and even looking to use robots instead of people. The problem is getting worse and will continue to do so long as there are barriers to deal-making between those who would hire and those who would like to work.

It is not lack of work. Rather it is the cost of getting the work done. So what makes the cost of hiring people so high? Government is the reason that cost is so high.

Lew Rockwell once listed a few of the reasons the cost of employment is so high. This list is far from being exhaustive:

The high minimum wage that knocks out the first several rungs from the bottom of the ladder;

The high payroll tax that robs employees and employers of resources;

The laws that threaten firms with lawsuits should the employee be fired;

The laws that established myriad conditions for hiring beyond the market-based condition that matters: can he or she get the job done?;

The unemployment subsidy in the form of phony insurance that pays people not to work;

The high cost of business start-ups in the form of taxes and mandates;

The mandated benefits that employers are forced to cough up for every new employee under certain conditions;

The withholding tax that prevents employers and employees from making their own deals

The age restrictions that treat everyone under the age of 16 as useless;

The social security and income taxes that together devour nearly half of contract income;

The labor union laws that permit thugs to loot a firm and keep out workers who would love a chance to offer their wares for less.

 

The US could “be great again” if just these government interventions were eliminated. There would be employment for all who were able to work. Congress and the President could eliminate these barriers to employment easily.

Given a new laissez-faire approach; the hiring of new employees would be breath taking to behold. But some would object to this approach. What would be the objection to this approach? Many would say that we need “good paying jobs” and not just jobs. They would claim that being unemployed and dependent on government is much better to working for what you are worth.

There is no exploitation in a market-based labor contract. Humans would freely come to agreement based on their subjective view of the benefits of the proposed arrangement just as von Mises told us in “Human Action“.

Exploitation is violence or threat of violence implied in the negotiation of anything affecting the life worker or employer. So, everyone in our system is exploited by the government and the onerous regulations and laws that rob the unemployed of wages, businesses of opportunity to hire workers.

Everyone is robbed of opportunity. The government is the thief.

 

A few thoughts on anarcho-magic of the communist “anarchists”

It has been a long time since I wrote a post concerning the socialist or communist wing of the anarchist movement. On twitter, a long time friend sent me a barrage of tweets on socialism and anarchy. I have copied the text of them, in order, here:

‏

I saw this on Twitter:

To identify as an anarchist/communist is to identify as anti-capitalist, racism is little more than an…..

…expression of the competition for wage-labour, and as we know the condition for capital is wage-labour.

The issue for me as an anarchist is not the color of your skin, but the fact that you are……..

………force to sell your labour power to exist.

When the condition for capital, wage-labour, has been reduced to activity sans wage,..

……..truly equality will be within our grasp.

The means of production are so vast; the need to trade has been largely rendered superfluous.

Without the need to trade, wage-labour could easily be relegated to the dust bin.

Promoting identity politics and political correctness to the level of wage-labour as an issue relative to..

equality is both misguided and juvenile at best. Frankly I find it preposterous.

This fellow was in a discussion with a Social Justice Warrior as I understand it, telling him that racism was of little concern as wage slavery was the important consideration. As you can see, his idea is that if one sells his labor for wages (money) then that is a total horror and the man is a slave.

Rothbard once observed:

And when the left-anarchists can be pressed for an answer, the response is disturbing indeed. Take for example one of our most distinguished socialist-anarchists, Professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our “right-wing” libertarian movement; apparently he is – I am afraid unrealistically – concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known.” (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an “anarchist” at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an “anarchist.”

I had someone say to me on Twitter that the large corporations would “dominate” us and become our masters in the absence of government. Does she not know of how many corporations have lost out in the competitive race due to the customer’s whims?

Where the hell is the A&P grocery chain that was the largest and most powerful in the nation when I was born? Were is Florida’s dominate drug store chain that was called Eckerds? Heck, I am not sure of the spelling any more they have been gone so long.

Dominate us? Walmart has no army to make me buy from them. I have not been inside one of their stores in years and they can’t do a thing about it. I prefer on-line Amazon to Walmart or Target either one. At one time IBM was the only maker of computers that any business would buy from. There was even a saying back then, “no one ever got fired because they bought IBM”. Do they even make computers any more? What happened to them? Does anyone still use a Zerox copy machine? Corporations come and go.

Thomas DiLorenzo once listed a few of socialism’s dirty secrets:

1. Socialism has always and everywhere been an economic disaster, and every honest scholar knows this. After seventy years of socialism, the Soviet economy was barely 5% of the U.S. economy, despite the false assertions of pro-socialist economists like Paul Samuelson, who wrote in the 1988 edition of his famous textbook that the Soviet economy would exceed the U.S. economy by the year 2000.

2. You cannot fix socialism with smarter government planners or plans. Socialism cannot work because the rational economic calculation is impossible without private property, free-market prices, the profit-and-loss market feedback mechanism, and economic freedom in general.

3. The ostensible goal of socialism – egalitarianism – is at war with human nature because all human beings are unique in thousands of different ways. The only kind of “equality” that socialism has ever created is equality of misery and poverty.

4. Socialism generates far more societal inequality than economic freedom does. In all socialist societies the politically-connected elite live lives of luxury while nearly everyone else is equally impoverished.  In democratic socialist Venezuela today the economy has been ruined by socialism while the daughter of the late Hugo Chavez, the father of Venezuelan socialism, is reportedly worth $4.5 billion.

5. The worst kind of people – the most immoral, corrupt, cynical, uncaring, and brutal – rise to the top under socialism because socialism is all about forcing people to abandon their own plans for their own lives and complying with mandatory government plans instead. It is no accident, in other words, that socialism is associated with such violent thugs as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao.

6. Fascism was just another variety of socialism. The word “Nazi” was an acronym for national socialism. The German socialists distinguished themselves from the Russian socialists by calling their variety of socialism “national” as opposed to “international.”

7. It is a myth that Scandinavian socialism has been successful. Swedish capitalism was extremely successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The Swedes began living off of the fruits of capitalist prosperity by adopting a version of democratic socialism in the 1950s.  As a result, there was not a single net new job created there from 1955 to 1995.

8. Nineteenth-century socialism was “government ownership of the means of production,” but it now includes the welfare state progressive income taxation and the strangulation of capitalism with regulation and taxation. The welfare state has destroyed the work ethic of millions; destroyed millions of families; caused a 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births in America since 1960; and transformed millions into lifelong beggars and wards of the state.

9. Government-run healthcare systems – medical care socialism – is like all other government enterprises in that it operates with all the efficiency of the Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles and all the compassion of the IRS. Anything as important as medical care should never be put in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats.

10. The worse pollution problems on the planet for the past century or more have been in the socialist countries, as documented by books with titles like Ecocide in the USSR.  After the collapse of socialism the world learned that, in addition to being economic basket cases, socialist countries were also ecological cesspools.

These facts about socialism concern the typical socialism of the State rather than the magical thinking of so-called socialist-anarchists but collectivism is collectivism no matter what you call it. There has never been socialism without the state because it takes force, guns, and coercion to enforce the lunacy of socialism.

 

 

 

The path to liberty

On this Christmas day in 2016 I would like to share a few random thoughts about seeking a path to liberty. My Twitter feed is full of liberty seekers arguing with each other over the silliest of things. I even saw that some young idiot calling himself an “anarchist” actually called Murray N. Rothbard a racist. A racist! Jesus on a stick, what fools show up in my Twitter feed. Anyway, this short post is about freedom and liberty — and how we might get there.

Society is necessary for mankind to rise above the primitive “cave man” state. We have to have division of labor to build anything close to a functioning, prosperous society. Government does not yield society, government retards and kills society.

“You cannot truly have a compassionate community, without consent and choice.  Socialism cannot build community as long as it is hierarchical. Community must be neighbor to neighbor, peer to peer. Community must be chosen consensually, not coerced.”
Mike Margolies

While I agree totally with Mr. Margolies that socialism can not build community, I would go further and point out that no government can build community or society. It is the state itself that keeps us at war with one another and injures society in direct proportion to its interventions into the laissez-faire free market. (we don’t have that in America today of course)

“Most libertarians have a hard time remembering: the enemy is the state.  This isn’t about smoking pot or gay marriage or open borders or limited government or more efficient government.  It is about killing the beast known as the state.  It cannot be killed by physical force – they have bigger guns.  It can only be killed by ideas, and since much of the audience doesn’t really grasp (or doesn’t agree with) the ideas, the next best thing is to strip the state of any semblance of legitimacy.
Political decentralization is libertarian theory put into practice.  A great step would be 50 sovereign states; a better step would be 3000 sovereign counties; even better would be 100 million sovereign households, but I don’t want to sound greedy.”
Bionic Mosquito

For my friends out there who have understood the message of Rothbard and so many others that the state is a “gang of thieves writ large” and that the state is the eternal enemy of a free, prosperous, and peaceful society: I hope you understand that we must beat down the state in any way we can.

The question is: how do we get rid of the state? Well, those who are thinking and have been observing the world for more than a few days realize that going from a world full of totalitarian states of various flavors to functioning anarchy is not going to happen by new year’s day. It is not going to happen in 2017. It is going to take some time.

Bionic Mosquito’s  message of decentralization to 50 sovereign states is a wonderful thought for America but that is not going to happen soon ether. I would welcome that breakup as the best news since the fall of the USSR, but I am not betting on that happening anytime soon.

So do we give up? No. We must be realistic and take any move toward freedom and liberty that we can. We need to fight for the right of states to leave the Union. We must fight for the 10th amendment which allows the various states to keep power away from the central government. Does that mean I trust Florida? Of course not. But I would rather be ruled by Florida than by the tyrants in Washington D.C.

Until any breakup of the US government occurres, we must fight on all fronts to reduce the power of the central state over the people. We must fight against taxes, regulations, mandates, public schooling, drug laws, militarization of the police, aggressive foreign policy leading to never ending wars, and all the rest of the state’s evil.

It is not a violation of the Non-Aggression principle to use the state against itself whenever we can. The state is pure force and aggression itself. The state aggressed against us first and continues to do so. If a vote comes up to legalize a drug then going to the polls and voting for legalization is perfectly defensible in our quest for more liberty. The state has ruined millions of lives with the insane “war on drugs” (war on some drugs) and anything we can do to end it is morally correct for the radical libertarian.

“Politics is of its very nature is biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its ‘minarchist’ or ‘night-watchman’ version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities – or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place.”
Lew Rockwell

We should not fall into the trap that just because we use the vote to make a drug legal or to stop some other state crime that we trust the state. No. We take what wins we can get and then demand ever more until the state is crushed beneath our feet.

This monstrous police state that is the USA started out as a “night watchman” small government in the style that the Classical Liberals thought would be constrained and controlled by the Constitution. I think we can all agree that the USA is in no way bound by the constitution — it is all in the interpretation you see. And who gets to interpret the constitution? Why the state itself gets to interpret the constitution. The failure of the experiment in a minarchist government does not seem to have registered on my minarchist friends. They still seem to think that some “night watchman” government can be instituted without it gaining ever more power over the people as time goes on. Nothing as blind as those who will not see.

We need allies in this fight given that about half of the nation receives salaries, welfare, incentives, and many other bribes from the state. There is no shame in allying ones self with mini-arch types or even with conservatives in the pursuit of reducing government power. Just remember that we will not always be on their side since they are still deluded into thinking that the state has some necessary uses. They don’t realize that the state is our main enemy; but they may well see the light as we move closer to eliminating the power of the state. After all, only a total fool would not welcome a mini-state like the USA at its beginning over the totalitarian state that it has become.

Our main enemy in this age is the modern so-called liberal who thinks that government exists to enforce their crazy ideas on the rest of the world. The idea of “social democracy” is just Marxism in nicer clothes. We must use whatever allies we can find to beat back the cultural Marxists who would see the whole world under their totalitarian rule.

The enemy often calls themselves “progressives” or “left-wing” but they are against any real progress. They don’t even know where progress comes from.

 

“Progressivism is a cartel. It is breaking down. It wins only by default. Its political leaders no longer inspire confidence. Yet the whole movement has been a massive confidence game for over a century: faith in bureaucracy. That faith is waning. So are new revenue sources to support the existing programs, which are all running deficits.
They promised a new world order. It’s the same old order: power grabbing and tax grabbing.”
Gary North

We must tolerate a “big tent” libertarianism and we must use strategic alliances with conservatives and others to win the war against progressives and other socialists that we have been losing for two centuries.

 

On being judgmental and discriminatory

The left-wing in the US and in western Europe have preached for generations that it is morally impermissible to distinguish between different individuals or groups. The only group one can be judgmental about, they claim, is white males. And holy God in heaven, there is no way one could discriminate without being guilty of worse sins than that German guy in WW2.

Being judgmental and discriminatory are two necessary and natural human actions. They both are the result of individuals processing information to make important life decisions. Yet, many categorically condemn both actions, no matter the target, no matter the reasoning involved.

Why? I think it’s because both actions threaten conformity of thought and obedience to authority. Being judgmental and discriminatory are antithetical to following the herd. Being judgmental and discriminatory means you are actually thinking, not just following.

~ enlightened rogue

We make judgements all the time, but the left wants to pretend that it is evil, homophobic, racist, bigoted, sexists, and all the rest if a white non-liberal does it. I don’t think it is racist to be suspicious of a gang of black teens approaching me. I will reach into my pocket so I am ready to defend myself if needed. On the other hand, I instinctively mistrust a rich white fellow who claims to be trying to help mankind. It used to be a high compliment to tell someone he or she was very ‘discriminating’ but now it is always an accusation. People should learn to be discriminating — and be proud of it.

In other words, we humans build up biases based on our experiences and observations. This is nothing more than the results of four million years of evolution at work. We especially need to be able to recognize the unwritten rules of civilized behavior.

“Rap” is the guttural emanations of soulless, untalented, lower primate, ghetto monkeys and soulless, untalented, tone deaf, white trash. The true abomination of this phenomenon is not its existence, but that it is claimed to be “music” and an “art form,” worthy of consideration and listened to by civilized folk.

~ enlightened rogue

The biggest distinction that I make between peoples is their culture. Like the enlightened rogue, I can find nothing of value in “rap” music. But more to the point, the sort of people that listen to that violent noise are judged by me to be uncivilized animals or totally deluded simpletons. Take your pick.

Culture is shared values. I think people who applaud the killing of innocent women and children in countries that the US Empire has invaded are sub-human, low-life cretins.  This judgement crosses the boundaries of race, class, and sex but I am sure some American Liberal could call me a vile name for that opinion anyway. But by the same token, I find the culture of the ghetto to be deplorable and animalistic. The inner-city “culture” is  bestial, beastly, brutal, brute, brutish, feral, ferine, subhuman, and swinish. I hope that sentence made it clear that I don’t find the inhabitants of most of America’s inner city to be the sort of people I want to be around.

I also don’t care for the “upper crust” that runs the government. They are moral frauds. Fred Reed pointed out that they don’t even know this. “In practice, they approximate George Wallace. Ask when they last went to the ghetto for dinner, whether they have ever been in a restaurant with a majority black clientele, whether they would send their precious children to the public schools of New York. Ask whether they have a blue-collar friend.”  I discriminate against the moral frauds of the ruling elite every chance I get. So?

Do I make judgements? Hell yes.Do I discriminate against people I find sub-human? Sure; I try to stay as far away from them as possible. Who really wants to be near the horrific people that the lack of culture breeds in the inner city?

Thomas Sowell once observed that 100 years of slavery could not and did not break the back of the black family — but welfare did. The same family killing effect is being felt by the poor whites also. The state is helping to build horrible people — almost as if that were the goal. The socialist-democratic program in the western world is destroying everything that led to our industrialized culture and society.

I love Bill Buppert and the following is a priceless comment on the idiocy of the socialist hypocrites on the left. California is the epicenter of crazy in the USA and they have recently been hollering that they should succeed from the US. The following is Buppert’s judgement of what would happen:

“If California left tomorrow, they would be a third world shithole in 24 months. They are a Federally subsidized funded debt canary that can’t sustain the pensions they promised and fairy dust welfare state they crafted on the backs of workers and the unborn progeny now mired in debt. If other Sovietized America-stans like the Northeastern hellholes and the Moscow analog in Chicago want to secede, please go, you are doing your neighbors a favor.”

~ Bill Buppert

We have many in America that have been ruined and made imbeciles due to their accepting the discredited notion of socialism. The fact that socialism has failed around the world in all time frames is a fact that the American Liberal just can not process. I judge the American Liberal and other welfare-state creeps to be horribly misguided and dangerous. I judge and discriminate all the time. You should also.

In life you must make decisions. These decisions should be made based on your judgement. When you come to a fork in the road, you must pick a path.

 

A Reply to Ben Stone on voting

I have always liked Ben Stone (aka The Bad Quaker), and have enjoyed many of his “tweets” on the social networking platform Twitter. Today I write because of some disagreements we have over the latest election cycle.

Ben tweeted often that for any of us to vote at all was immoral and enabled the political system, and so was committing aggression against people like him. At least that is the gist of what I got from his tweets. I know that I have often claimed myself that to vote for president was to choose the lesser of two evils and to legitimize the system.

But is voting in our system immoral on its face?  I think not. I think it depends on the reason. For example, I had not voted since 1980 but chose to vote against Hillary Clinton for anti-war reasons. I sincerely judged her as a great threat to world peace. In fact, I judged her as likely to start WW3 by pushing Russia into war, and possibly China as well. That, my friends, would lead to a full scale nuclear exchange.

Many young people that I talk to don’t seem to understand the total horror of a full scale nuclear exchange and the possibility that is could be an extinction level event. If humanity is to ever grow up and learn to live in peace, we will have to avoid nuclear war. Like it or not, there is no way around that requirement for our survival.

I did not vote to have the state give me something at the expense of Ben and others, but I voted to keep the world alive to give us time to defeat the American Empire and to move toward peace. How can we move toward peace? I judge that reducing the scope and power of the state is the path towards peace, prosperity, and happiness.

I thought of a situation that makes the argument very plain. If there was a vote in Florida to lock up everyone named Mark, I would certainly vote against that no matter what other preventive measures I might take. Voting in self-defense to keep the government from committing aggression against you is not immoral. The non-aggression principle does not say we can not fight back after we have been aggressed against — and the State has certainly aggressed against all of us.

Mind you, I have no idea what Trump is going to do and as a non-voter simply look on elections from a self-defense position. I do admire the fuck you aspect of the Trump vote and know he is doing something right because both sides of the illusory aisle are terrified and filling their pants in horror at the prospect of his triumphant ascension to the throne and the ring of power. ~ Bill Buppert

The self-defense part of this last election was the part each of us had to deal with on a personal basis. I chose to vote against the evil of the Clinton crime family and the warmongering bitch that was running for president.

“No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”
Ludwig von Mises

The intellectual war to convince the propagandized masses that we must end the State is going to take time. Mises was right that we all have to join in the battle and can not leave it to someone else. Ron Paul did great work in changing the minds of many young people and converting them to libertarianism. But he can not do it alone and all of us must get in the battle against the state. For this we need to keep a warmongering idiot like Clinton away from the control of the Empire’s forces — because she would risk nuclear war.

I told Ben that just not voting is not a strategy that will lead to anarchy and that we needed a workable strategy. He replied that I should read his book. I have made it about half way though and find much to like and some things I don’t agree with. I’ll do a review of the book after I have finished it. For now, you can find it here.

There were a couple of other points of disagreement and I will get to those in a separate post, as I want to keep this post simply about the morality of voting. Please note, I am saying nothing about how effective that vote might be. I am saying that voting in self-defense is moral and is not aggression against others.

As a last thought, I would like to say that I agree with the enlightened rogue when he wrote:

If you take the time to study just what went on during the crafting of the US Constitution, you may come to this conclusion: Many of  America’s “Founding Fathers” were “fathers” the same way a rapist is a “father.”

The present US Empire’s government is immoral, dangerous, and an enemy to the people. The constitution is worse than useless, it was written to consolidate power in the central government. It will lake time to build a broad consensus that we need to dismantle the present evil we call the US government.

I am fairly certain that I will go another 46 years before I vote again as most election cycles we see one warmonger vs. another warmonger. This time I judged on candidate as totally insane.