Posted on 05/03/2014 8:33:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you want to understand how markets, and creative destruction, work, just turn to the comics page in your local newspaper. If you can find a copy. Newspaper circulation is tumbling.
Yet comics, and the newspapers they appear in, exist in the free market. As newspapers fade, people will be forced to find other ways to follow their beloved strips. Artists will adapt. Some will go out of business. Others will thrive, perhaps by moving to Web-only strips supported by advertising.
Government, on the other hand, doesn’t adapt.
To cite one example, the federal government runs at least 47 programs aimed at training workers. They don’t work. “Federal job training programs targeting youth and young adults have been found to be extraordinarily ineffective,” The Heritage Foundation’s David Muhlhausen writes. “The simple fact is that when it comes to federal job training programs, there is a dearth of evidence suggesting that these programs work.”
And the government itself agrees. “Only 5 of the 47 programs have had impact studies that assess whether the program is responsible for improved employment outcomes,” the Government Accounting Office has written. “The five impact studies generally found that the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive, or restricted to short-term impacts.”
Yet each program seems to have enough supporters to keep it alive. Whenever Congress creates a new program, it simply leaves the old ones operating as well. It’s the embodiment of what Ronald Reagan said in 1964: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.”
That proved prescient: as a presidential candidate, Reagan vowed to shutter the Department of Education. As president, he not only failed to do so, he ended up seeing the budget doubled.
If the federal government would get out of the way, private industry could do a better job providing many services that are now handled out of Washington. National Review’s Kevin Williamson has an entire book explaining how: “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” But his projected awesomeness relies on the federal government conducting an orderly retreat from dozens of things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Such as job training programs.
That’s something it hasn’t managed to do yet.
“Look at people who say, ‘I'm going to shrink the government!’ Well, show me when they actually did shrink the government. They caused it not to grow as much, but shrink? When? You know, good luck on that,” Bill Gates says in Rolling Stone. He’s right, but only because we haven’t yet applied creative destruction to government.
People who read comics are fiercely loyal to their favorites. Even oldies such as Mark Trail and Judge Parker have their fans. They’ve succeeded in their individual market, and so it can seem as if old strips just go on forever: See Peanuts (Charles Schultz has been dead since 2000), Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau is on a long hiatus) and For Better or For Worse (currently recycling strips from the 1980s).
At first blush, that seems similar to the way government works. Once they’re established, it’s almost impossible to cull old programs. Yet creative destruction means newspapers will soon become online only outlets, a process that’s already underway in markets such as Syracuse.
The practice of channeling things such as job training, medical care and retirement benefits through the federal government is as obsolete as printing comics on newsprint. It’s happening elsewhere already; now we need to apply creative destruction to government.
“To cite one example, the federal government runs at least 47 programs aimed at training workers.”
BIG GOVERNMENT IS CRONY SOCIALISM
How big?…
http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/
Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat
How much?…
How to Identify Legal Plunder
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
Legal Plunder Has Many Names
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.
Now, since under this definition socialism is a body of doctrine, what attack can be made against it other than a war of doctrine? If you find this socialistic doctrine to be false, absurd, and evil, then refute it. And the more false, the more absurd, and the more evil it is, the easier it will be to refute. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.
/Bastiat
DISMANTLE BIG GOVERNMENT (watch the socialists whine)
DEPOPULATE socialists from the body politic.
live - free - republic
I guess this article points to one of the things that disappoints me the most about Republicans. I already know the Democrats are the party of government, but the Republicans at least pay lip service to wanting to making government smaller and more efficient (I personally think the latter is a fool’s errand).
Republican moderates especially try to claim the mantle of good government. They don’t necessarily support small government, but they do claim they want to make the existing programs run better.
So what did the Republicans do when they held Congress and the presidency? Well, they didn’t do jack squat to fix any of it, and they actually added a whole lot more. In other words, not even the moderates delivered, and they weren’t promising much to start with.
Pretty much everyone, left or right, understands the government is out of control. We have many very serious issues that need to be addressed, and Washington is treading water. President Obama is pretty much the nonexistent president. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he has no apparent desire to compromise...at all. Harry Reid likes to claim Republicans are the party of NO, but Senator Reid also seems to have zero desire to say yes to anything that isn’t 100% what Democrats want. Finally, the House leadership is hopelessly out of touch with America. With all the crap going wrong in government today, they’re busy pushing AMNESTY of all things! It boggles the mind.
Our tax system is an absolute joke—a byzantine mess of incomprehensible rules, the regulatory state is totally out of control, the NSA seems well on the way to implementing its version of Orwell’s 1984, we’re borrowing $ trillions we don’t have and can’t possibly repay, nearly everything is now made in China, our borders...LOL what borders!, our military is more concerned about social engineering than winning wars, etc. The list of possible reforms is nearly endless and Washington dithers!
Something’s gotta change and soon.
Have real money and interest rates - and governments will be forced to compete with private citizens for money.
Freedom is absolutely the last thing governments try.
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