It’s a long weekend. Enjoy it, along with this correspondingly long post.
No one really enjoys writing about politics, right? Political writers are some of the wannest, most opprobrious people on the planet.
Furthermore, I (Greg) hate injecting myself into my work. If the words can’t stand alone, then I’ve selected and arranged them poorly. It’s why I usually negotiate a syntactical labyrinth to avoid using the first-person pronoun. What “I” say and am advocating is less important than objective truth.
Today’s post is a little different.
Understand that I’m as far from an anti-capitalist as it’s possible to be. My 19th century ascendants (to say nothing of my modern-day Burundian cousins) certainly enjoyed more quality family time than I do. But if that family time involves hooking up the plow to the ass, rotating the crops, hoping the loom lasts a few more months so we can make some more clothes, and washing ourselves once a week in a communal bucket of fetid water, I’ll take the meaninglessness of modern American life any day, thank you very much. Me and 6 billion other people, despite what some of them might advocate.
Yes, I read Ayn Rand in college and devoured every word. She was humorless, and had the superciliousness that God has blessed so many atheists with, but she knocked it out of the park on capitalism.
The more control politicians have over their citizens’ economic decisions, the more moribund that economy becomes. This is so obvious to me that it barely counts as an observation, but there are millions of people who still don’t get it. No elected official, regardless of his intelligence or that of the people he surrounds himself with, can think a nation (or state or city) into prosperity. An economy is simply too complex and has too many variables to be under the control of anyone or any body of officials.
Cuba has “free” health care, and Americans should be so lucky. Meanwhile, the newest car on the streets of Havana could qualify for AARP membership, questioning the government officials’ economic decisions (and the concomitant political decisions) gets you imprisoned without cable TV and an exercise room, the man in charge is the very definition of “income disparity”, and, oh yeah, people risk their lives to get out.
Meanwhile, back on the shores of the Great Satan, our congressional leaders and chief executive engineer the taking of non-figurative dollars out of tangible pockets.
But it’s laudable, because they’re doing it for you and me. The nation. Our children. Generations not yet born. This is supposed to be the Age of Irony, yet politicians still speak in the same platitudes and people still vote for them.
It’s easier to blame things on people who have actual skin in the economy, and who necessarily have less charisma than politicians whose jobs consist of smiling when necessary, looking earnest when appropriate, and reciting bromides about A Better America, Opportunity For All, and Hope And Change Moving Forward.
Last year, BP’s Tony Hayward paid with his job for his indelicacy when dealing with the sensitive ears of American news consumers. Not that Hayward is suffering – his golden parachute is so heavy it barely opened – but to what end? They could have sentenced Hayward to walk the streets of Ciudad Juarez wearing a placard that reads “Los narcotraficantes son maricas” and it wouldn’t have cleaned up the oil spill any faster.
I’d love to live in a country where John Chambers, Jeff Bezos, Sam Palmisano, Jim Skinner, Rupe Murdoch and the guy who runs Chevron comprised the president’s cabinet while Ray LaHood and Ken Salazar were in private-sector positions where they didn’t have the power to restrict rights (and responsibilities, which scare most people far more than rights interest them). But such a utopia couldn’t exist. Business geniuses have little stomach for the stifling inertia of government. Bureaucrats have even less interest in the dynamism of gambling on public taste and then creating something to sate it, while running the risk of going broke.
For instance, government mandates fuel economy standards for cars. The immediate, reactionary response is, “How you can be against that? Getting more miles per gallon is better than getting fewer miles per gallon, you tard.”
But the very act of Congress passing a law mandating fuel economy standards means that Congress is attempting to force engineering breakthroughs where none may exist. It’s like the (completely true) story about the Indiana legislature codifying the (completely false) value of π.
National fuel economy standards require that the average car sold this year average 32 miles a gallon.
a) If 32 is good, wouldn’t 300 be better? Or even a real-world 99, which is what the Yamaha YBR125ED motorcycle gets. That bike also has an engine the size of a toothpaste cap and a storage capacity best described as “wanting.” So clearly the lower that national mandate is, the deeper the administration is in bed with the petroleum industry. Or something.
b) If a manufacturer sells “too many” 4-wheel-drive SUVs, i.e. if too many consumers find them big and powerful enough to be worth buying, it’ll lower that average fuel economy and result in fines. You get penalized for making a product that lots of people want. Bureaucrats can rationalize it in terms of weaning us off foreign oil, but the result is the same – fuel economy standards send the message that the government is serious about crises both real and perceived, and the individual’s choice as an economic agent is something less important.
c) The “energy independence” argument is ridiculous, as is the “greener planet” one. Things cost what they cost. As long as I can earn a gallon of fuel for a few minutes’ work, I’ll keep buying it as a necessary expense, inelastic to the forces of aggregate supply and demand. (If I want some, I’ll buy some at the going price, and what other people do is irrelevant. Which should be the impetus behind every economic decision.) If refined petroleum really was responsible for making our planet as lifeless as Neptune, it’d cost a hell of a lot more than 3-something a gallon.
Governments decide which lifesaving drugs pharmaceutical companies are allowed to sell – because if they didn’t, apparently GlaxoSmithKline and Roche would gladly watch their customers die one by one. The government would have us believe that drug companies have no incentive to keep their clientele alive, which is why that same government needs to step in and create the Food & Drug Administration.
The FDA is responsible for countless deaths, but indirectly. No one knows who or how many died waiting years for the approval of, say, Nulojix (a newly available T-cell blocker for transplant patients whose bodies are rejecting their new kidneys.)
Dr. Thomas Sowell suggests a simple warning label that no bureaucrat prohibit pharmaceutical companies from emblazoning on its wares:
“This drug has not been approved by the FDA. Take at your own risk.”
The less personal responsibility that government functionaries can keep in the agency of its citizens, the better for that government and those functionaries.
And so to what seems like a straightforward transaction – you buy a house, a lender helps you finance the purchase, the lender gets an income stream and you get a house. Both parties win. All three parties, if you count the seller.
But with the ever-broadening and capricious hand of government sticking itself down everyone’s pants, nothing is ever that simple. That’s why government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies who tried to achieve the never previously noted goal of “getting Americans in houses.” Those two companies represent the “secondary mortgage market” – the company who sold you your mortgage now resells it to the government, adding another layer of complexity and greater potential for fraud. And the government employee in charge of your resold mortgage has less incentive to care for it than you or your lender does.
Remember – every dollar government operates on is confiscated from somewhere. Your daily transactions, your annual tally of how much money you made – all of it goes to feed the beast. The beast does have several worthwhile purposes, the primary one being maintaining a national defense. The rest of the time, our elected bettors and their underlings are busy determining which music requires a warning label, which radio hosts are so inflammatory that they need to be fined, and which games of chance you shouldn’t play.
From a recent AP story:
“Rescuing the two mortgage giants (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) has cost the government nearly $150 billion so far.”
“The government” isn’t some monolithic and impersonal entity, especially when it’s in debt. Because $500 of that money is yours. Could you use $500 in this economy? Especially if it was yours to begin with?
The government is supposed to operate with the consent of the governed. Sometimes that even happens. The next time you complain about how bad the economy is (which it not only is, but has been for so long that people are starting to think of a weak economy as an inevitable condition of life), remember whom you put in charge.
**This article is featured in the Yakezie Carnival: Independence Day Edition**
**This article is also featured in the Carnival of Wealth #46-July 10, 2011 Edition**
