Honorable mention goes to Bill Bonner for “US Government to Kill Its Own Economy” :We live in antiliberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can't even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have traveled from the Age of Reason to our own times.
Referencing the great controversy about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Karen De Coster put the issue to rest by turning Rachel Maddow's question on its head. She demanded to know whether a white businessman has the right to refuse service to a black man. Karen asked, does a black businessman have the right to refuse service to a Klan member?
I don't think anyone would dispute that right. How a person uses the right to associate (which necessarily means the right not to associate) is a matter of individual choice profoundly influenced by the cultural context. That a person has the right to make these choices on his or her own cannot be denied by anyone who believes in liberty.
The right to exclude is not something incidental. It is core to the functioning of civilization. ...
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We exercise the right to exclude every day. If you go to lunch, some people come and some people do not. When you have a dinner party, you are careful to include some people and necessarily exclude others. Some restaurants expect and demand shoes and shirts and even coats and ties. The New York Times includes some articles and excludes others, includes some people in its editorial meetings and excludes others.
When business hires, some people make the cut and others do not. It is the same with college admissions, church membership, fraternities, civic clubs, and nearly every other association. They all exercise the right to exclude. It is central to the organization of every aspect of life. If this right is denied, what do we get in its place? Coercion and compulsion. People are forced together by the state, with one group required at the point of a gun to serve another group. This is involuntary servitude, expressly prohibited by the 13th amendment. One presumes that a freedom-loving people will always be against that.
As Larry Elder says, "This is freedom 101."
What about the claim that government should regulate the grounds of exclusion? Let's say, for example, that we do not deny the general right of free association, but narrow its range to address a particular injustice. Is that plausible? Well, freedom is a bit like life, something that is or is not. Slicing and dicing it according to political priorities is exceedingly dangerous. It perpetrates social division, leads to arbitrary power, mandates a form of slavery, and turns the tables on who precisely is in charge in society.
In fact, for the government to presume to regulate the "grounds" of any decision making is chilling. It presumes the right and ability of government bureaucrats to read minds, as if they can know the real motivation behind every action, regardless of what the decision maker claims. ...
And, of course, this mind-reading trick is not arbitrary. It is dictated by political pressure. It is hardly surprising, then, that since the act passed in 1964, the grounds that the regulators say they can discern and thereby forbid have proliferated and are now completely out of control. Has this strategy really increased social well-being, or has it exacerbated conflict among groups that the state has exploited to its own ends?
But do we dare let property owners make such decisions by themselves? From a historical point of view, the injustice against blacks was perpetrated mostly by governments. Private business does not go in for race-based policies, because it means excluding paying customers.
And this is precisely why racialists, nationalists, and hard-core bigots have always opposed liberal capitalism: it includes and excludes based on the cash nexus and without regard to features that collectivists of all sorts regard as important. In the imagined utopias of the national socialists, the champions of commerce are hanged from lampposts as race traitors and enemies of the nation.
The feds don’t really have any money. They don’t make anything. They don’t create any wealth. So they can only send us checks by taking the money from us – one way or another.
And that, dear reader, is the story of the most important trend of our time. The feds are taking a bigger and bigger share of the economy. And the bigger the share they get, the less the rest of it is worth. Because an economy run by politicians and bureaucrats is not a healthy economy. It’s a sick economy…it limps along. It wheezes and coughs. And if the trend towards more and more federal control continues…the economy finally dies.
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The feds don’t make decisions on the basis of fair play and rational economic choices. Instead, they’re political choices – such as bailing out the big banks because they are said to be “too big to fail,” or bailing out the big auto companies because they employ too many voters, or bailing out the mortgage industry because too many people would lose their houses if the mortgage industry were allowed to go whither it should.
Even in the best of times an investment is a risky thing. Sometimes it will produce a positive return (above the real cost of funds). Sometimes it won’t.
Imagine what happens when decisions are made by functionaries, political appointees and GS-12s? Capital is then allocated to the wrong projects for the wrong reasons…which result in the wrong outcomes.
Bad economic decisions produce bad economic results. Bad economic results lower the value of capital assets…and make almost everyone in the economy poorer.
We say, “almost everyone,” because the government’s employees, lobbyists, and contractors are in a class apart. They are the ruling party and its apparatchiks. While everyone else gets poorer, they get richer.
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