Dear Friends,
It seems to me, if the government wants more jobs in our economy, all they have to do is cut job destroying regulations and taxes. While this is not a new idea, or a particularly novel one, it is an concept that has always worked. Government, and by government I mean politicians, pass more regulations every year with no end in sight. Tens of thousands of bureaucrats working diligently regulating every aspect of human existence. While this creates some good paying jobs, in the bureaucracy, it destroys private sector jobs, you know, the ones that pay for the bureaucrats. Unless we wake up to this fact, and stop believing their lies, our economy, jobs and wages will continue to suffer.
All politicians know this. They know that jobs are not created by government fiat or programs. Those programs and fiats destroy jobs. They certainly know, but so want the power their regulations give them over us, they don’t care about the consequences, our ability to earn a living. The hubris and egoism of the elite that engage in the type of job killing regulation, as their own actions show, care much more for amassing power than the economic well being of the people they are supposed to serve. In this self aggrandizing egoism, a few names stand out, as do the results of their regulatory policies.
Woodrow Wilson is one. He inherited a good economy and destroyed that good economy with growth stifling regulation, taxes and bureaucracy. The economy he passed to Harding was far deeper in recession than the US economy in 2008. Franklin Roosevelt took a bad economy and made it into “The Great Depression.” His policies were so intrusive that economic activity almost stopped altogether, and it wasn’t until his death, before the economy rebounded. The Second World War is often cited as the reason we came out of the depression, but had Roosevelt been President after the war, the economy would have hit new lows. Barack Obama has followed the policies of both Wilson and Roosevelt and the results have been exactly the same. This same experiment has been tried the world over and has failed every time. Proving it is impossible to tax and regulate an economy into prosperity.
If we examine the most productive economies we find that they all have several things in common. They all have low taxes, and they all have low regulation. Singapore, Liechtenstein, and Andorra are but a few examples. Those countries with the poorest economies all have high taxes and stifling regulation in common. Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe are examples of this type. History shows, laissez fair capitalism enriches people every time it is tried, while socialist regulation impoverishes those same people.
Whenever laissez fair is offered as an option however, the elite in academia and politics make the spurious claim, we want to take the guard rails off the economy. This is entirely sophistry, because it is not regulation that protects consumers and workers, but standards. Regulations only benefit politically favored groups at the expense of everyone else. One example of job killing regulation is raising the minimum wage. Everyone knows, (politicians, economists and bureaucrats), that doing so will eliminate jobs, the only real debate is how many. Minimum wage jobs are filled by low skilled new workers. Statistics show that in the US there is huge unemployment in those areas, raising the minimum wage will eliminate some of those jobs, exacerbating the problem, and so low skilled new workers will have less opportunity to get work and start climbing the ladder out of minimum wage. Clearly, raising the minimum wage is counter productive, but those that don’t get laid off will think they have got a boon.
As long as the political elite can continue to fool the majority, into believing they are doing something for the economy when they are in fact destroying job prospects, we will continue to fall down the bottomless pit of poverty. Wages are like any other commodity, the more demand for workers the higher wages will be. As government drives down the demand for workers wages must naturally follow. This is no different than the price of gold or coal, if demand is high price is high, and if demand is low the price will be low too. Since Obama has taken office launching his war on business and enacted his job killing regulations, including Obama care, we have seen real wages fall, driven down because demand for workers has fallen. There has been no other recession, (other than FDR”s and Wilson’s), where the US economy has performed so poorly in the recovery, even going back to 1800. Obama’s great recession is due to the same policies that gave us the great depression. Isn’t it time to grow up and do what must be done? Stop listening to the glittering lies crooned by self serving egoists, and start believing the ugly truth, that government cannot tax and regulate us into wealth.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
