Amid the din of economic
nonsense being bandied about since the collapse of the housing bubble and the
steep ramping up of our national debt, there has been the persistent refrain
that Washington should be run more like a business. If only more business
people were in charge to wield their business acumen, we would have this
country in shape in no time. But is that a good solution?
Businesses seek primarily to
increase their revenues and profits. Government revenue depends on taxes.
Government accumulates taxmoney by squeezing it out of people's productive
earnings with threats of audits, fines and imprisonment. Our government
already collects roughly $2.1 trillion annually from the productive taxpayers
of America. We hardly need to increase our federal government's revenues like
a private business!
Businesses sell products or
services to voluntary buyers, always looking to increase their market share
as much as possible. But what is the federal government's product or service?
Rules, regulations, bureaucracy, paperwork, red tape, hoops to jump through,
uneven protection and security from people with guns, coercion and compliance
through force and confiscation of assets, militarism instead of national
defense, and of course a vast welfare state. Do we need more of these
government services? Hardly. In fact, we have far too many of these
destructive things already.
What we need is more freedom.
Freedom is the simple ability of people to live their lives as they see fit
without government coercion, provided they do not initiate force or fraud
against others. What we really need is a less coercive government, not more
revenues.
Washington needs to stop
seeing itself as a growth industry, and realize that the true function of
government is to protect liberty. Washington certainly has expanded and grown
and accumulated a great deal of the people's capital for itself, but this has
been at the expense of our nation's prosperity. This trend needs to be
reversed.
We don't need yet another
"jobs" bill to supposedly put the American people back to work.
Politicians need to realize that, aside from outright hiring some 14 million
people, government does not create jobs. The only thing government does is
hinder job creation by getting in the way and consuming otherwise private
resources. Therefore, the most useful thing government can do for
unemployment is to "liquidate" much of what government does in the
first place.
One plain example is our tax
policy that encourages U.S. corporations to accumulate foreign earnings
abroad rather than repatriate such earnings. Currently there is over $1
trillion of capital that companies are keeping overseas because of the 35%
tax charged for bringing it back to the US. Our government literally is
pushing capital and jobs overseas that could be used to hire an estimated 2.5
million people here at home.
Businesses create jobs.
Government is not a business. We don't need more stimulus or phony jobs
bills. We don't need more revenue - $2 trillion is plenty to fund the federal
government annually. What we do need is a wholesale rejection of government
as a central economic planner.