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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 businesspeople
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 revenues depend on taxes. Government
accumulates tax money 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
to 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 charge for
bringing it back to the United States. Our government literally is pushing
capital and jobs overseas, and 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.
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