I can't get over the sense that a significant portion of those who I see shopping at Fred Meyer, idling at stop lights, strolling down the sidewalk has absolutely no idea of what their governments are doing to them.
Not for them. To them.
If you know a small businessman in your hometown, you can ask him a couple of questions. Like, are you planning to weatherize your home? Are you looking forward to paying more for electricity so that we can increase our reliance on solar and wind power? Are you going to hire another employee in order to take advantage of federal tax credits for new hires?
Rational, calm voices have been ignored for quite a while. The state of Oregon alone has increased their spending by hundreds of millions of dollars for government employees and subsidies for items on the Green Agenda. And to pay for that agenda and those government employees we've increased taxes on the private sector by hundreds of millions of dollars. And, a couple of days ago, David's Oregon Picayune reported that $3-billion of retirement benefits for Oregon's state and local employees have remained off government books.
The debt obligation is there. Governments simply have chosen to ignore it when setting their budgets.
Which brings me back to those folks you see shopping at Freddies, waiting for the light to change and mindlessly measuring life with coffee spoons. Every program of every government that seeks to achieve a socially desirable goal by spending dollars gained by tax revenues or through borrowing is a program that takes dollars out of use by the private sector while further increasing the liabilities of the private sector. Getting a public school teacher to spend money on "green" windows and doors for minimal improvements in weatherizing may be good for manufacturers of windows and doors, but I've never heard "what's good for the window and door industry is good for the U.S.A."
Throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at "Green Technology" by the State, and hundreds of billions of dollars by the federal government cannot, I assert, lower the price you end up paying for a can of asparagus at your local market. This is the first assertion of capital investment that ends up decreasing productivity, not increasing it. There is, on its face, a rational argument against funding "Green Technology." It is a waste of money. It increases the costs of production. And it wouldn't be occurring at all without massive, wasteful spending by your state, local and federal governments.
The City of Seaside recently approved an increased fee for garbage service. We're in a recession--Oregon's economy traditionally lags the national economy by two years--and the city has decided to increase the amount we pay for garbage service. Want to save money? End the mindless subsidy for recycling. Remove the recycling program. End it. That would save us hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. And end the farce that is recycling.
Governments, their employed bureaucrats and their enablers, well-intentioned elected officials, are crippling our economy with programs dedicated to provide a sense of doing something about our environment. They are simply afraid to be the first to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Leadership is being replaced by committees. Unions, like AFCME, SEIU and OEA continue to hype their social justice agenda since it's costless to them. But crippling to the private sector.
I listened for awhile, to Noam Chomsky talking about the faults of America, and I was struck; I am the enemy of Noam Chomsky. I wake in the morning, dedicated to the proposition that the goods and services I supply my customers are essential to their businesses, and that if I do my job well, both they and I will make a profit. This, in the mind of Noam Chomsky, is what is wrong with America. He sees it as the mindless pursuit of profit.
Mindless, indeed.
What kind of mindless automaton could listen to Noam Chomsky and not take issue with such vapid pronouncement?
I think about those I see filling their carts at the market, secretly texting as they await a change in lights or deciding which coffee shop to visit for their next cuppa java and see people who are content to view the difficulties of providing for themselves and their progeny as simply the result of a capitalist conspiracy to pull unnecessary dollars out of their wallets in order to fulfill or sustain a profit lust that will only be ended when we make the transition from a capitalist economy to a socialist economy. They don't see the silent dance that is occurring around them at every step and turn in their lives. Thousands of people who are working to provide them with cell phones, computers, jeans, shoes and canned asparagus, all doing so voluntarily, all doing so in order to reduce the costs associated with providing them with these goods and services, all dedicated to increasing the productivity of each job, each shop, each company. And hoping, at the end of the day, that their effort will result in that effort creating profit. Profit that is the return needed to keep that shop open one more day, to pay the investor for the use of his money.
All being done, thanklessly, voluntarily, every day.
All being done on shorter margins, smaller inventories and fewer employees as the private sector seeks to adjust to the hundreds of millions being squandered by our state's governments, and the hundreds of billions of dollars being squandered by our federal government. For lower productivity and higher costs. Absolutely brilliant.
Remember this as the events in Europe unfold. Greece's tiny economy is melting down, and yet the world is feeling the effects of this. What are we going to do when it's time to pay the piper for the State of California? California's economy dwarfs that of Greece. Will California get its government expenditures under control before it's too late? Can Oregon get its government expenditures under control before it's too late?
I don't think so.
I see bureaucrats, their enablers and the government employee unions gathering together to defend the value of their thievery. They are "making a difference." Sure. It's just that we can't afford the difference you're making. And it is your rice bowl being threatened, neh?
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