In Defense of Freedom

Posts Tagged ‘Unemployment’

Kicking the Economy While it’s Down

Almost everything the government has done to rescue our faltering economy has been kicking it while it is down. From the bailouts to the stimulus packages to cap and trade and universal health care bills, it is a miracle the economy is functioning at all. It is crazy to criticize saving the economy, the environment, and improving the standard of living for Americans so that is not what I’m doing. I want the economy to come back, the environment to be clean, and the standard of living to be high.

The disconnect is that while the government says they want to do all those good things, they will end up accomplishing the opposite.

I’ve talked plenty about how the government’s attempts at rescuing the economy is the equivalent of giving a drug addict more drugs, how man-made climate change is a load of crap, and how the problem with healthcare is the excessive amount of government involvement. So, I won’t beat a dead horse. I will instead tackle another unpopular topic: the minimum wage.

If it was up to me, the minimum wage would be $0. The minimum wage is promoted as a means to create wealth equality and provide all Americans with a livable income but, the reality is nothing that is promoted. A minimum wage keeps more workers out of work.

The government is essentially saying that if you do not have the skills to warrant whatever the minimum wage is, you should not work. Sound backwards? It’s not. There is no reason for a company to hire you for $7.25 to do a job that is worth much less. So where there was a chance for people without skills to take a lower wage to learn the skills so that they can get ahead in life, the government takes it away.

If you made some wrong decisions or life just threw you a bad hand, you no longer have the means to work your way up. The government eliminated the steps at the bottom of the ladder and if you can’t jump high enough to reach the new bottom, you are screwed. To fix this unemployment problem, the government puts a band-aid over it by offering welfare for the people the government put out of work! How grand.

To compound the problem, the government via the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply to fund all their welfare/warfare projects and our cost of living goes up. To solve this problem, the government raises the minimum wage because it is now more expensive to live. The increased minimum wage puts more workers out of work and the government needs to offer more welfare by printing, borrowing, or taxing and the cost of living goes up more! This is the vicious cycle created by government and further made worse by more government intervention.

No one in Congress is going to vote no to the increase in the minimum wage because it is politically unpopular–except Ron Paul and a few others who understand economics and unintended consequences.

No one wants to see the actual picture of what the minimum wage does. When people criticize the minimum wage and call for its abolition–like myself–we are labeled as monsters who do not care about the poor. I am not multi-millionaire and I don’t make that much money. I just understand economics. I don’t care about the poor as much as I care about myself–I won’t lie about it.

I find little wrong with putting yourself, family, and friends first before random strangers. It is terrible that people are living in poverty but I am not so far away that the policies I support will benefit me at the expense of the poor. It will benefit everyone.

It is an economic lie that the minimum wage is good for the economy. If the minimum wage can solve our poverty problems, why not just make it $100/hr and everyone would be rich! Obviously, we can see that it would be disastrous and practically everyone will be out of a job or prices will be sky high for everything.

So as usual, the government is kicking the economy while it is down with this minimum wage increase.

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G20 to Undermine World Economy

Politicians love comparing the Great Depression to what is going on today. The reality is that it will never be as bad as it was in the 1930′s. Not because we have such great government institutions in place to make sure something so devastating never occurs again–in fact, we have the opposite in place–but, technology and the free market has improved everyone’s lives so greatly that it would be very difficult to literally relive the 1930′s.

There may be comparable numbers in terms of relative stock market losses, unemployment, etc. but, we still have the technology that we didn’t have back then. No matter what happens, unless we go back to the stone age, we are going to live through this depression in a much more comfortable state.

Now that we have put things into perspective, the heads of state attending the G20 Summit in London are using the threat of a world wide Greater Depression to further undermine people’s Liberties and make the situation worse for the masses. Obama is pitching his monkey-devised economic rescue plan to the world in hopes that everyone will adopt it.

I plea to the rest of the world to ignore what Obama has to say. He is either intentionally trying to feed poison to a weakened world economy or he has no economic understanding–either one is bad for all of us.

“We cannot afford half-measures and we cannot go back to the kind of risk-taking that leads to bubbles that inevitably burst,” he (Obama) said Wednesday.

This line is mostly meaningless. Who is taking risks? What the hell are half-measures? Obama has never said anything meaningful so this is certainly not something new. He is all about vague ideas of hope and change. Obama’s economic stimulus plan is an economic disaster.

The stock markets have rallied in the past week. Some people may call this the beginning of the new bull and that we’ve hit a bottom. It could be possible but, that is highly unlikely. The more likely scenario is that this is a bear market rally.

The sad reality is that ever nation at the G20 has the same plan. They want to argue over how much regulation here and there but, the ideas are all the same. They want to pump in enormous amounts of money into the economy. It doesn’t take an economic genius to understand that you cannot solve the problem of too much spending and credit with even more spending and credit.

However, it is the economic geniuses who will tell you we need to spend more and go deeper into debt to solve the problem of being in too much debt! There is no financial wizardry that makes this a workable solution. Natural laws cannot be defied by government!

The entire G20 hocus-pocus is to make it look like world leaders are doing something to save the world economy from ruin. There is nothing they can do that they also like to solve or mitigate the problem. The real solution is to shrink the size of government all over the world. Politicians don’t like to do that. Why would they want to take power away from themselves?

The real point of the G20 Summit is about how governments around the world can make this economic crisis worse.

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