{"id":1098,"date":"2010-10-26T20:40:32","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T01:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/?p=1098"},"modified":"2010-11-09T23:38:57","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T04:38:57","slug":"welcome-to-the-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/2010\/10\/26\/welcome-to-the-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eleven months ago, in the face of a gauntlet of headwinds that the Obama administration was creating in front of the American job creation engine, I came to the following conclusion:<\/a><\/p>\n

“If you were an entrepreneur, or a business owner or manager with the ability to start large new initiatives, perhaps ones requiring large numbers of new employees, in the face of the above legislative uncertainty, would you dare proceed?”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The resulting economic lockup, and the trillions of private capital sitting in fear on the sidelines, has become the story of the day.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Predicting this story was not difficult, due to the nature of The Machine itself.\u00a0 Driven by a lust for power, fueled by environmental extremism, economic illiteracy, and class warfare, and financed by a self-serving cycle of union cronyism, there can only be one conclusion:\u00a0 The Machine is antithetical to the founding principles that made this country great, and can only produce seizure.\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s how it breaks down:<\/p>\n

A Lust for Power<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the core principle behind every Big Government scheme that has ever been devised.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the reason that Health Savings Accounts<\/a> have not been promoted instead of Obamacare.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the reason that Keynesian \u201cstimulus\u201d<\/a> is still the statist\u2019s preferred economic weapon.\u00a0 It is the reason why all fifty states are not Right To Work<\/a> states.\u00a0\u00a0 Simply put, the programs of Big Government exist to perpetuate the power and influence of those in charge, with no regard of their effects to their constituencies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Under this worldview, any failure of policy can be traced back to a lack of financing or scale.<\/p>\n

Environmental Extremism<\/em><\/p>\n

With the hoax of human-caused global warming<\/a> now fully exposed as a funding-perpetuation scheme, it is nothing short of criminal that sweeping, multi-hundred billion dollar legislative initiatives based on faulty science are still being promoted.\u00a0\u00a0 But again, if power and control are the real objective, rather than protecting the environment, with the help of a complicit media, such inconvenient truths can be brushed off.<\/p>\n

Economic Illiteracy<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>In an environment where high schools and colleges rarely require any kind of economic education<\/a>, combined with an increasing disregard for our Constitution, our public policies suffer accordingly.\u00a0\u00a0 Policies devised by such economic illiterates that mathematically cannot work<\/a> can be sold via Teleprompters to a large portion of the public that is ill-equipped to challenge them.\u00a0\u00a0 We are now reaping what we have sown.<\/p>\n

Class Warfare<\/em><\/p>\n

Following a divide and conquer strategy, the statists seek to pit some groups in society against others.\u00a0\u00a0 Given the mathematical impossibility of financing an ever-enlarging state, the promoters of Big Government seek their life blood<\/a> from \u201cthe rich\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Economic illiteracy plays a big role here, in that the critical role the rich play in financing the economy, and indeed, in financing the very schemes of Big Government, is never discussed.\u00a0\u00a0 Big Government needs<\/em> the money of the rich, so they must be demonized in an attempt to motivate the rest of society to expropriate and redistribute their assets.<\/p>\n

Government Intervention, Job Destruction and Lost Government Revenues<\/em><\/p>\n

As more and more intervention takes place based on the fallacies of the above, job destruction can be the only result, as the real creators of jobs, entrepreneurs<\/em>, decide that taking a risk to create a job is simply not worth it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, those with large amounts of assets, \u201cthe rich\u201d,<\/em> engage in what Ludwig von Mises called a \u201cflight to the real\u201d:\u00a0 fearing that the value of financial wealth can be manipulated by government policy, people seek tangible assets instead, like commodities and collectibles.\u00a0\u00a0 These assets wind up creating no new wealth.\u00a0\u00a0 As the job engine slows and corporate and individual revenues fall, government\u2019s share of those revenues falls in sympathy.<\/p>\n

Public Sector Unions, Calls for Tax Increases, Mandatory Union Dues and Political Donations<\/em><\/p>\n

Rather than recognizing the root causes, class warfare groups, often funded by Public Sector Unions, such as New York\u2019s Working Families Party, attempt to make up the lost revenues by Calls for Tax Increases.\u00a0\u00a0 Never mind that such tax increases never produce the projected revenues (as the economic illiterates fail to acknowledge the power of incentives). \u00a0 And here we enter an entire mini-machine of destruction.<\/p>\n

The unions, with their mandatory dues, take their considerable resources and via Political Donations, promote politicians that will keep The Machine in action.\u00a0\u00a0 The unions have their own Lust for Power, as the union helps only itself in the aggregate, and cannot bring about any net positive benefit for the majority of their members.\u00a0\u00a0 Their very presence reduces the wages of the capable at the expense of the incapable, and often reduces to a game of nothing more than a parasite trying to keep its host alive.<\/p>\n

Unions wouldn\u2019t possibly support such commonsense legislation as Right To Work, because it is an existential threat to their entire machine.\u00a0\u00a0 But the fact that such legislation would even been necessary, that we have to affirm the right for an employer and an employee to voluntarily enter into a mutually beneficial economic arrangement<\/em>, indicates just how much damage The Machine has already done to the economic mindset in this country.\u00a0\u00a0 Knowing how this truth can not stand the light of day, unions instead attempt to hide their legislative motives behind innocuous sounding names like The Employee Free Choice Act<\/a> (which actually has nothing to do with making choices freely).<\/p>\n

In all, The Machine creates an environment ripe for corruption, as the stakes are very high.\u00a0\u00a0 It is said that people rob banks \u201cbecause that is where the money is\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 In Big Government, with crony-capitalism running amok, it is well worth the lobbying effort<\/a> to attempt to rig the game in your favor. \u00a0This in turn fuels cynicism about government itself, causing a large percentage of voters to tune out.<\/p>\n

Breaking the Machine<\/em><\/p>\n

Fortunately, the Machine can be stopped in its tracks, first by recognizing its parts, as I’ve done here.\u00a0 But more importantly, the politicians that support this Big Government vision can be held accountable, and replaced as necessary.\u00a0\u00a0 Throughout their terms, regardless of what they’ve promised, their day-to-day votes are out of our control.\u00a0\u00a0 For one day, every two years, the tables are turned.<\/p>\n

You know what to do.<\/p>\n

Free Subscription<\/a> ~ Follow on Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eleven months ago, in the face of a gauntlet of headwinds that the Obama administration was creating in front of the American job creation engine, I came to the following conclusion: “If you were an entrepreneur, or a business owner or manager with the ability to start large new initiatives, perhaps ones requiring large numbers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1113,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions\/1113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}