Amid the post-election Democratic handwringing, some activists have an answer — be more liberal. After a resounding midterm defeat, progressive leaders argue Democrats played it safe, sidelined the president and lost. But now, the party can win by moving to the left. [Adam] Green and his co-founder, Stephanie Taylor, wrote in an op-ed days after the electoral rout that the party needs to coalesce an agenda that aggressively trumpets issue like Wall Street reform, cutting the cost of college and student loans, and expanding Medicare and Social Security. They pointed out that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat beloved by their organization, was popular on the stump for many embattled Democrats because she touts that message. - The HillOne of the frustrations I have with being a libertarian-conservative is the difficulty of explaining a positive vision of less government, Bastiat's famous distinction between things seen and unseen. "Progressives" or Statists have a relatively easy time showing tangible returns of government-provided goods and services--you drive on "free" roads, you get to see a doctor or go to a hospital in a government health plan, your children can enroll, free of charge, in a brick-and-mortar, fully staffed school, you get a real social security check/deposit that allows you to purchase things in the real economy, health inspectors close down unsanitary restaurants, drinking water and the air are clean, etc. They want to expand the nature and extent of government-provided freebies, which will be paid at the "other" guy's expense, and other "essential" services, run by government "experts" more efficiently and cheaper in scale without the corrupting influence of "evil" profits. The private economy is full of "evil" corporations run by already wealthy, greedy executives willing to drive down worker compensation, cut environmental/safety expenses at the expense of workers and the general public, and pay off the government in the pursuit of even more wealth they don't need; only government has the ability to defend the interests of the common people.
We, on the pro-liberty side, are not paid-off dupes of the oligarchs and plutocrats. We don't necessarily demonize scale of operation; for example, John D. Rockefeller over the span of his career decreased the price of kerosene nearly 80% while improving its quality and availability to consumer
We find it incredulous that "progressives" use the world's worst monopoly, the State, to regulate the private sector's private ones; in fact, the State creates monopolies by restraints on competition. In practice, we see regulatory capture, where big businesses influence State regulatory policy at the expense of smaller upstart competitors in a way they can't impose through the marketplace; big businesses, because of their scale, are better able to absorb the hits imposed by industry policies.
One of the things we routinely see is how marketplace dominance can rapidly transition in a dynamic market. Take, for instance, that over the past 3 or 4 decades we saw the decoupling and regional segmentation of local wired phone service and the long distance phone wars; today, many cellphone customers have dropped landline service, most cable companies offer functionally equivalent digital voice and long distance has become a virtually no-cost option in many call plans. Former Big Tech names just a few years ago include AOL, Blackberry, and Nokia. Satellite Radio XM and Sirius almost went bankrupt waiting out antitrust deliberations over their merger even as alternative technologies like HD Audio emerged. Even as progressives focus with net neutrality on their discontent over Big Cable and high speed Internet, Google has introduced its much higher capacity Fiber service in multiple US cities and is working on its Loon project of reaching remote areas through high altitude balloons. I'm not arguing that Google's technologies will usher in the next Internet age, but I am confident that the next age of the Internet will arrive more quickly through a more robust, unfettered marketplace instead of a megalomaniac design of elitists based out of DC: after all, where is more likely the next mousetrap to be designed: from a pool of over 310 million people or the small pool of the politically connected in Washington? A day-late, dollar-short federal bureaucracy harms, not helps the marketplace and the consumer: it creates regime uncertainty
How do we show or articulate the things unseen? What would businesses do able to keep more of their hard-earned profits instead of seeing taxes inefficiently, ineffectively frittered away on politically favored but nonessential purposes? What if the federal government privatized noncore functionality to the free market? What if government didn't intervene in the markets (e.g., home mortgages, student loans, healthcare, banking, agriculture, education) using a multi-trillion dollar debt to "compete"? What if government didn't institute morally hazardous policies, e.g., deposit insurance, extended unemployment insurance, a State-run pension system mandate? What if State regulations didn't impose a nearly $2T drag on the economy, didn't restrict occupations or create monopolies (e.g., cable or utilities), ban work contracts below a certain wage level, impose Big Business-influenced regulatory burdens on small business? What if the government didn't counterproductively tax income, savings or investment? What if trade restrictions didn't protect local companies at the expense of consumers? What if the State didn't engage in monetary policy intervention, punishing savers and promoting malinvestment in certain financial assets? What if the State didn't bottleneck innovative medicines?
The "progressives"/Statists will tell you we would all be at the mercy of ruthless monopolistic capitalists, that people are too stupid to save for a rainy day or their own retirement, that elderly people won't be able to afford their meds, Grandma will resort to eating cat food, poor children won't get educated, etc. Actually, the government interventions discourage private-sector charities; But let's look at the record of Statism; over 40 years of the War on Poverty have, at best, flatlined poverty, which had been on the decline before LBJ; we have a permanent underclass of government dependency in urban areas, a 40% illegitimacy rate and deteriorating family unit in a system that perversely provides an incentive for males to abandon their households, a public school system that despite nearly quadrupling public spending has barely budged baseline English and math scores.
The Statists love to fear-monger: "they" want to take away your social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Why? To enrich the wealthy who don't even need it. A few things: first, these programs are both ineffective and inefficient, and they are unsustainable: currently 60% or more of the federal budget with unfunded liabilities which are several times the size of our annual GDP. The biggest risk is that politicians will continue to dodge the difficult question of properly funding these programs, and this game of musical chairs abruptly ends. The problem is, especially with senior benefits, is the inadequate funding for a large number of retirees with record tenure of retirement; we simply haven't been collecting enough to finance those retirements. Some estimates are we should be putting away an extra $5T a year, which would require almost tripling our tax revenues. This is over and beyond servicing our $17.5T national debt. We need to do something about spending which means capping the expenditures and deciding how to distribute those expenditures. The "progressives" continue to be in a state of denial, but I want to suggest that your biggest risk is relying on failed politicians to act until a crisis forces them to act. There are few things more morally reprehensible than for politicians to be dismissive of the very real financial issues behind all but insolvent entitlements: don't worry, be happy.
The inevitable insolvency of these programs becomes worse by the day; just to give a sense of the nature of the problem, consider a shrinking number of state workers relative to the retirees and an increasing retiree lifespan. A preview is available via the Pension Tsunami website; for example, California's state retirees are on track to exceed active workers, even double them in some plans. Already in Chicago and New York City, the number of cop retirees exceed active-duty cops. This is creating zero-sum city budget tradeoffs in hiring new cops, even though they make less than many retired cops draw in a permanent distribution. The outlays for the growing contingent of retiring cops are increasing more than the rate of inflation and/or revenues. We need to address the distribution problem--many state retirees draw more than triple the maximum monthly social security check of about $2600, and reform the system to make it sustainable through some combination of increased state funding and lowered benefits, ideally transforming state programs from a defined benefit (pension) to a defined contribution system (e.g., 401K/403B). But the main issue is that the status quo is increasingly calling for current/future taxpayers to bail out chronically underfunded pensions, hurt by inadequate funding and unrealistic investment returns. The idea that we can finesse our way to solvency is delusional; to "progressives", the policy is easy: convert the payroll tax into a unbounded permanent tax increase over all higher-income earners.
I don't want to write a long economic argument here against the populist anti-1% rhetoric; let me simply point out that with some estimates of unfunded entitlements of up to $200T or more, there aren't enough wealthy people to make us whole, even if we confiscate all assets. Second, we need the consumption and investments of the wealthy to grow the economy. Third, the idea of entitlement to someone else's property is morally corrupt. Investment is the seed corn of future economic growth; taxation of productivity and economic success (e.g., income) is counterproductive. Low, flat taxation is far less damaging from an economic perspective; progressive taxation shrinks the tax base, encourages the consumption vs. generation of capital, and shifts the focus to defensive vs. risk-taking deployment of capital.
How, then, do you make the case for a pro-liberty solution when it's difficult to show the benefit of a smaller footprint government. a lower tax and regulatory burden? The private sector is built on the spontaneous order, the voluntary transactions of over 310M Americans (not some remote central planning elitists); it generates 5 of 6 jobs, some 98% paying over the minimum wage. Government operations typically lag the private sector in terms of standards (e.g., Medicare fraud), there are redundant operations, and administrator hands are also tied by collective bargaining agreements; we've seen the utter incompetence of the ObamaCare website rollout, monetary policy under the Federal Reserve has led to the loss of purchasing power of the dollar by over 90%, the social security and Medicare reserves are less than 20 years from exhaustion (i.e., meaning general funds will be needed to make necessary payments), infrastructure is ill-maintained, and almost anything government touches--healthcare, college loans, mortgage loans, retirement, etc.--is inflation-bound. Not to mention political considerations--e.g., earmarks, unrequested military procurements, the blocking of military or post office closures, etc.
I think you start by pointing out that the dollar was largely stable up until the creation of the Fed, that panics and depressions were short-lived (and the result of dysfunctional bank policies); we rapidly grew and overtook Great Britain as the world's leading economy without a self-sustaining large footprint government with its trickle-down benefits. There were charities, mutual aid, fraternal societies; the elderly often lived with children and received free or heavily discounted medical care. We know that large tax cuts in the Coolidge, JFK/LBJ, and Reagan years in fact maintained or expanded tax revenues and helped contribute to a high-growth, job-expansionary economy. (In some cases, spending exceeded any revenue gains).
But we can also point, within our own lifetimes, to the examples of China and India, which have brought millions of their people out of poverty and into the middle class, not by megalomaniac Statist policies, but by liberalizing their economies.
And what's the response of the Statists, of the "progressives"? After 6 years of a "progressive" President and Congress/Senate where the publicly-held debt has more than doubled, the highest spending in world history, we've seen structurally high long-term unemployed, lower household income and net worth, decades-old labor force participation rates... And their response is to double down on "progressive" ideology, central planning of the economy, and the Politics of Envy.
We find it incredulous that "progressives" use the world's worst monopoly, the State, to regulate the private sector's private ones; in fact, the State creates monopolies by restraints on competition. In practice, we see regulatory capture, where big businesses influence State regulatory policy at the expense of smaller upstart competitors in a way they can't impose through the marketplace; big businesses, because of their scale, are better able to absorb the hits imposed by industry policies.
One of the things we routinely see is how marketplace dominance can rapidly transition in a dynamic market. Take, for instance, that over the past 3 or 4 decades we saw the decoupling and regional segmentation of local wired phone service and the long distance phone wars; today, many cellphone customers have dropped landline service, most cable companies offer functionally equivalent digital voice and long distance has become a virtually no-cost option in many call plans. Former Big Tech names just a few years ago include AOL, Blackberry, and Nokia. Satellite Radio XM and Sirius almost went bankrupt waiting out antitrust deliberations over their merger even as alternative technologies like HD Audio emerged. Even as progressives focus with net neutrality on their discontent over Big Cable and high speed Internet, Google has introduced its much higher capacity Fiber service in multiple US cities and is working on its Loon project of reaching remote areas through high altitude balloons. I'm not arguing that Google's technologies will usher in the next Internet age, but I am confident that the next age of the Internet will arrive more quickly through a more robust, unfettered marketplace instead of a megalomaniac design of elitists based out of DC: after all, where is more likely the next mousetrap to be designed: from a pool of over 310 million people or the small pool of the politically connected in Washington? A day-late, dollar-short federal bureaucracy harms, not helps the marketplace and the consumer: it creates regime uncertainty
How do we show or articulate the things unseen? What would businesses do able to keep more of their hard-earned profits instead of seeing taxes inefficiently, ineffectively frittered away on politically favored but nonessential purposes? What if the federal government privatized noncore functionality to the free market? What if government didn't intervene in the markets (e.g., home mortgages, student loans, healthcare, banking, agriculture, education) using a multi-trillion dollar debt to "compete"? What if government didn't institute morally hazardous policies, e.g., deposit insurance, extended unemployment insurance, a State-run pension system mandate? What if State regulations didn't impose a nearly $2T drag on the economy, didn't restrict occupations or create monopolies (e.g., cable or utilities), ban work contracts below a certain wage level, impose Big Business-influenced regulatory burdens on small business? What if the government didn't counterproductively tax income, savings or investment? What if trade restrictions didn't protect local companies at the expense of consumers? What if the State didn't engage in monetary policy intervention, punishing savers and promoting malinvestment in certain financial assets? What if the State didn't bottleneck innovative medicines?
The "progressives"/Statists will tell you we would all be at the mercy of ruthless monopolistic capitalists, that people are too stupid to save for a rainy day or their own retirement, that elderly people won't be able to afford their meds, Grandma will resort to eating cat food, poor children won't get educated, etc. Actually, the government interventions discourage private-sector charities; But let's look at the record of Statism; over 40 years of the War on Poverty have, at best, flatlined poverty, which had been on the decline before LBJ; we have a permanent underclass of government dependency in urban areas, a 40% illegitimacy rate and deteriorating family unit in a system that perversely provides an incentive for males to abandon their households, a public school system that despite nearly quadrupling public spending has barely budged baseline English and math scores.
The Statists love to fear-monger: "they" want to take away your social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Why? To enrich the wealthy who don't even need it. A few things: first, these programs are both ineffective and inefficient, and they are unsustainable: currently 60% or more of the federal budget with unfunded liabilities which are several times the size of our annual GDP. The biggest risk is that politicians will continue to dodge the difficult question of properly funding these programs, and this game of musical chairs abruptly ends. The problem is, especially with senior benefits, is the inadequate funding for a large number of retirees with record tenure of retirement; we simply haven't been collecting enough to finance those retirements. Some estimates are we should be putting away an extra $5T a year, which would require almost tripling our tax revenues. This is over and beyond servicing our $17.5T national debt. We need to do something about spending which means capping the expenditures and deciding how to distribute those expenditures. The "progressives" continue to be in a state of denial, but I want to suggest that your biggest risk is relying on failed politicians to act until a crisis forces them to act. There are few things more morally reprehensible than for politicians to be dismissive of the very real financial issues behind all but insolvent entitlements: don't worry, be happy.
The inevitable insolvency of these programs becomes worse by the day; just to give a sense of the nature of the problem, consider a shrinking number of state workers relative to the retirees and an increasing retiree lifespan. A preview is available via the Pension Tsunami website; for example, California's state retirees are on track to exceed active workers, even double them in some plans. Already in Chicago and New York City, the number of cop retirees exceed active-duty cops. This is creating zero-sum city budget tradeoffs in hiring new cops, even though they make less than many retired cops draw in a permanent distribution. The outlays for the growing contingent of retiring cops are increasing more than the rate of inflation and/or revenues. We need to address the distribution problem--many state retirees draw more than triple the maximum monthly social security check of about $2600, and reform the system to make it sustainable through some combination of increased state funding and lowered benefits, ideally transforming state programs from a defined benefit (pension) to a defined contribution system (e.g., 401K/403B). But the main issue is that the status quo is increasingly calling for current/future taxpayers to bail out chronically underfunded pensions, hurt by inadequate funding and unrealistic investment returns. The idea that we can finesse our way to solvency is delusional; to "progressives", the policy is easy: convert the payroll tax into a unbounded permanent tax increase over all higher-income earners.
I don't want to write a long economic argument here against the populist anti-1% rhetoric; let me simply point out that with some estimates of unfunded entitlements of up to $200T or more, there aren't enough wealthy people to make us whole, even if we confiscate all assets. Second, we need the consumption and investments of the wealthy to grow the economy. Third, the idea of entitlement to someone else's property is morally corrupt. Investment is the seed corn of future economic growth; taxation of productivity and economic success (e.g., income) is counterproductive. Low, flat taxation is far less damaging from an economic perspective; progressive taxation shrinks the tax base, encourages the consumption vs. generation of capital, and shifts the focus to defensive vs. risk-taking deployment of capital.
How, then, do you make the case for a pro-liberty solution when it's difficult to show the benefit of a smaller footprint government. a lower tax and regulatory burden? The private sector is built on the spontaneous order, the voluntary transactions of over 310M Americans (not some remote central planning elitists); it generates 5 of 6 jobs, some 98% paying over the minimum wage. Government operations typically lag the private sector in terms of standards (e.g., Medicare fraud), there are redundant operations, and administrator hands are also tied by collective bargaining agreements; we've seen the utter incompetence of the ObamaCare website rollout, monetary policy under the Federal Reserve has led to the loss of purchasing power of the dollar by over 90%, the social security and Medicare reserves are less than 20 years from exhaustion (i.e., meaning general funds will be needed to make necessary payments), infrastructure is ill-maintained, and almost anything government touches--healthcare, college loans, mortgage loans, retirement, etc.--is inflation-bound. Not to mention political considerations--e.g., earmarks, unrequested military procurements, the blocking of military or post office closures, etc.
I think you start by pointing out that the dollar was largely stable up until the creation of the Fed, that panics and depressions were short-lived (and the result of dysfunctional bank policies); we rapidly grew and overtook Great Britain as the world's leading economy without a self-sustaining large footprint government with its trickle-down benefits. There were charities, mutual aid, fraternal societies; the elderly often lived with children and received free or heavily discounted medical care. We know that large tax cuts in the Coolidge, JFK/LBJ, and Reagan years in fact maintained or expanded tax revenues and helped contribute to a high-growth, job-expansionary economy. (In some cases, spending exceeded any revenue gains).
But we can also point, within our own lifetimes, to the examples of China and India, which have brought millions of their people out of poverty and into the middle class, not by megalomaniac Statist policies, but by liberalizing their economies.
And what's the response of the Statists, of the "progressives"? After 6 years of a "progressive" President and Congress/Senate where the publicly-held debt has more than doubled, the highest spending in world history, we've seen structurally high long-term unemployed, lower household income and net worth, decades-old labor force participation rates... And their response is to double down on "progressive" ideology, central planning of the economy, and the Politics of Envy.
