If you've posted in forums you might remember writing some decent responses. I usually spend a lot of time polishing my discussion forum responses depending on the subject or who I am talking to. Often I want to remember what I said about something, but finding the original post can be difficult. So it makes sense to capture the better responses for later review. Welcome to Clint's Reposts.Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Jobs Moving Overseas Issue (rmiug-jobtalk)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Suzanne Lainson
> I was arguing for different government
> intervention. We currently tax
> and give tax breaks, educate, fund R&D projects,
> have a social
> security system and Medicare, etc. So I am
> suggesting we adjust their
> emphasis to facilitate rapid economic change.
>
> If you want less government than we currently
> have, then that's going
> to require political activism as well because the
> country is not
> going that direction.
>
Yeah, I keep getting that response that we "aren't going in
that direction" whenever I mention limited government. But
as I said in my previous post: "events have a way of
rebalancing political distortions in any case." There is the
Peter/Paul principle at work here in that those who rob
Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul and
his friends.
I'm not sure that all that much political activism is
necessary - one need only wait for the payers to stop paying
when the pendulum swings too far out of kilter. Consider
California's recent woes and you can see the Peter/Paul
principle at work. The end result in California was a move
back toward limited government - a small one to be sure -
since government expansion is what caused much of their
problems in the first place. You can only tax away business
profits (Peter) for so long before things go awry.
Which takes me to the first part of your post. Simply put, I
am arguing that "we", in the form of "different" government
intervention, are entirely ill-equipped to adjust
practically anything affecting rapid economic change. A good
goal for us would be to lobby to dismantle as much as
possible the Peter/Paul environment that leads to the kind
of cronyism we are seeing at present.
Likely that is going to happen soon to some extent anyway
since government is quickly running out of Peters even here in
Colorado, and Peter's money is the fuel used by government
to carry on distorting the market. Disabling Tabor, as you
suggested earlier, will only accelerate that trend. So in a
way I'm with you there, but for different reasons.
Clint
> From: Suzanne Lainson
> I was arguing for different government
> intervention. We currently tax
> and give tax breaks, educate, fund R&D projects,
> have a social
> security system and Medicare, etc. So I am
> suggesting we adjust their
> emphasis to facilitate rapid economic change.
>
> If you want less government than we currently
> have, then that's going
> to require political activism as well because the
> country is not
> going that direction.
>
Yeah, I keep getting that response that we "aren't going in
that direction" whenever I mention limited government. But
as I said in my previous post: "events have a way of
rebalancing political distortions in any case." There is the
Peter/Paul principle at work here in that those who rob
Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul and
his friends.
I'm not sure that all that much political activism is
necessary - one need only wait for the payers to stop paying
when the pendulum swings too far out of kilter. Consider
California's recent woes and you can see the Peter/Paul
principle at work. The end result in California was a move
back toward limited government - a small one to be sure -
since government expansion is what caused much of their
problems in the first place. You can only tax away business
profits (Peter) for so long before things go awry.
Which takes me to the first part of your post. Simply put, I
am arguing that "we", in the form of "different" government
intervention, are entirely ill-equipped to adjust
practically anything affecting rapid economic change. A good
goal for us would be to lobby to dismantle as much as
possible the Peter/Paul environment that leads to the kind
of cronyism we are seeing at present.
Likely that is going to happen soon to some extent anyway
since government is quickly running out of Peters even here in
Colorado, and Peter's money is the fuel used by government
to carry on distorting the market. Disabling Tabor, as you
suggested earlier, will only accelerate that trend. So in a
way I'm with you there, but for different reasons.
Clint
