Frustrating Michael Moore | Foundation for Economic Education
If Michael Moore would study a little political economy he might turn into a potent champion of individual liberty.

I don’t usually have time on Fridays to click through and read the latest TGIF article from FEE. FEE (for those who aren’t long time readers) is the Foundation for Economic Education. They’re a group of Austrian school economists who are trying to spread, without profit to themselves, information defending a true free market. They’re responsible for the translation of Bastiat into English. TGIF is the Friday play on acronyms that stands (for FEE) for The Goal Is Freedom. Today I had a few minutes and the topic looked interesting (Michael Moore’s new film) and so I clicked through.

What I found was not the usual Moore bashing hateful rhetoric that many might be used to seeing from some of his opponents, nor even the uncharitable assumptions that Moore is stupid or anti-american. No, this article treats Moore with more charity than many think he may deserve, and takes his film as an opportunity to describe the eventual results of what Moore is advocating, and describe how our current corrupt system is not the free market.

And that’s the greatness of this article, which won’t take long to read, it’s that it shows in stark terms the difference between a free market and pro-business, and it does so while agreeing with some of what Moore rails against. Any longer here and I’ll do the article disservice–so go read it and I’ll shut up.

Vote NO April 7
The ballot question will be called Sales Tax to Support Public Facilities. Please vote NO on election day or during the early voting period of March 16 through April 2.

Vote NO on Public Facilities Sales Tax
On April 7, 2009, voters who live in Peoria County will decide whether to approve a .25% sales tax increase for public facilities purposes — specifically, to help construct the proposed Peoria Riverfront Museum. We believe Peoria County residents should vote NO.

http://www.nomuseumtax.org/

I voted early, and an enthusiastic no. If it only takes $17 per person to get this done, (btw that’s more for my large family–but I still only got one vote at the ballot box) then it should be easy to raise the funds. Especially if they’d spent all the money they spent lobbying and advertising for taking my money without consent.

Davids home now: Can there be a right to Medical Care
When I was in medical school, there was no insurance. People got care. Doctors charged and received payment with a direct doctor-patient relationship that was mutually sustainable and satisfactory, medically and financially. Poor people received care through the dedication and compassion of the doctor and community.

I was taught, “Save the widow the farm.” That is, when Farmer Joe comes in with a lung cancer, one might encourage him to undergo extensive, expensive surgery that would require that the farm be mortgaged. However, the results were dismal. After Joe’s death, the widow frequently was unable to pay the mortgage and lost the farm.

Instead, one could explain the situation with compassion and frankness and Farmer Joe and his wife, using the same frugality and value system by which they had otherwise lived, would accept the reality of the situation, a reality that bespoke a meager chance of benefit that was not appropriately affordable. Joe’s plight would be alleviated by all palliative means medicine had to offer. This rational, realistic decision was the norm. Indulgence in futile care to the point of threatening the whole system was not a problem.

This is a great blog post from a retired doctor on what’s gone wrong in health care in the last 50 years or so.

Why are the states having budget problems? Because tax revenues are down. The real estate market crash and the recession we’re entering will affect the state budgets by billions of dollars across our nation.

Local governments are not immune to the problem either. My own city just published a press release here on the changes they’re making to deal with the economic downturn.

Before I quote from the press release, look at this article detailing how the public sector pays 11% more in benefits and wages than the private sector. That’s state and local government numbers only, btw, not including Federal salaries. If you’re a state government employee or local government employee, on average you’ll be making 11% more than if you worked for a for-profit company, let alone a non-profit private charity.

I believe this is because government pay scales get instituted during private booms and are unadjusted when the bear markets come. So now, when layoffs and pay and benefit cuts are looming nationwide, government employees will enjoy the same benefits and automatic salary increases they enjoyed last year, while tax revenues plummet. The solution often chosen at these times is to raise taxes, rather than cut spending, which will only compound the problem. The fewer dollars able to be spent in the private market (because they were taken as taxes), the worse the economy will get.

Now to the release. Here are the changes Peoria is making:

The City always looks to use tax dollars most efficiently, but those efforts will be re-doubled in the coming months.”

Beyond the measures taken during the budget process, the City is identifying a number of cost-cutting steps. Those steps include:

• Instituting a sensible hiring freeze starting on January 1, 2009;
• Implementing recommendations from a recently completed report by the Energy Efficiency Task Force that will reduce fuel and electricity costs;
• Reducing the number of employee take-home cars; and,
• Realizing a savings of approximately $150,000 in the City’s refuse collection contract.

In early January, at the direction of the City Council, the entire senior staff of the City will gather for a series of workshops that will identify further contingency plans to be enacted if revenues are depressed. The finance staff is constantly monitoring receipts in order to identify trends before they become realities.

Starting at the bottom. In January the high paid city staff (senior staff for the city make six figure incomes) will gather for workshops. I’m guessing these workshops cost money.

Next line up: what does “realizing a savings” mean? Does that mean that they’re cutting the services back? That Waste Management just suddenly cut their prices? The whole phrase sounds suspicious.

Reducing take home cars? Why do public employees need take home cars? It’s a nice fringe benefit, but when taxes are high enough, those ought to have gone out the window in favor of a rainy day fund for times like this.

And a hiring freeze? What about a wage freeze? A benefit cut? Caterpillar has frozen all wages corporation wide, and management bonuses will be next to non-existent. And still people are losing jobs.

Mitch Daniels spoke at an event I attended recently and talked about how he turned Indiana from a huge deficit to a surplus in four years. Are you sitting down? He said “we spent less than we took in.” They didn’t raise taxes, they adjusted spending.

We are likely only at the beginning of what could be the biggest recession since the 1930’s. If the City of Peoria means business, they need to look ahead at what’s coming and prepare for it by taking big steps now, and finding unessential services that can be cut, and therefore jobs. Scale back benefits to be equal to what workers in the private sector have. Save money for when it gets worse.

And they can start by tossing out the idea of raising the sales tax to support a museum that not enough people want and trash this $40M taxpayer subsidy for a private hotel.

FDA Faulted for Stance on Chemical in Plastics – washingtonpost.com
The FDA’s position on BPA has been controversial because it contradicted more than 100 studies, as well as a finding by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, that there was “some concern” that BPA may affect the brain and behavioral development in fetuses, infants and small children, thePostsaid.

Relying on the government for protection puts us at risk. It invariably becomes politicized. As the quote above points out, the FDA (your watchdog!) approved something more than a hundred studies said was a bad idea.

Private consumer protection is a better option. The FDA has no profits at stake when their advice is wrong, and there is no one to watch the watchdog when that watchdog is the government.

Will U.S. Taxpayers Need A Bailout?, Declan McCullagh Says Plan To Partially Nationalize U.S. Banks Has Many Potential Perils – CBS News
The almost-nationalization will happen even if, as the Wall Street Journal
delicately put it it, bank executives and shareholders are “unhappy” and oppose the idea.

This invites micromanaging from Washington, D.C. Members of Congress will have a strong incentive to demand preferential treatment for borrowers in their home districts or among politically-favored constituencies. Politicians who are members of the committees overseeing the Treasury Department’s budget will enjoy outsize influence. So will Treasury and other regulators that banks must please to stay in business.

A new column at CBSNews.com called Other People’s Money, of which this is the first installment, just got added to my reading list.

Looks like it will be informative to those who want to see the government spending less money, rather than more.

Dry-Cleaning Economics in One Lesson| The Foundation for Economic Education: The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty
Another day, another news story about economic wackiness. Gas prices rise, the dollar sinks, and stores are limiting rice sales. What could be next? Clothes hangers.

Yes, clothes hangers. Marie Sledge, co-owner of Rome (Georgia) Cleaners, states, “Hangers last year at this time were $28 a box, where now they are $56.” News reports indicate that cleaners in Springfield, Missouri; Birmingham, Alabama; and Harlem are also encountering doubling hanger prices. In response, many cleaners are posting signs in their shops encouraging customers to return used hangers.

Hangers can’t, even if combined with government subsidies, be converted into biofuels. So what is causing the rapid increase in hanger prices? Government, of course, though in this case it’s the trade bureaucrats at the Department of Commerce rather than the folks behind other debacles in the news these days.

In a March 19 news release the Department of Commerce “announced its affirmative preliminary determination in the antidumping duty investigation on imports of steel wire garment hangers from the People’s Republic of China.” Translation: The government will now impose tariffs on hangers imported from China. The tariffs vary by supplier, ranging from a lightly starched 33 percent to a truly stiff 221 percent. With hanger prices potentially tripling because of tariffs, it’s easy to understand the disruption facing dry cleaners.

As one who uses dry-cleaners a lot, I found this examination of how unintended consequences of government action affects our day to day out-of-pocket outlays. Enjoy!

Health: Better Safe Than Sorry – US News and World Report
Andrew Stout’s farm in Carnation, Wash., is one of the most successful small organic farms in the country. Each week, Full Circle Farm delivers fresh lettuce, green peas, spring garlic, and spinach to 17 farmers’ markets in the Seattle area, as well as to dozens of restaurants and retailers, including Whole Foods Market. Some 2,400 boxes of produce a week go out to families who have bought a share in the farm’s riches. His customers are counting on getting freshness and taste-and also on Stout’s care when it comes to hygiene. “Bacteria exists everywhere,” he says. So he keeps the manure pile away from the packing shed, tests the water used to irrigate and wash vegetables, and keeps an eye on his workers to be sure they wash their hands. “I’m a food provider,” he says. “You want to do the absolute best that you can.”

The rapidly growing passion for locally grown produce from farmers like Stout and his wife, Wendy Munroe, is one sign of just how nervous Americans have become about the state of food on their plate.

Holy Cow! Whole Foods Linked to E. coli Outbreak – The Checkout
Whole Foods initiated the recall after Massachusetts health officials investigating a cluster of E. coli illnesses discovered all seven victims had bought meat at Whole Foods. The chain pulled ground beef from some of its stores on Wednesday. The Nebraska Beef recall was announced late Friday night.

The first article I linked to above is one I read about a year ago while in Arizona visiting my parents, the second is one I saw on my Google homepage this morning.

Food. It’s the stuff we take in that God has designed to give us energy, life, health, and enjoyment. Certainly God could have designed a “more efficient” way for us to get our calories in, but food was given for enjoyment, for feasting. And we miss it when we fast–turning us back to Him.

But food lately has become a knotty issue, as these two articles point out. Food can be dangerous. It can give death almost as easily as it brings life, because it can carry with it many dangerous things that exist in our world since the fall. Most people in our nation look for the FDA and the USDA to guard the quality and safety of the food supply. But can they? I mean, short of inspecting every single food item before it hits your grocery store, is that even possible? And what would that do to the tax cost of food? And is it even their job?

The first article talks about a growing movement of buying food that is local. Food that you know where it came from. Certainly that doesn’t eliminate safety concerns, but doesn’t it make them smaller than a federal agency ever could? In the old days people would buy meat from a butcher that they knew, who bought the meat directly from a farmer that they probably knew as well. The grocer? He carried vegetables and such from local farmers also. And so on.

Do you know where your food comes from? Have you ever asked they guy at the meat counter where those chickens were raised and what they were fed? He probably doesn’t know. (As an aside, I have had conversations with people at both Alwan and Sons and Pottstown Deli locally and I got an answer, and usually it was someplace I could find out more about if I wanted to.)

If you don’t know where your food comes from, you are at risk. Maybe not huge risk, but since the largest organic food vendor (Whole Foods Market) in the United States just had meat issues, I don’t think you can even say that buying organic makes you safer.

But if you grow your own veggies or get them from a friend or neighbor or a local farmer–they’re likely to be safer, and at least you can ask more questions about what they grew near, what fertilizer was used, etc. And if you take responsibility for your consumption purchases, you will always be better off in the long run, and safer. We buy most of our meat directly from local farmers and prefer veggies from the same, when we can get them. (Here’s a link to a video of a chicken plucker that we got to help with, and help a farmer, who gave us a sizeable chicken for our work).

And you just might help a local business thrive instead of a big box.

So if you don’t know where your food came from, think about it, and consider changing that. If you do–good job!

I’m sure I’ll have more to write on this later, but be careful what you eat, especially if you have no idea where it’s been.

State Policy Network | Blog
“How can people believe they are free when something as intimate as childbirth is so heavily controlled by the corporate state?” Gregory asks. “Of course, we need freedom for families to make their choice among hospitals and home birth options. For a case for home birth, and against the establishment that embraces a program of processing women in labor as fast as it can through the systematic reliance on the pitocin-epidural-cesarean process, see the great documentary, The Business of Being Born.

“The artificial process of bringing on contractions, then giving pain relief, then bringing on more contractions, then resorting to cesareans when things don’t go as smoothly and quickly as desired, reminds me of the spiral of interventionism Mises described,” Gregory adds.

Another example of the nanny state and corporate welfare. Don’t let people do anything they want to if you can find another, more expensive, more highly regulated way.

My friends who have had home births (as have we) should know that the laws are in part guided by medical professionals who lobby for stricter regulations in order to protect their market share.

Pushing Help on Flood Victims (Cato-at-liberty)
Libertarians often talk about the possibility of private charity picking up the slack for reduced government welfare. Statists scoff at such notions, pointing to the weakness of local community and cultural institutions today. The charge rings true, but the reason, if this is the case, is not that the American character is weak and that it casually ceded responsibility to government. It’s because government largesse is an insidious, attacking organism that goes right for the fibers and joints of civil society to draw down their strength and make them arthritic.

I found this quote to be quite insightful. I believe that more private charity is necessary, and here is one reason why it doesn’t exist. The government will spend your money before a charitable organization has time to jump in, all too often.

So if we are to be salt and light, and to move true charity into our communities, we’re going to have to be aggressive, bold, quick, and competitive. We’ll have to find ways to get ahead of jimmy gummint in the race to do good, so that true good will actually be done.