Wisconsin Gets Jobbed

The first headline in the Google list told the whole story: “Government Data Shows Wisconsin Leads Nation In Job Loss Under Walker.”   

The paragraphs that follow cite a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report that says Wisconsin lost 23,900 jobs over the past 12 months, more than any other state in the union, and then the article quotes numerous opponents of Governor Walker who demand that he be recalled because of it.   

Actually, I was hoping to avoid yet another swim in the murky waters of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but since none of my fellow countrypersons whose crushing student loan debt bought them a degree in journalism seem inclined to use it for the five minutes it takes to discover a fly in any BLS ointment, I passed on the SNL musical guest last night and contradicted the BLS headline with its own data.  You can fact-check me yourself; here is the link:    

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LASST55000005?data_tool=XGtable

A little housekeeping first…can we all agree that the “last twelve months” is March 2011 to March 2012?  Fabulous.  And can we agree with the experts at BLS that the term “employment” means the number of persons who are working?  Outstanding.  And one last thing - more persons working is better, and fewer persons working is worse, are you with me?  Terrific.  I can feel that civil war healing itself already.        

So here we go.  According to BLS – not me - the number of persons employed in Wisconsin in March of 2011 was 2,838,145.   And according the BLS – not me - the number of persons employed in Wisconsin in March of 2012 was 2,856,643.  My calculator says that is an INCREASE of 18,498. 

My Excel spreadsheet says that is an INCREASE of 18,498.  Arithmetic by hand says that is an INCREASE of 18,498.  Slide rule, abacus, ponies stomping – anyway you count ‘em up, that is 18,498 more people are working now than a year ago, not less.  When do I get my Pulitzer Prize? 

While we are at it, the BLS – not me – says that during Walker’s first 15 months in office the number of people working in Wisconsin has INCREASED by 23,575.  And BLS – not me – says that during his predecessor’s first 15 months in office, with a national economy growing at more than double the current rate, the number of people working in Wisconsin DECREASED by 143.

Don’t shoot the messenger, especially now that we have concealed carry and you never know which messengers will shoot back.  Did we recall Governor Jim Doyle after a year? No, that was a different time; nearly a decade before we lost our minds.  Should we have recalled Doyle in 2004?  Absolutely not – he won an election, and elections should mean something in a democracy. 

My point is not that Walker’s policies have led to high rates of job creation; 23,575 more people working is anemic and we need to do a lot better than that.  My point is that the professional axe-grinders would like you to believe BLS data is some Biblical truth whenever a slice of it can be carved out to support their narratives, but a BLS headline is not truth.  They do statistics, not truths, and there are limits to statistics.   

If you want to go cherry-picking BLS data, Milwaukee is pretty gruesome; so whose fault is that – Barrett, Abele, Walker, Obama, or whoever is running the U.N. these days?  Dane County is not exactly frackin’ North Dakota, so which Madison politician wants to fall on their sword for that?  What next – should we go ward by ward and start recalling aldermen?  

The fact is that none of our elected officials who promise to create jobs in the private sector have any say in the matter; politicians can only put up or tear down barriers to job creation. 

If you want to judge Governor Walker, or any other politician for that matter, on job creation, then list the barriers he has erected to private sector job creation down one column, and list the barriers he has removed down a second column.  As a businessman and job creator, I can tell you that one of my lists is substantially longer than the other, but everyone is entitled to their own list and their own opinion.     

Just don’t form that opinion based on one headline – especially when the headline is based on a description of BLS jobs data that is contradicted by its own employment data three rows up in the exact same data set.  It is not BLS’ fault that headline-hawking partisans don’t appreciate the limits of statistics; they tell you they are not counting jobs on their fingers and toes:      

“The sampling errors provided in this technical note have been estimated using the Repeatedly Grouped Balanced Half Samples (RGBHS) method, a modification of the Balanced Half Samples (BHS) technique used for the National estimates…This technique involves the repeated calculation of BHS estimates R times. After each calculation, the sample units are randomly assigned to two groups in order to produce new BHS estimates. The final estimate of variance is an average of R BHS estimates. This method is used in calculating the sample errors for each published basic and summary cell. Under normal circumstances, where the average response rates are met and there are no reporting anomalies...”

Still think you know how many jobs there actually are in Wisconsin?  And if any of you student-debt-laden journalism majors want to do a little investigative journalism, why don’t you go figure out why one floor of the BLS – not me – says that 2,856,643 people are employed in Wisconsin today while another floor of the BLS – not me - estimates there are only 2,730,100 jobs? 

How could that possibly be?  That is 126,543 more people working than there are jobs to employ them; do people think they are working when they are not?  The data comes from the same federal Department, same agency, same website, same web page, same table even – and only 3 rows apart.  

And which of these two conflicting pictures – 24,000 fewer jobs or 18,000 more people working – is consistent with the other BLS data that shows the number of unemployed Wisconsinites dropping from 232,167 to 207,527 over the past year?  Which one is consistent with the unemployment rate dropping to 6.8%? 

I don’t know if any of the BLS numbers are accurate to the last digit, but one of these things is not like the other and it was that one thing that set off the media frenzy and poured gasoline on the recall fire.  Is it too much to expect that our objective journalists might tell us there was a lot more to the story?    

It didn’t take much work to find the information that I have presented here; any 9th grader could have done it in a half hour with a little encouragement.  So ask yourself why you are just reading this now for the first time.  Better yet, ask your favorite news outlets why they didn’t tell you about employment going up under Governor Walker, since that is what BLS – I repeat, not me – says. 

Now there is a recall story that might actually be interesting.  


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

I Choose Drugs

Imagine if someone had come to President Richard Nixon in 1970 and said, “Here is a plan to reduce the national debt by $1 trillion, reduce the gang population by 1.2 million, reduce violent crime by 90%, prevent 37 million citizens from becoming felons, save our inner cities, maintain strong black families, and prevent civil war on our border in Mexico.”   How could the President just say no?  

That plan, of course, would have been to NOT launch the war on drugs we have been waging for the past 40 years - more correctly, the war on intoxicant choice.  Had Nixon known the high costs and the negligible effect, he would most likely not have chosen to start the insanity.  We do know; so let’s end it.    

If it were as simple as drugs or no drugs, I would choose no drugs.  But in the real world, the choice is a) drugs, or b) drugs, gangs, violence, world-record incarceration rates, the implosion of our inner cities, warlords running Mexico, and a trillion dollars flushed down the toilet without putting a dent in either use or addiction rates.  I choose drugs. 

Not literally, of course; I don’t smoke, drink, or take drugs now that my wild oats have turned to oatmeal.  But abstinence is my choice, and I don’t have any right to throw you in prison simply because you make a different one.  Criminalizing choice is a basic no-no in a country founded on the Liberty principle.

How can we justify government telling us which intoxicants we are permitted to choose and which we are not?  More importantly, why do we tolerate it?   If I feel like starting my morning off tomorrow with a little yoga stretch followed by a Pall Mall, Cabin Still, and some red bud, who the hell is Gil Kerlikowske to tell me I can’t.       

If you don’t know, Gil is President Obama’s drug czar, who somehow kept his job after admitting the truth about the war on drugs last year, saying, "In the grand scheme, it has not been successful.  Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

And there you have it from the guy in the know – the war on drugs is all side-effect and no cure.  And what a shame there is zero chance this guy will ever be Treasury Secretary and tell us the truth about the war on prosperity, a.k.a. the Obama economic plan, with the same brutal honesty. 

To be clear about it, drugs are not illegal in this country; only some drugs are illegal in this country.  It is perfectly legal to get so wasted you black out and go catatonic for hours; you can stay hammered for days on end and not break a single law.  You can throw your whole life down the drain and live as a blithering, degenerate, wasted burnout; the only legal requirement is that you do so with government-approved intoxicants.  There are many hundreds to choose from.      

We have indeed spent over $1 trillion in our contrived “war on drugs”.  Even after adjusting for inflation, President Obama’s $15 billion budget is 30 times larger than that spent by President Nixon.  The states spend another $27 billion.  The Drug Czar was the first of the constitution-evading “czar” positions – the drug war was the “gateway drug” that set that awful precedent and now we have them popping up everywhere like weeds in a garden.  Every President since Gerald Ford has spent more than his predecessor and achieved less.       

In 1970 it was estimated that 15 million Americans used illegal drugs.  More than 40 years and more than $1 trillion later, an estimated 25 million will use illegal drugs this year.  This is not a good return on investment.  Over that time, we have made 37 million Americans felons for possessing a plant; and those felonious wrong-choice botanists are disproportionately black and Hispanic.      

Liberals who would tie themselves to a tree because a frog might have to move to another tree if the first was felled won’t lift a finger to prevent millions of black fathers from being ripped away from their homes and families and sent off to incarceration. 

And conservatives who claim to be tough on crime and even tougher on government spending won’t even consider ending prohibition the second time.  Wisconsin’s Governor Walker was bold in confronting our #1 public expense – education - but where is he on #2 - the prison system? 

Making some drugs illegal has created 1.2 million gang members who commit 90% of the violent crime in this country, according the FBI.  Half of the population of our federal prisons is made up of non-violent drug offenders - half.  We could cut our law enforcement and incarceration costs by 50% if we would quit making felons out of people whose “crime” is that they prefer marijuana over chardonnay. 

And yes, it is that simple and that silly.  If the stoners were winos we would have no war on drugs - it is entirely fabricated based on the choice of intoxicants – and we would not be incurring all these economic and social costs.  But then if we made Merlot illegal, we would throw all the red-wine winos in prison while the white-wine winos lived free.  Prohibition is a bad idea; selective prohibition is a dumb bad idea. 

Be honest, do you really think that drug violations are crimes?  Let’s do the nephew test: you discover one of your nephews raped a 12 year-old neighbor girl and you discover another nephew has a bag of weed in his apartment.  Which nephew do you report to the police – the first, the second, or both?   You know the answer.  C’mon.  

Studies report that 46% of all Americans have used an illegal drug at least once – 53% of Americans under the age of 50.  Did 53% of us try murder in college to see if we liked it?  Did we experiment with extortion, or kidnap someone for ransom because everybody else was doing it and we wanted to fit in?   The country is broke now; we can’t borrow money to keep this foolishness up for appearances.     

Just because libertarians are against drug laws does not mean we are for drugs.  And libertarians are not soft on crime; we want resources wasted on prosecuting intoxicant choice to be spent protecting us from real criminals, like nephew #1.  I want my tax dollars used to take child-rapists and con-men off the street, not to take nurses and teachers and entrepreneurs and policemen (don’t be naïve) off the street. 

Ending the war on intoxicant choice should be one of the few things we can all agree on.  Liberals can support decriminalization as social justice; conservatives can support decriminalization as fiscal responsibility; libertarians can support decriminalization as a matter of principle; and constitutionalists can support decriminalization on Constitutional grounds – state’s rights, 4th amendment. 

And the rest of us can support decriminalization to defang the gangs that terrorize our cities, our schools, our borders, and our Mexican neighbors.  It is not the drugs that fund those gangs; it is the profit from the illegal drug trade that they are killing over.  Take away that profit by ending selective drug prohibition and gangs and violence disappear overnight.   

Whatever harm drugs do to our society, our drug laws inflict damage that is orders of magnitude worse.  Totalitarianism is not an effective treatment plan, and liberty is too high of a price to pay to put up a flimsy appearance of prevention.  
 

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Freedom Tax

A friend of mine said today she considers her speeding tickets to be a “freedom tax” - the price she must pay to choose the speed she will drive on the open highway.  It reminded me that I have been blessed with an overabundance of very cool friends. 

Naturally, our group chimed in and improved upon the idea, deciding we should all have the option of paying more for license plates with stickers that let us drive as fast as we want on highways.  Don’t even bother pulling us over – that defeats the whole purpose of driving fast - just let us pre-pay for the privilege of channeling our inner Montana on rural roads and leave us alone.   

Think about it for a minute - how many of you would pay, let’s say an extra $250, to be liberated from the 65 mph speed limit?  I thought so.  And think about how much revenue our cash-strapped state could raise if they let us buy freedom by the slice. 

In fact, I think adjustable-rate freedom it is such a good idea we should extend it to everything.  Instead of paying income tax at rates that increase based on how much money we make, let us all choose our own rates based on how much freedom we are willing to pay for.   

At 10% tax you get your basic rights of citizenship as our government has currently capped, hogtied, and straight-jacketed them with its kajillion laws and perverted interpretation of the Constitution.  If this is your idea of the land of the free and the home of the brave, then pay your ticket and enjoy the ride.  Go in peace, friend. 

But for 15%, you can upgrade to the “Goldwater” package – you get a coupon book with, say, 100 coupons exempting you from any laws, regulations, and mandates that some stick-up-it in a far-away cubicle decided to saddle you with that interfere with your personal civil liberties.  Whether its Cuban cigars or concealed carry, each coupon gives you back a right they took from you along the way.

Or you can go all-in at 20%, which buys the top of the line “Ron Paul Plus” package – you get an interactive, searchable, electronic Smart Constitution with unlimited veto power…and if you buy today, Ginsu knives and George Foreman Grill.  

 

So if you don’t ever want your government treading on you again - not to mention fat-free burgers and a paring knife that will cut a soup can - then you want to get in on this unbridled liberty package while supplies last.  

Here’s how it works:  whenever some government official puts the grip on you, you just show them your RP+ Card emblazoned with “We Are The 20%” and then they have to talk into your Smart Constitution device and tell it what it is they think you must do or must not do because they say so.   

The Smart Constitution searches itself to see if they have the authority to bust your chops; if they don’t the thing lights up and vibrates like a reservation fob at the Outback.  And then it starts  screaming at them in that droid electro-voice:  “Buzz…off! You…have…no…authority!  Lay…by…your…dish!”  

You win!  Nullified!  You are your own Supreme Court, only without those annoying 4 dissenting votes that show up like third cousins at a wedding reception with open bar.  I don't get those 5-4 votes; any nine 8th graders could get it right while texting and giving you that “whatever” look that makes you want to smack ‘em and go apologize to your own mom.  You know the one.  But I digress... 

And for an extra $20, you can download a celebrity voice module to holler at them – Ted Nugent, Allen West, Clint Eastwood, Penn Jillette, Vicki McKenna, Herman Cain, my friend Pierro, or the man himself, Ron Paul.  The Ron Paul module tells them to bugger off and then gives them a ten minute lecture on the Federal Reserve; that alone is worth the extra $20, trust me.    

How about it, patriots?  Wouldn’t it be worth the extra money to be able to say to the government, “you’re not the boss of me” and mean it?  Wouldn’t you give almost anything to feel like they did in September of 1787, when Americans empowered themselves to rule over their government, instead of the other way around?  How much is that much liberty worth to you?  What would you pay to live free - 20%, 25%, 30% maybe? 

Or how about…ZERO?  How about our freedom is not for sale?  How about we do not negotiate with terrorists?   How about we remember that our freedom has already been purchased and we all start acting like we own it?   

Our freedoms and rights were gifted to us by God; we should not have to pay a ransom to the government that hijacked them.  We already have the right to tell our government to go pound sand; it is guaranteed to us in the Constitution that every single one of our elected officials, appointees, and military personnel swore an oath to uphold.  Don’t want to uphold it anymore?  Then quit. 

We are a free people endowed with rights that government is not permitted to alter.  We elect other free people to represent us, not to rule us.  They are our reservation fob; they have the responsibility to light up and vibrate and say no to any law or regulation or administrative rule that limits our freedom. 

We have tens of thousands of elected officials who are supposed to say no government encroachment on our liberties, we should not have our freedom hanging by a thread on the whims and mood swings of one or two  judges – this is not figure skating.

Some of our elected officials get that. It doesn’t matter if they are Republicans or Democrats, liberal or conservative, libertarian or socialist, first-termers or careerists with decades of scars to prove it.  If they get it, they deserve to represent us. 

But most of them don’t.  Most of them have turned our system of noble self-government to a tawdry auction of stolen goods, where privilege goes to the highest bidder and where partisanship passes for principle.  If they don’t get it, they don’t deserve to represent us; they deserve to be replaced. 

And that is the simple agenda of our liberty movement: to keep elected officials who protect our freedoms and abide by our Constitution, and to replace elected officials who don’t.  Voting in general elections is not tricky; nine times out of ten all you need to know about any candidate is where they think our rights come from.  It’s a one-word answer.  

 

If you get the chance, ask a candidate that question and count the number of words in their answer.  You’ll know what to do. 


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!
 

And Then What?

In the past few days the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a couple of remarkable articles on the upcoming Wisconsin recall elections – both interesting and infuriating. 

The first one reported that the public-sector unions who endorsed Democrat candidate Kathleen Falk have now suspended advertising on her behalf with just weeks to go before the primary. 

Thank you so much, WEAC and AFSME, for forcing a primary upon us that will add several millions to the $9 million it was already going to cost the taxpayers to humor you with a recall, only to pull out when it came time to spend some of your own money on it.  That’s just terrific; a sure-fire way to win over independent and undecided taxpayers by spending a boatload of their money for nothing.  Bravo.

The second was the astonishing admission of both leading candidates to unseat Governor Walker – Falk and Tom Barrett – that they have no plan to offer the voters of this state to counter the reforms enacted by the guy they want to replace prematurely.  Even the liberals at the paper found this bizarre.  

Thank you so much, Democrat Party of Wisconsin, for forcing a recall election that will cost taxpayers upwards of $20 million in a runoff between two candidates who, with nearly 18 months to come up with a better idea than Scott Walker’s reforms, can’t think of anything besides not being Scott Walker.  Isn’t the cream supposed to rise in the dairy state?        

There are 3.6 million other adults here who are also not Scott Walker and who also have no earthly idea how to run the State of Wisconsin effectively.  Why not put them all on the ballot, if that’s what democracy looks like.  Just pick one at random; or maybe rotate daily, so everybody has a better chance of taking a turn.  Maybe it could be a scratch-off lottery prize and we can make some money on the deal. 

The left also endured a minor thong-twist this week over Walker’s reinstatement of merit bonuses for some state employees, although I don’t know why paying state workers a little more would cause angst among Team Public Worker. 

They say it is too costly in this era of austerity, but the bonuses will only cost taxpayers an additional $725,000 or roughly 1/30 the cost of the recall over…what was that again?  Oh, yeah, cutting state workers’ pay in the age of austerity.

Actually, it is no longer clear that the recall is about worker pay; in fact, I don’t think anyone knows anymore what this recall is supposed to be about. 

It started over benefit adjustments for public employees, but once a database of teacher salaries and benefit values was made public, sympathy for besieged public servants turned to envy.

Then it switched to collective bargaining, which sounded like a pretty good principled argument until residents of the Badger state got a good look at the behavior of the “collective” in question when they hit the capitol en masse last winter.  And putting the muscle to neutral businesses turned off a lot of fair-minded people who suddenly understood that “bargaining” has a different meaning altogether to the boys from Chicago who are calling the shots.    

So the argument shifted to Walker’s cuts in education funding, which actually had a little traction going until we discovered the extent of the WEA trust insurance scam and realized how much we have been ripped off and for how long in the name of education.  Turns out your average fish-fry cheesehead couldn’t get whipped into a frenzy over cuts to money-laundering.  

Then it was just sort of, generally, um, that Walker’s Act 10 reforms, like, you know, kinda destroyed the state and stuff; until people started to see that the state was not destroyed and over $1 billion had been saved in less than a year since Act 10 was implemented over the objections of every living and breathing Democrat, who are still living and breathing despite the issuance of 100,000 concealed carry permits, thank you very much Governor Walker.  

Then it was all about jobs – the Democrats had something going on there until they voted down the mining bill and killed off the biggest opportunity for high-wage job growth to come down the pike in this state in many years.  It is quite a feat to get unions and old people from up North pissed at Democrats – kudos.       

Next they tried out this pitch:  it wasn’t exactly what he did, it was how he did it.  But when people looked at their lower tax bills and those concealed carry permits they pretty much decided it didn’t matter how he did it.  And besides, having a majority of both houses of the legislature vote for a law that the governor then signs, is pretty much how he is supposed to do it.  It’s the veto by any old county judge with ink in the pen that is a process problem. 

So now about all that is left for The Left is the old standby - Walker didn’t tell us he was going to do this reform stuff before we elected him.  Forget that we didn’t buy this crock when they first whipped it on us in January of 2011 - that’s their story and they are sticking to it…for now. 

Let’s see if we got this straight: we are supposed to throw out the guy who saved the state from fiscal catastrophe because he didn’t spell out his plan to a level of specificity satisfactory to his opponent, and replace him with said opponent who has...wait for it...no plan whatsoever.    

Really?  And then what? 

I guess recall that one in a year, too. Because if they won’t tell us anything at all now, then if they do anything at all once in office it will be at least equal to Walker’s transgression – i.e. not telling us ahead of time exactly what he was going to do and how.  

If that is how this is all supposed to work from now on, then we might as well just rent a Governor for a year instead of hiring one for four and then tossing him or her after one anyway.  Someone call Manpower and see what the rate would be for a temp.     

This is not getting ridiculous; it put ridiculous in the rear view mirror a long time ago.  President Obama has no plan to solve the deficit and the debt at the federal level; his Treasury Secretary admitted so under oath in a Congressional hearing.  They apparently think not-Paul-Ryan is a winning strategy.  Governor Walker’s opponents admit they have no plan to avoid deficits and debt at the state level; they apparently think not-Scott-Walker will work here, too. 

Until someone in the Democrat party brain-trust decides to make this a difficult decision and give us a plan – any plan - to consider, the recall vote is going to be easy, even if you don’t care much for Scott Walker.  Whoever runs against Walker plans to spend more, tax more, and tell us what to do, and if Walker wins he plans to spend less, tax less, and tell us what to do.    

So if we are going to have a government hell-bent on telling us what to do, we might as well have the one that takes less of our money doing it.  Not exactly bumper-sticker material, but then I'm not a Republican with turf to defend or a Democrat with an axe to grind - just a libertarian with an opinion.


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

What Money Can't Buy

As long as we are going to spend the next several months yelling at each other over who makes too much and who makes too little, I thought it might be helpful to talk a little bit about what people actually make and why.  

Let’s start with who makes the most money – according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 42 professions whose median pay is $100,000 or higher.  Number 42 is nuclear engineer, and from there income rises in professions you would probably expect – pharmacists, lawyers, doctors, executives, airline pilots, engineers, architects, law professors, judges. 

What may come as a surprise are the (relatively) modest median incomes for those very top-paying professions.  Surgeons top the list at $219,000; CEO’s come in at #9 with a median income of $167,000; dentists at #12 and $156,000; lawyers at #16 with $129,000. 

Most of us hear “CEO” and think “millions”, or hear “surgeon” and think “Beverly Hills”.  $219k is what we would have guessed for alimony, not median income. We think of the lawyers who make millions off rain-maker settlements, when in reality half of our barristers toil away earning just a little more than a married pair of high school teachers ($55,500). 

I wonder how many of the class warriors on the left who rail against unfair CEO pay, and how many of their counterweights on the right who rail against outrageous teacher pay, had any idea until just now what the median pay for CEO’s and teachers actually are.       

Down at the low end of the wage scale are the jobs you would also probably expect – fast food workers, dishwashers, cashiers, amusement park attendants, ushers.  The 300 lowest-paying professions all pay less than $36,500 and the lowest 12 pay less than $10 per hour.  Like the song says, they work hard for the money.       

Interestingly, not one of the ten highest-paying professions appears on the list of the ten highest satisfaction ratings (www.myplan.com). The most satisfying professions are singers ($36,000) and firefighters ($47,000).  As a former volunteer firefighter, I can totally relate; we loved that job so much we did for free - and God Bless every firefighter who reads this, whether paid or volunteer.     

The least satisfied are clerks – municipal clerks, mail clerks, insurance clerks, front-desk clerks.  And sandwiched in the midst of all those clerks, for reasons I don’t understand (but have a friend or two who does, I bet) Program Directors in radio and TV.  Maybe they wanted to be singers or firefighters. 

The ten professions (in order) who employ the most people are retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, food preparers, registered nurses, waiters and waitresses, customer service representatives, freight handlers and movers, janitors and cleaners, and stocking clerks.  For a nation that grew rich by making things, that is a scary list. 

The median wage for all working Americans is $34,460 – half of us make less, half make more.  It is certainly doesn’t buy very much, and we can thank the Fed for that as they devalue our currency to finance the massive debt we have amassed, but that is another post for another day.   

Creative writers, listed at #213, make a median income of $34,650 (don’t I wish), unless they are economists, in which case they are paid $96,230 (#48) for making up stories. Or if they don’t mind flat-out lying, they can upgrade to Political Scientists (#41) at $101,500.  Lighten up, it’s just a joke.  

Do you want a high-paying job?  Then you should know what makes some jobs pay more than others.  The easy answer is education, of course, but there are plenty of exceptions to that general rule.  The median pay for petroleum engineers (B.S. degree) is 50% higher than that of Professor of Foreign Language (Ph.D.), for example.  Rotary drill operators need only to graduate from high school, where they learned from B.A. and M.A teachers who earn a lot less.

Naturally, each profession has its own specific body of vocational knowledge that must be acquired to even enter the profession – pilots must know how to fly, welders to weld, counselors to counsel, and so on.  But knowing and doing are two different things, and the MyPlan website lists the skills and abilities needed to perform each of the 600 jobs in its database.    

There seem to be three common threads among the top-paying professions.  The most commonly-cited critical skills required to perform them are reading comprehension, critical thinking, active listening, active learning, judgment and decision-making.  

And the most commonly-cited abilities among these professions are problem sensitivity, written and oral expression, written and oral comprehension, speech clarity, and reasoning (deductive and inductive).

Along with education, skill, and ability, the most important common characteristic of high-paying jobs is that the consequences of failure are catastrophic.  When a surgeon or air traffic controller screws up, someone dies; the highly compensated live in a world where there are no excuses, no passing of blame, and no mulligans.  You must own your mistakes and not make the same ones twice if you want to work.  

Surgeons and CEO’s were not born with a special gene that enabled them to think, listen, learn, judge, decide, write, clarify, reason, and accept complete accountability for the consequences of their actions.  These things used to be taught in school, in the home, at church, in scouts, in clubs, in sports.    

Most people can’t go back to school, and even if they did would probably not find these things taught there anymore.  But there is something you can do to develop those skills and abilities it takes to increase your value and therefore your pay – volunteer.     

Charities, civic groups, churches, political organizations, professional associations, clubs – any form of volunteering allows you to grow and discover without worrying about getting fired when you mess up.  Willing mentors are happy to help those who want to learn, and practice really does make perfect.

Most highly-successful (and rich) people I know began volunteering in high-school or college and attribute much of their success to the skills and abilities they acquired while giving to others.  Libertarians love volunteering, because we don’t trust the government to do anything that we can do for ourselves; but everyone can volunteer for whatever reason they like, and everyone should.

Because most happy people I know still volunteer – and happiness is wealth that money can’t buy.  So be happy and volunteer – and along the way, you will find yourself acquiring skills and abilities that will qualify you for bigger jobs with bigger paychecks.       


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Speaking of Records

The headlines making the rounds in the blogosphere this week certainly sound damning:  “Corporate profits set 50-year record while unemployment tops 8%”.    

It is a fact that the S&P 500 reported a combined $1.6 trillion in profits in 2011, the highest profits in 50 years, adjusted for inflation.  It is also a fact that unemployment remains above 8%.  Advocates for higher taxes add these two facts together to refute the notion that lower taxes stimulate job creation.       

But there are a couple of other facts to consider when evaluating the implications of those first two - first, there are 2.5 million corporations in the United States, and those 50-year record profits are what was reported by 500 of them for a single year.  A record amount of profit posted by .02% of our corporations does not tell us anything meaningful about the profitability of the other 99.98%.

Next, only 21 million Americans work for a Fortune 500 firm, out of the 130 million or so who work.  With something like 15 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, the Fortune 500 companies would have to collectively increase their workforce by 71% to put everyone back to work.  Not gonna happen. 

And finally, perhaps most importantly, 52% of the profits of the Fortune 500 in 2011 were earned overseas.   When overseas profits are removed from corporate earnings reports, 2011 was a quite ordinary year in comparison to the previous 49. 

Jobs are being added by the Fortune 500; they are being added overseas.  Corporate taxes are being reduced abroad, profits are being earned abroad and jobs are being created abroad; taken in their entirely, the facts contained in earnings reports of the Fortune 500 do not refute the supply-side theory of the tax-hawks, they support it.   

The rationale for taxing corporate income (profit) is that the exchanges which generate profit for the stockholders are facilitated by the infrastructure – physical and legal – that allow businesses to flourish.  No argument there; businesses need a playing field that is both even and mowed and a safe investment environment costs money to maintain.     

But when Apple builds an iPhone in China and sells it in Thailand, what is the legitimate claim of the U.S. Government on the profit of that transaction?  What American infrastructure was depleted?  Why should Apple pay taxes in China, pay taxes in Thailand, and then pay still more taxes here in the U.S. where nothing was built and nothing was sold? 

Apple, Google, Cisco, IBM, HP, Oracle – many of our largest and most profitable companies are virtual, defying any definition of physical place.  As the rest of the world enters the information age, the growth in revenue and profits for these firms will occur mostly outside of our borders. 

Looking at corporate financial data as if it were still 1962 is not useful in understanding 21st century economics in 2012.  Comparing profits earned in 190 countries to employment in one of them is not particularly enlightening. 

It is hard to even say what is and is not an American company anymore – the stockholders of the Fortune 500 reside in every country in the world.  We could go by which stock exchange a company’s stock is listed, but nowadays that is a choice driven by a wide range of factors, none of which is geography. 

Of course, we could force the Fortune 500 to hire unemployed Americans. What would you like to do at Walmart?  What could you do for IBM?  What would they even let you do at Lockheed?  Or we could tax all their overseas profits and give the proceeds to our unemployed; how many minutes do you think it would take tax-savvy GE to re-list on the Australian exchange once we busted that move on them.  

President Obama has promised to make tax fairness a central point of his campaign for re-election this year.  I hope that he will do so by endorsing the FairTax, a single national sales tax that replaces all other federal taxes, voids the 3.8 million word tax code, and abolishes the IRS. 

Taxing consumption broadens the tax base, lowers the tax rate, and levels the playing field.  Taxes will be fairly paid in proportion to consumption and paid on all goods consumed - including those produced overseas that are currently untaxed. 

Enacting the FairTax eliminates the thousands of loopholes that exist today and removes tax barriers to new entrants in the marketplace, including the double taxation that awaits foreign companies thinking about building factories here and hiring American workers. 

It is those new entrants, not the Fortune 500, that are the key to solving our problem of high chronic unemployment.  In a market economy, high profits are a good thing; they attract new competitors willing to accept lower profits for better goods.  That is why prices drop and quality rises in free markets where choice and competition are left to work their magic.

It was the high profits of IBM in the 1970’s that invited insurgent start-ups like Apple and Microsoft.  Henry Ford did not walk to Detroit dreaming of high taxes and low profits; it was the other way around, just as it is for every other entrepreneur whose dreams of today will provide the jobs of tomorrow.  Nobody gets in it for the taxes. 

The economics of taxation is not difficult to understand, it is only difficult to accept; in the end, there is no corporate tax - it is all paid for by consumers, every penny of it.  FairTax eliminates the middlemen and the myth, making a necessary evil far less evil.  Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson is a FairTax advocate, and the bill to enact FairTax has 62 Congressional sponsors.     

Higher taxes on “record” profits might sound appealing, but emotion and economics are two very different standards by which to judge ideas.  Raising corporate tax rates means higher prices for consumers and job cuts to offset the government’s larger rake - ask the people of Illinois if it has solved any of their problems.

Next year, a $500 billion tax increase awaits Americans if Congress does not act this year to extend current tax rates, including the infamous “Bush tax cuts” from the last decade.  70% of this will fall on middle and low-income families with an average increased tax burden of $3,800 per family, according to Heritage Foundation. 

That is not just a 50-year record, it is the largest tax increase in the history of the world. 


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Party of Women

Ok, now that Ann Romney has been savaged by the White House for breathing without permission can we quit pretending that Democrats care about women? 

Apparently the powers that be in the 21st century Democrat Party have determined that raising children and running a household is neither important nor difficult.  Not to be compared with something really, really, really valuable like, say, being an activist, advocate, consultant, professional protestor, community organizer, spokesperson…or Snookie. 

But the crime that Mrs. Romney committed against her gender in the eyes of those who make such judgments about women nowadays is not simply that she stayed at home to raise her family, but that she chose to stay at home and raise her family.  In case you haven’t noticed, they don’t like us making choices for ourselves. 

And adding insult to injury, she relied on her family and faith to empower that choice, not turning to government dependence, elevating her choice a hate crime status to those whose first and only love is government.   

The White House attack against Mrs. Romney did not reveal anything new about the self-appointed Party of Women; it merely confirmed what has been obvious to anyone with a an independently functioning brain for at least 40 years or more – the leaders of the modern-day Democrat party believe women are stupid. 

That’s right – stupid.  Too stupid to make up their own minds, too stupid to make decisions about career path and vocation, too stupid to form moral and religious positions independently, too stupid to develop a political philosophy, too stupid to make their own way in this world, too stupid to manage contraception, too stupid to raise their own children, and now apparently too stupid to even know whether or not they have ever worked or struggled.   

For the record, we libertarians do not think women are stupid.  Well, some are – like whoever said raising five boys is not “work”, and that cancer and MS do not count as “struggles”.  Or whoever thought attacking the wife of his presumptive opponent would be a good way to get more women to vote for President Obama – that is one stupid fool, right there. 

Attacking the spouse of an opponent for (gasp) raising her own children won’t win over any voters, but it sure did bring out a slew of vulgar tweets from the liberal twittersphere who thumb-hated on Mrs. Romney with gusto for a few days.  If I had used those names for women growing up I would have eaten so much Lava there would still be bubbles every time I burp; the older I get the more I appreciate the difference between being raised and being whelped.   

The Obama campaign would like us to believe that the Romneys are too rich and too out-of-touch to serve the people.  And what exactly are we supposed to be afraid of - that Mitt might play too much golf?  Ann might take too many vacations?  They might fly to getaways on separate planes?  Maybe take the grandkids to Cabo for spring break?  How much worse can it be, for heaven’s sakes – they call her Michelle Antoinette behind her back.   

And it’s not like her husband is exactly President Everyman.  How many name-changing illegitimate interracial sons of Kenyan Marxists do you know who were raised in Indonesia, bankrolled by Chicago con-men, mentored by terrorists and  voted “absent” most of the time in the only full time job that appears on their resume prior to coming to Washington, D.C.?  

There are only two people on the planet whose opinion about the Romneys’ life choices matter – Mitt and Ann Romney.  From a distance, it looks like they have done a pretty darn good job of it, and for those yearning to covet, Ann Romney is a target-rich environment – rich, pretty, smart, classy, nice, loving family, married forever to a handsome committed guy who is likely going to be the next President of the United States.  There will be feminists jumping off buildings if it turns out she is musical and athletic and mechanically inclined.     

Obsessive covetousness bordering on the insane is about the only explanation for hatching a political strategy that trashes Mrs. Romney’s successful career as household CEO while putting Sandra Fluke on a pedestal for begging us to provide free government contraception.  That doesn’t seem like a long way, baby - perhaps that now-infamous women’s 17% pay gap in the Obama White House has something to do with the quality of their advice.  

We libertarians are neutral on social issues and we don’t believe you can either detect or assign a person’s political philosophy by peeking down their thong to see what kind of equipment they were born with.  We have this annoying habit of treating each individual person as if they were a fully formed, fully developed, and fully sovereign human being with a mind of their own, a heart of their own, and the right to live according to the dictates of their own conscience and beliefs.  

Liberty is the absence of government in choice, and Ann Romney made a choice for herself and her family – let freedom ring.  There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Mitt Romney, but she is not one of them.     


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Caring Loudly

If life was a caring contest, I would probably be a liberal, too.   But life is not a caring contest; it is a living contest, and therefore I am a libertarian. 

Because the best way for a society to provide the greatest number of its people the opportunity to live life to their fullest potential is not to care loudly about them; it is to keep them free – free to do as they wish, earn what they will, keep what they earn, exchange with others as both see fit, speak their mind, hold to their faith, and to live securely in their property and persons without fear of unwarranted government interference. 

In the Hallmark card world of disconnected liberal happy thoughts, it is sufficient to express a sympathetic emotion, to care loudly.  They remind us over and over again how much they care about the children, the women, the hungry, the sick, the poor, the disenfranchised, the minorities, the planet, the uneducated, the worker, the middle class, the uninsured, the elderly, the debt-laden, those of reproductive age, and the disabled.  

And so what if they care?  We all care.    

Caring loudly makes the care-ers feel good about themselves but it does jack squat for the care-ees.   Those who care loudly should examine the consequences of the policies their loud caring has brought about.  Has their loud caring made Detroit thrive?  Did it save the textile industry?  Are the loudly-cared-about kids better educated today than they were 50 years ago when we cared about learning instead?  

I care deeply about those who are unable to sustain themselves due to disability; but does all my caring help a disabled person sustain themselves?  No, it doesn’t; but my hiring a disabled person does.  And what do you think a disabled person would rather receive from me - my sympathy or a job?  I think you know.

The stubborn reality is that I can’t hire a disabled person – or any other person – unless I operate a profitable and economically sound firm.  How much we care has about zero to do with it; how much we make has everything to do with it. 

The reason I write so often about economic liberty and free market capitalism is that shared prosperity can only exist when there is prosperity to share.  And real prosperity is only created in a free market where free people profit from free exchange.  Capitalism – real capitalism - truly is the goose that lays the golden eggs. 

Governments and non-profits provide essential services, but they do not create wealth.  They are funded entirely out of profits generated in the private sector, a private sector which is under siege from the very same governments and non-profits that depend on its profits to pay for all that loud caring they enjoy so much. 

Our companies need capital to expand and add jobs – jobs for Americans of every flavor and stripe.  The ideal source of that capital is the profits our companies and investors produce when they are left alone to operate in their own best economic interest.  Taxing those profits takes away capital needed for expansion and job creation; regulating those operations sub-optimizes their earning potential.   

If you really care about your fellow man, you should be working your butt off to reduce taxes and regulatory barriers on corporations and high-end producers.  You should do the quiet caring that we libertarians are known for – care only about the degree of freedom that is guaranteed to every person and every firm.       

American companies are the highest taxed in the world; and if we are not the most heavily regulated, we are certainly right up there.  Unless Congress acts, there will be 11 tax increases imposed on our corporations and our most productive citizens on January 1, 2013.   We will go from world’s worst to worse yet – it will be the largest single tax increase in the history of the world.   

Those who care loudly will be giddy - high-fiving each other and reveling in their victory over the uncaring rich and successful.  For a time; but then reality will sink in.  Companies will relocate to more hospitable business climates; rich people will go live elsewhere; new factories will be opened in places where they are welcomed.  Tax revenues will plummet, just as the Laffer curve predicts they will. 

Caterpillar is an Illinois heavy equipment company that recently bought Bucyrus, a Wisconsin mining equipment company.  Caterpillar is building a new factory to build underground mining equipment; do you think this plant is being built in Illinois, which recently raised taxes by 67%, or in Wisconsin, where the loudly caring are viciously trying to recall the Governor so they can raise taxes on the rich and productive? 

If you answered Indonesia, congratulations. 

Sadly, that new factory will not be built in Wisconsin with Wisconsin labor; none of that mining machinery will be built in Wisconsin with Wisconsin labor; and none of that mining machinery be used in Wisconsin, operated by Wisconsin labor. 

This is the deliverable handiwork of those who care loudly about the working class - lots of noise, no work, and no class.  Caring loudly is no substitute for employing gainfully. 


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

The M Word

One of the liberals’ favorite justifications for more government is that free markets can’t regulate themselves.   This argument betrays a fundamental ignorance of markets and a fundamental delusion about government. 

And placing our economy in the hands of ignorant and delusional people explains how we arrived at our current economic quagmire.  In fact, it would have been quite the miracle if a century of increasing government interference into markets could have ended any other way. 

The truth is, we haven’t had free market capitalism in this country for several decades now; in fact, the word “markets” is thrown around as an epithet by the anti-capitalists who dominate the Democrat Party and is shied away from in polite Republican company.  It is rather silly to point to this or that catastrophic economic event as evidence that markets don’t work, since we don’t have markets.

If anything, the periodic meltdowns caused by our centrally controlled economy and money monopoly prove that government is a poor substitute for the best of all regulators – free markets.  The idea that markets – the M word - need to be regulated is itself redundant. Markets are a regulating device; that is what they do, and that is all they do. 

In free market capitalism, the individual actors – buyers and sellers – act of their own volition in the marketplace.  Markets regulate the behavior of the free agents by reporting the results of thousands or millions or billions of people making choices in their own rational self-interest.  There is no question that billions of people need to be regulated; the question is only whether markets or government does it better.

Markets establish prices for things, and the movement of those prices tells suppliers what to produce more or less of and signals buyers to buy or wait.   Markets tell us what things are truly worth; they decide what we value and what we do not.  Markets tell us what quality is acceptable, what quality is not, and what level of exceptional quality is worth in terms of price premium.  Markets determine safety tolerance and risk, performance and technical preference.  

Markets are near-perfect regulators.  They are swift to punish inefficient producers, stupid consumers, unethical traders, and stubborn inventors too proud of their own ideas to give people what they want.  Bad actors are quickly swept from the marketplace and new competitors arise to take their place.  A fool and his money are soon parted, as the old saying goes, and no more effective mechanism for incenting prudent economic behavior –a.k.a. the public good - has yet been invented.   

Governments, by comparison, are dreadful at regulating economic transactions.  When government interferes in markets, it protects inefficient producers, encourages stupid consumers, indemnifies unethical traders, and dictates to people what kinds of products and services they can buy, stifling innovation.  When government does the regulating, other people and their money are soon parted by the regulations of fools.  No more effective mechanism for incenting loopy economic behavior has yet been invented.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any three more heavily regulated industries than education, health care, and Defense; there has not been a free market in any sense of the word for half a century in any one of these sectors.  And aside from government itself, I can’t think of three more dysfunctional industries.  What does it tell you about government regulation when the most heavily regulated industries are the most screwed up?     

The liberal fetish of telling other people what to do (regulating) has now spilled over into the private sector with boycotts and buycotts and demands for removal of products from shelves over ideological differences of opinion.  Apparently we are supposed to check with Planned Parenthood now to see what soda is acceptable for purchase…or is it Americans For Prosperity on soda and Planned Parenthood for dish soap?   I get so confused…  

President Obama recently announced another regulation (because we so desperately need more) that will instruct federal agencies to give preferential bid treatment to bidders who demonstrate a commitment to his administration’s policies in the fields of environmentalism and nutrition.  This politicization of procurements is inevitable whenever and wherever government regulates; he is certainly not the first anti-capitalist to impose ideology into the regulatory process.

The federal government already requires bidders to hire union workers on some contracts, pay prevailing union wages on others, enact affirmative action programs, etc.  Preferences are already given to firms who are owned by minorities, women, disabled people, and veterans, or who locate operations in historically underutilized economic zones.  The Code of Federal Regulations (FARS) covers every aspect of contracting imaginable and compliance with those burdensome federal regulations is why hammers cost $750 when the government buys them. 

More importantly, those FARS are why there are still 135,000 bridges in need of repair in this country that are not getting fixed.  The cost of fixing bridges is prohibitively high because of the regulations and risks that are imposed on contractors doing the work.  So bridges go unrepaired while special interests lobby for more transportation funding.  

Someday, one of those bridges is going to come down on a busload of special needs kids coming home from field trip to a Walker recall rally and liberals are going to come unglued; it will be my fault that us uncaring libertarians left those poor children defenseless in a dog-eat-dog world where unregulated libertarian bridges come down and kill them.  I don’t know why it will be my fault; but that is the price to be paid for the increasing popularity of this little hobby blog.   

How about we try a little caring right now, BEFORE the next bridge comes down and somebody in a short bus dies?   Why don’t we suspend all the those ridiculous FAR regulations and let eager, qualified non-union companies go out and fix those bridges without having to write up climate-change plans and hold mandatory all-hands training on how to steam broccoli the Michelle Obama way? 

Better yet, how about we take Act 10 national and liberate local units of government and local offices of federal agencies from the FARS and give them the flexibility to use taxpayer dollars wisely and let choice and competition – the M word - bring down the cost of necessary services like bridge repair. 

We could fix twice as many bridges at half the cost if we would let markets work.  Or we could just keep talking about our crumbling infrastructure and the need for more government to regulate markets and protect us from ourselves.  

 

I say let's go fix some bridges. 



“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Civil War

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has announced he will challenge former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk for the right to run against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the June recall elections. 

Mr. Barrett says he will put an end to the “civil war” that Governor Walker started in this state.  That’s funny stuff. There is indeed a civil war being waged, but it is not confined to the state of Wisconsin, and it did not begin when Governor Walker was sworn in.  He was sworn in after one of its battles was won; he is one of victory’s spoils.  

Our second civil war is national, state, and local – it is the struggle between the taxpayers and the tax-eaters; it is the state and its wards versus the people who create the wealth and pay the bills.  It may look like the usual Democrat/Republican scrum to those who can’t see beyond; but those brands merely attached themselves to the side they hope will prevail.  

Most taxpayers struggle to pay for food, mortgages, health care, automobiles, energy, college tuition, and taxes for their own families.  Few of us have the means to buy those things for someone else’s families, too; even fewer of us have any real desire to do so, except in cases of extreme hardship.  Hardship is in the eye of the beholder.

A recent report from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction says that 42% of Wisconsin children now receive some form of school lunch subsidy – a number which has grown steadily for eight years.  While the purpose of the report was to demand more funding for education, it only convinced me we should do away with school lunch.  

When families with incomes nearly double the poverty line will not feed their own children, that is not a poverty problem, it is a priority problem.  A half century of government lunches in government schools has turned a few hungry kids who can’t learn into a lot of fat kids who won’t.  That is only progress to a Progressive.      

And it’s not just school lunch subsidies. 47% of Americans pay no income tax. Over 50% of Americans receive government-funded health care.  Government-guaranteed student loans have more then doubled in the last decade.  We have provided mortgage subsidies, car-buying subsidies, train subsidies, energy subsidies, training subsidies, and a list of corporate subsidies a mile long.  

We have hit the wall.  A shrinking base of taxpayers has had enough of doing the heavy lifting for an increasingly ungrateful segment of society obsessed with taking an even bigger share of our incomes in order to obtain through state confiscation the things they refuse to purchase for themselves. 

That is not a hateful thing to say; it is merely an observation that anyone can make for themselves any day of the week.  If a kid with the latest fashions and hottest sneakers listening to his iPod while gaming over the internet doesn’t have a sandwich, the guilt trip should not be laid at some other working family because they didn’t pay enough tax.   

And don’t think for a minute that all tax-eaters are poor people or kids; most beneficiaries of government wealth transfers are the already wealthy.  As economist Robert Reich has pointed out, the beneficiaries of President Obama’s “recovery” are the very 1% he claims to be fighting against.  Meet the new boss… 

So please, Mr. Barrett, tell us how you propose to end this civil war?  

Will you tell the tax-eaters they must live within their means and pay their fair share?  Or will you tell the taxpayers to be grateful you have left us with any of what we earned?  A war ends when one side wins and the other side surrenders – which America do you think is ready to throw in the towel because you have decided it’s time?   

I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet; this is a nation worth saving.  I don’t agree with Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan for the country or Governor Walker’s budget plan for Wisconsin – neither goes nearly far enough – but I do commend them both for having the courage to stand firm and have it out now with those who would rather just keep governing stupid until the day of reckoning is too awful to face. 

The President’s tax-the-rich plan will raise only 15% of the amount needed to close the deficit projected over the next decade.  We will still have to double the tax on all other taxpayers just to fund the government we have now, to say nothing of any new programs, additional benefits, or increasing the number of kids on school lunch subsidies.  Not-your-plan is not a plan.   

This is not about Mayor Barrett, or Governor Walker, or President Obama.  This is about you.  This is about your liberty, your family, your prosperity, your future.  Our civil war needs to be won – not with bullets and blood, but with ballots and blogs.  And it needs to be fought now, while we can still talk with each other, not later, when desperation moves people to violence. 

No one ever thought they would be killing each other in Greece, either.  That’s where we are headed if we do not stop pretending that the same socialism that failed everywhere else in the world will somehow work here.  It hasn’t, and it won’t.

   


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Unprecedented

Few Americans are old enough to remember the last time a sitting U.S. President – Franklin D. Roosevelt – publicly intimidated the Supreme Court over the outcome of a specific case under deliberation.  

Since FDR, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush Dance Remix somehow all managed to make it through their Presidencies without feeling the need to bully-up on the Supremes to overcome an oral argument too lame to stand on its merits.       

And then there is President ObamaCare.  In a press conference about trade with our neighboring countries Canada and Mexico, President Obama warned the Court against overturning his namesake – because it was passed by a majority in a duly-elected legislature - saying such an unthinkable thing was “unprecedented”. 

For reasons that continue to defy human understanding, the two most obvious follow-on questions went unasked by the assembled corps of professionally trained and fully-credentialed crack national journalists: 1) what other kinds of laws are there, and 2) what did any of that gibberish have to do with Mexico and Canada? 

For a guy who graduated from Columbia and Harvard and taught law at University of Chicago, the President seems to be eighth-grade-ignorant about the separation of powers and the checks and balances of government under our Constitution, that thing he swore an oath to defend with his hand on that other book some unelected guy was holding.  

It’s not like this is an aberration or something.  He taunted Congress in their own house at the State of the Union, dispensing with all of Article I in a single “if you won’t do it, I will” bluster.  He sues states with frightening regularity, erasing such inconveniences as the 9th and 10th amendments.  His is the “Fast and Furious” administration – the guys who do what they want because they can.       

In case it matters to his devotees, “unprecedented” means never been done before, which seems an inappropriate adjective to attach to an action that has been taken on 163 prior occasions.  And not to be snarky about it, but overturning unconstitutional laws that are passed by elected legislatures is what the Supreme Court does; it’s why we have one. 

In the 1950’s the Court didn’t vote on some non-binding Hallmark Card resolution that said segregation was bad; the Court voted that specific laws and ordinances – all of them passed by a majority in a duly elected legislature - were unconstitutional. 

Had the court not overturned those laws more than half a century ago, President Obama would be known as Mr. Obama, the negro (or worse) community organizer from Chicago.  He should know the history of the Court and those unconstitutional segregation laws well – it was his Democrat party that passed them.       

I think I know what has got the President all twisted up over the prospect of having his Health Care Bill struck down by the Supreme Court.  Without it, he has nothing for his Presidential Library, and it’s getting to be that time when Presidents on their way out the door start thinking about the library. 

It would be awkward to be the only President without one - and don’t think for a minute that Bill Clinton wouldn’t rub it in every chance he got - but sometimes nothing really is better than something:  “Welcome to the Obama Library…on the left is the Bin Laden room…alrighty-then, thank you for coming and don’t forget to stop at the gift shop on the way out.” 

President Obama is my President, too, and I hate to see my President fail.  But if the choice is a) seeing our President fail and b) surrendering our Constitution to avoid the appearance of failure, the choice is simple.  In our system, the Presidency is temporary and the Constitution is permanent – bring in the next guy. 

It’s a little late now to be worrying about what the Supreme Court might think about ObamaCare; the President should have thought about that when it was being written up and shoved down our throats.  Everybody swore the same oath.  Bush tried that lame “not my job, man” on some of the rank stuff he signed even when he knew better - we all called him on it; it’s not like anyone is getting picked on here.       

The Constitution is not conservative and the Constitution is not liberal; the Constitution is limiting.  It establishes the borders between liberty on one side and government on the other.  It defines which of those two is the servant and which is the master; who is the dog and who does the whispering. 

It forces us to cooperate, to tolerate, to accept each other as equals, and to live honestly as free people.  It is not a difficult document to understand; it is a difficult document to abide by.  And that’s ok – we are not entitled to live easy; we are entitled to live free. 


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!

Who Saved Bentley?

Ok, here is a test for you - which of these year-over-year sales increase percentages reflects the correct performance of General Motors in February:  40%, 17%, 15%, 14%, 12%, or 1%?  

If you picked 1%, then you are either very knowledgeable about the U.S. automobile industry or a regular reader of Moment of Clarity who knows I am about to obliterate our President’s ridiculous recent claim that he single-handedly saved the U.S. auto industry by bailing out the UAW and GM.

The industry as a whole is up 15%, and the President is taking credit for the resurgence.  His “rescue” of the automobile industry will be a major campaign theme this fall, and he has pre-empted debate on the matter by calling any challenge to his messianic claims “a load of you-know-what”.  Actually, we do know what – truth. 

There are 36 brands of automobiles sold in the United States; only a handful of them received government “assistance”.  Automotive News, the gold standard for industry statistics, reports that only three brands manufactured in the U.S. are seeing sales declines this year; all three - Cadillac, Buick, and GMC trucks – are products of General Motors, the official pace car of the Obama victory lap.  

The number of new vehicles sold in the U.S. this year is expected to be 15.1 million, far below the 17.2 million Americans averaged from 2000 to 2007. At this rate, we will just be getting back to where we were when this President was elected in the second year of the next guy’s term.  Progress is progress, but let's keep some perspective here.   

It’s not all the President’s fault - George W. Bush started the ball rolling with the GM and Chrysler bailouts, diverting billions of TARP funds to sustain two of the nation’s seven automobile builders until the next President could finish the job.  That should have been all the argument President Obama needed to conclude it was a dumb idea.  But he followed through on the Bush bailout plan – all told, nearly $85 billion in taxpayer money was put at risk to benefit two Detroit companies. 

The September 2008 pitch from the Detroit unions was that without immediate government intervention to stave off bankruptcy, the whole industry would collapse and 2-3 million jobs would be lost.  It is ironic that the only two carmakers who really did go bankrupt were the two that accepted government assistance.  And the President conveniently neglects to mention that his imposed bankruptcy settlement at GM cut the pensions for a large segment of GM’s retirees by 70%.  Must be the third Koch brother or something.        

Chrysler, the other 2008 welfare queen, was liberated from government ownership last year, and celebrated its independence with a cool 40% increase in sales this year, the highest of the major builders.  We taxpayers lost billions on the Chrysler bailout, too, and bondholders were brutalized by a politicized bankruptcy proceeding that would need major reform just to qualify as a Kangaroo Court.  The corporate bond markets are still screwed up three years later thanks to that reckless maneuver.

Someone needs to inform the President that Chrysler’s industry leading resurgence has come about after its return to private hands and change of ownership – for all practical purposes it is now Fiat USA.  This illustrates the importance of unimpeded bankruptcy in market capitalism.  It is Chrysler, not GM, which teaches the important lesson of economic recovery.  The purpose of bankruptcy is to transfer assets from those who managed them poorly to those who will manage them better; the sooner this transfer takes place the faster the return to prosperity.  

The reason we are still mired in economic crisis in the fifth year of this current downturn is that government still intervenes to prevent the liquidation of bad assets, props up mal-investments like GM, and has gobbled up available credit to finance its obscene deficits and debt.  The President has postponed the very economic recovery that exists in his imagination.   

GM is still partially owned by the U.S. Treasury.   When the last of the publics’ stock is sold, we taxpayers will have flushed between $10 billion and $20 billion down the UAW rat-hole, depending on its stock price at the time of divestiture.  And by any measure, GM will still be the worst U.S. car company, lagging far behind the players who declined the handout and focused instead on getting better. 

General Motors, with its 1% year-over-year sales growth, trails Chrysler, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar.  And why not - what has changed in the last three years of government supervision to make General Motors better?  Why is it now a more attractive destination for bright, talented, innovative managers, or for visionary engineers, skilled-trades workers, savvy marketers, process developers, logistics experts, strategists?  

If you were graduating at the top of your class next month at Wharton, or Michigan, or RPI, would you hitch your wagon to a company owned by the UAW and the U.S. Treasury Department that takes a victory lap at 1% growth?   Or would you go discover how high is up for you over at Jaguar (48%), Volkswagen (43%), or BMW (29%)? 

The U.S. auto industry is rebounding in spite of, not because of, government intervention.  The lasting symbol of the Government Motors era will be the Chevrolet Volt – an overpriced, impractical death-trap nobody wants whose most desirable feature is an $8,000 government bribe that still wasn’t enough to fool people into buying one. 

And if we are supposed to pick a President based on turning a car company around in a bad market, let’s go find the person who saved Bentley (25%), not the guy who told us the Volt is our future.   
 


“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”