Contents of ‘No They Can’t!’

Introduction

Ch. 1 Fixing the Economy

Ch. 2 Making Life Fair

Ch. 3 Keeping Business Honest

Ch. 4 Improving Life for Workers

Ch. 5 Fixing Healthcare

Ch. 6 The Assault on Food

Ch. 7 Creating a Risk-Free World

Ch. 8 Making Sure No One Gets Offended

Ch. 9 Educating Children

Ch. 10 The War on Drugs

Ch.11 War to End War

Ch. 12 Keeping Nature Exactly as it is Forever

Ch. 13 The Budget

Ch. 14 There Ought Not to Be a Law

 

Introduction

 

People crave simple answers that some program will fix everything. The government fails repeatedly, yet when something goes wrong, we say, ‘Why doesn’t the government do something?’ The government makes us deeper in debt and makes the problem worse.

 

Hayek said the curious task of economics is to show men how little they know about what they can design.

 

If the government did nothing, the free market would self-correct and actually solve problems.

 

Obama called for more government control of production. Even though he didn’t call for complete government control of production, it’s still socialist.

 

Bush, Obama, and most Americans agree that we should use socialist means like bailing out Banks and car manufacturers who would otherwise fail.

 

We may want the government to make laws to get rid of bad stuff, but the more the government is involved in promoting good stuff and getting rid of bad stuff, the more it will have its nose in everything.

 

Reality limits our fantasies about what governmet and spending can do.

 

The reality is that no one knows enough to efficiently centrally plan our society.

 

A law cannot make a $5 worker worth $10; if it could, we might as well set the minimum wage at $100.

 

Minimum wage laws prevent people from having access to low-salaried jobs, which give people great experience and training.

 

Oil was not arbitrarily picked as our main source of energy, it is much more efficient than all the other sources we have, and the green subsidies use other types of energy suck away resources from things that actually work putting those resources into things which don’t.

 

Real heroes don’t control other people’s lives. When asked who your heroes are, in 2001, Christ topped the list, in 2009, Barack Obama followed closely by Ronald Reagan and George Bush. When people think about heroes, they think about politicians. Businessmen and scientists who develop and promote useful products are the real heroes compared to politicians who just talk about things.

 

Bush launched us down the road of bailouts, and Obama continued it.

 

Politicians just want to publish the bad guy who ran off with a sack of money in business instead of doing the research to find out which bad policies were sucking all the money out.

 

Nader said a certain Chevrolet car wasn’t safe and never apologized, even when it was proven it was just as safe as other cars. The regulations still stand which came from the Nader propaganda.

 

The code of federal regulations and codes is 160,000 pages long. Every year, Congress adds several thousand new ones.

 

The way capitalists get rich is by serving their customers well. If they try to rip you off, word gets out, and they will likely lose business. The free market is ruthless at ferreting out low-quality products.

 

Progressives always fear the power of business, not the power of government, but government has a power no business has – the power of force.

 

If you’re free to do business with the government, they will find you or jail you if you refuse to pay the IRS for their wars and their government bailouts, etc, no matter how dissatisfied we are with the results.

 

The more power we give the government, the more businesses try to do business with the government. Rather than focusing on real entrepreneurship, they focus on getting involved with political people who help them get around the rules.

 

Computers came into existence far away from Washington, DC, in Silicon Valley, and they did it without any lobbyists. But then the government attacked them, so now they have to spend millions on lobbyists.

 

When we get rid of government regulations, liberals panic and think disaster will happen, but the opposite happens: everything gets better. Companies begin to face competition again without government restrictions, and prices therefore drop. Flying in airplanes becomes something not just for the rich but something for everyone.

 

He found Reason magazine about the libertarian view and began to teach those things, and he fought against liberal pushback for two decades.

 

Liberals deny they have any bias and slam conservatives, accusing them of bias. But really, everyone has bias.

 

Both political parties share the same mistake and idea that their plan will fix everything. No economic genius could run everything.

 

Just because the government can’t solve our problems does not mean humanity cannot solve our problems. Individuals can succeed. Markets aren’t perfect, but they create a world where prudence is rewarded and recklessness is punished. It makes a world where people are more likely to take risks and innovate. It creates a world with much more prosperity.

 

 

Ch. 1 Fixing the Economy

 

The recession gave government an excuse to do what they wanted to all along, which is spend. Obama said in 2009 that we have to do whatever it takes to get out of this recession, yet he spent spent spent.

 

For some reason, we think that giving a dollar to the government, the government will multiply it, but people spend money more wisely than the government does. Individuals are more likely to bring returns on investments. In the free market, people creatively make new things, and wealth comes from that.

 

The economy is not a machine that needs jump-starting with government spending, as some economists suggest. It is individuals with incentives.

 

Businesses sit on cash rather than investing it when they don’t know what’s coming, when they’re afraid of the government making some new rule, some new restriction that will tie their hands and cut them down.

 

When labor laws make it almost impossible to fire someone, businesses hire less.

 

Politicians hype up how many jobs they created but what we don’t see is what might have been created without them getting in the way.

 

The government creates jobs, but they are often useless. Think of the Egyptians building the pyramids. Non-government jobs are more meaningful.

 

People favoring government job creation are using the logic that it would be great if everyone was hired to dig holes then fill them up again or if we were to ban all machines because people would have to work much harder.

 

Money spent rebuilding from a war can help the economy but that money could have been used elsewhere for much greater purposes.

 

Non-government jobs are more productive.

 

If someone breaks your window yes you have to hire a repairman but if your window didn’t get broken you could have used that money to hire someone else to do something more useful.

 

Minimum wage laws price people out of the market. There results in many people who don’t get any job at all.

 

Creating jobs is not difficult for government. What’s difficult is creating jobs that produce wealth.

 

Since government projects are funded by compulsion we have no way of knowing if what would have happened otherwise would have been at a better rate etc.

 

People assume the government is the only one who does something productive with money, whereas the private sector has people who are all just goofing off with money. On the contrary, the private sector uses its money wisely.

 

The policies of FDR probably lengthened the Great depression

Generating a depression within the depression.

 

When the government made things like the Fannie May Bernie Mac the 0% home buying they created a housing boom that could not be sustained. Canada does none of these things and more people there have houses than America.

 

When governments deem businesses too big to fail and bail them out, it invites recklessness.

 

Obama complained about how we weren’t regulating business enough when there were certain failures, but it was the government aid given by Bush and prior politicians that made the unstable situation in the first place.

 

Failure is what makes markets work. It’s called creative destruction. Businesses should fail; it helps adjust the market.

 

Banks ensure up to $250,000 to protect the truly needy, and when the people who had tons of money invested in a certain bank would have lost big without a government bailout, it should have taught them to diversify their investments.

 

Panic creates the situation where people think they need to support government bailouts.

 

Government bailouts result in huge taxpayer losses. If the bailouts didn’t get in the way, those companies could have negotiated, reevaluated, and adjusted, but now we will never know.

We’ll never know what would have happened without the taxpayer payouts and bailouts for the big companies. They should have been left to adjust like everyone else. Businesses avoid reckless behavior when they know they won’t be billed out. The banks that are declared too big to fail have advantages over small banks; this is not free market capitalism.

 

Many mainstream economists think stimulus spending is a terrible mistake, but the mainstream media is not interested.

 

Companies that give money to political campaigns get more attention and praise. For example, a company called Serious Windows was praised by Biden and Obama and other liberal politicians as an example of the wonders of stimulus spending. The only thing special about that company is that they gave money to the Obama campaign. The company also got a special tax credit that others didn’t.

The company got a tax credit, which others didn’t get, which gave them an advantage when accused of getting a subsidy. They said No, we didn’t get a subsidy. In reality, they got a tax credit; it was a word game.

 

Tariffs to boost certain industries etc are crony capitalism, or “crapitalism.”

 

When the government subsidized alpacas, it created a market bubble for that.

 

When subsidies are given for this and that, we will never know what that money would have otherwise been used for. It’s the same with war, you never know what the money that goes into war could have been used for.

 

There was a big subsidy for golf carts, and people got tons of those for free; it helped the golf cart industry, to be sure.

 

See the book Economics in One Lesson.

 

Cash for Clunkers benefited a few people and the auto industry, but it increased used car sales, and the environment didn’t notice. Mechanics who would have serviced the used cars lost business. The government money spent on these new cars that people were trading in comes from more borrowing, taxpayer funding, debt, and interest. Low-income people depend on the used car market. So many clunkers were destroyed that the used car prices went way up.

 

The government subsidizing the destruction of useful things is no good; we saw it in the New Deal, where piglets were killed and milk was poured down sewers to keep prices high. Leave it to politicians to think that we can prosper by obliterating wealth.

 

When taxpayer dollars go towards private companies, like people who build football stadiums, it just further impoverishes the town.

 

Bureaucracies have no bottom line, no market incentives, no demand for excellence, just people who want them to spend more money and spend all the money budgeted best they lose it next year. No one spends other people’s money as carefully as he does his own.

 

Ch. 2 Making Life Fair

 

Michael Moore and other socialists claim that wealth is a public resource belonging to everyone, which should be distributed, like Obama wanted. Michael Moore says capitalism needs to be replaced with democracy, but he really means socialism.

 

People who bash on capitalism often bash on the government bailouts, the government getting in the way which makes capitalism inherently unfair, but of course that’s not really free market capitalism, it’s crony capitalism.

 

Socialists say they want the government to represent the working class, but the government does that best when it protects their freedom. The Constitution clearly calls for a free market.

 

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government buying mortgages from lenders to ‘help the poor’) created the environment for the housing bubble.

 

Running your own business is the best way to prosperity and happiness, but big government makes it hard to start a business – in Iraq it can take 2 months to get the permits to start a business; in Europe one month; in the US a week or two; in Hong Kong one day.

 

The little guys are who benefit most from market freedom.

 

When you make a transaction you instinctively say ‘thank you’ and the storekeeper says ‘thank you,’  because both people are gaining from the interaction – it’s not inherently oppressive like radicals suggest. Government is force, trade is voluntary.

 

License requirements and minimum wage requirements get in the way of trade.

 

Obama echoes the sentiments of FDR saying that he wants to live in a society that’s ‘fair.’ To these guys fair means forcing you to give your money to other people. Sharing is good, but when government requires sharing, bad things happen. (Note: And it’s no longer sharing. You can’t force charity.)

 

The first Thanksgiving almost didn’t happen until they changed from socialism to private property. Plymouth pilgrims almost starved because of their sharing system. Some people would fake illness to get out of work; people became de-incentivized to work hard when they got the same share everyone else did. Some stole. When they moved from socialism to private property everything prospered. The problem of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ has been known since before ancient Greece. Aristotle said that which is common in the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.

 

Note: the only way a consecrated society can work is when such is voluntary, not by force. There must always be real incentive, whether that’s working for God or for money. Either way, each individual must chose how he serves, it can’t be by force; treat people like animals, and their work quality will never be what people are capable of.

 

The land reserved for Indians, which is common property, is never well taken care of. Across the street where you have private property it’s well taken care of. By claiming to care for Indians the government kills their spirit. When asked what should be done, tribal leaders often say ‘more government’ like most people.

 

Public parks which become privatized run well. Central Park was privatized which converted it from being rundown into a nice place. It doesn’t matter who keeps the money, the point is the park is actually nice. When the government runs it it’s a place for vagabonds and drug dealers. When private business runs it, it’s an attractive place for people to enjoy themselves and have markets. In Central Park there’s still the same number of homeless people, but now there’s also thousands of other people. Homeless people are welcome if they follow the park rules and citizens feel safe to go there because it doesn’t just look like a homeless Park.

 

Thomas More advocating abolishing private property as the way of ending social ills. He could be called the grandfather of socialism. His ideas appealed to many Catholics except for when they found out that confiscating private property usually began with the confiscating church property.

 

Note: More was a good man but wrong on this point. Perhaps he envisioned something only possible in a private society and made the error of trying to impose that on the public.

 

Stossel highlights various religious communities who tried communal living which failed.

 

If you want fair, letting people decide how they’ll interact with each other rather than being forced is the most fair. You shouldn’t be able to vote to regulate your neighbors or tax them extra which is what happens when government gets involved in the way of business.

 

Note: This is why Ayn Rand said only those who support a free market support human rights.

 

“People who join committees tend to think like socialists.”

 

Note – hilarious!

 

Only an unimaginative person would think he could micromanage society from the top down. Only an arrogant man would want to.

 

Classical liberalism is now called libertarianism. Libertarians are not against rule, they are against top-down rule. In other words they favor local government and dislike big government. They also don’t want unelected people making decisions, which often happens.

 

Ch. 3 Keeping Business Honest

 

We don’t need government regulation laws to protect us from dishonest business, we need reputation. Businesses want a good reputation and word gets out quickly if they are cutting corners. It’s a good thing that businesses want your money, this is what motivates them to outdo competitors, which benefits you.

It’s not just the businesses that are in it for themselves, the lobbyists, politicians and unions are too, but it’s worse with them because they aren’t accountable like businesses are.

Stossel highlights a public transportation union in New York that seeks to crush any competitors in transportation services. The labor boss says these little transportation people offering alternative transportation undermine the transportation business, but when they say undermine they mean compete with. The transportation entrepreneurs have to apply for business licenses and they almost always get denied that license. Government doesn’t want to compete in a free market. They fight against entrepreneurs who offer services that people voluntarily want.

Most New York subways were built by private organizations, not government. Eventually the government took them over. The world’s only profitable mass transit is privately run.

Note: On public trains you get people cramped in and it’s not an enjoyable experience. A private company would stop selling tickets when the vehicle is full to get customer satisfaction, and build more cars as demanded by customers. This is pointed out in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert Murphy.

Competition works better than regulation.

Brand names are a good thing, a sign of quality. Companies must constantly innovate and improve their product and work to keep prices down to maintain their good name. Liberals complain about brand name products suggesting they’re just brainwashing us into buying their products but they’re not.

 

Whenever someone proposes to cut government spending people complain that it’s going to kill a bunch of people. But it’s not regulation that keeps us safe, it’s businesses making sure they have a quality product that people will actually want. Companies do plenty of safety checks which aren’t required by the government just to make sure their brand is quality.

The only way to protect from reckless businessmen is the discipline of the market. No privileges, no bailouts. When there’s government bailouts it makes brand names irrelevant – you never know if they’re really being responsible. Free market capitalism automatically tells us which institutions we should trust.

In Las Vegas and Nashville, car regulations require a minimum fee to be charged per ride, and no one can enter the market (obtain a license) unless they prove it won’t adversely affect other similar businesses. That’s absurd; the whole point is competition. Competition among businesses is good for customers.

 

One hair braider had hundreds of satisfied customers then was told she needed a cosmetology license because a competing business filed a complaint. She would have to take a 1200 hour course on hair cutting. Then she would need an instructor’s license because she employed others, which would be another 2,000 hours. Neither license dealt with the braiding service she provided. Then she would have to work for 3 years as an apprentice before she could reopen business. She was able to fortunately get the law changed because this was arbitrary government involvement preventing her from doing business.

In Louisiana monks who made wooden caskets for hundreds of years were threatened with jail time. They were forced to get funeral directors licenses in order to make these boxes. It would force the monks to turn their monastery into a full-fledged funeral home, complete with embalming facilities, and a one-year course would be required. It’s established funeral directors who make the complaints and sit on the boards to make these rules.

No one can sell flower arrangements without a license which you get by passing a test created by people who already sell flower arrangements. They don’t want competition, so the test requires knowledge of techniques that aren’t used anymore. In Louisiana existing flower shops were surveyed, and 86% of them liked that law. Duh! It keeps competitors from entering the market, which is good for them, but bad for consumers.

Some places require a license to be a yoga instructor.

When margarin was made the dairy industry got a law making margarin illegal in several states. Businesses often try to get laws to stop their competitors.

There have been laws that forbid markets from putting food on sale in an attempt to minimize competition. Licensing always hurts consumers by limiting competition. Licensing is mostly an expensive restraint on trade.

One guy went to jail for writing a letter of a legal nature. He didn’t misrepresent his credentials. He was not a licensed lawyer so he got sent to jail. Writing this letter saved a guy $3,000, maybe that’s why they put him in jail.

Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln had no license to be lawyers, yet they were lawyers, some of the best. It was the customer who decided whether they were worthy of being hired. Competition and reputation are better than licenses at protecting customers.

When you move somewhere new, you don’t decide who to have for a doctor, dentist or mechanic based on their checking their licenses, you ask around and see who’s highly recommended. Even with licensing laws there’s a wide range of quality and lots of quackery.

Smart consumers use private consumer rating agencies. Licensing raises costs, stifles innovation, and decreases customer choice.

Philadelphia required a license fee for blogging, and a lady who earned $11 on her blog was prosecuted because she didn’t have the $300 license.

In practice, monopolies almost never happen, and customers benefit from “predatory” pricing.

In Milwaukee you have to purchase a license to go out of business.

You get in trouble for giving an unlicensed tour of Washington DC, including 90 days in jail.

Insurance companies and other private businesses have plenty of regulations in place, we don’t need government regulations. Insurance companies require higher premiums for people who behave recklessly.

Theft, physical assault and fraud are the three crimes that have to be policed for a free market to thrive.

The reason companies don’t rip you off is not because of a government rule, it’s because they want repeat customers.

 

Ch. 4 Improving Life for Workers

 

Unions pair up with friends and government to make things bad for workers, customers, businesses, taxpayers and even union members. Employers then have to cut costs by hiring less people or changing the location of their business overseas and so on.

Charts showing that OSHA improved fatality rates are misleading because the mortality rates were already improving before OSHA came around.

Safety measures created by the government such as OSHA save some while hurting others. For example, the company is not going to bother with making their own safety regulations if the government is requiring them to deal with all of theirs. Rules are better when vested players in the industry themselves make them rather than outside government agencies.

Even ruthless employers want to protect workers because it’s expensive to hire and train new ones.

It’s easier to rally people in favor of dramatic solutions that will never really work than to rally them around gradual economic processes that naturally resolve these issues subtly.

Reagan once said he wanted to take President Gorbachev on a flight over American cities and point out all the swimming pools that were owned by the workers.

Often labor unions create monopolies that force workers to join the unions. This treats diverse individuals as an undiverse collective and requires people to pay dues to the unions that don’t appear to do much.

Union culture is often very slow, basic tasks begin to take elaborate amounts of time.

Employers have an incentive to keep a good relation with their employees or the employees will quit and go work for the competition.

Government agencies don’t face private competition so they aren’t pressured as much to serve the people.

Bosses in the private sector face competition all the time, whereas government bosses only have some soft pressure on rare occasions.

Businesses and charities do much more for the public than government agencies do.

Government agencies suggest that their facilities are open to the public, but it’s much easier to enter a supermarket or a church then a public school without permission, in which case you might get arrested. Don’t call them public buildings and public sector work, they are government buildings, government schools and government jobs. Note: Let’s call public schools ‘government school,’ and home and private schools ‘freedom school.’

Gerrymandering ensures most politicians get elected year after year, regardless of how they perform.

Unions elect their own bosses and in turn the bosses reward the people who got them in. So politicians give workers the wages they demand, and in return the people vote in these highly promising labor union leaders. It’s a money cycle from the taxpayers to the public employee salaries to dues to the union then from the union to the candidate who promises to do more for the union. This leads to unsustainable government pension deals.

It used to be that government work was a trade off – you got paid less, but you get more job security and earlier retirement. But now government jobs are paying more than private jobs. A federal salary council said that government workers earn less, but it was deceptive. The council was just nine people, most of them labor representatives . The so-called study ignored pensions and medical benefits, which are known to be much better than private sector benefits. A Heritage Foundation study concluded that federal employees earned 30 to 40% more. The wages are comparable to the private sector, but the benefits are much better.

Cooks working for the federal government earned $38,000 a year but 23,000 in the private sector. Janitor’s 30 government versus 24 private. Landscape architects 80 government versus under 60 private. It’s unlikely these government workers are so much more skilled. They get paid more because they negotiate with bosses who don’t get paid, bosses who don’t pay the bills. Politicians don’t want the bad press of a strike so they give what is wanted. They’re incentivised to get a deal done. After that politician leaves office people discover they are liable for his promises. Government workers retire at 58 the rest at 65 or older.

The US public sector is basically the European welfare state, which Europe is rolling back.

Factories are safer because of market prosperity, not because of unions.

Most employees make more than minimum wage, not because the government forces it, but because competition insists on it.

Government rules hurt workers by making things less flexible.

Work slows because you have to wait for a union specialist to do something. If you do it yourself, you risk repercussions.

Union rules send a message – don’t try anything new, don’t shake the boat, work is something to be minimized, not an opportunity, not something that could be enjoyed.

Union membership has fallen to only 8% in private sector jobs because workers understand that unions suck the fun out of work.

Unionized companies atrophy while free ones grow.

Union rules protect workers all the way to the unemployment line.

We trade with people at distant places because there are things they can do more efficiently than we can. Free trade is not a race to the bottom. We don’t need tariffs and limits on trade. States are allowed to trade with each other even when certain states pay lower than other states. When American businesses save more money they can use that money to pay workers here.

Studies show that American companies who outsource jobs also hire more people in America. New jobs replace the outsourced ones. Americans leave the factories and move on to better jobs. Disappearing manufacturing jobs in America should be accompanied by cheers for all the more pleasant jobs we have created. Unemployment would be worse without globalization. Trade is win win.

Most people now are calling for tariffs and blocks on foreign imports but be careful, you might want to buy those foreign goods and you might want to work for those foreign companies. When people lose money they invest less.

Historically when we have required federal projects to be done with American-made goods, it has resulted in higher costs and unemployment. There doesn’t have to be a trade war, don’t use tariffs sanctions and embargoes, then it can be win-win. Then people can focus on what they do best and have competitive advantage.

When politicians leave us alone we do our specialized work and it’s a win-win. You’d rather pay money than make a drink and someone else would rather make a drink and get money.

See the Independent Women’s Forum. A woman from that group defended the right to contracts. The laws that say you can’t refuse to hire or fire a woman because of being pregnant make employers more skeptical of hiring women in general so it actually hurts women. The employer with these laws lives in fear of being sued by the woman if he does happen to fire her. The cost of hiring a woman gets higher when that law is in place.

After the ADA American Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990 the number of disabled people employed dropped from 60% to 49%. Protective rules like this cause employers to avoid hiring people from those groups. The employer doesn’t think about what the person might bring to their business but about what burdens the person might cause.

Several people report that they would not have been successful if the ADA was around when they were young because the ADA encourages people to think about how to get accommodations rather than how to succeed.

Minimum wage laws help a very small percent of people but it causes lots of people to lose their job and many people to not be able to find a job.

Some 90% of American workers are paid above the minimum wage because real wages are not determined by an arbitrary law, they’re determined by the supply and demand of the market.

Minimum wage law is why gas stations no longer hire teenagers to wipe your windshield and why construction companies no longer allow teenagers to come learn on the job (Note:  Less service for you, and less jobs and starter opportunities for them.)

Wage minimums tell employers not to give beginners a chance.

Minimum wage laws lead to many businesses never opening, automating, and hiring fewer people. They don’t want to be forced to pay someone more than what they think a job is worth, so they don’t.

If minimum wage laws really help workers, why stop at $15 an hour why not make it $100? (Note: As we see, there is no reliable principle in wage laws.) Every little bit hurts when the government forces employers to deviate from market prices. Wages are a function of productivity, not whim.

Big companies like minimum wage laws because their rivals can’t handle paying that much. This is why unions favor minimum wage laws even when their own workers already make more than the minimum. Where there’s humanitarian government intervention, there’s often special interests.

The Obama administration wanted to get rid of unpaid internships for students. They said internships can’t directly benefit employers. But interns that don’t benefit a company are a nuisance. Students like internships and report that they learn more at The internship job experience than they do at the school, and they don’t even have to pay for it. For many students internships lead to careers. It’s a win-win for employers and students.

Note: Our society now bullies its youth to go to expensive schools to get a certificate for basic jobs that don’t really require the four year training programs, often unrelated to the job. Government deals with schools have lead to this scenario.

Note: Unpaid internships give us a glimpse into the past where low-rung beginners had real possibilities of on the job training like apprenticeships to get into careers they wanted, without the burdens of government guild regulations. Now that is mostly a thing of the past, and these internships are experienced only by college students while the rest of the population suffers.

When companies had to pay interns $10 an hour, the number of interns dropped by half. The student is not an indentured servant, if the employer exploits the student, he can quit. The contract should be no one’s business but theirs.

We are taught to think that markets are cruel and governments are kind, but in reality government attempts at kindness are cruel. The best way for more people to find jobs they like is to make everything free for people to interact in contracts they want.

Pregnant women do impose more costs. They need more time off work for appointments. They can’t work as long of hours. That’s normal and fine, just don’t require employers to pay them the same amount as people who don’t need those accommodations. Allow them to work less hours and be paid less. Then employers won’t be afraid of hiring women.

Minimum wage law is not compassion, it’s denial of reality. People can learn how the market really works without these laws in the way, and have much greater chances of success.

 

Ch. 5 Fixing Healthcare

 

Government already dominates healthcare, and that’s the problem.

The government reports Cubans living longer, but socialist governments lie. 20 years ago the Soviets insisted there were no poor people in Russia. Why would anyone believe a Cuban health statistic? Cubans claim a low infant mortality rate, but doctors there say if the baby dies soon after birth they don’t count it as an infant mortality, not counting the baby as ever having lived.

Government does give equal healthcare treatment, but it’s equal second rate treatment.

Government healthcare is fine if you don’t mind waiting and if you only want immediate attention for extreme emergencies. Making people wait is how government healthcare keeps costs down. But rich people can jump ahead of the line. The relationship between income and health is greater in Canada than America.

Free healthcare means taxpayers pay, and when that happens individual choice dies, and rationing kicks in. They hate the word rationing because it brings up the ugly truth. Who gets to make rationing decisions: you or a bureaucrat?

Some want to spend their money for every ounce of health care that might keep them alive, others want to save that money for their children.

British government healthcare has such long waits that people with toothaches pull their own teeth to avoid the four month wait.

In Canada you’ll hear surveys of people who like the healthcare system, but the people who get those phone calls usually aren’t sick. Some Canadian towns hold lotteries to see who will get to see a family doctor. Sometimes Canadians can’t even get heart attack victims in the ICU. Canadian officials declared a blocked artery as an elective surgery so a lady had to go to America to actually get it done before she died.

Pursuit of profit brings innovation even in medicine. Government healthcare countries preload off of American healthcare inventions. America is where they allow profit so that’s where we get advances. Governments don’t innovate. Only the hope of profit gets people to break free of their comfort and get investors to risk the big money required to invent. (Note: Profit isn’t the only thing that inspires inventors and thinkers, but it’s a big one. Economic freedom also allows a sufficient amount of prosperity such that people have free time they can use to pursue innovation.)

Before the free market, people only lived a few decades. If Canadians live long it’s because they use American inventions.

When Michael Moore decided to get treatment for his weight problem he didn’t go to Canada or Cuba, he went to a private spa in Florida.

In Canada dogs can get a CT scan in one day, but people have to wait a month. Canadian vet care is cutting edge because the market demands fit.

In the agriculturally rich communist Soviet Union (USSR, United Soviet Socialist Republic) there was so little food that mothers sent their children into the fields to catch rats to eat.

No, patients would not have to haggle over the price for a surgery in a free market, those decisions would have been made by thousands of other decisions being made before. In a free market, private rating agencies would evaluate hospitals for quality – word would get out about where to go for the best care. Health insurance companies would have already haggled about the price.

Yes, healthcare is complicated, but so are cars, and the free market guides cars just fine. Reputations of good mechanics grow and bad ones atrophy. (Note: And if you think this process is too slow, it’s the best we’ve got, government goes much slower, without having much incentive to respond to market forces.)

When the government tries to make cars it’s way worse. Yugos and Trabants disappeared along with the Soviet wall.

It took us decades to apply grocery store technology to hospitals to scan medications with barcodes because of all the barriers to competition in the hospital world.

Doctors don’t give out their email address because insurance companies don’t pay for that. If there was a free market that would be a competitive advantage where a doctor would give out his email address for the most effective communication.

Insurance companies are part of the problem; they love insurance mandates. The problem isn’t that not enough people have insurance, the problem is that most people have too much insurance. Doctors spend 14% of their income on insurance paperwork. Much of our healthcare we are blind to the costs, you likely don’t know how much your insurance was charged for your last checkup. Employers should not pay for your insurance; they don’t pay for your food and clothing, so why should they pay for this? Originally paying for your insurance was an advantage a business could offer, but then due to taxes it became better to get insurance from an employer than on your own.

When other people pay for your stuff you don’t care how much it costs; this is the effect of insurance. Doctors often don’t even know how much what they’re doing costs the patient, or in other words, costs the insurance. We should be asking ourselves whether a certain procedure is really necessary, and whether there’s a cheaper place to get it, but we don’t because of insurance. Third party payment destroys the shopping process which is the essence of a market.

When people go to a restaurant paying their own check, they order less than if they were all going to split the total. The cost of healthcare rises at twice the rate of inflation because it’s someone else paying.

Private abortions charge around $370, and abortions at hospitals charge around $5,400.

Health insurance companies don’t even need to advertise.

Some healthcare like Lasik surgery is private pay, so those procedures stay cheap because competition keeps prices down, as there is no government involved. Waiting time is short and the patients are treated nicely.

We should only insure against catastrophes that would bankrupt us. Insurance is not supposed to be about routine things. If you billed your insurance whenever your car needed an oil change prices would skyrocket.

There were many more charities before the government pushed them aside.

At whole foods their employees get a health savings account where it’s their money and they can choose to spend it or not. This causes them to be much smarter about when they go to the hospital.

People are smart enough to make decisions for themselves.

Risk-based pricing in insurance motivates us to take better care of ourselves.

Women go to the doctor more often than men so it makes sense to charge them more for insurance, but politicians have called this wrong.

When the government demands that everyone pay the same for insurance, insurance just becomes another part of the government.

No discrimination in insurance pricing encourages dangerous and unhealthy behavior, and makes prices go up for everyone.

Almost all people get healthcare even if they don’t have insurance as hospitals rarely turn people away. Some people pay cash, and some doctors forgive bills.

Being forced to pay for preventive medical care just makes the whole of medical care more expensive and a lot of false positives occur and people get on medicines and operations they never really needed.

We don’t have free healthcare in America as the government and business have colluded to corrupt it.

In 1960 the 1960s hospitals became heavily subsidized, that’s when prices shut up.

Half of American healthcare is already government paid.

Whenever the government comes up with something it ends up costing way more.

Medicare is unsustainable. Politicians promise 34 trillion more in Medicare benefits than they can pay. Social security promises 5 trillion more than it can pay.

People say they paid their dues and are just getting out what they put in, but now that you live longer than 65, that’s not the case. We now live on average upwards of 78 years so today’s elderly collect 2-3x more than they paid in.

There is no trust fund that your money is being stored in when you pay towards Medicare tax; that money gets spent immediately. Future Medicare payments will have to come directly out of young people’s checks.

Becoming bankrupt is the biggest threat to America’s future.

 

Ch. 6 The Assault on food

 

Natural fruit juices contain about as much sugar as soda. (Note: Fruit juice is indeed like liquid beer, but is still better in some ways. But it is a junk food. And the soda will have less vitamins etc., but neither are health foods.)

In the US they try to ban trans fats, salt, etc.

Healthier foods are catching on, companies are innovating without government force.

Beware the government wanting to help you make better choices. The government is people with guns who force you and take away your choices.

When the government arrests people to level the playing field in the market, that’s crony-capitalism.

Producers who pasteurized use government force to shut down competitors who don’t. (Note: There are pros and cons to pasteurization, Stossel would say let the market, not the government, decide.)

About half the chemicals we use for everything industrially are toxic, and one by one the EPA is hunting them down, so companies switch to chemicals that haven’t been tested yet, and they have to keep switching. This drives up costs.

Both natural and man-made chemicals induce tumors in rats at about the same rate. Perhaps we will ban half of nature to be safe.

He doesn’t believe in the danger of BPA (but I do).

He says the water you drink is fine. (I don’t believe it, and several states like Utah are now banning fluoride from drinking water).

He says irradiating food kills the bacteria inside it, it’s the way the astronauts eat food, but people are scared of nuking their food. Some say doing this to food causes cancer death but many agencies say it is safe and would save lives.

Grain-fed beef mature a lot faster so they require less resources than grass-fed.

He claims there’s no difference between organic grass-fed beef and regular beef. Note: I disagree in general, but I’m sure this has happened at times.

What about the hormones fed to beef? He says everything is has hormones in it. Note: We don’t want those extra and foreign hormones.

Natural things like antibiotics help save many lives. Note: Yes they do save many lives but there are bad side effects too, and we are in a situation of unsustainable antibiotic use.

Activists aren’t just altruistic, they also want to make money and get fame, so they can’t always be trusted.

Government scientists are often from advocacy groups aiming at regulation.

Freedom is more important than health. Don’t let the state decide what you should eat. Note: This is true but we also want to be not deceived by food companies.

If you let the government regulate and provide your health care, it will most certainly begin to regulate your choices.

We have nutritional information, we have advocacy groups, we have nutrition celebrities. This is enough, we don’t need the government messing with food choices. Note: One important step towards nutrition could be getting rid of school lunches as they are extremely unhealthy and they mean the government chooses what we eat.

Sometimes America enforces silly rules from other countries. There were some people who brought goods from Honduras in bags rather than boxes. The Honduran law required boxes. So when the people got to America, they were arrested and put in a federal prison for 6 years. Later the Honduran government said ‘by the way, we repealed that law.’

The more government is involved the easier it is for people to get arbitrarily in trouble

Note this is one of the reasons why privacy is very important it’s not because you have something to hide it’s because people who are out to get you can take normal things and twist them into something that looks bad taking them out of contacts exaggerating them etc.

Congress creates on average one new crime every week and federal agencies create many more.

Plus Hobbs road about Leviathan as in a government which is very involved and strong But he thought it would be about protecting us from war not planning our dinners.

You can’t just say everything good should be legal and everything bad illegal because then you’d have a totalitarian government involved in every detail of life.

 

 

Ch. 7 Creating a Risk-Free World

 

Rosie O’Donnell calls for banning guns, yet she has armed security guards. Gun control is not crime control. The media ignores stories about people with pistols disarming robbers.

In Texas, there was a law that said you can’t bring your firearm into a restaurant, and a guy shot a bunch of people in the restaurant. He even stopped to reload and continued shooting. He could have been stopped if someone had a gun. Someone present reported that they did have a gun, but they kept it in their car because they weren’t allowed to bring it into the restaurant. Texas fortunately changed the law. Several states don’t even require a permit to carry a gun.

In the US where people own guns, people are afraid to break in and rob those houses.

When more people have guns, crime goes down. We saw this in DC etc.

See the book One Nation Under Arrest.

One girl was sent to prison for 9 hours for having a butter knife in her car at school. Kids were suspended from school when they were playing cops and robbers and one of them yelled ‘I have a bazooka.’

Zero tolerance leads to zero common sense. Government one size fits all solutions don’t make people safer, they make people sadder.

When people do stupid things and we help them on tax dollars, they’re more likely to do stupid things. You should charge for these medical rescues of foolish events; when that’s been tried, people still call for help.

Federal flood insurance means taxpayers like you pay for it when someone foolishly builds their house too close to the water. There are flood zones where building is outlawed, but let’s just let people use their own money, and take their own risks the way they want, and let them pay for it.

You aren’t free if you can’t decide what medicines you can take. The government rules out helpful medicine and treatments because of possible side effects, but desperate people are willing to risk the side effects, and everything they try, even the approved stuff, has plenty of side effects.

Many medicines and procedures can’t get approved because it costs so much money for the approval process.

Doctors have to under prescribe pain medication due to fear of getting sued for over prescribing it. Just because some people abuse prescriptions to get high doesn’t mean they can’t be prescribed at all, or in insufficient quantities to those who need it. Doctors learn to be stingy with pain meds as they hear of people getting sued for giving more than the government thinks is right.

Seat belt laws don’t save lives. When people are required to be safe by law they act more recklessly. Let people choose. If seat belts make you safer, word would spread quickly and auto companies would compete to make safer more comfortable seat belts. But with all the regulations companies had great barriers on changing seat belts. We don’t know what good things we might have had if government didn’t step in and get in the way. The improved safety belts would result in more people wearing them.

Patrick Henry didn’t say give me safety or give me death, he said give me liberty or give me death. That’s what America is about.

 

Ch. 8 Making Sure No One Gets Offended

 

The New York times endorses limitations on speech when it’s funded by rich people.

People on the left and right support free speech right up until it counts, that is, when it offends them.

No one can be trusted to limit others. Note: This isn’t a call for anarchy, but a call for a less regulatory approach to government.

Affirmative action based on race (like deciding who gets into a school based on quotas of having certain numbers of people of a certain race) is like selling food at different prices depending on what your race is. It’s inherently racist. No matter what race you’re favoring, you shouldn’t favor any race.

On college campuses students often scream to drown out the voice of someone they don’t want to hear, usually conservative voices.

Censorship rules give the power of censorship to whoever is most easily offended. This gives everyone the perverse incentive to become more easily offended.

At one school a student was reading a book about the history of the Klu Klux Klan which had a picture of them on the cover. Another student complained about that cover offending her, and the student with the book got serious consequences, though fortunately he was able to get those consequences removed.

One company got in trouble for advertising bagels because they said the advertisement was not aesthetically appealing.

On college campuses everybody agrees that black women and homosexuals need special protection, but nobody worries about a Baptist being offended when someone mocks Christ.

The government uses one-size-fits-all rules. Instead, individual businesses and the marketplace in general should decide.

Note: He talks about a pornographer who was getting fined for obscene material who got off the hook. I disagree here. Porn isn’t speech, it isn’t conveying ideas, its just filth. I do not want to make legal any circumstance going against one of the ten commandments to not commit adultery. Those are Gods laws, and are there for a reason.

The book The catcher in the rye was banned and called obscene and explicit, but today people call it a classic, and kids read it in school. Note: I do not like such books and would vote for them not to be used on earth as it isn’t used in heaven. It’s ok to vote for a moral society, to make a society that’s good. Who decides what’s good? For starters, in a free society, we vote on it. So make your opinion heard.

Those who censor claim to seek politeness, but telling people to shut up isn’t polite. Note: True, but sometimes we encounter evil, and it is proper to shut that down.

Banning private discrimination is an overreach. We condemn racism, but there’s freedom of association. We don’t want government discrimination, but private companies should be able to.

If you disagree then argue and shun and boycott, just don’t bring the government in to settle the dispute.

Private groups should be allowed to air political ads.

Corporations are people because they’re made of people.

When Private companies choose what is said, that’s not censorship, that’s editing. Note: But companies should be upfront about their bias. We all have bias, and that’s ok.

The tolerance preaching liberals are the most intolerant.

Fox news doesn’t censor liberal views. He thought they would, but when he went to work there he saw they didn’t. But those at ABC NBC CBC, they did censor conservative and libertarian views. They hid their political views and claimed to have no bias. We should be open and up front about our political interests and affiliations.

 

Ch. 9 Educating Children

 

American education spending has tripled but scores have flatlined. It’s not improving since it’s not a free market. It’s not about the money, it’s what you do with the money.

One successful private principal says he doesn’t do teacher evaluations, he just walks around, and if the kids aren’t working, the teacher gets fired.

Note: Indeed, getting students to work is a key job of teachers, not just to coddle and do everything for the students. To be educated is to be able to self-teach. The older the child, the less help the student should need. Ron Paul’s School Revolution treats this subject at length.

Like athletes, teachers need coaches to keep them at their top game.

You don’t need experts to tell you whether something is good or not.

Public government schools are not the great equalizer of poor and rich and all colors. Rich parents buy homes in neighborhoods where there are better schools. This has resulted in government schools being more segregated than private schools.

Government schools tear communities apart. You have the conservative parents who want conservative authors in the school, and the liberal parents who want liberal authors taught in the school, and if we just had school choice this wouldn’t have to be a problem; more parents could have what they want.

Public schools just means government schools, and that just means you have to pay for it like it or not. Note: And if you want to send your kid to a private school, you still get to pay for the government school and your school on top of that.

Government schools are inefficient centralized bureaucracies, just like everything else the government does. We should be horrified that the special task of teaching has been left to the government. Note: Socrates warned us that if teaching became a profession, it would quickly become corrupted. Many of the great teachers have shared their ideas freely.

Great teachers typically don’t get paid anymore than the bad ones.

Tenure makes organizations unaccountable. Being able to fire people is the only way to keep them accountable. Public School teachers generally get tenure after they’ve taught for about 3 years, meaning it’s basically impossible to fire them.

Note: Of course I have heard of horror stories where there have been witch hunts of sacking good teachers, but generally, the teachers stay in forever.

They couldn’t even fire a tenured 600-pound teacher who urinated into a bottle and had his seven year old students carry the urine to the bathroom.

Even the employees are often better off when they get fired because then they can go find jobs for which they are better suited.

Non-union schools can fire their teachers, and those schools typically outdo union schools on all standardized tests.

Good teachers want the bad teachers out so the bad teachers don’t bring down the morale of the group.

If you’re a doctor who isn’t doing his job, you get fired. It should be the same for teachers, but union schools want to give excessive chances for low performing teachers to improve before firing them. Unions complain about how hard it is on a teacher to get fired, but think about how hard it is on kids to have a bad teacher.

A 37-year-old lady was put in charge of a school district and saw it wasn’t working, there was incompetence everywhere so she started firing people who demonstrated that incompetence. People complained of course, and said the only way you can fire a teacher is if the teacher hits a kid and you get it on camera, or if a teacher was caught stealing money from the school and you have a receipt to prove it. She assumed people would be happy with the school improving, but she was wrong.

Some claim that charters outperform the public because the charter schools get better kids, but its not so. Some public school advocates have touted a study that shows public kids to be as good or better than private school kids in reading etc., but the actual study skewed the data adjusting for race, class, and a bunch of other things to get the result it wanted. The plain data was that the kids in the private schools do better.

When a charter school fails it goes out of business. When a public school fails it just keeps failing, and hardly ever closes.

Even the poorest parents in the inner city still try to send their kids to private schools at great sacrifice.

Studies show that the Head Start program, though it might help a little bit during the program, there’s no long-term results, no long-term benefits, and yet it doesn’t get discontinued, it just keeps going.

Universal pre-kindergarten is a flagrant waste of money. It is like going shopping for a dress for yourself and buying one for everyone whether they need it or not.

Pre-K isn’t showing good results on academic measures. They say we don’t just want academics, we want social emotional, but how are they going to do that if they can’t even get the basic measurable academics?

It’s hard to think of better ways to do things until competition makes it apparent. When competition is limited we will never know what we could have had. That goes for education and everything else.

Before innovation all you had was your local teacher, your local singer etc. Now with the internet you can have access to the best teachers, no matter where you are.

Note: And the top universities are putting lectures online free. The way of the future in education involves an online component where the best teachers around the world can be accessed on an unlimited level.

 

 

Ch. 10 The War on Drugs

 

He says making laws against drugs drives it underground so people use guns rather than lawyers to settle the disputes, and they smuggle it instead of ship it.

Note: These inherently dangerous things we should at least try to control. We can’t give way to bad things just because they’re hard to police. Here’s a hint – execute big drug dealers; this dissuades drug crime in an effective way. People know where this law exists, and the dealers don’t go there. They fear death more than prison.

He compares heroin and nicotine saying they are of a similar level of addictiveness.

Note: Obviously there is a different level of danger. You don’t see people speeding down the road at breakneck speeds to get their next nicotine fix like you see with heroine addicts.

He points out those who use medical marijuana avoid drug side effects.

Note: While that’s likely true, there’s also side effects to marijuana such as coughing delirium lung cancer and many other negative side effects.

He advocates punishing people who do stupid things under the influence more so than punishing being under the influence peacefully.

Note: Of course this is correct, and even some conservatives have taken this position, but I don’t think it’s wise to make such dangerous things commonplace and normalized.

Each state is supposed to be its own experiment on democracy the powers of the federal government are supposed to be very limited, it should be state’s choice.

Note: Making drugs a state level issue could work, but the issues of drugs crossing the border could change the nature of this. If some states get tougher on drug crime and others get weaker, it would indeed be a good way to see what works and what doesn’t.

Some things are legal in a state and illegal on the federal level so people get in trouble for doing something perfectly legal.

Alcohol is more likely to create addiction than crack or heroin. He claims most who try them don’t continue to use them, and those who do continue often use safely and he advocates adults choosing.

Note: He underplays the dangers of these drugs. More are addicted to alcohol likely due to alcohol being more widely available. Creating a culture where this takes place does not seem wise.

He claims that prohibition does not keep people from using and that while drugs harm people, making them illegal leads to even more harm.

Note: We did see during prohibition that plenty of underground crime rings developed. We have decided to allow alcohol to adults as a society and punish them heavily for infractions under the influence. But doing this for drugs is a whole new level. Drugs are typically more toxic and dangerous than alcohol, and most people recognize this.

Many of the times people who are enforcing the law directly benefit as in seizing cash and goods from drug users or potential drug users on suspicion. It ignores innocent until proven guilty.

Despite its illegality, marijuana is easier to buy than beer.

Voluntary social pressure might be enough to deter people from using dangerous substances without government rules.

 

 

Ch.11 War to End War

 

Defense is something the government is actually supposed to do; it’s in the Constitution.

Sticking around after a war to do nation-building is scandalous.

Sending someone money after we beat them in war is scandalous.

The Vietnam War was not necessary to protect America.

Intervention frequently goes wrong – when you help one person, you arm the others.

You get an overextended military when you try to ‘kill people over there before they kill us over here.’

When we try to smash the bad guys at every opportunity, it creates new bad guys that want to kill us.

People have a never-ending list of things they want the military to do, like build democracy in other countries, teach other countries how to teach other countries to build democracy, make the internet safe, change regimes abroad, etc., and you simply can’t accomplish all this stuff.

Some people advocate keeping troops in conflicts longer than they should be so that we look tough, but it’s not worth risking trillions of dollars and soldiers lives to look tough.

Note: It’s also as a deterrent of more terrorism and communism, like our Korean border soldiers who remain to this day. We saw what happenned in Afghanistan when we pulled out our token forces there, the place quickly collapsed. Perhaps we shouldn’t have gone in the first place, but we were attacked, and leaving a token presense there could have brought stability.

When you spend money on other nations, giving them what you think they should have, they’re not grateful, and you get upset that they’re not grateful.

We’ve had to do all kinds of bizarre things in foreign countries like paying people to go see a play about donkeys, or paying for a farmers market that never gets built, or paying to hand out croissants, or paying Iraqis to attend a French pastry class.

There have been projects abroad of rebuilding houses, and the people in charge higher contractors after taking their share, and then those contractors hired more contractors after taking their share, and so on until there was no money left to build the houses, and there’s just a few wooden beams they used for firewood which cost 150 million.

In order to establish a need for financing, they’ll often spend money one year to get that money the next year, like sending people on pointless helicopter missions just to use fuel.

Candidate George Bush said he didn’t think we should spend money on foreign nation-building, then, when he was the president, he changed his mind and orchestrated a war of nation-building.

Today, the US spends about as much on defense as all the other countries in the world combined. If we focused on defense rather than offense, it wouldn’t cost us almost a trillion dollars a year in defense spending.

We built an Air Force Base in Greenland to monitor the Soviets during the Cold War, but we’re still there for some reason.

There are places where the United States is defending them, where they could defend themselves, but they don’t because we are there.

After 9/11, everybody wanted federal security at airports, but the problem they’ll never fire themselves for failing. If you had private contractors in there, the government could fire them.

The CIA has failed to detect just about every major event, and they failed at 9/11. They claimed they had bad computers, so they weren’t able to keep track of the hijackers, and they failed to investigate suspicious reports.

Those who want to cut defense spending are not isolationists, they’re often in favor of trading with the whole world. When goods cross borders, armies don’t!

 

Ch. 12 Keeping Nature Exactly as it is Forever

 

If you want to preserve an animal species, don’t ban the hunting of it; encourage the breeding of it. In cases where you let people own these exotic animals and farm them on private property, that works, but in cases where you ban the hunting and selling of animals, that never works, because it always goes underground.

Privatize the water system, and people will pay more for quality water and less for irrigation water.

He does not believe that there is evidence that DBT pesticides harm humans. Tens of millions have died because of the DBT ban. DBT is the best anti-mosquito anti-malaria product we have. Many environmental agencies have now backed off and have welcomed the use of DBT.

Note: it does seem like DBT is the lesser of two evils to be used when there’s nothing else, but it does not seem that it is a health product by any means, as in not for ideal health, but of course if it’s saving lives that’s better than not using it. Perhaps it should be people’s choice on this. But I’m not savvy on the research.

Ever since the ’50s they’ve been claiming that electric cars are the way of tomorrow and still they aren’t viable for consumers other than the government grants that are fudging them on us.

Note: Even today, electric cars are a nuisance, running out of fuel all the time.

If there’s some great way to make windmills that work well enough to be worth their while, the free market will buy them, no need for a subsidy. Solar and biofuels simply aren’t worth their while. Biofuels take up lots of land that could have been used for farming.

Many presidents promised to reduce America’s oil imports, and none of them did.

People rave about how Denmark uses a lot of wind power, but they don’t realize that Denmark uses way more coal and oil than wind.

Windmills barely make a dent in our energy needs. It would require an area the size of the state of Rhode Island for windmills to give as much energy as one nuclear power plant. It’s not political, it’s just physics; these alternative energies can’t do the job.

Green jobs programs are snake oil; other countries that tried this are shutting them down. They’re very expensive. Obama said they’ll only work if we do lots of it fast. Not so.

Note: Classic scam: buy lots of my product now, or else!

All green projects have done is make energy cost more, though some like that.

The planet does not notice our efforts to recycle, etc. Politicians want us to spend the money on global warming causes, which won’t do anything to the environment for over 100 years; it’s just a waste of money

When they spend money on global warming, we’re not spending that money on other, more useful causes.

 

Ch. 13 The Budget

 

Before Lindon Johnson, when the government was less than 5% of the economy, was when we grew the most.

Give money to the people who earn it, not to the government to spend on programs that don’t work. No group of people are smart enough to manage the economy

When you tax people too much, they’ll hide their money and leave the country or state. The rich stop working when the tax gets too high.

Republicans recently pulled off a 1% government spending cut. Democrats complained that basic services were going away. But this isn’t nearly enough to keep us from bankruptcy. We are like alcoholics in our spending, always insisting on just one more drink.

We think we are entitled to Medicare & Medicaid, but people usually get three times out more than they put in. Note: In part due to living longer these days than the program was built for.

Not all military spending is sacred and well-spent.

Entire departments need to be eliminated for us to have a balanced budget.See Downsizinggovernment.org for the numbers.

Emmys are a silly award the liberal media gives to people who confirm their anti-capitalist views.

No giving foreign aid. Note: Particularly when you’re in debt, you’re not in a position to help others.

No department of education. Note: Astonishingly, the Trump administration has spoken of possibly ending this department. Indeed, if any government is to be in schools, its state, not federal.

No energy department. No agriculture subsidies. No Nasa. Privatize TSA. No national endowments for art,s humanities, etc. Cut the whoppers Medicare Medicade and Social Security.

The government almost always spends less efficiently than the private sector. What we see about how the government spends money is vague and misleading.

 

Ch. 14 There Ought Not to Be a Law

 

When in doubt, leave it out.

Even the fall of the Soviet Union (an epic failure of big government) didn’t convince people not to use big government. People think “next time, centralized government will work.”

No Child Left Behind is useless.

The march toward more central government and free stuff continues.

The US is rated far from the top in a list of free countries.

Businesses make big cuts all the time, but the government never does, it only does rare tiny cuts.

When fewer people work for the state, that’s a good thing.

The US was founded on more libertarian principles than other nations, yet now it refuses to admit it has big government.

Government can’t even count votes correctly.

Government doesn’t have special wisdom. We can do better.