“One in four Americans work(sic) for companies with federal contracts, and administration officials see an opportunity to lift more families into the middle class.” New York Times, February 26, 2010. That’s what produces economic progress, federal diktat about wages. Goodness me, how many people believe any of this except for politicians? Just raise wages. FDR did it during the Great Depression and it helped make that depression Great. Let’s do it again.
Government is the most broken when it’s working best.
from the Book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
Socialism is such a failure that it exists in partial form only where it can be supported by free enterprise. The postal service, school system, the medical system in many countries, etc. all exist because of external support, not internally generated revenue. Thence, they are inefficient in the extreme and produce the most bizarre and slovenly behaviors in the people who work in them. As an example, over the years, several hundred parcels have been sent to me. These parcels were supposed to be delivered by the Canadian postal system, a government agency. Although my business is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. on all but two days of the year, only about 12 of these parcels were delivered. Notices for most of the others were left in the postal box. They didn’t even make the effort to put the notice on the door of my office where delivery was supposed to occur so they could at least pretend they tried to do their job. The private delivery businesses always deliver inside our door. Just to complete the cycle, the Canadian postal service purchased a package delivery business which has the same dismal delivery techniques and tries its best not to deliver packages. Unionized government services are not known for service. This is too easy, but–The government does not deliver. As an added bonus, Canada has a government agency which controls cable access which limits competition and makes Canadian internet providers much less efficient and more costly than their U.S. counterparts.
“Many people are so preoccupied with the notion that their own knowledge exceeds the average knowledge of millions of other people that they overlook the more important fact that their knowledge is not even one-tenth of the total knowledge of those millions. That is the crucial fallacy behind the repeated failures of central planning and other forms of social engineering which concentrate power in the hands of people with less knowledge and more presumption.” Thomas Sowell.
There is relentless propaganda for state control and intervention in spite of thousands of examples of it not being a very good idea. For example, in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, seven people died and many hundreds became ill because of e. coli in the town’s drinking water. There was a large outcry about the perils of privatization in public services in spite of the fact that, in the whole chain of errors which led to the tragedy, only the private laboratory provided the correct information. The public servants responsible spent more time drinking beer than doing their jobs, were found criminally guilty for their trouble, but the public faith in government workers remained, and remains, unshaken. The Romance with Socialism lives on with no regard for facts.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
