Only a Liberal…

The “powerless” laborer pitted against the “powerful” executive… illustrated by statements like:

The CEO of Walmart earns more in an hour than his employees will earn in a year… Walmart CEO Michael Duke’s $35 million salary, when converted to an hourly wage, worked out to $16,826.92.

“How can you go to bed at night and sleep knowing you make this kind of money and the people working for you can hardly buy a package of beans and rice?” - Ed Smith, Chicago alderman

What Ed Smith doesn’t know or chooses not to consider is if you CONFISCATED Duke’s entire salary, and distributed it to all the low-level employees, lets say half of ALL Wal-Mart employees, you’d raise their annual salary about $35. If you confiscated it and hired all new employees, you’d pay the salary of 14oo entry level Wal-Mart employees. Let him keep $5 million, and you can still hire 1200 new employees

Question for Ed Smith… how many employees would get laid off downgrading the CEO from one paid $35 million to one paid $5 million? I guarantee you its a lot more than 1200 people. The class-envy crowd always ignores this simple economic fact, but everyone ignores what I consider a more important question…

What about the consumer?

Everyone always want to talk about the employeE vs employeR compensation debate. What about employee compensation vs consumer savings?

Why are the wages of the laborer valued more than the savings of the consumer? If Chinese underwear saves the consumer $2 over the American alternative, it is correct to acknowledge American workers that could be making underwear won’t be. So they won’t make wages from that particular labor. It is incorrect to omit the very relevant effect of saving millions of consumers $2 a pop. That money being saved will be spent elsewhere, creating a new market opportunity for any of those American laborers.

The consumer is EVERYONE, rich and poor, so no one lobbies on behalf of the consumer. The laborer on the other hand, is represented by powerful lobbies, and as a result, their wants are valued above the wants of the consumer.

Why is the laborer more entitled to compensation than the consumer is to keep their own money? If something can be bought from another country for $1 less than in America, we are essentially saying the American worker deserves that $1 more than the American consumer. What is this misguided belief based on? A hodge-podge of disconnected beliefs involving irrational hatred of the employer and outsourcing.

As I illustrated above, you cannot improve the lives of the employee by reducing the pay of the employer. The numbers just don’t work that way, so any talk about how annoyed you are some guy makes more in an hour than some people make in a year is a waste of time.

As for outsourcing, until the recent recession, outsourcing was increasing every year, as were the number of domestic jobs. Outsourcing opponents would have you believe that an outsourced job means someone gets fired in America, and that’s a bad thing. But what is the upside of outsourcing?

Outsourcing increases demand. Every dollar saved by outsourcing goods and labor to make them cheaper saves the American consumer money. All that money turns into more demand for EVERYTHING. That demand turns into consumers spending more on existing stuff, new products being developed to meet that demand, which results in an increase of jobs. No its not a proportional increase when you add up all the outsourcing, BUT it doesn’t have to be in order to be a net-win for America. To think outsourcing is a net-loss to Americans is to value the concerns of the laborer over the consumer.

Demand drives innovation

When you free up time and money with outsourcing, you grease the skids for innovation. Innovation makes us more efficient, smarter, and healthier as it results in new technologies that help us do our jobs faster and cheaper, and new drugs and tools that help save lives. When that money is destroyed by destructive regulations or international tariffs, innovation slows down.

Anti-outsourcing folks and “Buy American” folks will tell you all day about the guy who got laid off because his job got shipped overseas.  They’re only looking at one side of the equation. Buying American when there is a cheaper international alternative is really “Wasting American.”

Artificially propping up labor force inefficiencies is not a positive thing. Putting tariffs on foreign nations with cheaper products directly wastes American money and indirectly wastes even more money when that nation and other nations retaliate. Tariffs are a two-way street, as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 proved. Its idiotic proponents wanted to decrease imports to support “buying American.” Problem is other nations choose to NOT buy American when we do stupid shit like this.

Imports decreased 66% ($2.9 billion), which was the point of those tariffs, but…

Exports decreased 61% ($3.3 billion). Even Canada retaliated with their own tariffs on American goods… that’s how bad it was.

Next time someone says employees don’t get paid enough, tell them consumers don’t save enough.

Why did an earthquake in California only kill 63, while a similar earthquake has killed over 100,000 in Haiti?

The News media keep referring to what has happened in Haiti as a “natural disaster.” This could NOT be further from the truth. This is a poverty disaster.

Now why would I bring this up now in Haiti’s time of need? Even if you agree with me, you may be thinking, “why can’t we talk about this later, after we stabilize the devastation?” Because every dime we spend on ineffective aid is a dime wasted, and I find it to be despicable. Haitians are not helped by billions of our tax dollars being sent to their country. In fact it probably hurts them.

While we have sent no money to China over the last few decades, they have made gargantuan leaps and bounds in their economy and the quality of life for a billion people. Why is Haiti still awful, while China is booming?

The reason is not as complicated as you think. We cannot fix these countries; they must fix themselves. All we can do is hand them a crutch, in the form of billions of dollars that do nothing but teach them how to walk on a crutch. To run, they must reform their infrastructure to foster an environment where each individual can reach their full potential.

Political bottom-feeding opportunists

Now if you can believe it, there are people who strongly believe, or pretend to strongly believe, that capitalism is the culprit in the Haitian disaster, not the solution. I would generally dismiss such nonsense as unworthy of acknowledgment but I will use it as an illustration of why countries like Haiti never get fixed. This was written by Tanya Golash-Boza at the Dissident Voice.

The story of Haiti — a nation that broke the rules from the beginning by standing on its own two feet — is the story of how global capitalism works to keep most people in poverty.

Tanya Golash-Boza is on the faculty at the University of Kansas. Here’s another quote from Golash-Boza:

The earthquake in Haiti is a prime example of how unbridled capitalism kills.

Slum in Jakarta, Indonesia

In the same article, Ms. Golash-Boza cites the Bay Area earth quake of 1989 where only 63 people died, yet she still identifies capitalism as the CAUSE of over 100,000 deaths in Haiti. This woman is a highly paid educator at an American university who hates the very system that provides her with her way of life and career.

Look at this building… what planet do you have to live on to believe capitalism is the cause of this? Buildings like this don’t exist in capitalist societies.

The real problem caused by capitalism

You want to know what the real problem with “unbridled capitalism” is? It makes a country so rich, so prosperous, that intellectuals get bored being prosperous and think up pseudo-compassionate, ineffective techniques to waste their money in pursuit of social status. Start a charity, collect money, and then send it to a poverty-stricken dictatorship, and reporters will write soaring articles about what a nice person you are. The results of your work will never be evaluated. The money will never be tracked to see where it ended up or if it had any positive, long-term effect.

People like the capitalism-hating Professor are the negative side-effect of capitalism and free speech. They live in a country with so much wealth, they can produce feel-good movements that can politically pressure legislators to send other people’s money to countries less rich than us. Whether that money makes a difference or not does not matter… assuaging their own guilt is more important than actually helping. If those good intentions result in more poverty and weak building construction that causes thousands of structures to collapse on their inhabitants, that can’t possibly be placed at the feet of the people who had good intentions. They convince themselves, and unfortunately others, that the problem is they didn’t send enough money.

On top of that, they wriggle around with cockamamie arguments that their ideology combined with capitalism attempting to intervene in the socioeconomic progress of these poor countries is proof that capitalism has caused their plight rather than their own ideology.

Direct aid still doesn’t help

Even if you manage to magically ensure every penny makes it to the people instead of the coffers of the rich dictator, it still doesn’t help. Poverty-stricken people don’t know what to do with lots of money. They don’t use it to change their situations. It doesn’t help them learn economic best practices that Americans don’t even realize they know. It doesn’t change social or religious hurdles that live on in those countries.

The dominant religion in Haiti is voodoo. While voodoo is probably most widely known in America from an Indiana Jones movie, the fundamental issue with it is when bad things happen to Haitians, they believe it is the will of god and they must accept it rather than deal with it. This is not conducive to progress.

Can we fix problems like this? Should we fix problems like this? The latter is a much tougher question, while the former is slightly simpler. No one can fix the economic problems of Haiti until the Haitian people remove the relevant social obstacles. Every year we send them more useless money is another year their people don’t move in the direction necessary for change.

And frankly, as much as I think voodoo is superstitious nonsense, it is not my right nor my business to determine the beliefs of other people. If we as Americans believe that Haitians are entitled to their religious and cultural practices, and we can also determine these same beliefs will hinder their progress, then we must learn to accept the situation. Spending time and money pretending to help them is not for their benefit, but for the benefit of our own egos.

Accepting reality

Alcoholics Anonymous learned long ago that forcing people to attend is futile. The alcoholic must choose to make a change, or else any advice and counseling given will not help in the slightest. The problem is not that we aren’t spending enough money on helping alcoholics deal with their problem. Continuing to send money to Haiti is like deciding you’re going to fix alcoholics by giving them more money to spend on getting themselves help. They will spend it on booze.

Please, send your money to the Red Cross if you’d like in an effort to help rebuild parts of Haiti, but don’t convince yourself you are changing anything. Only the Haitians can do that.

A picture of poor people getting fired

I have been warning of the unrecognized consequences of raising the minimum wage. While the cost of a computer continues to go down, politicians make sure that the minimum cost of human labor in America goes up as fast as possible. The blindly driven car of the minimum wage is wilfully unconcerned of the approaching cliff.

We have reached the “wage singularity.” I have been saying for years that if Liberals continue pushing the pseudo-compassion of increasing the minimum wage, fast food workers will soon be replaced by a computer touch screen. Last weekend, I came across just that at a Jack in the Box in the San Francisco Bay Area. Other than Santa Fe at $9.92, San Francisco will enter 2010 leading the country with a minimum wage of $9.79.

I have said it before and I will say it again.

The minimum wage gets poor people FIRED.

While San Francisco brags about it’s compassion for the poor, it is slowly ensuring that our poorest citizens will become even poorer. Before the arrival of these kiosks, employers of poor workers were given a choice: pay someone the min wage or pay them zero. Many can afford to pay their higher wage but many businesses simply can’t. So they choose zero. Now they can choose a computer.

Hal the kiosk will soon be the perpetual employee of the month, as I have no doubt Liberals will be unphased by the arrival of kiosks. Communist areas like Berkeley or elsewhere will likely pass legislation banning the kiosks but most areas won’t.

Hal works 3 8-hour shifts with no breaks, no lunch, never goes to the bathroom, and never gets tired.
Hal does not have health coverage or workers comp or paid vacation.
Hal doesn’t have any tattoos, piercings, or attitude.
Hal doesn’t eat the fries or drink the soda. He doesn’t steal from the cash register. He is never late.

Hal does need his screen wiped occasionally.

Let me add that I do not oppose the kiosk taking people’s jobs. Technology makes our lives better every time it advances, as evidenced by past history. Yes, some people will lose their jobs and find it harder to find jobs, but for society it is an improvement. It just shouldn’t be happening so soon, but it is, thanks to your local politician.

Click the minimum wage category below to read more about the economic realities of minimum wage laws.

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British Parliament member Daniel Hannan excoriated the Prime Minister of England last week. His 3-minute speech pretty much sums up the fundamental problems with government spending. This speech has common sense that any layman can understand. Watch it here. Here are some highlights.

“You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.”

Why don’t liberals acknowledge common sense like this? Hannan makes the point that when individuals are in debt, they reduce their spending. Its kindergarten math, but politicians are amazingly skilled at getting away with ignoring such simple logic.

I love that when it comes to the economy, inaction is completely unacceptable to a liberal, but when it comes to national security, inaction is 100% the right decision. This is the fundamental problem I have with liberals: this lack of concern with consistency. They just don’t care if they’re being disingenuous or ignoring facts and logic.

Liberals think that it is none of the government’s business if Middle-East dictators repeatedly break international laws for decades, increasing the likelihood of dangerous behavior by rogue governments as well as separate terrorist organizations. These same liberals think it is the government’s business, nay, its duty, to intervene in the financial concerns of individuals, infringing on the financial freedom of individual Americans and their businesses.

Our founding fathers worked their tails off to make sure that the American government could never get involved with private businesses. Liberal politicians, both Republican and Democrat, have exploited the ignorance of regular Americans to justify trespassing into areas of our freedom they have no business trespassing on. When there is a bubble in the stock market, it must deflate slowly or burst. Pretending you deserve the money you “lost” in the recent crash is misguided. The stock market never actually reached 14,000. That was a fake number. Politicians would have you believe that it is big business’s fault that you lost all those Dow Jones points. The reality is you never had them. They were a facade, and when you accept that, you will be able to move on from these commonly believed myths that big business ruins everything and government can solve it. The fact of the matter is America didn’t have as much money as it thought. So politicians want to solve that fact by spending more money. Its ridiculous.

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You wanna be angry? Fine, but be logical with your anger. If you’re focused on being angry with AIG, its harder to be angry about the following B.S., which is exactly what Congress and Obama want.

• Stimulus bill earmarks $198 million to compensate Filipino World War II veterans for their service. Most don’t live in the U.S. Let me repeat that. ONE HUNDRED NINETY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS FOR WORLD WAR TWO VETERANS WHO HAPPEN TO BE FILIPINO. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
• Non-emergency spending in stimulus: $100 million for security at upcoming political conventions. Hey, if its 700 billion, who’s gonna notice another $100 million?
• Stimulus bill gave Congress a pay raise. Democrats think rich people need to share the burden of tough economic times, unless those rich people work in Congress.
• Card check - removing anonymity from voting on unions will cause job loss
• AIG bonuses were explicitly allowed by Senator Dodd amendment
• President Obama started to propose a plan to make veterans pay their own health insurance (fortunately it failed)
• Obama is trying to cause a depression, not prevent one
• Obama budget deficit is 8.5% of our GDP: EU requires deficit be under 3%
• Obama’s war on trade. In pursuit of keeping American teamsters happy, the recent $410 billion earmark bill had a provision preventing some Mexican trucks from operating in the U.S. The result: Mexico has responded by placing tariffs on 90 U.S. exports. This will cost Americans a lot of money and jobs.

If you’re still angrier at AIG than you are at American politicians, then I have wasted my time. Please leave my site.

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I completely understand why liberals get mad when a corporation spends money on an expensive party. They hate rich people who make money from the strength of capitalism. The problem I have is when their partisan, class-envy nonsense permeates to normal people like you. Everyone is angry with Northern Trust for spending money on a golf event at a country club. Let me explains something to you.

Northern Trust received $1.6 billion from TARP. Subsequently, as they do every year, they hosted the Northern Trust Open, a professional golf event that raises millions for charity. I’m not even sure how much they even spend on the event, considering the Golf Channel and other TV stations fit a huge part of the logistical bill. Even if you assume they spent $10 million on the event, that is one half of one percent of the money given to them in the bailout. That $10 million is just the expenses for the event… I have no idea how much it made to hedge the expenses. $10 million is chump change… what can you do with $10 million? You could give 10,000 people $1000. Or 10 million people $1. $10 million isn’t a relevant topic when talking about stimulating the friggin American economy. This is small fish B.S.
The most humorous part is the fake disgust of lawmakers in Washington:

“This behavior demonstrates extraordinary levels of irresponsibility and arrogance,” wrote Frank

Yes, that’s right. Barney Fwank [sic] is criticizing someone for irresponsibility and arrogance. Reminds me of an old saying involving a pot and a kettle. That’s like Bill Clinton criticizing John Edwards for cheating on his wife. John Kerry will introduce a bill to prevent “extravagant spending practices of U.S. banks.”

You morons out there that constantly criticize big business for its behavior need to start directing your anger at big government. Politicians like Barney Fwank and John Kerry ROUTINELY spend irresponsibly, arrogantly, and extravagantly. I think Frank should be charged with sedition. He’s a disgusting, dishonest excuse for an American.

I find this quote to be representative of illogical liberalism…from a Thomas Friedman op-ed:
“I wake up every morning hoping to read this story: “President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David. ‘We will not come down from the mountain until we have forged a common, transparent strategy for getting us out of this banking crisis,’ the president said, as he boarded his helicopter.” ”

Sounds nice, right? Read it more carefully… Friedman says every day he hopes Obama will announce something. He hopes Obama announces that he’s gonna get a bunch of people together and “forge” a strategy. Kumbayah nonsense.
Mr. Friedman, your time would better be spent hoping that you wake up one morning to the announcement that the banking crisis is OVER. Not being worked on. Not being worried about. OVER. SOLVED. Liberals are so obsessed with the appearance of trying to do good things. Forget that! GET IT DONE. I’m sure Mr. Friedman does look forward to the crisis being over, but he decided to write that he hopes Obama will try, instead of do.
Me personally, I wake up every morning hoping to hear this announcement:

The government has decided to leave the financial markets alone. President Obama announced today, “It has come to my attention that I and my friends in Congress don’t know a fucking thing about economics. My fellow Americans, we are politicians: not economists. We don’t know the first fucking thing about the economy, and in all likelihood, our intervention is making the problem worse. We especially know nothing about making cars or running businesses, yet it is politically advantageous to pretend we do. Therefore, I have decided to stop meddling in things that are bigger than me or this government.”

Meet the new Obama-mobile. The New York Post reports that the new stimulus package has $300 million that will be used for purchasing a fleet of NEVs, or Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. Here is a picture. It is a friggin golf cart. This is like a punchline on the Daily Show, but unfortunately this is not a parody.

Folks, President Obama is a lot of things, but he sure as shit isn’t an expert on what kind of cars Americans want to drive. Golf carts have existed for decades, and people could have easily bought them for use in their neighborhood. Why didn’t they? Because there is virtually no demand for such a small, open vehicle.

Oh, and by the way, NEVs run on electricity, which is produced mostly by coal. You Obamaniacs need to learn more about your guy. He really does think he can fool all of the people all of the time, despite Abe’s words of wisdom.

Obama annouced on Wednesday that he is imposing a cap of $500,000 on the compensation of executives at companies receiving significant taxpayer assistance. “Public outrage over compensation has been building since October” says Bloomberg.com.

Barack, let me explain something to you.

If you limit the pay of CEOs at a select few companies, you won’t get any CEOs applying for the job.

Sure, when you fill the job, that person will be a CEO, but that person isn’t really a CEO, because CEOs get millions, tens of millions, or more for their work. All the good CEOs will work elsewhere, and your cheap CEO will do a cheap job. Maybe we should thank you for doing socialist experiments instead of a complete overhaul of the country.

Still mad at CEOs? Ok, how about pro athletes and Hollywood actors. They make income comparable or substantially more than many of the CEOs you liberals hate so much. Let’s cap the amount of money Will Smith can make on his next movie. I guess since the tax breaks for movie-makers was stripped from the pork-ulus bill, we won’t cap salaries in Hollywood. Just CEOs cuz ignorant people are mad.

When you get mad at someone else for making money for doing a job, you are a jealous, insolent child. You don’t have the slightest clue what a CEOs pay is. A CEO should be paid what a company is willing to pay them. That is freedom. Picking a number like $500,000 is evidence that Barack Obama likes to put fuel on the class-envy fire. Idiotic.

When you lie all day, every day, it can be hard to keep track of your lies.

House Speaker Pelosi publicly stated that “every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”

500 million per month in a country of 300 million. We are in deep trouble folks. Even when Fox’s Chris Wallace asked if she meant 500,000, her response makes you want to bang your head against a wall:

“What did I say, million?” asked Pelosi, adding that it “feels like 500 million.”

Really Nancy? Does it FEEEEEEL like 500 million? Gosh, I’ll bet if we don’t pass global-warming legislation, the earth temperature will go up 500 degrees per month. Or maybe it just “feels” like 500 degrees. Nancy Pelosi “feels” like a moron.

Liberals don’t concern themselves with the truth. Why jump over the hurdle of due diligence when you can just pull numbers out of nowhere and cite them so assertively? Its so much easier. Take that example and multiply it by a couple times a day per congressperson, Republican and Democrat, and try to go to sleep tonight.

Folks, Nancy Pelosi ain’t some obscure moron. She’s the speaker of the friggin house. If someone offs President Obama and VP Joe Biden, she becomes President. In her first 100 hours, I’m sure she’ll be so effective, it’ll feel like 500 trillion people screaming.

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