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by Free Market Duck

Is Micron Whining for Corporate Welfare or Demanding Free Market Capitalism?

   What is the proper free market relationship between business and government?

   Let's review a couple of fundamentals that both businessmen and legislators seem to have forgotten:

1. Corporations are not formed to produce jobs or health insurance or education or housing for the public.  They are not welfare bureaus.  They are free market traders who expect to be treated fairly in a free market.
    

2. Corporations are formed to take a risk, move capital to meet demand, and hopefully earn profits for their investors by producing time and labor saving services or commodities for consumers in mutually agreed upon exchanges.
    

3. The state was not formed to play the role of economic Big Brother.  The state was formed by free people to protect their individual rights obtained from Nature, to protect them from infringements by others, especially the government.  The function of a limited constitutional government is to provide objective justice in a free market, not to participate as a player dispensing corporate or blue-collar welfare.

   Business is best left to business.  Justice is best left to an objective state. Those businesses who seek special government protection from competition, whether in the form of monetary subsidies or laws against their competitors, are not free marketeers but rather socialist sycophants of the state.

   If Micron is demanding the reduction or elimination of various Idaho taxes for ALL businesses large and small, on free market principles, then I support Micron's proposal.  If, however, Micron is simply groveling for special corporate welfare in Idaho, then I do not support its special legislation.

   Those politicians who claim that a reduction in Idaho taxes foils their statist plans for continued big government spending should re-think their position.  The people do not become wealthy or safe or secure or more intelligent or more healthy because of government-mandated wealth redistribution programs.  They, in fact, become impoverished.  The people -- especially the poorest -- reap great benefits by receiving products and services made possible by free marketeers risking their own capital in a true free market.  The only function of the state is to protect individual rights to freely exchange ideas, commodities and services -- including education, health care, and “social security” (which are not exempt from free market principles and should be totally privatized).  The real question is not how much should the state allow free marketeers to think, to create, to produce, to retain, to freely exchange or to exist.  The real question is, by what right does the state interfere in the business of free market corporations and individuals who are freely exchanging in a voluntary market?

   It is a fallacy to believe that businesses exist for state taxes.  They do not and should not.  Businesses are individual entities that exist for themselves.  Free market consumers should decide the fate of corporations, not state politicians.  Those who continually argue the socialist pablum of the alleged rights of state welfare recipients -- whether it be for statist education, statist health care, or statist blue-collar welfare or statist corporate welfare -- should re-read Atlas Shrugged and hope the men and women of ideas, the thinkers, the true creators of wealth don’t figure it out and go on strike.

   Let me remind Idaho politicians that future corporations -- and I happen to know of one that is a multi-quadrillion dollar, privately-financed, international energy company -- are watching to determine whether Idaho is a free market state or a socialist corporate welfare state.  Laissez-faire, legislators.  Long term free trade for all, not just for Micron and Albertsons.

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