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Back to Quack Off
Quack Off
by
Free
Market Duck
If Idaho "needs" more nurses, let supply and demand in the free market
automatically solve the "problem"
(Nov 19, 2006)
Boise, ID – Why is it that every time the politicians, educators, and
socialist cheerleaders down at the Idaho Statesman claim we have a shortage
of some commodity, their solution is for the government to intervene into
the free market? One would think these people never heard of private
enterprise, free market pricing, competition, and supply and demand.
Even if it is true that Idaho has a shortage of nurses, the assumption that
the problem is due to a lack of enough University Nursing programs in Idaho
is specious. Maybe the shortage is due to low wages for nurses in
Idaho. Maybe there is no real shortage.
Regardless of whether there is a shortage, supply will dynamically catch up
to demand in a free market when the right price is attained. That's
what's great about a free market, it automatically manages trillions of
economic decisions involving supply and demand and prices without Big
Brother government intervention. In fact, intervention by Big Brother
will skew, corrupt, and cause future unintended consequences, including
ramifications exactly opposite to those intended.
In
addition,
it is ridiculous to assume that all professional positions for all companies
in Idaho, from engineers to physicists to software programmers to doctors,
must come from Idaho's universities. People move to and from Idaho for
all kinds of reasons. Salaries, weather, camping, hunting, river
rafting, and a myriad of other priorities, not just where you attended
university, determine where people choose to live. Just because you receive a nursing
degree from BSU does not mean that you will remain in Idaho to practice
nursing -- especially if wages are 30% higher in California and you like
surfing.
Have our politicians and socialist cheerleaders down at the Idaho Statesman
ever thought that maybe Idaho is too small, population-wise, to provide
enough tax money to build the university capacity for every professional
degree possible and that it makes more sense to let other bigger states
provide university education while Idaho lures nurses and other
professionals to work here with HIGHER WAGES that can be offered by NOT
taxing Idahoans to death for more and more never ending public education?
In free market economics, this is called Division of Labor and it is very
very efficient. Grow, build, and manufacture commodities where it is
cheapest to do so and import them via free trade exchanges. In short,
Idaho does not have to physically produce every commodity it needs,
including nurses, in order to obtain that commodity. Otherwise, we
should be creating huge greenhouses to grow our own bananas and coffee
plantations in Idaho.
Since this basic economic reasoning for Division of Labor is true for nurses
and all other economic commodities, then the same economic arguments hold
for NOT expending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new Community
College system in Idaho on the absurd premise that Idaho businesses can only
thrive if they have home-grown grads as employees. In fact, it could
backfire. What if Idaho taxed itself to death to expand nursing
programs and the nurses all dashed off to California, Montana, and New York
for higher salaries, smoother surf boards, and the bright lights of Broadway
shows?
The real reasons that Idaho politicians and the socialist cheerleaders down
at the Idaho Statesman continually push for more and more taxes and spending
for nursing programs and new Community College systems, more governmental
intervention into the free market, are: (1) ignorance about basic
economics on the part of the socialist Statesman editors and, (2) political
power and free cookies for special interest groups by Idaho's politicians.
-- FM Duck
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