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by Free Market Duck

Idaho Statesman pushes Fascist Business Model as “Vision for the Valley”
(Sep 8, 2008)

The truth is, the state of Idaho – i.e., the government -- is the single largest employer in Idaho.  So much for the Idaho Statesman’s absurd proclamation that Idaho’s labor market has operated over the last two decades with little intervention from the government.  Idaho’s labor market IS the government.

Boise, ID – Whoa, girl friends, pour yourself another hot cup of Rocket Java and let’s briefly analyze the Idaho Statesman’s recent socialist Op Ed from Tuesday, August 26, 2008, entitled:  “Growing Idaho’s Economy:  The complacency must end; invest in job creation.”

   There are so many false assumptions and economic sophisms regarding how the Statesman editors’ proposed Fascist Business Model would work regarding “job growth,” it is difficult to know where to begin.  Let’s start with their first erroneous statement and work from there.

   Absurd statement # 1:  “Idaho’s labor market has flourished for two decades, with little intervention from state government.”

   The Truth:  Cities, Counties, the Idaho State Legislature, the Executive Branch, and over 140 separate bureaus, departments, commissions, committees, and Urban Renewal Agencies, many of whose sole function is to intervene into Idaho’s economy, have been busy taxing the crap out of Idahoans or granting special interest tax breaks for corporations and other groups as if there was no tomorrow – oftentimes pulling off unconstitutional end runs around the Idaho Constitution to spend taxpayer money without a required 2/3 majority vote of the voters.  In at least one highly publicized case, the Ada County Courthouse fiasco in which the Commissioners and a group of lawyers, Supreme Court Justices, and local politicians openly violated the Idaho Constitution by creating a fake corporation that pretended to purchase and then lease the proposed courthouse land to the Ada County Commissioners, illegally going into multi-year debt, the Idaho Statesman’s main reporter/columnist cheered them on.  As the book, Boise’s Watergate showed, this initial infringement – a huge governmental intervention -- was the financial trigger that instigated a $136 million University Place fiasco which resulted in one of the biggest financial scams in Boise’s, and the University of Idaho’s, recent history.  Everybody from ex Gov Kempthorne through the state legislators, lobbyists, U of I Administrators, and a private development corporation participated in this scam.  Tax breaks for corporations such as Albertson’s and Micron have not only not done anything to help Idaho’s labor market, they have, in fact, worsened Idaho’s labor market as major corporations are disappearing from Idaho like jackrabbits in a brush fire including Albertson’s, Morrison-Knudsen, Boise Cascade, Micron, GWI, and now Hewlett-Packard.  The problem is not complacency or lack of government intervention into the job market, or the market at large, but rather too much government intervention into what’s left of the free market.  The truth is, the state of Idaho – i.e., the government -- is the single largest employer in Idaho.  So much for the Idaho Statesman’s absurd proclamation that Idaho’s labor market has operated over the last two decades with little intervention from the government.  Idaho’s labor market IS the government.

   Absurd statement # 2:  ”Now it’s time for a new [?? New ??] strategy that is more proactive, and in line with the competition from other states.  It’s time for Idaho [as a government entity] to invest in promoting high tech and in growing its own work force.  Idaho can no longer assume job growth as a given.”

   The truth:  Government intervention is not a new strategy.  It’s an old strategy called: the Fascist Business Model.  Another name for it is:  socialism, or syndicalism, or communism, or fascism, or the oxymoronic term by Keynesian socialists called “state capitalism.”  All of these ideas are bankrupt variations on the theme of a central Big Government usurping individual rights in a vain attempt to “manage” – another oxymoronic statement – the free market.  If the government “manages” it, it isn’t free.  Implicit in the Idaho Statesman’s basic assumption is that job growth per se is a good economic idea.  Buzz, wrong!

   Let’s rethink the idea that job growth per se is good.  In many cases, for a given geographical location, job growth may be bad.  If one lives in a high desert location such as Boise, Idaho, the availability of water can be a limiting factor for job growth.  Another limiting factor might be developable real estate.  A third show stopper is:  what is the psychological effect of cramming too many people into too small a space for living, working, and playing?  So, job growth must be put into perspective for many other reasons besides what the Left Liberal Idaho Statesman is mostly concerned about, namely, increasing the physical population of workers in order to obtain more tax money for its favorite Fascist Business Model programs such as detox centers, more state education, more highways, and more Big Brother government telling us how to spend our money.

   So the Idaho Statesman editors make a huge error by assuming that job growth per se is “good.”  It is not axiomatically good or bad but rather depends on many other variables such as, already stated above, a finite amount of available water in a high desert area and other parameters.  The idea of job growth itself in pure economic theory also cannot be defined automatically as “good.”  Consider how the job market in an evenly rotating economy (trying to reach equilibrium but never does, and is not supposed to) actually functions without government intervention.

    First, there is not a finite amount of wealth or tangible capital goods in the market.  Economics is not a zero-sum game of dividing up a finite amount of wealth equally to everybody in the market.  Also, legitimately earned wealth is owned by individuals, not by a collective Borg.  Individual rights include private property rights.  The state of Idaho does not own your house or car or wallet.  You do.

   Wealth is, in fact, continually created only by transforming ideas into time and labor-saving devices, such as electric pumps, computers, vehicles, medical equipment, etc.  Note that when labor is saved by, say, inventing a water pump that takes the place of 100 water carriers, those 100 water carriers can then move on to perform or transform or invent or implement other ideas into more time and labor-saving devices – restrictive labor unions notwithstanding -- and thus a snowball effect of capital wealth accumulation occurs that benefits EVERYBODY in the market from the lowest laborer to the richest entrepreneur.  The poorest people benefit the most, relatively, as accumulated capital wealth drags them up from relative poverty to (1) more leisure time, i.e., less working hours per day and (2) more individual wealth in terms of all goods and services per capita such as health care, home appliances, etc.  It is only when the government intervenes into the free market that goods and services -- such as our current high cost of health care -- skyrockets.

   Note, however, that in a true free market capitalist society, job growth – i.e., the number of hours that workers must work to produce a given amount of capital wealth -- can DECREASE while wealth INCREASEs.  Clean your eyeballs and re-read this statement again:

   It is not axiomatic – in fact, it is exactly the opposite – that job growth must increase in order to increase the net wealth of a nation or a city.  What we are pointing out is that as capital wealth increases to the point of essentially satiating the production of that which is required to sustain the basics for survival for everybody in a given society, job growth can – and it actually does in a capitalist market – taper off to be replaced by leisure time job growth or non-essential working time for more and more people.  Gaming industries, sports industries, vacation industries typically pop up in rich capitalist nations for the above reasons while Fascist Business Model societies continue to force workers into agricultural communes, state factories, or other government jobs that socialists claim are necessary to advance society.

   In fact, one could argue that the ultimate consequence of continuing wealth accumulation in a free market must necessarily, by definition, result in NO job growth or a negative job growth (with "work" becoming voluntary free or paid leisure time) as individuals do not have to exert any time or labor in order to provide the basic necessities of life.  Imagine, for example, an extraterrestrial human community on another planet in the Milky Way Galaxy in which the ET human inhabitants spend most of their time exploring, learning, playing games, and using robots to produce all of the basic necessities of life for them.  It is only in an Earth global community ruled by Keynesian economists trying to implement their Fascist Business Models that “job growth” and taxation become important to the bureaucrats and socialist ideologues with simplistic economic myths.

   Free market economies tend toward zero exchange ratios, i.e., zero market prices for basic goods and services, as they accumulate more capital, more wealth, and more leisure time.  Only in Fascist Business Model governments, in which the government continually intervenes, especially with central banks that erode the peoples’ medium of economic exchange, do market prices tend toward infinity, due to continual “legal” counterfeiting of paper money and hyperinflation of the non-backed paper money supply.  Welcome to the U.S.A. and the quasi-private Federal Reserve system.

   Given their non-understanding of even the basic concepts of free market economics, it is not surprising that the Left Liberal editors at the Idaho Statesman think that their idea of “job growth” and its concomitant taxation of more and more people for more and more government programs is the only way to increase prosperity for the masses.  It isn’t.  Our current Recession is the result of the type of thinking espoused by the editors at the Idaho Statesman.

   And that’s exactly why it’s so important that one political group does not get to replace the free market with their personal – and erroneously disastrous -- Fascist Business Model ideas.  Socialism is a recipe for economic disaster.  We suggest the Idaho Statesman should check its premises before trying to force a $50 million dollar state “job growth” program down everybody’s throat to supposedly stimulate the Idaho economy.  The economy does not need to be “stimulated” by the state.  The economy needs only individual freedom and objective law.

   The free market is not “complacency,” as the Statesman has intimated.  Nor is the free market an “accident,” as they have further stated.  The market – sans government intervention -- is the net result of trillions of subjective evaluations every day by free individuals exercising their inherent Natural Given rights under the Constitutions of Idaho and the United States, voluntarily deciding how to exchange ideas, goods, and services with each other.  The last thing we need in Idaho is more “job growth” driven by state government and more taxation.  One could make a good argument that Boise and the Treasure Valley have already reached its population limit due to parameters such as available water and livable land.

   “Job growth” as a free market phenomenon is a nonsensical issue since everybody who wants to work in a free market is not prohibited from doing so.  Only in statist Keynesian economics do terms such as “job growth,” GDP, trade surplus, trade deficits, and other Keynesian econometric terms take on their collectivist meanings created by central bankers and collectivist politicians who are busy robbing the people via “forced” currency manipulation.  Witness the cause of our current U.S. and global Recession.

   It is in this vein that the Idaho Statesmen wants to blow $50 million of taxpayer money in a bureaucratic attempt (with a High Tech Panel) to increase Idaho’s “working” population so they can tax more people for more Big Government.  It’s a never-ending vicious circle of tax and spend and tax and spend.  The Statesman even thinks, erroneously, that increasing Idaho’s education system will increase the “job growth,” which, in turn, they think will increase taxation, which will then increase revenue for even more of the same.

   But the Statesman’s definition of “job growth” is not the solution for anything in Idaho – or anywhere else -- because taxation for more government programs is not the goal.  Once again, at its basic premises, this is another moral philosophical rights issue pitting the collectivist state vs. the individual and private property rights.  In fact, with our current overpopulation as the major cause of most of Earth humans’ current problems from pollution to using up limited food supplies in our oceans to overcrowding, what Idaho really needs is a program of No Growth, not more growth. – FM Duck

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