The Elephant in your Back Yard

Would you be surprised to discover an elephant in your back yard?  And what if, on discovering it, you learned it had been there for several years?

I imagine your reaction might be similar to what I felt after I finished reading a short publication I received a couple of days back entitled Hack Your Showerhead: Ten Ways to Get Big Government Out of Your Home.


What I found most amazing was the variety of ways in which government regulations affects us and our lives without our even being aware of it.  The unfortunate thing about this is that we often have a tendency to blame other the wrong people for the consequences of these regulations.

One of the ten ways that Jeffery Tucker, the author of this article, sees government regulations affecting us is in the shorter life that many --maybe most-- electric appliances have today, in comparison to the way they were a few years back.

I'm sure you've heard the complaint: "They just don't make [insert name of appliance] like they used to!" and then the complainant goes on to blame the greedy manufacturers for cutting down on the quality presumably in the interests of making more profit.

As Tucker sees it, these manufacturers are under the pressure of government pressures and regulations to implement a series of changes to their products, some of which actually make them perform worse than they did before without adding any material benefit to the end user.  So, in order to comply with the government presser so that they can stay in business, they are forced to substitute parts and materials that will meet the government requirements and yet will not increase the price beyond what their customers are prepared to pay.   All too often the consequence of this is to use cheaper parts which will wear out faster than the older ones.

Tucker explains what happened to air conditioners:

Manufacturers are permitted to make units that use only so much electrical power. They must choose among the features in which to allocate this energy ceiling. The lighter, “more efficient” parts tend to break more easily than they once did. This means that you have to replace the units more often than you did in the past. 

And that's just air conditioners.

Adding Tucker's article to my own observations over the years I have started to wonder how many of all the problems we face in the world today, ranging from wide spread diseases, to aberrant social psychopaths, to threats of depleted resources, to animals in danger of extinction, to hunger, to wars, etc. could be traced back to government interference, intervention or stimulation of some sort or the other, regardless of how well intentioned it may have been.

This suspicion is not because I believe that everybody in government has some evil intention to make the world into a living hell for us, but rather that people, both those who are in the government and those to look to the government to solve problems have too much faith in the ability of these people to find solutions.

The people in government are not superhuman before they go to work for the government, nor do they become endowed with any special abilities once they enter the government.  Why then, do we, and they believe that they can solve problems which supposedly couldn't be solved before the government became involved?

So if you discover you have an elephant which you don't want in your garden, do you then look around for another elephant to deal with it, or is it better to consider other alternatives such as finding a new place to plant your garden, start planting things which elephants don't like, or some more imaginative option?

Calling spades spades

To anyone who knows me it would not come as a surprise that I believe in the precepts of free-market capitalism (FMC).

T hat being said, it is also vital to recognize that I do not condone any and all actions that are taken or promoted under the banner of FMC. I also feel it is important to take into account the fact that there has never—ever—been a country which has been a 100% pure FMC economy.

To my recollection the USA, even at it’s very inception, was a mixture and it has moved more and more away from FMC every year even though it is popularly held up to be the exemplary model of FMC.  Perhaps, it is still the most free of all the countries today—although there may be much reason to doubt that—it is still far from a pure FMC and should, in reality, be called something else.

With this background I wish to express some doubts that I’ve had in recent times which grow out of the increasing concerns—both in number and loudness—that I’ve been hearing about the movement of the US towards a socialistic or communistic economy.

The crux of my concern is the connection which is always shown between the horrible actions of major communistic movements in the past in terms of genocide and suffering.

The questions which I am asking is what is there in socialism or communism that is inherently violent, or that makes a nation which adopts these systems to start killing off people on a large scale.

Yes, we can look at a large sampling of nations and name leaders like Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, etc and show that under them millions of people perished.  I’m not arguing about these facts … but the thing that I am asking is whether it is the system that is at fault, or the person or people who were flawed.

From the evidence I’ve seen I have little doubt that the most efficient way for an economy to operate is the FMC model, but that, in itself, doesn’t make the other systems inherently evil, just as travelling in an ox cart is slower than a bicycle, comparing the two needs to be done on the basis of what you wish to achieve and not on the personalities of the famous people who have used ox carts or bicycles.

What this point of view raises is another issue which is possibly more vital to our future than the exact mixture of economic systems which we use:  the issue is that some individuals are possibly much more inclined to abuse power than others.

With this in mind, then we need to concern ourselves with two points:  1) Identifying who are most likely to abuse power and 2) Limiting the power which they can have so as to limit the damage which they can do.

Technorati Tags: economics,USA,communism,socialism,free market

Global Warming, Population growth, and Petroleum Reserves

YouTube - The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8)

This professor has some impeccable math, and a very clear explanation of how it can be applied. I highly recommend it, however I do not agree with his logic. He doesn't take into account the fact that innumerable situations in which this kind of exponential growth have never occurred, that something -- usually completely unexpected -- have happened to prevent the disaster from culminating.

This does not excuse us from acting sensibly in dealing with issues which face us either now or in the future. Using the issue of global warming, as an example, whether or not you agree that it is a real problem, it does not make sense to continue to pollute our environment with abandon.