Contrast that with how the government would react if you decided to stop paying taxes because you don’t like the services it offers and provides in return. Agents of the government would descend upon you and threaten fines and imprisonment – resorting to physical assault if necessary – if you didn’t obey.
The businesses we created have employed hundreds of thousands of Americans. We have paid tens of billions of dollars in wages and contributed hundreds of billions to U.S. gross domestic product, and made the tens of millions of Americans who use our products and services better off. The Home Depot lowered hardware prices across the country.
Brazil’s fiscal incontinence is legendary. The number of civil servants grew by 60% between 1995 and 2016, to 12m. Since public-sector workers cannot be fired or have their pay cut, they become a permanent expense once hired. Nearly 80% of government spending in Brazil goes on salaries and pensions. “Instead of a state that serves the public, you have a state that serves the state.”
Trump talks “GO-talk” when he makes speeches about the jobs that have been lost to globalist trade policies, and when he talks about bringing manufacturing back to the USA. The globalists did great harm to the US economy by assuming that production could be shifted to low-cost labor countries while the American consumer took care of global consumption.
When I assess President Trump’s economic policy, I generally give the highest grade to his tax policy. But as I pointed out in this interview from last year, there’s also been some progress on regulatory policy, even if only in that the avalanche of red tape we were getting under Bush and Obama has abated. […]
Given the belief that consumption is the source of output, it’s only natural that to believe government waste during the Trump years would be the cause of growth. Implicit is that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are better allocators of precious resources than are Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. That’s not serious.
The phenomenal performance of innovation through businesses has not only been present in the transportation market but also in everything from faster internet to new varieties of beer, new medicines, and better delivery services. All of these things have been incentivized through the profit motive and made possible through the investment of part of that profit into R&D.
Imagine the costs and inconvenience we’d suffer if people were generally dishonest and we couldn’t trust anyone. We would have to lug around measuring instruments to ensure, for example, that it was ten gallons of gas and one pound of steak we purchased.
As economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
To make a judgment that the citizens should prefer clean energy and its cost structure requires an objective assessment of what they should be valuing. Such judgments are often made by experts, intellectuals, scientists, bureaucrats, and commentators. Citizens’ perception of value is entirely subjective.
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