Postindustrial economies create a far more challenging path to upward mobility than the manufacturing economy of the 1930’s. Education is now the most likely route to middle-class comfort and relative stability. The children of low-skilled immigrants, particularly Latinos, are struggling. Instead of climbing the income ladder, they are slipping down.
The message I had expected to be controversial, was old hat to the industry folks. But it was beside the point, because recycling was for them a moral imperative. Once you begin to think of recycling as a symbol of religious devotion rather than a pragmatic solution to environmental problems, the whole thing makes more sense.
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.
Fill out the form below to get the CFI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of CFI's 10-Point Manifesto for Individualism
Join the CFI Mailing List using the form below to recieve a free Sample Chapter of Hunter Hastings' The Interconnected Individualism
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of Poetic Justice Warrior Society: Freedom's Radicals
The Center for Individualism is a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization with a mission to promote Individualism in America. All work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than CFI. Learn More…