The True Means of Production

Socialists like to proclaim that the workers are the means of production, and therefore should own all of its benefits.

But the factory worker is, in fact, the LEAST of the elements that goes into the production of wealth:

• The inventor’s role is indispensable.
  Without him, there is nothing to make.
• The entrepreneur, who recognizes the value of the invention and promotes its production, is almost as important.
  Without him, the invention is a dead end.
• While anyone can invest, those who do are unique among the society in taking a risk and enabling the production.
  Without them, there are no resources for making it.
• Without the facilitation of the management, everything would still fall on its face. Only some people are capable of organizing with any competence.
  Without this, people end up running in circles.
• The engineers, who may not know science, but figure out how to produce things efficiently, have a relatively rare skill.
  Without them, nothing can be built effectively.
• After all of that, the workers are little more than human cogs. Almost anyone can be trained into a production worker’s role…a fact that is exploited by the oppressive union monopolies, who TREAT them like interchangeable numbers.

Laborers can be proud of how they accomplish their otherwise-interchangeable role, and of their potential to move beyond their basic position. They have a right to the ambition of moving up into a less disposable role…but to pretend they are the “means of production” is fraudulent.

Corporations are Socialism

It's amazing how many things government intervention causes, and then blames on economic freedom

When people discover Stop Blaming Capitalism for Socialism’s Failures, or its Facebook Group, some are astonished at the list of problems government intervention has caused, them blamed on freedom of choice.

What often surprises them the most is that it includes the modern corporation.

We’re taught, in socialized education anyway, that corporations are an icon of everything wrong with capitalism.

The problem is that everything that makes a modern corporation has been imposed on us by government laws and force…and that’s socialism.

In fact, you can’t anything like the modern “public corporation”, in a free market.

Why could British Petroleum take risks that no privately owned company would dare? Because it’s effectively nationalized, as a Public Corporation. No owners or managers will be held accountable for the oil spill, not even under Obama’s abrogation of Rule of Law. Likewise any managers or owners in a company selling products it secretly knows are harmful, or fraudulent.

This is why you hear ads on the radio, by The Company Corporation, saying that you should incorporate your business, or to avoid liability for any harm you cause.

In a free market, there would be no way to simply renounce your liability for actions you take, or a company you own.

This can only be done by government fiat.

The very reason that Liberal Democrats pushed for the creation of corporate law, in the US, was to nationalize industries that they could not openly take over.

Since they couldn’t get people to accept an unaccountable People’s Automaking Bureau like you could in China, they simply ensured that existing automakers would become unaccountable bureaucracies owned by People.

In order to get the special treatment of a public corporation, a company must become OWNED by “the public”:

It is not allowed to simply write a custom document of ownership and sell stock to the public, to raise millions in capital. Instead, the company must follow a massive set of regulations, becoming in effect a mini-government.  In return for selling out their property rights, its owners and management become exempt from the consequences and liability for their actions, just like government bureaucrats.

Companies that do this, of course, have an unfair edge over companies that do not…so they come to dominate an industry, for example automaking.

And thus, the automaking industry comes to be owned by The People, through a quasi-governmental agency.

Impure, adulterated socialism, called Market Socialism…but socialism nonetheless.

The Double Thank-You of Capitalism

John Stossel is correct, when he points out that politics and socialism are Zero Sum Games, where wealth is taken by force and nothing gained, while the free market is a Win-Win Game, where in any transaction both sides feel they have gained, not lost.

You thank the clerk, and he thanks you…because he wanted the money more than the product, and you wanted the product more than the money.

The Anti-Jobs Bill: Tax Breaks for Welfare Jobs

If government could "create" jobs, it could simply pay half of the unemployed to dig holes, and the other half to fill them in, and we'd have full employment.

Drug mega-giant Pfizer recently dealt with its bloated payroll in St Louis, Missouri, by laying off over 600 employees.

It had hired them in order to gain reduced tax punishment from the local government. It was given a “break” of almost seven million dollars on the massive property tax, in return for hiring over one thousand employees…apparently more than it would otherwise have chosen to hire, or else the “break” would have been a meaningless loss of revenue for a money-strapped government.

Maintaining make-work welfare jobs, of course, was just a needless burden on the company. Eventually, such government coercion contributed enough to its woes that Pfizer actually found it necessary to lay off over half of its staff. In all likelihood, this backlash resulted in fewer jobs left-over than if it hadn’t over-hired to begin with.

When the government “encourages” hiring, it creates an employment bubble, just like when it encouraged home ownership, it created a housing bubble. When the bubble bursts, the net result is more harm than good, just as with housing.

Government “stimulating jobs” causes even more job loss, in the long run.

And yet Congress is about to pass a “jobs bill” that involves tax breaks for make-work hiring. Companies will be pushed to employ people they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to do, essentially being forced to live beyond their means. In the long run, as with the housing boom and with Pfizer, this will backfire and cause MORE unemployment.

When the government “creates” a job, it’s just engaging in another form of welfare. A job “created” where one wasn’t actually needed has no honor, and causes harm. It is a burden on society…one that will come back to haunt, just the way the stimulus spending, bailouts, and other government busybody behavior will do.

The way to create jobs is not to “create” them directly, any more than you make sickly person healthy by giving him cocaine to create energy. Jobs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They work because people work to create more wealth than their job pays, justifying its existence. What we need is more wealth creation, and then the jobs will come naturally. And what is stifling job creation, already, is massive government regulation and interference, including the “stimulus” spending that out-competes healthy private ventures.