Amid the din of economic nonsense being bandied about since the collapse of the housing bubble and the steep ramping up of our national debt, there has been the persistent refrain that Washington should be run more like a business. If only more business people were in charge to wield their business acumen, we would have this country in shape in no time. But is that a good solution?
Businesses seek primarily to increase their revenues and profits. Government revenue depends on taxes. Government accumulates tax money by squeezing it out of people’s productive earnings with threats of audits, fines and imprisonment. Our government already collects roughly $2.1 trillion annually from the productive taxpayers of America. We hardly need to increase our federal government’s revenues like a private business!
Businesses sell products or services to voluntary buyers, always looking to increase their market share as much as possible. But what is the federal government’s product or service? Rules, regulations, bureaucracy, paperwork, red tape, hoops to jump through, uneven protection and security from people with guns, coercion and compliance through force and confiscation of assets, militarism instead of national defense, and of course a vast welfare state. Do we need more of these government services? Hardly. In fact, we have far too many of these destructive things already.
What we need is more freedom. Freedom is the simple ability of people to live their lives as they see fit without government coercion, provided they do not initiate force or fraud against others. What we really need is a less coercive government, not more revenues.
Washington needs to stop seeing itself as a growth industry, and realize that the true function of government is to protect liberty. Washington certainly has expanded and grown and accumulated a great deal of the people’s capital for itself, but this has been at the expense of our nation’s prosperity. This trend needs to be reversed.
We don’t need yet another “jobs” bill to supposedly put the American people back to work. Politicians need to realize that, aside from outright hiring some 14 million people, government does not create jobs. The only thing government does is hinder job creation by getting in the way and consuming otherwise private resources. Therefore, the most useful thing government can do for unemployment is to “liquidate” much of what government does in the first place.
One plain example is our tax policy that encourages U.S. corporations to accumulate foreign earnings abroad rather than repatriate such earnings. Currently there is over $1 trillion of capital that companies are keeping overseas because of the 35% tax charged for bringing it back to the US. Our government literally is pushing capital and jobs overseas that could be used to hire an estimated 2.5 million people here at home.
Businesses create jobs. Government is not a business. We don’t need more stimulus or phony jobs bills. We don’t need more revenue – $2 trillion is plenty to fund the federal government annually. What we do need is a wholesale rejection of government as a central economic planner.
Dr. Ron Paul. More than 4,000 babies delivered. A man of faith, committed to protecting life.
Ron Paul: This whole notion of life not being valuable just is something I was never able to accept.
I happened to walk into an operating room where they were doing an abortion on a late pregnancy. They lifted out a small baby that was able to cry and breathe, and they put it in a little bucket and put it in a corner of the room, and pretended it wasn’t there.
I walked down the hallway and a baby was born early, slightly bigger than the baby they just put in the bucket, they wanted to save this baby. So they might have had ten doctors in there doing everything conceivable.
Who are we to decide that we pick and throw one away and pick up and struggle to save the other ones? Unless we resolve this and understand that life is precious and we must protect life, we can’t protect liberty.
“[T]he message of freedom is important,” was one of the first things Texas Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul said to me during my private interview with him on Sept. 27. Nicknamed by many as the “Modern Thomas Jefferson,” he has spent more than two decades in Congress doing his best to adhere to the limitations placed on the federal government by the Constitution. But the congressman quickly dismisses any credit for his positions, insisting that he’s just following the rules and the principles of the founders.
A licensed ob-gyn and former captain and flight surgeon in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, Dr. Paul is regarded as the most consistent voter in the House of Representatives. That sounds like it might be campaign nonsense, but many things stand out about Paul that lend credibility to the hype: He has never voted to raise taxes, for an unbalanced budget, to raise congressional pay and has never taken a government-paid junket.
Paul has voted against the Patriot Act, against the Iraq War, against federal regulation of the Internet, and against increasing the powers of the executive branch. Paul does not even participate in the congressional pension plan, and he returns a portion of his annual budget to the U.S. Treasury each year. Consistent in his private life too, he’s been married to wife Carol for 54 years.
Herman Cain: “The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why people think we’re going to learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. Now I no longer serve on the board of the Federal Reserve [...] but people who say “we gotta audit the Fed because we don’t know enough about it,” well, here’s the advice I’ve given to people: Call them up! And ask them! If you can stop by and have one of their PR people or one of their public relations people explain to you how the Federal Reserve operates. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don’t know enough about it.”
Bloomberg Television and The Washington Post, in partnership with WBIN-TV and host Dartmouth College, presented the first debate of the 2012 campaign focused exclusively on the economy, debt, taxes, trade and jobs. Moderator Charlie Rose was joined by Washington Post political correspondent Karen Tumulty and Bloomberg White House correspondent Julianna Goldman.
Participants: Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Fmr. Regional Federal Reserve Chairman Herman Cain, Fmr Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Fmr Massachussets Governor Mitt Romney, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Fmr Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Fmr Utah Governor Jon Huntsman.
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