Category Archives: Regulation

A Free Lunch, Or The Last Supper?

Business, Europe, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Private Property, Regulation, Welfare

Permanently tethered to the welfare state, Europeans are unwilling to make the connections between the regulatory state and steep prices, high unemployment, and a declining standard of living. It would seem obvious that the greater the cost of doing business, the less business will be done. But not to the individual who is motivated to keep the gravy train chugging along.

He wants to get that free lunch, even if it is his Last Supper.

Via John Stossel:

In Europe …workers … get “vacation do-overs”- if they are sick on vacation, they get additional paid time off to make up for it. In Spain, employers must give 24 months of severance pay after they fire someone. No wonder companies don’t hire. [Unemployment among youth there is 50 percent.]
America doesn’t have mandatory vacation time, but we still have 170,000 pages of rules.

Want to expand your business? The costs to a proprietor of adding new workers will be prohibitive, often in excess of the workers’ productivity.

In Italy, it is near impossible to fire an employee once he has been hired. If he steals and worse; the onus is on the business owner to prove his case before he can fire the offender. Bad work habits and low productivity don’t constitute cause for dismissal.

In all, a European business is better off staying small. Don’t reach for the sky. Limp along below the regulator’s radar.


MORE.

Sick-Making Hussein And His Health Care

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Government, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Not that I doubted it, but Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that their health care would go up, under ObamaCare, by about $2000-$3000 annually. Before Creep Care this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Creep Care became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, in an upbeat letter, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how they would continue to care for us under current conditions (and still stay in business).

Our plan has now altered what was once 100% coverage to a high-deductible plan with a health savings account. This could cost us up to 2000, even 3000, additional dollars a year.

The great John Stossel entertained a healthcare expert who reminded viewers for the umpteenth time that the employer mandate decrees that every employer employing more than 50 people must provide a one-size fits all government designed plan to his workers. This indeed will cost twice as much as the plans that employers currently offer.

The costs of this employer mandate are such that it’s cheaper for the owner to pay a penalty for denying coverage—all the more so when compliance may see a business go under.

Employer-mandated healthcare will add $1.75 per-hour (“every hour”) to the cost of a worker. Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires, as $1.75 per hour doesn’t much matter when you are hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high: That’s not worth it.

That ass with ears (Barack) doesn’t understand that a businessman cannot pay a worker (or fork out for him) in excess of his productivity and hope to stay in business.

Thanks to our Creep-in-chief, people who had full-time employment and insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed with no job and no insurance.

Northeast Sliding Into Third-World Status? Blame Anti-Energy Policies

Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Technology

“Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Hurricane Sandy shows why the U.S. needs to improve its energy infrastructure.”

“The issue that needs to be raised [and won’t],” says Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about the New York locality, is, “we don’t have the modern energy infrastructure that we should have. We’re operating at the brink. Every day during hot days I’d worry about the possibility of a blackout. I built 10 new generators in NY City to try and address the problem. but had I tried to build a big generator, the environmentalists would have blocked it. We don’t build nuclear power-plants, we don’t expand transmission lines, we don’t put in modern generators. Anytime you try, it’s a 10-15 year process of litigation. We have to modernize our infrastructure, otherwise, we’re living on the brink. Something goes wrong and it’s 10, 5, 4 days to come back.”

“The opposition to [modernizing] projects, especially in the northeast, is systemic. You have to undergo 10-15 years of litigation to put in a new pipeline”

[SNIP]

Washington State is outside the orbits of power, so you hear nothing much about our annual battles with nature and regulation. But as “Dispatch from Third-World Washington State” detailed, early this year, we endure devastating power failures almost annually. The main problem in our state are regulations that prevent the maintenance of a tree-free grid and power lines.

Mayor GIULIANI repeated these important points on the Kudlow Report, implicating Obama’s policies of,

“absolutely just say[in] no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we’re having such a tough time recovering. … this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven’t rebuilt it, not because we don’t have the money to do it, we haven’t rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.”

KUDLOW: But that’s what Bloomy is saying. I don’t mean to cut. That’s what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we’re going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It’s anti-growth. And New York City doesn’t need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.

Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy. … I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where–and this is not just true of New York, it’s true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn’t exist because we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years. … We haven’t expanded transmission lines, we haven’t modernized. And a lot of that is because–I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely. …”

Who Will Be Our ‘Massa’? The Mormon Or The Mulatto?

BAB's A List, Business, Debt, Democrats, Intellectual Property Rights, libertarianism, Regulation, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation, The State, War, Welfare

We all live on the “plantation”; we are all “moocher-hiddeen,” says Barely A Blog contributor, Myron Pauli.

Who Will Be Our ‘Massa’? The Mormon Or The Mulatto?
By Myron Pauli

Unless you are hiding in the Unabomber’s Montana shack and consuming rabbits and berries, we all give to and take from the government. However, some give more than they take and some take more than they give.

Just how large is the sector that depends upon government?

Children and the elderly have become virtual wards of the state – so that 50% already falls into the “moocher-hiddeen” (to use an Islamic term!). That leaves the “working age population” of roughly 25 to 65 supporting the rest. Of course, if “Joe the Plumber” has kids or elderly parents, then the government acts as a conduit from him to his extended family. Even addressing just those working age people with neither children nor parents – are they the ones who pay more than they receive? Maybe.

Remove government employees and the government contractors from that. Then you have the governmental corporations such as Fannie Mae and academia who are funded via government largesse. And what to make of GM, Chrysler, the bailed-out-financial sector, etc., kept afloat by government? Public utilities are governmentally regulated monopolies. Automobile Dealers function only thanks to governmentally legislated monopoly. Pharmaceutical firms, publishers, and the entertainment industry function on patents and copyright for their financial status. Sectors in agribusiness, health care, insurance, energy, and transportation (Amtrak!) are so heavily regulated that those employees are de-facto governmental workers even if there is a semblance of profit. The less said about lawyers and lobbyists, the better!

Truly private workers such as waiters, plumbers, and preachers are quite independent of government; but in locations like metropolitan Washington DC, nearly all their customers come out of the “oink sectors.” Even worse is that when Americans invest their money, the Roth’s, IRA’s, 401k’s, 529’s, HSA’s, “cafeteria plans” are so controlled by governmental rules that one wonders who owns the money – you or the government – or is that even a distinction?

The sad and pathetic truth is that we are all living on a large plantation with a quadrennial democratically elected “Massa” and a bureaucracy of overseers. It is to the credit of racial and religious tolerance that we can have a Mormon vs. mulatto fighting for the job of “Massa”.

The fact is that government has entangled itself from cradle to grave like a metastasizing cancer. Rhetorical flourishes aside, the only government programs downsized in the last 40 years was transportation deregulation under Carter and welfare reform under Clinton (nothing eliminated under Republican presidents), and the budget was in near-balance (ignoring raids on the “Social Security Trust Fund!”) by Clinton. I mean, this not as an endorsement of the unabashed big government Obama but merely to point out that the odds of Romney downsizing the Federal Government is smaller than the odds that the Chinese politburo will make Yom Kippur a Chinese holiday!

So when “Tea Party Conservatives” start bitching about Obama endangering their Medicare, it is because the addiction to government is nearly universal. Some of us on the plantation may be more productive than others, but we all live under the rules and, regrettably, most inhabitants (or inmates) generally support the system.

A few libertarian “nutcases” like Paul or Johnson may point the other way, but even most billionaires are as happy to have the Warfare-Welfare state as the poor. Who do you think pays for the TV commercials and the spin doctors and the political “think tanks” – Christian coalminers and Hispanic gardeners, or guys named Koch, Adelson, Soros, and Spielberg?

Nothing short of a major non-violent libertarian revolution” (Constitutional restoration) is needed – but until then, we can all stick our hand out for our share of the public gruel.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.