The Fortnightly Rant for March 11, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 12, posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2011.
Nearly three million American families went into foreclosure last year. The figure would have been even higher if the foreclosure processing system weren’t jammed up due to the heavy workload. But don’t complain — at least there are jobs in the foreclosure racket. The employment rate is at nearly nine percent and that’s good news, because it had been higher for so long. Still, for every available job opening, five people are looking for work. The national economy is so shaky that a single disruption, like a kink in the flow of Libyan oil, threatens to collapse the whole house of cards.
The nation is in a perilous position, we all agree. There is, however, some debate as to why.
One view — currently dominant enough to render any others inconsequential — is that the blundering idiots in our ham-handed government spend all their time sabotaging the only true friends the American people have, namely the private sector and those inspiring people who have selflessly accepted the burden of owning it.
This understanding of the way our God-given economic system works comes to us thanks to the clear thinking and hard work of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, its friends at the Heritage Foundation, its colleagues at the Cato Institute, and various allied scholars from the Federalist Society, in league with notable thinkers attached to the American Enterprise Institute, The Club for Growth, &c., &c.
With such broad agreement across this wide array of disparate sources, it is no wonder that the nation’s news media should accept this narrative as the default analysis, as Conventional Wisdom. A heavy burden of proof would justly fall on anyone rash enough to challenge it.
Our Two-Step Plan
Yet despite the efforts of all these eminent thinkers, the nation is clearly still in trouble. Perhaps, we thought, the policies employed so far just have not been quite bold enough. Our journalistic objectivity is not so pure that we can stand to sit idly by while the nation founders. And so, humbly, we offer our own Two-Step Plan for Recovery which will unleash America’s bold and entrepreneurial spirit and break the fetters and chains which have held back our titans of industry.
1. Regulate Government
Government has been regulating private industry for too long. Since by their very natures government is evil and private enterprise is good, it stands to reason that private enterprise should regulate government — to death, if necessary.
Where private industry finds that government is stifling growth, it should have the power to close offices, agencies, and bureaucracies. Former government employees will be freed from their bondage and set loose to make their own future in the free market. After a brief period of adjusting to their liberty, they will thank us profusely.
2. Tax Nullification
Our current methods of encouraging investment through tax breaks have clearly failed us. That’s because they have been so half-hearted. Namby-pamby “encouragement” amounts to discouragement — we need robust and virile encouragement.
We need nullification — tax nullification. Now. Perhaps even retroactively.
It is common knowledge that jobs can only be created by 1) amassing a significant pool of wealth and 2) investing that wealth in such a way that it brings the highest conceivable return in the shortest possible time. Acting in even a fractionally less aggressive manner would constitute a felonious failure to fulfill one’s fiduciary duties to all the stockholders.
Obviously, taxes hinder a person’s ability to accumulate wealth. They are, therefore, perversely self-defeating. They exert a constant, disheartening drain on the spirits of America’s entrepreneurs, whose creative impulses turned all pale, wan, and sickly. They sit disconsolately on the sidelines while moths eat holes in their portfolios and the Hermès scarves of their trophy wives. That’s why today’s economy is suffering so terribly.
But all is not lost — we can revive the flagging spirits of our job-generating overlords and re-engage them in our collective struggles by cutting the tax rate for high income earners — to zero.
If you bring in a million a year or more, that’s fine — keep it. It is your money, after all.
Those of us who are too coarse to attune ourselves to the heavenly spirit of Adam Smith, we mere mortals who can envision no other way than to plod along working for a living — we owe it to those who created our jobs to pay their taxes for them.
A New Day
Once these policies are in place, we’ll see a new era of prosperity. Never mind trickle-down — from these new, Olympic-size pools of capital, mighty streams will flow — eventually. Surely once they have all the money, and pay none of the taxes, the deserving rich will be so grateful they’ll start feeling badly that the other 99 percent are left out of all the fun.
This approach to an economic revival might seem at first to be a little extreme, but it’s not. It’s really just a minor adjustment. We have been slowly inching in this direction for decades — and that has been the problem.
If only we had assumed this position thirty years ago, we would not be in our current predicament. We would all be living in an economic Lake Wobegone, stretching from coast to coast but without the low expectations. Everyone would have a high income, nobody would pay any taxes, and everybody would vote straight-ticket Republican.