This is about things government does to help, or usually hurt, the economy.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2019-01-31 |
Economics, Government • [12 items]
40 Hour work week |
---|
The left thinks the Unions/Government gave us the 40 hour work week. It was standardized a decade before by Henry Ford (Capitalism). By the time we had the FSRA, it applied to less than 20% of the population. The Government created a regulation for the very few remaining, and took credit for something that was already done, and leftist media repeated the lie and the non-skeptical gobbled it up. |
Bay Bridge Boondoggle |
---|
The bay bridge is a metaphor for San Francisco. The Golden Gate was built privately and under budget for $35M ($1.2B in today's dollars), one span of the Bay Bridge needed a retrofit. It was run by the city and came in late, and over budget at $6.4B, has metallurgy issues. All show, but we could have built 4 other bridges for the price. |
Cell Phones |
---|
A good example of government helping is what the FCC did for cell phones: it delayed them by 40 years. In 1945 the Saturday Evening Post was talking about handle-talkies, which could have been done with transistor radios of the time. But while the technology was known for how to do it, as well as business plans and motivation, it took until 1982 for the FCC to allocate the spectrum to do it, and another 7 years (1989) to authorize licensing the service. |
Costs of Defensive Medicine |
---|
There are often unexpected consequences for everything we do. I had a minor epiphany for improving a medical device/process, that heads my company (Baxter) agreed would save lives... but they could never use it because of medical liability. When they say, "Defensive medicine"... it is about protecting the company from lawsuits, thanks to overlitigation. |
Dispersed Knowledge |
---|
In the battle between Keynes and Hayek, history has shows Keynes wrong and Hayek the winner. Keynes models broke with Stagflation, Post WWII economy, Japans Lost Decades, China and Russian growth by privatizing. Hayek won the noble prize for explaining why: Dispersed Knowledge. Leaders don't know more than everyone else combined, then the more decisions you make from the top, the less efficient those decisions will be. |
Gender Wage Gap |
---|
This one is many myths (lies) in one: (a) Women get $.77-.82 cents on the dollar compared to what men make (this injustice is called the "Gender wage/pay gap" or GWG) (b) We need big government (politicians) and new laws/regulations/taxes to fix it (c) Democrat politicians motives are all sincere, anyone that opposes is a sexist/misogynistic/bigot. All false, and debunked here. |
Gini Coefficient |
---|
The Gini Coefficient came about when Corrado Gini wrote the book on Fascism. He said that income should be evenly distributed, and if it wasn’t, the imbalance is an excuse to seize and redistribute wealth and liberty to make things “more fair”. His coefficient is basically just that: a measure of how economically fascists (socialist) your country is. |
Income inequality |
---|
The left pretends that we're getting poorer by ignoring that our Real GDP has doubled. Our grandparents didn't have cellphones, gene-therapy for cancer, had one car, 3 generations lived in 900 sq. ft. homes, they didn't take as many vacations, the rest of the war wrecked globe wasn't competing with us (yet), and social programs and taxes/regulations hadn't driven up the costs of everything. |
Numbers Covered by Obamacare |
---|
Those claiming 20 million more people are insured because of Obamacare (ACA) either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are bald-faced liars. We're around 29 million people short of the campaign promise for universal coverage. And it's well below the 20 million new people covered that the fools and frauds like to claim. The facts: about 2.8M were covered because of Obamacare, and another 4-6M because of medicaid expansion, at a cost of about $20K per new person covered. |
Prop D |
---|
This is a vacancy tax that penalizes landlords for the inability to find tenants for their storefronts after the city has made it harder to find tenants for their storefronts. If you want to know why businesses flee the state, and why the rest of the nation thinks that SF is a city of fascist morons, look no further than the Prop D. |
Suffocating Liberty - the cost of red tape |
---|
Each new tax, law or regulation, comes with costs (compliance, non-compliance, enforcement and punishment). We have 174,545 pages of regulations, 73,954 pages in our tax code, 23,000 page in our federal legal code, double that for statutes, 300,000 criminal punishments from administrative agencies. Then add in the state+local laws, regulations and taxes on top. |
Zero Sum and the Government |
---|
A progressive said my problem was that I saw government as a zero sum game: where every dollar you used to help one person, came from the pocket of someone else. I explained it is worse. Government adds overhead, waste, fraud, work rules, politics, and other things that kill efficiency, freedom, pride and value, as part of the transaction. Thus it is a negative-sum (lose-lose) game. |
🔗 More
| |
Tags: Economics/tab