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Community Corner

The President's income inequality speech

On Dec. 4th The President gave a speech that was to address income inequality. In the speech he makes claim to government making "an enormous difference in increasing opportunity and bolstering ladders into the middle class". He cites these government difference makers, Education, Unions, and minimum wage. He also cites Social Security and Medicare as well as the Earned Income Tax Credit as working successes. We can call this Demand Side Economics. That which you demand you will be given more of.

 

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Social Security and Medicare and the Earned Income Tax Credit are income redistribution systems. You take income from working people and give it to non-working people. These programs of theft worked to start out with because like all parasites the original host was healthy. But as we watch and witness the bankruptcy of these systems how can any honest person call them a success? Once you have built a society of dependency you are going to get more of it and reach a point of collapse. Also, when you remove wealth from producers to redistribute to non-producers you undermine the production needed to maintain wealth production from which the wealth is confiscated.

 

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Education has been a growing failure. Yes, Education is important but what has transpired in the schools isn't improvement but rather the deterioration of education. What students get from a high school education isn't even comparable to what a student just one generation ago received. It is now almost imperative that a college degree is required to have the same value as a high school degree from the fifties. Much of the problem can be laid at the door step of the teachers unions, which brings us to the next issue. Are Unions really important? They can be and to some extent were. They once were a place that companies and employers could go to get trained and skilled labor at a define cost. This was a value to the employer and employee alike. What we have today is collective bargaining for unskilled labor that demands treatment as a skilled person and using this position to promote a socialist agenda. We all know of the many low to unskilled jobs and industries that have gone over seas because of high costs. We can thank the unions for that.

 

As for Minimum Wage Laws, they don't work. We see the many jobs that once were and are now gone due to Minimum Wage laws. Do any of you remember the service attendant that pumped your gas? There are a great many automated positions being performed today because the cost of machines had become cheaper than an entry level, low skill minimum wage person.

 

“As seen on TV” labor strikes for Hamburger flippers. We are now at a point, as witnessing from these demonstrators, that the hamburger flipper and deep fryer is to be the new middle class jobs that The President is fighting for. Oh how the mighty has fallen. We will see these jobs go the way of the gas pumpers of yesterday. Either the positions will become more self-service or automated.

 

This leads us to the infamous invocation of a quote from Adam Smith and Obama's subsequent interpretation of the quote to support these and future government interference in the market place with Demand Side Economics. That which you subsidize you get more of.

 

We should state here who Adam Smith was since there are not many, especially the youth, that know who he was. He is known as the father of Free Market Capitalism. He wrote of the market place and advocated for a free market and without government interference due to the havoc the government brings to the market.

 

As quoted from The President’s speech-“You know, it was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves, to be well-fed, clothed and lodged,” he continued. “For those of you, who don’t speak old English, let me translate: It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living.”

 

First, it is not “old English” but rather regular English. Second, The President’s interpretation of the quote is wrong. The President was either told what to say or was lying. He was banking on that few know who Adam Smith was and would not recognize what was written in the whole of the paragraph. So allow me to help out here. Adam Smith said in the whole of his paragraph that it was good that the common worker had benefited in their quality of life due to the lower cost of goods and services due to the increase of technology and industry. It was good that people should benefit from the fruits of their labor and will do so in an expanding economy more so than higher wages in a stagnant or declining economy. It is a shame The President didn’t tell the truth here because it would have been a real eye opener for many that listen to him.

 

I leave you with a quote

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson





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