| Notes | Book |
The government propaganda machine always tries to get us to think about the plastic substitute for the real thing.
Jobs are not work, and work is not wealth.
Education is neither knowledge nor wisdom.
More cops, judges, and lawyers are not more justice.
The people who create wealth are the ones who turn the screwdrivers, solder the wires, pound the nails, write the code, design the circuits, plant the crops, etc. You can find them on the business ends of shovels, saws, cranes, tractors, lathes, and steering wheels of all kinds.
A job is a method the establishment uses to extract the wealth from the wealth creators. Job creators are wealth extractors.
If we want to help small business, we should remember that there is no smaller business than a baby born to a poor family. That baby faces at least $45,000 in debt on the day she is born. She will be expected to pay a substantial portion of her income to an extortionist government for the rest of her life. Her birthwrong debt is ironically named the national debt, though is it really a debt the rich think they are owed by the poor.
If we want to improve infrastructure, why not start with the infrastructure of that baby's family. They need equity in their home to motivate them to home improvement. They need to be able to sell the products of their labor on a free and open market. They do not need to spend their live as wage slaves chained to a W2 form.
A wealth creator in the job framework is a sitting duck for taxes. The government gets its taxes before the paycheck is even issued.
A wealth creator outside the job is much more difficult to tax. The government taxes profits. Determining what is profit and what is not is a very difficult business, and would cost more to adjudicate for every individual wealth creator than the government would collect in taxes. Government keeping track of all the transactions in a society is a sure way to reduce the amount and quality of those transactions.
The desire to collect income taxes is the real reason for the government's many restrictions on independent wealth creators. The building codes, licenses, health department regulations, and etc. are all designed to herd the wealth creator into a job.
But this short sighted government policy eventually causes an economy to collapse, because there is no better enthusiasm destroyer than a job, except perhaps a high school classroom.
A wealth creator who has customers instead of a boss, needs to actually produce results people want. A boss often has little idea what people want and will pay for, but customers know.
An independent wealth creator can work when he wants, doing what he likes to do. Chances are he will love his work a lot more than a wage slave.
People love to gamble. They love it so much that the government gets a substantial amount of income from taxing and regulating that impulse. A wise society would harness that energy by allowing people to gamble on their work.
As a society, we are insurance poor. Our attempt to guarantee outcomes in particular cases has degraded the outcome of the average transaction.
In the 19th century, most Americans were wealth creators: farmers, shopkeepers, laborers, etc. Now we have a very large contingent of wealth extractors starting with the so-called small businessman and right up the line through the large corporate and government bureaucracies, to the US President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.
We could become prosperous again if we spent more time working and less time fighting over the wealth created by work. We need a society where a woman could bake a loaf of bread and sell it to neighbors without asking the governments permission. We need a society where a person can improve his or some else's home without a government permit. A society that outlaws work is a society that is not going to get a lot done.
The total amount of wealth a society has is determined by the goods and services its wealth creators can deliver. A gold coin or a paper dollar are equally useless if there is no one to do the work required to create the goods or services that money is supposed to buy.
We have created a Mother may I society where it is respectable to do nothing unless you have permission from the government. The laws of physics and chemistry are not suspended when the government is not around. People get hungry, cold, tired, and sleepy without a govenment certificate.
It's true that the Federal Government, and the Giant Corporations are a threat to liberty and prosperity, but there are plenty of threats to peace, prosperity, and justice that are much closer to home. Logistical analysis indicates that these closer threats are a much easier target for reform. Much less of the reform energy is soaked up in transportation and communication.