My Fourteenth Theorem of Government explains that when government intervenes for the ostensible purpose of providing help to poor people in the short run, it is all but inevitable that such policies will hurt poor people in the long run.
It is hardly a revelation that bigger government causes problems, but it is particularly discouraging when such policies victimize the least fortunate members of society.
I’m discussing this issue today because I recently discovered a 2018 article by Brian Balfour.
Published by the Foundation for Economic Education, the article lists seven ways that government traps people in poverty.
At the risk of over-simplifying, four of those policies directly hurt poor people.
- The “quicksand effect” of the welfare state, which discourages self-advancement.
- Minimum wage laws that remove the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
- Green energy policies that make basic utilities needlessly expensive.
- Protectionist trade policies that increase the price of essential products.
And three of those policies indirectly hurt poor people.
- Punitive tax policies that discourage job creation and productivity advances.
- Regulatory policies that impose high costs and cause inefficiency.
- Inflationary monetary policies by central banks that cause higher prices.
There’s nothing in the article that’s wrong, but I’m going to conclude today’s column by pointing out a big sin of omission.
The author’s list should have included the government education monopoly. Especially since poor families tend to live in the areas with the worst-performing government schools.
Failing government schools have a very direct and very negative impact on the life prospects of low-income kids.
So I’ll end by noting that I’m very excited that school choice is beginning to sweep the nation.
P.S. There are many other government policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on poor people. Everything from Social Security to revenue policing, but don’t forget government lotteries, licensing laws, and nanny state protections (all of which may help to explain why poor people are skeptical about the supposed benefits of bigger government).
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay .
The aim of good governance is to never act altruistically towards your citizens.
Being “Altruistic” should never be an objective of any government structure! While individuals acting altruistically would be a blessing! Altruistic Defined: (1) The unselfish concern for the welfare of others. (2) ‘Ethics’ The doctrine that the general welfare of society is the proper goal of an individual’s actions.
Examples below of altruism within our current government structures, which put into action have inflicted conflicts between groups along with the deterioration of individual and/or group initiative.
(Universal truism of Honest Abe) No person at any time after the end of the Revolutionary War should ever have had the objective of being within any government structure as a career objective. For example, the famous statement, ” A government of the people, by the people and for the people” was a quote by Abraham Lincoln, which meant everybody should participate within the government, BUT for a very short period. Meaning everyone (citizens) should devote a very short time within a government structure whether that be as an elected person (which equals the old world’s kings, princes, noble men & women) or as a bureaucrat (which equals the old world’s king’s men & women).
ULTIMATE MEANING OF THE WORDS “TO BE REPRESENTATIVE” ENTAILS THAT ALL GOVERNMENT JOBS TO BE OF A VERY SHORT DURATION WITH NO RETIREMENT PLAN OTHER THAN A DEDICATED AMOUNT OF FUNDS TO BE PLACED INTO THEIR PRIVATE RETIREMENT SAVINGS ACCOUNT FOR THOSE WHO SACRIFICED A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE
New Constitutional Rule: There should be a Constitutional Amendment to restrict government employment to a maximum of 10 years in a lifetime and combining all employments, be they city, state, or federal employments, whether bureaucratic or elected positions.
Functionally, a government official would better represent the whole population if that government employee were to be in just one government job, for a short period of time, in their lifetime. The rest of their lifetime should ideally be self-employed. Offhand, being a cog in a big business organization (corporations) is identical to that of being employed within any government structure for extended periods of time.
Government decisions in which a government employee (elected or bureaucrat) enriches themselves or favors a government or a non-government group more or less than others then those circumstances should be outlawed.
Altruism In Action, Example One:
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and their dependent indigenous folks, in the USA, have in combination created rural ghettos in America by making these once independent groups of citizens dependent on government largess or the central government’s inflicted altruistic acts.
Altruism in action, Example Two:
The Dept. of Agriculture seemingly has favored large acreage farming activities by giving individual farmers and/or farm corporations extraordinarily low priced “crop insurance premiums”. Our federal government’s low-cost crop insurance premiums (act of altruism) are being provided to most all farming operations. This action has transformed farming operations into becoming dependent on government largess or acts of altruism. These low cost “federal crop insurance premiums” created a system to where most large farming operations could never fail, whatever the circumstances (weather, commodity price, land price, fire, rain, drought, etc.).
While “federal crop insurance” is of little benefit to smaller farm operations other than making the cost of farmlands and their associated land taxes much higher. Small family farms (80 to 640 acres) are now all but gone along with most native wildlife forms, be they birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, etc. This loss of biodiversity on the Great Plains is because of the popular and wide use of GMO seeds and/or the extensive use of pesticides and herbicides especially by large row crop farmers. The lack of biodiversity now found within these ever-larger single grain species fields on the Great Plains are probably less biologically complex than corresponding lands masses found on the north slope of arctic Alaska in mid-winter, or the life diversities found in Death Valley, California, be it summer or winter,
Ever since those above hi-tech farming methods started in the late 1960’s along with the low-priced government crop insurance, small rural villages have all but disappeared within most portions of the Great Plains. Those small farms (80-640 acres) and accompanying rural villages was where, once upon a time, was located that special Shangri-La environment, that incubated and nurtured citizens of independent grit.
From: David Johnson, 178 County Road 892, Etowah, TN 37331
Horsepucky. Just more reasons for the rich to get richer. You start the article with a bunch of statements as though they’re fact without providing any sort of documentation to back those statements up. You remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan right? You’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts, no matter what Kellyanne Conway told you.