Ever notice that almost every trip to the Post Office, Department Of Motor Vehicles, Public Library, Local Courthouse, or Police Station results in long wait times and terrible customer service? The reason for this is that the government does not operate the same way that a private sector business does. The private sector uses a profit motive as a guiding force. For example, if a private sector business is deciding whether or not to embark on the development of a new product line, they will typically conduct market research to see if the long term gains justify the short term sacrifice involved in creating a new product. Bad planning causes losses, and strong planning creates profits. Poorly run businesses will eventually fold. Only the strong businesses survive.
There is no profit motive in a government run operation. If for example, the local Post Office is taking losses year after year, it doesn't matter because it has a base of tax payers who are forced to financially support its poor business practices. If a citizen doesn't pay their taxes, their property is confiscated. The citizens also risk being fined or imprisoned if they neglect to pay their taxes. People don't like to go to prison, so the Post Office continues to operate like a black hole where reason and logic do not apply.
Here in the USA, we have the (temporary) privilege of being able to print our own currency in any amount needed at any time. If the tax base cannot support their local Post Office, there is always the Federal Government and the printing press available as a last resort to come and bail out the Post Office with currency created out of thin air.
There are of course long term consequences of using the printing press to support failing government operations. See also: Greece, Spain, Italy etc. The consequences of currency printing have been discussed on this blog in previous posts. Sooner or later the consequences will show and it will not be fun.
Government is the collective manifestation of our individual fears. Government is a belief system that is dependent upon fear. Fear of people and cultures that we have never visited. Fear of taking responsibility for our own actions.
In order for government to grow, the level of fear in the society that it controls must also grow. Government has incentive to promote fear (either real or conjured) in order to justify its own existence. This is why the nightly news is so bleak and difficult to stomach.
Bill Hicks had it right when he told us that life is a simple choice between fear and love. Remember, its just a ride.
We will let the videos do all of the explaining. The key thing to note about a ponzi is that money comes in the front door under the guise that it will be invested some place, but in reality the money goes out the back door to satisfy the requirements of a person who is leaving the ponzi. Ponzi schemes always end suddenly without warning, with the end being triggered by a flood of sellers that outweighs the number of incoming buyers. The ponzi ends when there are no fools left to fool.
The purpose of minimum wage laws (or so we are told) is to increase the standard of living for the worker who is receiving wages, reduce poverty, and to make sure that workers are being payed a "fair" wage for their labor. Without bringing in a slew of charts or numbers into the argument, let us think about this logically for a moment. One question that comes to mind is, what about those workers whose labor does not meet the minimum wage? What happens to these people? We have to assume that these people will not be employed, which essentially means that they were put into poverty due to such a mandate, have a reduced standard of living due to not being paid, and have not earned a "fair" wage for a labor or service that they could have provided. Unfortunately, "fair" in the sense of wages is not determined by the voluntary agreement between the business owner and worker but instead by the outside party that mandates such a wage. How this outside party ever comes up with such a number, we will never know, but while we are all left wondering, many people will be left without a job and we will also never get to know what jobs could have existed.
Remember the days of full service gas stations? One could argue that minimum wage laws could have something to do with these services going away for good (other then where full services gas stations are forced to provide such services by law; New Jersey for example). Today, Pennsylvania's minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Think about it; what gas station would pay a young teenager, for example, $7.25 per hour to wash car windows or check the fluids in your car? It's a service that many people miss and would not mind to see come back but again, no business owner would risk being fined or shut down because they paid an employee less then the mandated wage. If we think logically about this law, it breaks down almost immediately into arbitrary nonsense that never ends up helping anyone, especially those who could be employed had this barrier to entry in the labor market never existed.
