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Sunday, March 27, 2011

Dear Coffee Party

Do you have any reading material that can explain things as well as “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt?

I ask because your emails to me often touch on issues very important to me, but they don’t provide any kind of educational material.  There are statements like the following:

  “We must ask our state legislatures to pass laws that require shareholders have a say in their companies’ political spending.”

The cost of such laws and their enforcement, and the doors to corruption that they will create, boggle my mind.  Consider that the government is the ONLY legitimate way for otherwise unacceptable behaviors to be undertaken, and that as long as We the People give it license to do more and more unacceptable behaviors, it will be used like a tool by those with the means to use it to oppress the rest of us.

If a law requires a company to provide shareholders with a say, the shareholders will get their say in a way calculated by the company to prevent that say from having any effect.  This is easy to do, because the shareholders are interested in profit, not politics.  There are better solutions, and chief among them is forcing the government to shrink.

  “Seriously, the Federal Reserve should give us emergency low-interest loans that they gave to Wall St and foreign firms.”

The solution is not to perpetrate the same fraud over again with different beneficiaries (poor people), but rather to reverse the effects of the initial fraud.

I am aware that the Coffee Party is designed to attract compassionate people who believe a strong government is necessary to take from the greediest of us in order to provide for the neediest.  I also realize that this aim is served by encouraging the printing of more money, but this time to be distributed to the poorest people.  It has the special political feature that if such Federal Reserve largess (well, it’s taxpayers, ultimately, isn’t it?) is used to effectively BUY VOTES from poor people, it is the most efficient way to do it, because such a small amount of money will make the poorest people happy enough to vote Democratic.

I think it’s immoral.

We all make mistakes.  Some of us are smart enough to recognize them, humble enough to admit them, and brave enough to reverse them.

Dave Scotese.