How do you value the risk that EPA head Lisa Jackson, will come up with some new and arbitrary rule which increases your energy costs dramatically? How much should you hold back to account for the risk that government will make an ‘investment’ in one of your principle competitors? What do you do to prepare for the impact of increased healthcare costs when the rules for those costs haven’t been completely written yet?
How do you prepare for government instituted ‘fairness’ when that term means whatever the current crop of politicians think it should mean? How do you hedge against the risk that some leftist 'social engineer' will 'fundamentally transform' things to conform with what they believe is 'fair'?
What businesses need is objectivity. They need the rules to be based on something external to government that they can verify. This is the main reason why leftist ‘fundamental transformations’ have unexpected consequences which overwhelm their primary goals. A world where the bureaucracy has triumphed, and all economic activity is directed by a government which places the political goals of politicians ahead of economic goals of the people, simply doesn’t achieve what leftists want it to.
The single most effective criticism of the leftist world view is that it fails every time. It never works. A top down, command and control economy like the one Obama has tried to implement will never be as efficient as one that is directed from the bottom up. The bureaucrat will never be as good at directing a business as the business owner. The politician cannot invest as efficiently or effectively as a professional investor. It will never be any different.
The only thing that will help us now is economic liberty. And that economic liberty needs to be defined by deregulation, tax reform which is based on consumption (rather than a progressive “punish the rich” vision of fairness) and an economic climate which allows people to keep as much as possible of what they earn. Anything else is simply a waste of time – as the ‘stimulus package’ has been. We need to bring an end to all the ‘special cases’ and ‘directed benefits’ that Democrat love so well. The government needs to stop trying to pick all the winners and losers, and allow consumers to do it on their own.
Slashing the public sector will bring short term pain; especially for those who work in it. But the more severely we attack the problem, the sooner the long term benefit will arrive to compensate for it.
If we want to a strong economy it’s now our only option.
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