Why Can't People Manage Their Own Money?

Part of good budgeting is knowing just how much money you will have after the government steals a good portion of it from you. If, for example, you make $30,000 a year in gross terms, you would want to know how much of it you would have left over after taxes so that you could plan a monthly budget. If you are left $24,000 after taxes, which is $2,000 per month, then you would have $660 to spend on rent each month (assuming the 33% rule for housing expenditures). Sensible adults can handle this as long as it does not get much more confusing.

Why can't people do this very well? As usual, blame it on the state.

The fact that there are taxes to begin with, and that they are so numerous and severe, make it very difficult to actually determine net income. Check this website out for ways to do it. Notice how complex it is.


If you look over the steps that the link gives for figuring out your net income, you might notice a lot of talk about the so-called savings apparatuses like Social Security and 401(k). Therein lies another explanation for why people cannot manage their money. The state has given people every reason not to do so. Making compulsory contributions to retirement accounts has taken away the brain work involved in money management and savings. No longer do you have to deliberate over whether you should put money in the bank, buy savings bonds, buy gold, invest in K-Mart, or anything else. The state has made it easy for you, since you are basically a child.

Why has the state made it easy for you? Because it doesn't want you to think things through, do what's in your best interest, and save money in such a way that may NOT benefit the state (buying gold and silver, for example). It would much rather you go along with the 401(k) system (which hasn't worked) or perhaps buy war bonds as people were forced to do during WWII. It should come as no surprise that the state does not want people managing their own money. No, the welfare-warfare psychos would much rather take your money and either waste it or provide a mediocre, over-regulated imitation of the services the private sector would produce. When people take care of their own finances 100%, there is nothing left for the thieves in Washington to take away under the guise of "security." Their only other option is to deliberately steal, as the petty burglar would do, WITHOUT pretending to help you. Politically, this does not work any more.

Ending Death Tax = More Humane Than Giving Unemployment Benefits

Unemployment is no longer the exclusive territory of the lazy, careless, or disinterested. Everyone knows this. The same can be said for the wretchedness of the estate tax; it affects lots of people. If not, then it soon will once the federal thieves reduce the death tax exemption from $3.5 million to $1 million. The tax rate will also increase from 45% to 55%.

Is this being discussed extensively by the mainstream media? No, not by my honest recollection. Perhaps it gets some coverage here and there, but not anywhere near the level of focus placed on the issue of unemployment insurance. As of right now, the welfare-statist/re-distributionist crowd is crowing very loudly for even more extensions on benefits, calling anyone who opposes that move draconian, scrooge, brutal, callous, and uncaring.

Those folks could be consistent enough with their position of helping the poor by providing relief if it was not for the fact that they are concurrently making new rules that would extract money from families. If they believe that providing stipends to the unfortunate is the only compassionate thing to do, then why do they appear so eager to burden more and more American families by confiscating thousands or millions of dollars when a family member dies? What bizarre form of compassion is this? No doubt, many struggling individuals would benefit greatly from the financial boost of an inheritance. Even if the individual on the deathbed may not be having a difficult time financially (hence, the million dollar nest egg), they may very likely have family members that are not doing so well. The law will not allow large transfers of money before death either without incurring a "gift" tax. Again, the severity of this estate tax is not to be under-estimated. This is not just skimming off the top. It is wiping out over half of one's wealth and wasting it on the federal government.

These are not legislative moves that help America's debt-ridden, perhaps paycheck-to-paycheck Americans move into economic security. Abolition of the right to inheritance is one of the Ten Planks of Marxism. We have not abolished yet (entirely), but certainly do not fully respect it.

I encourage anybody who has fallen for the propaganda of socialists championing the poor to think again about these policies. Everyone knows $1 million is not that much money in the big scheme of things (a decent house might be worth a quarter of that alone). Shoveling unemployed people a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars does not make one magnanimous when it coincides a huge tax hike. Obama's crew promised no taxes. Only a fool who looks at tax policy solely through the narrow spectrum of the personal income tax would fall for Obama's proposition of not raising taxes. It's a cruel lie.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that taxing an inheritance so heavily reduces the the incentive to save money. Now I see why we need Social Security: because it is illegal to save (at least if you want to keep much of it).

Will the Government Shut Down the Internet? What about just me?

Hopefully, you have been privy to the recent news about the government trying to regulate the Internet. This goes well beyond Ted Stevens' series of tubes meme. We even have a new federal agency to deal with the Internet, which has been given a name that sounds like something out of bad B-movie.

Here's a little video evidence to corroborate my claims about a potential Internet kill switch.




I read something earlier today that brought up an interesting point, however, about regulating/shutting down the Internet (from Robert Wenzel; Economic Policy Journal):

"But, the idea of the kill switch hints that the government is indeed scared of the internet. If they can't shut down the entire net, they will, when they deem it necessary, shutdown political bloggers who don't support the regime. How they actually shut things down is not exactly something I want to hang around to find out."

This is how this kind of thing tends to work. Governments do not have the capacity to shoot ALL the Jews, shut down ALL the chat forums in China, or arrest ALL the file sharers who supposedly "steal" music. They also cannot, for similar reasons, run an economy for very long. What they will do is go after those who are the most antagonistic, visible, and hittable. The rest of Wenzel's article talks about the possibility of getting out of Dodge, much like Mises and Hayek had to do during WWII. I may end up expatriating to another country anyway (lack of career opportunities in the U.S.), but rest assured, as long as I can, I will keep this blog operating. I see no reason, for the time being, to shut down the blog. Even if I leave, it will have to be to an English-speaking country.

If I do pull the plug on this, you will know that all of the libertarian/Austrian school predictions have come true, and that freedom of speech has been mortally assaulted. These predictions were all laid out in Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Help fight the freedom fight by disobeying the statist elitists (smoke in bars, protest taxes, tell off the census workers, pirate music, make Hitler rant parodies, etc.). Otherwise, be ready to suffer the fate of the boiling frog.

Minarchist? Anarchist? Downward-Momentumist!

If you were not already aware, there is a bit of a rift between two different types of libertarians in the liberty movement (to put it very generally). The two somewhat-opposing viewpoints are minarchism (limited, minimal amounts of government) and anarcho-capitalism (volunteerism, purely free market, no state).

A quick look at some of the libertarian chat forums on the web, RonPaulForums.com for example, shows that these two camps do not necessarily get along too well even though they both purport to want a change from the totalitarian statist quo (to borrow Jeff Tucker's term). I've seen a lot of shouting and acrimony over this debate. I'll not spend a lot of time dissertating the two camps, but basically the minarchists accuse the anarcho-capitalists of taking the desire to destroy the state too far, while anarcho-capitalists believe minarchism is too nebulous and does not vanquish the root of the problem. Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest anarcho-capitalist thinkers, makes the point that anarcho-capitalists and minarchists would not be at odds with one another and would be able to work together against a common enemy better if it was not for minarchists' lack of a hatred for the state.

Personally, I am much more in line with the anarcho-capitalist school. The biggest problem for minarchism is the lack of an identifiable goal. What is a minimal amount of government anyway? Would that not be "zero" government? It's just too hard to pinpoint a fixed, identifiable level of government that is ideal. That is, unless you come to the conclusion that we should have no government at all. This is one of the reasons anarcho-capitalism is appealing (that along with the myriad of empirical examples of the state being miserable in EVERYTHING it touches).

Can we get beyond this libertarian dichotomy though? Both minarchism and anarcho-capitalism appear to be a long ways off anyway. My suggestion is this: Downward Momentumism. It's perfectly fine for everyone to have their preferred destination of either limited/no government, but let us at least agree that we need to strip away government fast and furiously for the time being. We should know by now that the state is not going to give up easily and it is very unlikely that minarchists will get exactly what they want or anarcho-capitalists what they want. It is up to the freedom fighters to keep the momentum downward no matter what happens! Eventually this would lead to zero if done effectively enough and long enough (which favors the anarcho-capitalists), but in the unlikely event that it gets that way, and, we realize it's a questionable state of affairs, we can then revise our plan and visit the possibility of instituting a benevolent state.

In the mean time, even if you are a minarchist, it's imperative that you avoid the beltway libertarianism that has become popular. Downward Momentumism cannot be accomplished with libertarians who are willing to compromise all the time. Bad ideas like school vouchers, anti-discrimination laws, and libertarian "status seeking" in Washington are the bane of the freedom movement. Whether you hate the state or are simply irritated by its present manifestation, please do what you can to help us reduce its size and scope. Compromises and the re-arranging of chairs will not accomplish anything and will likely advance statism further.

Which is more tacky? Capitalism or the State?

I get a little tired of people using the tackiness of reality television as a rebuttal to capitalism. Leave alone the absurdity of using aesthetics for political theory, I take exception with the idea that the free market produces demonstrably unappealing things compared to statism. Perhaps people simply do not think about the alternative to capitalism and the undoubtedly horrible creations that come from it. Allow me then to help the statists see that the state creates some possibly tacky items as well (I say "possible" due to the fact that this is all completely subjective, as any intelligent person would know).

First, there's this monstrosity, the Ryugyong Hotel, in North Korea. Could this maybe be tacky? There's a friggin' crane on the top of it! This is what government planning gets you. It looks like the ruins of the pyramids of Giza (worse). I'm not saying I would like to see a Taco Bell next to the Taj Majal, but only government can produce something this bad. This thing will never be finished, by the way.




Next, we have something a little closer to home, the U.S. Federal Reserve Building. You don't see this very often because of the clandestine nature of the Fed, not because it is ugly. Nevertheless, it is an eyesore and the propagandists in D.C. would not want to showcase it anyway. Look at this thing. I would just assume take a picture of the Temple of Doom. Honesty compels to admit that the inside looks rather nice (seen on that interview with Helicopter Ben last year), but the outside is chock full of government-crusted ugly.





I may as well throw in this lousy piece of junk that I saw on LewRockwell.com the other day. It's the U.S. embassy in London. Not every statist eyesore comes in the form of a building (how about piles of dead bodies?), but the state tends to get it done best in the realm of architecture.





I do not want to make it sound like statists have not produced anything beautiful (Palace of Versailles, ancient pyramids, etc.). They do after all steal from the beauty of the free market all the time. I just want to highlight some of the nasty structures the statists have erected and dispose of this silly misconception that the free market has a monopoly on tackiness. Also, if people are willing to pay for something, it can't be that tacky anyway. Prices can even help us in the domain of aesthetics.

Job Applications in the Union of American Socialist Republics

Job applications are lot of fun each and every time. Judging by what I see on applications, I have come to the conclusion that I am completely useless to employers in the UASR. I have not spent time as an imperial storm trooper (military). I possess a clean bill of health. This is bad because only people with major disabilities can be productive, so says the ADA. I do not possess a pair of ovaries (so maybe I am disabled, just not in a good way). I do not have the correct "ethnic makeup." If only I were black or Hispanic, then I would be much more productive.

Oh, and one can clearly tell that employers hate these nasty little things called resumes. They would prefer you completely re-type everything about yourself every time you apply to a job. I fully respect the rights of employers. That does not mean that the majority of them aren't complete blockheads like every other genius whose graduated from American schools and cannot identify the country that borders the U.S. to the north.

Why Government Cars Are Worthless

I think it's safe to say that over the past several decades the car industry has been wholly co-opted by the state and the unions, rendering it a fascist industrial complex similar to the military, medical, educational, and environmental industrial complexes. Here are some reasons why the government-infiltrated car industry produces shabby vehicles and a lousy transportation system:

1) Repairs - Any of the following items may require you to spend money either fixing or
replacing: car engine (good luck), catalytic converter, car battery, mass air filter, electrical issues, belts, fuel hoses, throttle sensor, brakes, accelerator, cylinders, muffler, oil changes, tune-ups, tire rotations, re-fueling, spark plugs, broken fuses (these are just a few of the things I've dealt with; there are more) . . . and you will also need to get a driver's license, car insurance (whether you want it or not, and whether it pays anything when you make a claim), state inspections, car registrations, and license plates.

By the way, I know things break, but let's be honest, cars break down at a ridiculous rate and the automotive repair industry is a boon because of it. However, their benefit is at the expense of an efficient, safe driving experience.

Why can't manufacturers work on making cars that do not fall apart every few months? Because that would require them to respond to the consumer demand for better quality, something that does not rest well with unions who are in the business of pumping out new hunks of metal repeatedly (see Detroit). This is just like how public school teachers have no desire to provide quality educations, for then pupils would rise through the education process quicker, thereby decreasing the need for a high supply of over-paid teachers.

2) Debt Financing to Pay for Them

This is the same unsustainable problem Americans have with housing, education, health care, and even general purchases. People use and abuse debt at an obscene level. All things considered, car debt may not be what breaks the camel's back for most families, but it does make up another several thousand dollars in expenses, stymieing the effort to save money. As has been the case in the housing industry, people have fallen for un-fixed loans and extended warranties in this domain as well. The average auto loan in this country is about $30,000, even higher than student loans.

3) Monopoly on Transportation

Believe it or not, cars CAN share the road with travelers of other means. Check out this video of 1905 San Fransisco. This is spontaneous order for transportation. Nobody needs a stop light, stop signs, yield signs, or much else to function peacefully. Even for its time, San Fransisco was still more crowded than many American cities and towns today. To say that we need traffic regulations and a one-vehicle-type system is to ignore reality. Urban planning at both the local and federal levels have distorted the marketplace for transportation. We are de facto stuck with a single mode of transportation, for most of our travels, due to the dictates of elected/non-elected tyrants. Wouldn't things be better without the automobile monopoly?

4) Used on Unsafe Roads

With all the fuss that has been made about BP's blunders, it is a wonder why nobody holds government accountable when its Frankenstein roads put far more people in danger than any oil spill. In Walter Block's book, The Privatization of Road and Highways, he cites a death toll of around 40,000 per year due to automobile accidents. Could the private sector get away with anything like that? Of course, they could not. This problem may not be directly attributable to the quality of cars, but it is worth mentioning. The monopolization of cars as the only method of transportation may have a lot to do with the government plastering roads and highways all over the country, leaving little or no alternative for getting to and from places. Unsafe/faulty cars go hand-in-hand with unsafe roads. Anyone who has seen how inefficient government is in dealing with postal delivery should not be surprised that the same entity takes it sweet time doing basic repairs for roads. For more on this, I highly encourage a reading of Block's book.

5) Very Little Advancement Recently

Unless you are easily impressed by the increase in mass of the average American car over the past 20 years, there is very little to write home about when talking about the most recent evolution in automobiles. The government decided to enact emissions crackdowns on polluting cars, the emission standards ex-communicated almost all old cars, manufacturers got around this by creating SUVs (which pollute a ton, but are not really "cars"), and the rest is history. Now everyone wants to get rid of SUVs. We also have hybrid cars, which are also a statist/leftist idea, and are completely impractical. Hybrids have multiple, highly-polluting batteries.

When compared to the great leaps made in the early part of the 20th century, recent developments are decidedly lame, unnecessary, and usually brought on by frivolous lobbyists (unions and environmentalists). If the free market was allowed to operate, our vehicles would be more akin to Star Trek or the Jetsons. However, when the state interferes with things, progress is slowed to an almost stand-still and prices increase due to artificially-imposed scarcity. I have not even said anything about the oil manipulations, almost entirely attributable to the state in one way or another.