Tag Archives: ethics

Europe’s Labor Problems

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Aside from the debt and profligate spending problem, Europe’s labor laws are large contributors.  The Wall Street Journal recently described Italian labor law.  And Italy is not atypical for Europe.

  • Business pays 2/3 of each employee’s social security costs (I won’t go into how cheap we Americans are compared to the Europeans when it comes to social security).
  • Businesses with more than 10 employees (quoting the WSJ)

must submit an annual self-assessment to the national authorities outlining every possible health and safety hazard to which your employees might be subject.  These include stress that is work-related or caused by age, gender and racial differences.  You must also note all precautionary and individual measures to prevent risks, procedures to carry them out, the names of employees in charge of safety, as well as the physician whose presence is required for the assessment.

  • Businesses with more than 15 employees encounter very onerous limits on the ability to fire an employee, for any reason.
  • Businesses with more than 15 employees also must explicitly hire disabled—qualified or not—and must have at least 14 disabled employees when they go above 50 employees.  The businesses must maintain that 7% ratio at all larger sizes.
  • Businesses with more than 100 employees must submit to the government a biennial report on the gender dynamics within the company.  This report must include a tabulation of the men and women employed in each production unit, their functions and level within the company, details of compensation and benefits, and dates and reasons for recruitments, promotions and transfers, as well as the estimated revenue impact.

The WSJ cites the OECD as noting that

All of these protections and assurances, along with the bureaucracies that oversee them, subtract 47.6% from the average Italian wage….  Two-thirds of that bite comes before payroll, meaning many Italian workers are unaware of their gross cost to employers.

I mean, really.  YGTBSM.

Progressives and Freedom

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From The Wall Street Journal:  Progressives are now actively lying about the National Federation of Independent Business because that organization is the formal lead plaintiff in the Obamacare lawsuit, which ruling the Supreme Court is scheduled to announce today.

Here’s what’s going on.

The chairmen of the House Progressive Caucus, Democrats Raul Grijalva [D, AZ] and Keith Ellison [D, MN], [wrote] a letter accusing the NFIB of acting against “the best interest of small business owners” and “the popular opinion of the American small business community.”

Because, of course, all those 300,000 small business NFIB members adore Obamacare.  These guys say so.

Then the WSJ notes:

…among the four million small businesses eligible for new tax credits if they provide health insurance for their workers, a mere 170,300 have signed up.

Hmm….

And they ask:

…if the NFIB is as unrepresentative as liberals claim, then why have its ranks grown by 5% since it became a plaintiff in the ObamaCare suit?

And they add:

Some 65% [of NFIB members, in an NFIB poll of its membership] believe ObamaCare will do the opposite [i.e., will increase health care costs] and 77% believe it will result in a higher tax burden, which are among the reasons the group joined the suit. One in five small businesses believes it’ll be forced to alter the benefits it offers employees.

Yeah.  That’s broad-based support for Obamacare, all right.  It’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Another Out of Control Regulation

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This regulation began as a Bush the Younger administration’s EPA attempt to work on an environmental problem now known to be non-existent.  Unfortunately, it’s being continued under an Obama administration EPA for no reason other than a cynical exercise in governmental power for the sake of that power.

The regulation in question is the EPA’s requirement that oil refiners mix into their refined fuels millions of gallons of a cellulosic ethanol, even though that additive does not exist.  This has the refiners in a quandary because the EPA is intent on fining them heavily for their failure to use this ghost chemical.

Tom Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research points out that

None, not one drop of cellulosic ethanol has been produced commercially. It’s a phantom fuel.  It doesn’t exist in the market place.

He goes on

Why would [the EPA] ask them to blend any at all if it doesn’t exist?  Because they know that they can squeeze some extra dollars out of them.

On the other hand, the EPA does have the authority to relax the requirement, and apparently they’re in the process of that.  The cellulosic ethanol blending requirement is, supposedly, being reduced by 98%.  Thus, in the end, the refiners only need to use 2% of this non-existent additive compared to their original requirement.  There’s a break.  Charles Drevna, representing refiners, has the right of this.

[The EPA is] forcing us to use a product that doesn’t exist; they might as well tell us to use unicorns.

He added

We’ve had to go to the courts and litigate this thing is because [the EPA] just turned a blind eye to us[.]

They have to because that mandate, the potential per centage reduction notwithstanding, just gets larger and larger: 500 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol this year, 3 billion in 2015, and 16 billion in 2022.  Never mind that nobody is making this stuff.

It shouldn’t have come to this.

An Old Dead Guy’s View of National Debt

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On this, the 80th day shy of the 215th year since George Washington’s Farewell Address, an anniversary made notable by our present astronomical and exploding national debt, I thought I’d post what that old dead guy had to say about national borrowing and national debt.

The short version is, “Don’t do it, and don’t have it.”  Following are his specific words.

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit.  One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible: avoiding occasions of expence by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it; avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expence, but by vigorous exertions in time of Peace to discharge the Debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear.  The execution of these maxims belongs to your Representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should cooperate.  To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue; that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant; that the intrinsic embarrassment inseperable from the selection of the proper objects (which is always a choice of difficulties) ought to be a decisive motive for a candid construction of the Conduct of the Government in making it, and for a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining Revenue which the public exigencies may at any time dictate.

Notice that bit about taxation, too.  Taxes are for paying down the national debt and for the common defence, not for frivolous spending.  But again, the overriding imperative this Founder laid out is that our nation’s debts should be kept small by keeping spending small, and those debts should be paid by the generation that incurred them—not visited on our children’s children.

We citizens bear an additional responsibility in this, too: not to make frivolous demands on government to do for us that which we should—and can—do for ourselves.

Á propos is this remark by David Ricardo in response to Great Britain’s decision to print fiat money in an effort to increase funding for their war against Napoleon (one of those “unavoidable wars” to which Washington would have been referring, and not too far removed in time from Washington’s address):

Why should the mere increase of money have any other effect than to lower its value?  How would it cause any increase in the production of commodities? ….

Money cannot call forth goods, —but goods can call forth money…[.]

The Progressive Endgame

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What Progressives don’t understand—won’t accept—is that, as Eric Falkenstein wrote

People get most of their pleasure, and meaning, being useful to others, which includes inspiring the admiration or happiness of others by one’s actions. Every time I make my daughter squeal with delight makes me thankful to be alive, because I know she really loves me, and I work to provide her with things and habits that will make her prosper, and hope that at some point after I’m gone she will remember me with sincere gratitude.

This made especially in the actual community interactions of individuals.  Progressives are only willing to help their fellows by government diktat, not directly with their personal resources.  I’ve written elsewhere about who donates to charity, for instance, but it bears repeating: Conservatives donate 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; Liberals just 1.25% to 1.5%.  And further,

A healthy wage is a strong correlate with one’s usefulness to non-family members, especially if you work in field without a lot of regulation.

Adam Smith understood this.  John Locke and our Founders understood this.  The “invisible hand” and the existence of a social compact both are founded on the not-so-enlightened self-interest—the greed—of the individuals participating in the commerce and in the formation of the social compact.  Free commerce, and the republican government over which the compact members are sovereign, are what lead to the greatest material and moral prosperity of the individuals involved.  The first is self-evident.  The second derives from that material prosperity: being useful to others, indeed, satisfying our duty to others (which involves such mundane things as honoring our commitments, here to provide our mutual support to defend and preserve our—and our fellows’—individual and several inalienable Rights, to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and so on) is enormously facilitated by personal prosperity (which, just incidentally, also creates community prosperity): we have more wherewithal with which to satisfy our individual obligations (which are, don’t forget, individual, not collective).

Falkenstein concludes

[Eric Hoffer considered that] intellectuals found free societies a threat because such societies didn’t need mandarins directing them, and if not flattered would help incite the masses to some sort of revolution.  A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding, and so those unhappy with their own meaningless affairs will focus on minding other people’s business.  Hoffer noted one must not merely provide for those without meaning in their lives, but provide against them, because in a democracy and market economy their preferences will have power.  Those who see their lives as inferior and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom, and this can cause a Republic to fall to a democracy, and ultimately a tyranny.

Thus,

In other words, Hoffer describes the essence of the Liberal [I say Progressive—ed.] desire to micromanage society into perfect equality at the expense of liberty.  A coalition of intellectuals and the underclass, both of whom feel unappreciated.  We haven’t figured out a good outlet for these do-gooders, or a good way for those without a purpose to find life rewarding, so they continue to plague us with their plans and angst.