Labor Day. I hate federal holidays. They are emblematic of what’s wrong with the Leviathan we call the federal government and the corrupting influence it has over American productivity. I hate the collective mentality. Every federal employee gets a paid day off, no matter how badly they suck. A better system would be one where if the employee didn’t work, he wouldn’t get paid. Getting something for nothing just divorces the apparatchik from the real world which pays his salary. I prefer a workforce in touch with America’s rugged individualism. We should be a nation of Marlboro men, not flabby bureaucrats. A number of years ago I found myself at a Starbucks in Fairfax City, Virginia at 7:30 in the morning. The line reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a movie I watched in a college film class. Clearly, everyone in line was a federal worker driving into DC for their 9 to 4 job regulating the activities of the productive classes. I still have nightmares about what I saw. Everyone in line was an unsmiling, slothful moving, androgynous, slovenly dressed robot. It is next to impossible to fire one of these federal manatees. Health insurance and lifetime pensions are given to them. They need do nothing but show up for work each day. If you are wondering why so many federal agencies have been so easily weaponized under the Obama/Biden regime, why wouldn’t they be? They have a good gig. They have immense power and they don’t do jack. Threaten their fiefdom and they will retaliate.
Whenever I have bought a company, it has always been an asset sale. All the employees are fired and then the ones you want to keep are hired back. Wouldn’t it be nice if the federal government worked this way. Vivek Ramaswamy has obviously been paying attention to my Rob Is Right media outlet. He’s parroting what I have been saying for years. Fire them all, hire back the good ones, give each bureaucrat a term limit to work for the feds, move agencies out of Washington and dismantle the union.
Our country has slid into a world of perverse incentives that ensure inefficiency and stagnation, severely limiting the incredible productivity that exists when individuals are not pampered by the state and have to contribute to a means of production to get ahead. Our biggest national problem is out of control federal spending which crowds out private sector capital. Everything society deems as “good” emanates from private capital. Governments have no money, they take it from productive sources and squander it. Government spending is a cancer on societal advancement, it metastasizes and inevitably latches on to the most vital and productive organs in our economic body. The way to kill the cancer is with a time honored and venerable drug that has existed for thousands of years. Its name: Incentive, produced by the Carrot and Stick drug company. It is a miracle drug. Our elected representatives are rewarded by voters for spending money. If all 435 members of Congress got to split just 1% of every real 1% reduction in federal spending, each member would receive $1,500,000. Make it 10% and it is $15 million/piece. With these kinds of incentives, crooks like the Bidens would feel no need to commit treason and federal spending would be dramatically slashed. Since necessity is the mother of invention, the feds would have to figure out how to do more with less. Moreover, think how inefficient bribery schemes are. The Biden Crime Syndicate might have raked in $50 million of foreign bribes, but it has given away $125 billion of taxpayer dollars to Ukrainian oligarchs as part of the deal. That’s a lousy .04% return on corruption. Hell, if the treasury just paid the Bidens $50 million, the treasury would be $124.95 billion richer, and we would not be on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Back when the Founding Fathers were crafting American independence, one had to own property to vote. I think it should be apparent to everyone why this was so. Over 40% of Americans pay no taxes, yet they vote for politicians who spend taxpayer money like wives, ooops, excuse me, like drunken sailors. Every federal expenditure seems like a good deal if you don’t pay taxes. Wouldn’t a law requiring a taxpayer to own say $100,000 in assets and pay federal taxes to be able to vote make sense? If the United States was organized more like a stock company, it would be better managed and those that could not vote would have incentive to accumulate assets and not spend their paychecks on lottery tickets and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose.
Skin in the game. Other people’s money. Those of us who put deals together for a living understand the importance of these terms. If the 40% of those who pay no income taxes had to pay a modest “head” tax for each member of their family, you can rest assured that these voters would be much more pissed off about federal spending. Having skin in the game produces many benefits, including and perhaps most importantly instilling personal and fiscal responsibility where perhaps none existed before.
Do away with withholding. It would enhance the feeling of “skin in the game” if each W-2 recipient was responsible for writing a check to Uncle Sam.
Health Insurance. As a wartime measure to combat the government wage control laws, FDR changed the tax code to allow employers to deduct health insurance costs and boy did he fu#k up health care and the medical profession. Insanity is any circumstance where the customer does not negotiate the price of services from a provider. Imagine if the waste in the health care industry was unlocked what this extra money put in the hands of the productive class would do to spur the economy.
Social Security. As I stated in a previous article, the biggest scam in financial history. A taxpayer contributes money to an imaginary fund. The government steals it. The taxpayer suffers under the illusion he has a big pot of money. He makes contributions for 45 years and at the end of the day, he owns absolutely nothing. Keeping this money out of the hands of the scamming government and putting it into productive pools of capital would generate the greatest economic boom in world history.
Do you want a better world where fewer people are poor, there is much more individual responsibility, less crime, basic necessities cost less and there is an explosion of technological innovation? This world doesn’t cost a plum nickel. It all can be achieved with less taxes and federal spending. It’s as easy as administering the aforementioned wonder drug. Imagine if the federal work force was half its size, worked smarter and was compensated on performance. Elon Musk cut 80% of the Twitter workforce in a few months, don’t tell me it can’t be done. The 1.5 million fired employees will have to be engaged in a means of production to eat. More human capital being engaged in the division of labor, producing goods and services is a good thing. Let’s reward Congressmen for reducing spending. Let’s give them a piece of the action of what they save. The incredible reduction in federal waste will free up private capital to do amazing things. One shouldn’t be allowed to vote without skin in the game. No withholding, we want each taxpayer to feel the pain. Loosen up laws where the patient pays the provider directly and gets rid of the dead weight of burdensome regulation. Virtually every public pension is vastly underfunded. Workers relying on a pension and/or social security are always better off taking care of their own needs as opposed to having a third party pretend to do so for them. But it's more. Freeing those who are drags on the economy by forcing them to take more responsibility and be engaged in real economic production produces better values, good citizenship, engaged voters and stimulates wealth that benefits us all.
It’s all about incentives.
