Shooting Inconvenient People

The professional left in America and their chattering-class useful idiots have followed a consistent pattern for a century: sympathizing with tyranny in their musings over how to implement policies fueled by jealousy and an undying fear of economic liberty. (Ross Kaminsky – Stern Idiocy)

Never met a dictator he did not like

Add Andy Stern, former SEIU Kommisar, to the list of Communist China admirers

Inside of every good progressive is a very illiberal goose-stepper longing for the strongman. Planning committees and central control send a thrill up the legs of those who disdain the individual liberties enshrined in our moribund constitution. Bold action! Intervention!

Stern waxed poetic about China’s bold central planning:

China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development. (Andy Stern – I Love Communism)

That’s nothing. Tom Friedman’s ardor swells and his breast heaves as he gushes forth his paeans to the burly, bossy, ever so muscular Chinese Communist Politburo. If only the power elites here in America could snatch such willy-nilly decision-making from the ignorant clutches of workaday rubes! Why can’t we do away with all this messy democracy and have a dictator state like China, ask the ChiCom fanboys.

Jonah Goldberg knows how to puncture the balloon:

China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty.

Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.

Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death. (Goldberg – China Envy)

Here’s the reality that the progressive toadies don’t want to face…

Now comes the hangover. The public works projects are winding down, unleashing a wave of unemployment and an uptick in social unrest. The banks' nonperforming loans are rising, and local governments are insolvent. The country is littered with luxurious county government offices, ghost cities of empty apartment blocks, unsafe high-speed rail lines and crumbling highways to nowhere. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

This last statement could also describe the US just as well…

A financial sector that allocates credit based on politics rather than price signals led China into this mess. Popular pressure to dismantle crony capitalism is building, and the Communist Party would be wise to get in front of it while it can. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

For an entertaining and excellent and critique of Stern and Friedman’s corporatist mindset, see Matt Welch’s The Simpletons.

It's Not a Free Marketplace...

...  when government restricts freedom of action

It's not a free marketplace when a union can cry for government to use its coercive powers to tell a company that it can't open that new airplane factory it just built. That is exactly what happened in the Boeing case that was just resolved.

The National Labor Relations Board has dropped its controversial case against airline manufacturer Boeing, which had become a lightning rod for conservatives.

The labor board argued for much of the past year that Boeing decided to locate a new plant to build its new 787 Dreamliner jets in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, in retaliation for strikes by unionized workers at its existing facilities in Washington state. (The Hill - NLRB Withdraws Boeing Case)

"Retaliation" is a natural reaction to market forces

What if Boeing decided to lower all wages by 10 dollars per hour and workers quit because of it, going to a company that pays more? Why isn't that worker retaliation against the company? A better question is, why would government prevent employers or employees from "retaliating?"  Retaliation is just a dirty word for a reaction to a previous market force. If Starbucks jacks up the price of a vento to $10 dollars a cup, I ain't buyin' no more coffee there.

Coercion is the Key to Progressivism 

This also reveals the coercive mindset of progressivism. There are still people in America today insisting that our economic decline is due to the decline of unions, despite the lack of evidence to support their contention. The only way enforced unionism works is if you chain down businesses and take away their free agency.

This is why Detroit, a once-thriving union dynamo, collapsed into a liberal junk heap. Union Labor bid its prices up too high, Big Business foolishly accepted, and government failed to protect them from the free market "retaliation."  Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs headed south to non-union climes, and foreign imports further impinged upon the Big Labor-Big Business fantasy land of price-setting insulated from market forces.

Progressives would use government power to prevent such free-market reactions, setting up trade barriers that would spark trade wars resulting in higher consumer prices, tying down companies and forcing them to "take it," which is what the big three pretty much did voluntarily, to their ultimate detriment.

Communism, Fascism, Corporatism

Back in the bad old days, raw communism would do this by expropriating the capitalists' property, eventually running the confiscated enterprises into the ground, murdering those who resisted, and miring their societies in misery.

Fascism, communism's little leftist cousin, was more sophisticated, adding some sweeteners in for the bourgeoisie. Fascists were smart enough to leave the means of capital in the hands of the business owners; it was more convenient and efficient to just shake down everybody at the factory door as they left for the day.

The modern-day way of chaining down a corporation is with state-sponsored corporatism. Businesses will stay put so long as they are protected by an archipelago of government regulations, protections, exemptions and other formidable barriers that protect them from competition, giving them free rein to continually jack up prices with government-sanctioned impunity, making consumers a captive audience.  

As an added bonus, they can freely dip into the government coffers to the tune of tens of billions when their unsustainable business model inevitably fails.

Welcome to Corporate America.

Further Reading:
Rothbard - Power & Market, Ch 6

Why Does Obama Hate American Workers?

The Chavez twins

Barack Obama is the Hugo Chavez of North America

Western Hero doesn't celebrate international communist holidays, but we recognize our American Labor Day, since it has been cleansed of it's embarrassing socialist origins.



Obama and the Democrats Wage War on the American Worker

Obama used the power of the state to punish another enemy this past week, sending armed agents to storm a guitar factory whose owner had the temerity to not bribe, er... pay a campaign contribution to the Obama campaign.  The pretext?  Indian workers should have sanded those boards, not Americans!

Boeing's newest plant remains shuttered and thousands out of work because Obama has again used the power of the state to punish South Carolina for not voting for him.  

Add to this the fact that President Obama's "Jobs" Czar has shipped tens of thousands of jobs to China, and it is clear that President Obama and the Democrats hate the American worker and have done everything in their power to discourage American businesses from hiring them.

President Obama and the Democrats are gold-plated members of the DC-Chamber of Commerce Cheap Labor Cabal that supports the exploitation of illegal immigrants.  They violate the human rights of immigrants while denying millions of American workers a decent wage for their labor.  Millions more Americans are completely out of work thanks to the Democratic party jobs program for illegal immigrants.

Strangling Job Creators with Red Tape

Another dictatorial tactic is to tangle up a company with confusing and contradictory regulations so that no matter how diligent and sincere its efforts are, an army of compliance bureaucrats can storm its offices and quickly find damning evidence of corporate malfeasance and disobedience to the state.

Trucking company Old Dominion took an alcoholic trucker off the road, following Department of Transportation regulations.  That same action ran afoul of another government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (See the Human Events article)  Another company impaled upon the horns of a government-created dilemma.

We need to get rid of EEOC, Department of Labor and every other agency that enforces labor laws or enshrines the enforcement of some laws over others.  So many government agencies serve as nothing more than infestations of special interest activists to they can sap this nation from the inside by using the government's powers against their enemies.  It is a sure sign of a destructive, hidebound government when one private sector business action complies with one government regulation while simultaneously breaking another.

Pass the laws and let violations be dealt with in civil court.  As a bonus to liberals, that action could increase labor union membership, making unions actually useful again as an advocate before the bar for workers whose rights have been abused by employers.

Our government must also cease raiding places of business as if they were Al Qaeda strongholds.  The federal government's armed raid on the Gibson Guitar factory was a gross overreach befitting a Latin American dictatorship, or perhaps a Russian Kleptocracy raid on BP.
 
Obama's Jobs Machine is Stuck in Reverse

So if you're out of a job, you should be marching on the White House and demanding an end to job killing statism that supports foreign workers over American workers.  Demand an end to illegal immigration that is stealing millions of jobs.  Tell the government to call off the regulatory gestapo that harasses the people who hand you a paycheck.