Southern Bread Blog

Frequent readers of the blog will know that I’m a huge Auburn Tigers fan. Today is the Iron Bowl (Alabama vs. Auburn) so I guess it’s time to make my prediciton. Hmmm. Auburn has had a terrible year and their offense has really sputtered. But, they have settled on a QB and in the last game against Georgia they looked so much better. On the other hand. Alabama has a solid team at pretty much every position. They aren’t All-American at any one position, but they also don’t really have any weaknesses. So I guess I’ll have to do the old matchup grid to figure it out:

So, given that, I’ll give Alabama the win. Especially since it’s in T-Town. But, as always, we’ll just have to wait and see. I’m clinging to 2002!

How out of touch are these people like BabaWawa that, number one, they are all excited that the messiah is making his kids do chores. And, number 2, it’s somehow news. Umm, Baba, there are about a hundred million people in this country who make their kids do chores. Jeez. Get a news story:

To their credit, at least in the transcript version, the messiah and Jackie O. seem to be surprised that Baba is surprised. I guess they didn’t realize how INCREDIBLE chores were.

Try as you might, you just can’t boil down something as broad as “social programs” into a single blog post. You just have to seperate them out into individual posts. So in that vein let’s start looking broadly at welfare as a whole. Then we’ll get into specifics in later posts. Let me go ahead and tell you what you know about conservatives in the area of welfare: conservatives want to rob from the poor and give to the rich, because we are greedy hard-hearted capitalists that place money over compassion. Now let me tell you what reality is: that’s complete BS. First off, do you seriously think people like that exist en-masse? No. Scrooge is a character in a book. Not a real person.

So why do conservatives consistently get this rap? It’s partly demogoguery, partly mis-understanding and partly just ideological disagreement. The conservative view on welfare is simple: earning a wage is better than being given one. Hard work is better than a handout. That’s the broad idea, and I don’t see it as being anything particularly radical. Would anyone really say that those things aren’t true? I doubt it. But the devil, as always, is in the details. Especially when politics are involved. So what does a conservative view of welfare look like? Let’s take a look at the 1996 welfare reform bill that the Republican dominated congress passed:

The 1996 bill has been called a success by most everyone. Even such social justice champions as Barack Obama have jumped on the bandwagon and claimed it. The bill tried to take a middle ground between no safety net at all, and pure handouts. To me that seems fair. It’s not cruel to require someone to work for their pay. It’s life. Again, even the hardest of the social justice crowd implicitly agree with this notion, when they back programs such as Obama’s newly announced plan to create 2.5 million public jobs. If the work doesn’t matter then why not just give them money? Why make these 2.5 million work for it? Because it’s intuition. And everyone knows it. Even if they play dumb for political gain.

Since the 1996 bill was primarily geared towards putting more power into the hands of the states to administer their own welfare systems, let’s look at the state that has received the best grade: Idaho.

Now, let’s compare that with the state that got the lowest grade: Vermont.

I think those are pretty convincing facts. The more you expect of people, the more they respond. If you treat them like responsible adults, they are more apt to act that way. If you treat them like children and always give them something for nothing, they will never grow up. Sure, we all are going to need help at some point in our lives, and sometimes there will be no friends or family there to catch us when we fall. I don’t know a single conservative that would want to see someone in real need go hungry. But when welfare gets out of the realm of the church and into the hands of the state, you must reign it in tight. Government turns everything it touches into a mindless, bloated money pit. And that “helps” nobody. I’ll say it again: conservatism is the only political ideology that takes a realistic view of human nature into it’s policies.

I realize that such a broad topic as taxes is a bit much for a blog post. But, rest assured, I’m not going to try and cover every little tax issue. I’m just going to give a broader view of taxes in general and then we’ll zero in on some of the more specific forms of taxation later. Broadly, a tax is any financial payment mandated by the government to be paid to them for the reason of some government function. It can take many forms such as excise, tariffs, capital gains, duties, etc. For the purpose of this first part, don’t concern yourself with what the government does with the taxes it collects. This is firstly about the act of taxation in and of itself.

Generally speaking, conservatism is anti-tax. Conservatives and libertarians oppose taxation on the grounds that the government doesn’t produce anything. So the effect of any tax is to take money away from producers -you and me- and place it in the hands of non-producers. Not only that, but a percentage based tax, penalizes production. It discourages production, because the more you produce, the higher the tax – leaving you with less money in which to produce more. Libertarians also emphasize the moral aspect of taxation as a form of legalized theft. They rightly say that it clearly violates private property rights since the government is taking your money by force.

The other big reason that we are anti-tax is that all taxes are ultimately a tax on the individual. I’ve heard it put before that “businesses don’t pay taxes”. Meaning that when you tax a corporation, you are really taxing the individuals that either work, sell to, or buy from that corporation. Business must pass that cost on in some form, and it always ends up at the feet of individuals citizens. Let’s work through a scenario, in which you are the owner of a small company that makes shoes:

So your monthly profit is $40,000. What could you do with that money? Well, you could either drop the price of your shoes to hopefully increase sales, give each of your employees a raise, invest in new equipment to reduce expenses, or a mix of all three. And you would still have some money left over to pay yourself a wage and put some in savings for unexpected consequences. But wait. You haven’t paid your taxes yet. Looks like your rate is going to be in the 30% range. So go ahead and break off $12,000 to uncle sam. You are left with $28,000 now.

So now all those plans you had are not possible. You will have to either keep shoe prices the same (hurting the consumer), not give your employees a raise (hurting your employees), or not invest in new equipment (hurting both the consumer and employee long term). You still have to pay yourself a wage because you can’t work for free and you know your equipment is getting old, so you decide to invest in new equipment to keep the business competitive. Well, there you have it. Corporate taxes just made your employees(no raise) and the general public(higher prices) poorer. Just remember: All taxes trickle down to the individual, making them poorer. Without exception.

This should really be called the “artifical labor market tampering” post, but since we started it with the minimum wage moniker we’ll stick with that. I just want to give you an example of what happens when government intrudes into the labor market, instead of allowing the market to regulate itself. I think a great example are the New York draft riots. The name is a little mis-leading because it wasn’t solely about conscription. It was primarily about Northern labor fear of mass emancipation of Southern slaves. I’ll let Albon Man, Jr. explain:

What this is saying is that freeing the slaves in the south essentially glutted the Northern labor market with low-priced labor. These freed slaves were not “un-skilled”. Many of them learned trades and skills while working as slaves in the south. Upon being emancipated, the un-skilled immigrants in the North feared a labor glut. Free’d black men would come in and do a better job because of their training, but do it for the same price or lower. We are seeing a similar situation with minimum wage today. An artificial floor at which one group(low-skilled and young Americans) isn’t allowed to compete on price, and another group(illegal immigrants from Mexico) is. What happens today is economic instability. What happened then was riots.

So this now gives us a real world example to devise a solution to this. What should the government have done? Left slavery alone? No. That would be immoral. The better solution in such a situation is to change the market conditions, rather than directly manipulate the industry. You can change the market conditions to encourage a certain direction and then let it naturally evolve. This is exactly what happened with slavery in England. Through a system of “compensated emancipation”, the British government paid slave owners %40 of the value of each slave. As a result, slavery was abolished peacefully in less than ten years. So why not pay 100%? I’ll let Thomas DiLorenzo explain it:

This is the dirty little secret. Slavery was already becoming unsustainable because of the natural economic forces in capitalism. Servile labor is naturally less productive than free labor, because free labor has an economic incentive to produce more. By only paying 40% of the value of the slave to slaveholders, the British gave a nudge to slaveholders to free their slaves, yet didn’t glut the market with an artificial workforce. Instead this gave incentive to slaveholders to keep their free’d slaves on as paid labor to recoup even more cost. But you won’t hear any of these excellent explanations or arguments in the main stream media. All we get fed on the minimum wage issue is “it’s mean”. “Those greedy conservatives want to keep people poor.” That’s total bull.

A conservative view of minimum wage fits perfectly into a Christian worldview also, because it promotes freedom and opportunity, and doesn’t ignore the human condition in the process. Artificial tampering with the labor market, such as happened with American emancipation, can be dangerous as I have just shown. Slavery was ended peacefully all over the world. But because America had a radical interventionist in office (Lincoln), we ended up losing 600,000 american lives in the war. That isn’t Christian at all. Freedom, freedom, freedom is at the heart of conservatism, and it’s at the heart of the Christian ethic as well.

Ok, let’s get this thing going. The first topic in Conservatism 101 is Minimum Wage. Minimum wage is a law that says employers are not allowed to pay hourly workers less than whatever the current minimum wage figure is. It’s a floor on the dollar per hour wage an employer must pay. Currently in the US, the minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. It’s not hard to understand the pro’s of a minimum wage law. They are pretty intuitive. If you establish a base pay that employees must recieve, it acts as a protection against greedy employers that would underpay employees. It also acts as a means to make sure workers are not paid a wage that would put them under the poverty line. I think we’ve all come to see these things as obvious. So why write an article about it? Well, I’ll let Walter Williams answer that question:

What is he saying? He’s drawing our intuition away from that of emotion and into the area of economic realities. It’s as much of an intuition we all share that what someone’s paid should be a measure of what he or she is “worth”. I don’t expect to be paid $80,000 to sack groceries at the supermarket, and I also don’t expect to be paid $18,000 to do complex legal work. Both rates of pay are obviously wrong because they are out of touch with the actual value of the thing being produced. Sacking groceries is a low-skilled job, and as such, might only bring $3-$4 per hour of value to a employer. But because of minimum wage law, the employer has to pay the sack-boy $6.55 per hour. Now, let’s consider that he’s part of the UFCW(United Food and Commercial Worker’s Union) as I was when I sacked groceries in high-school. His total compensation now approaches perhaps $9 per hour. So the employer is losing $4-$5 per hour on each bagger.

What’s the effect of this? The employer will hire fewer bag boys and make them hoof it from register to register sacking double-duty. Sound familiar? Or, he could just forget baggers and make the cashiers bag the groceries as they scan them. Again, sound familiar? Well, in the last few years we have even a newer option for this employer to avoid losing money. Now he can just forget the cashier and bagger altogether and install a few “self serve” checkout lanes. So what minimum wage did is cost baggers and cashiers their jobs. How many times on the way home from work have you stopped by Target and they had 40 lanes and only 3 open. Thankyou minimum wage. But wait! All this about business is great and all, but what we really care about is making sure we help the poor, and minimum wage does that right? Um, no. Take it away Walter:

And this gets to the heart of the matter. Minimum wage is economic discrimination against the young and the low-skilled. For example, if you are a low-skilled worker or maybe a teenager just getting into the job market, you can’t compete with higher skilled workers in the area of productivity or experience. So how can you compete? Pay. You say, well I might not be as good as that guy but I’ll work for 30% less. That gives the employer a value proposition that makes sense. But minimum wage robs the young or low-skilled worker this most important bargaining tool. Instead employers just make due with fewer employees and in turn, these low-skilled workers have a hard time finding a job. But you won’t hear any of this solid argument in the popular media or education. Like I said before, liberalism has reduced all this to: “that’s mean and greedy.” But, playing games with the laws of economics produces real consequences. I’ll give some of the consequences of artificially produced labor competition in the next post.

With all the talk of conservatism being dead and this and that, it’s clear to me that some straight talk on just what exactly it is, is in order. So this is the first of a series of articles on what exactly is conservatism and why it fits as a puzzle piece into evangelicalism. Bashing the Religious Right is both easy and tiresome these days. I will hopefully show why the easier it is to explain an ideology, the more wrong it usually is. Truely good answers to real problems can only be given in well thought out, carefully crafted methods of thinking. The problem is that long, well thought out answers are anti-thetical to mass media.

Liberalism has been largely crafted in modern times as a series of ten second soundbite answers to easily-attacked sections of the larger ideologies of conservatism. That makes it the ideology of choice for the media by default. Hopefully in this series I’ll be able to flesh out the full measure of conservative thought so you can see how these positions came about, not just what they are. It’s true for example that conservatives and libertarians are against a minimum wage. That fact by itself is easily attacked and denounced as un-caring or even un-christian. That doesn’t impress me. But in the first post I will talk about this very issue and show how minimum-wage law actually harms individual workers much worse than leaving it free for the market to decide.

The latest news is that part of the upcoming 60 minutes story will include this from the messiah:

Wow, I’m so conflicted. If he gives us a playoff I say go ahead and put him on the 10 dollar bill. Take Hamilton off and replace him with a modern Federalist. My fear of Obama is now battling my love of college football. I fear I may be torn apart. Must… resist…

If you needed yet another affirmation of why you chose to homeschool your kids, try this one on for size. Everyone knows the name Bill Ayers now. He’s the ex-radical hippie that, together with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and a number of others set off a bomb at the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war. What may be lesser known is his involvement in Chicago’s education system. He’s currently a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois (Chicago) and has headed numerous education campaigns, organizations and commitees in the Chicago area. His most public work, perhaps is his involvement with Barack Obama on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge(CAC).

Now, I just want you to think about this for a moment. Here you have a 1960’s domestic terrorist, who is only a free man because of a prosecutorial technicality (illegal use of wire-taps), who is now a leader in the Chicago urban educational system. Do you seriously want your children’s curriculum and educational methods being chosen by this guy? Here’s an excerpt:

It’s often been said that the hippies of the 60’s left their communes, put on tweed jackets and took jobs in education. Well, this must be a shining example of that. How does a blatantly unrepentant domestic terrorist and “small c communist” become the chairman of the board of an education initiative in one of the largest cities in the country? He actually worked with the mayor of Chicago to make it happen for goodness sake. Makes you wonder who else is out there running the show who’s background we might not know as well as Mr. Ayers. Do yourself a favor. Keep homeschooling your kids. Unless you are a domestic terrorist that is.

So where will the coolest kids on the block end up going to school? That was evidently the subject of a piece on townhall.com by Terence
Jeffrey. This is always the big question on an incoming liberal president. Will he put his money where his mouth is and put HIS kids in the same schools he
thinks OTHER people’s kids should attend? Well, the prospects don’t look to good for that so far with the messiah:

So, here we have Obama’s firm conviction that the people of DC should not be given any choice of what school to send their kids to. He believes that they
should be forced to send their kids to their local public schools so that they will “foster innovation and provide students with varied, high-quality learning
opportunities.” He must want that for his own kids as well then, right? Umm, no.

I just have to shake my head at this stuff. It’s so endlessly predictable. Newsbusters pursues it further.