Saturday, January 24, 2004
One down, 6,344,100,587 to go.
Well, I enjoyed doing the Dean thing last night, so later today I'll do Senator Joseph Lieberman. He's probably the best candidate out of the bunch. He doesn't deserve to take over for Bush, but at least he's reasonably principled.
Anyway, before I go on with the festivities, I want to give you a better look at who I am politically. It will give you a chance to determine any bias on my part as I look at the candidates.
First off, a small history. I grew up as a mild Republican under my parents' influence. After analyzing Bush and Gore in 2000, I decided that both parties were seriously flawed and became an independent. I am a centrist in nature, leaning towards the Libertarian point of view. If you don't know what a Libertarian is, it's essentially someone who holds the belief that the government should be involved as little as possible.
To support my position, I'm going to make an analogy.
Whenever I become interested in a subject, I am driven to become an expert in it. For example, I have been a baseball fan all of my life. It is something I find endlessly fascinating. Because of this, I have invested a lot of time into learning everything I can about the sport. As a result, I have an understanding of the game and its economics that surpasses even most baseball journalists. This is admittedly not a hard task; baseball journalists are typically generalist writers, and don't posses much detailed knowledge in the field. They are notoriously ignorant of the sport's intricacies.
I'm going to take the time now to do a QnD (quick n' dirty) explanation of baseball economics. Don't worry, I will demonstrate its relevancy to you and your life.
Major League Baseball is the only business that has an anti-trust exemption. This means that the normal anti-monopoly laws in our constitution do not apply to MLB. As a result, a strong players' union has emerged to make sure that owners do not force wages down as they once did.
The typical MLB player salary is around $3 million. The minimum is around $350,000. There is no cap.
Now, the owners have taken to portraying the players as overpaid crybabies, and have claimed that the cost of labor is coming dangerously close to forcing them out of business.
So what do they do? They ask Joe Q. Taxpayer for money in the form of publically-funded stadiums. They claim that without these stadiums, your city's favorite team will not have the resources to compete with the New York Yankees (who pay substanially more for players than any other team due to their huge flow of revenues) and other rich teams. They ask their fellow owners to subsidize the lower-payroll teams with a share of the richer cities' revenue in order to solve the alleged competitive balance problem between poor and rich cities.
It's a fraud.
They promise their cities that their tax dollars will allow their team to compete. They then make no effort to field a competitive team. They take revenue-sharing payments and pocket them as profit. They then continue to cry poor and ask for more revenue-sharing and stadiums.
None of this fixes the source of competitive imbalance: poor management that has no understanding of baseball economics.
In many respects, the baseball industry has it good. It's really simple to determine smart management from stupid management.
Stupid management pays a declining average-to-middling famous baseball player $3-5 million to fill a hole.
Smart management pays an average-to-middling unknown minor leaguer the league minimum for the same performance.
This is of course how competition lowers costs. If you allow competition, then you will get more efficient production for your dollar. Capitalism at its finest.
Now, let's compare baseball economics to the economics behind socialized health care and education.
First off, let's get one thing clear: there is no such thing as free health care or education. Any money the government spends will be money that is taken out of your check, or added to your rent.
That being said, the government should not be either running or paying for the health care and education systems. Advocating the government's involvement in either shows a lack of economic understanding.
Think about it: health care and education are not new issues. For a long time, there has been outcry that the government has not been pouring enough money into both.
Only, goverment has been pouring billions of dollars into health care and education for years now. So why hasn't it been enough? Why have costs been rising in both fields without sign of stopping?
Simple: the people that sell schools their books, or hospitals their drugs, know full well that to vote against any proposal that sends money to either system is viewed as akin to political suicide. They therefore continue to raise the price of their services because they know that the money will keep coming in.
Look at England if you want to know how well socialized health care works. England does virtually no medical research on cures for diseases and ailments. They can't afford it. All of the money for health care is tied into treatment.
As for our government's involvement in education...there is a reason why the quality of a high school education has slipped to the point where a diploma is almost worthless. There is simply no motivation for schools to increase the quality of their services. Their only concern is to make sure that you don't notice that they're not doing their job. They therefore lower their standards so that you don't complain that your child is failing.
If you don't like it, you have very few options. Private education is prohibitively costly due to high and the affluency of its patrons. You can't change schools without moving. Simply put, you're stuck.
So what do the politicians in power propose? Throw more money at the problem. This is akin to asking for publically-funded sports stadiums and expecting that to solve your revenue issues.
It simply doesn't address the source of our health care and education problems.
The solution? Trust in competition.
Not even twenty years ago, only the most affluent could afford a computer of their own. If for some reason the government deemed it neccessary for every citizen to have a computer, then the costs of a computer would never go down. Why would they? There'd be no reason to.
As in baseball, if you are willing to go through public scrutiny to break the mold, the effiency of your services will increase. If you are willing to let the private market take over for government in health care and education, then competition will be the order of the day. Costs will go down, quality will go up, and everything will be fixed. Yay! Hooray for capitalism!
And no, making rich people pay for it is NOT a solution. People who earn over $250,000 pay approximitly 30% of the taxes while controlling only 15% of all income. And if the rich people's money is going towards education,health care, and all those other things you think they should pay for, then it isn't going towards creating new companies, and therefore new jobs.
Rich people create companies that produce goods or services so they can gain more money. To do so, they hire people like you and me to produce those goods and services. This is how the economy works.
To complete the analogy, having the taxpayers, rich or not, pay for health care and education is like paying Brad Ausmus and Jose Vizcaino $4 million dollars to play baseball for your team. It may give you the warm fuzzies, but the job ends up not getting done, it creates more problems than it solves, and if you were just willing to allow for competition instead of blindly supporting the status quo, you could find a much more efficient way of getting it done.
Dig The D
Well, I enjoyed doing the Dean thing last night, so later today I'll do Senator Joseph Lieberman. He's probably the best candidate out of the bunch. He doesn't deserve to take over for Bush, but at least he's reasonably principled.
Anyway, before I go on with the festivities, I want to give you a better look at who I am politically. It will give you a chance to determine any bias on my part as I look at the candidates.
First off, a small history. I grew up as a mild Republican under my parents' influence. After analyzing Bush and Gore in 2000, I decided that both parties were seriously flawed and became an independent. I am a centrist in nature, leaning towards the Libertarian point of view. If you don't know what a Libertarian is, it's essentially someone who holds the belief that the government should be involved as little as possible.
To support my position, I'm going to make an analogy.
Whenever I become interested in a subject, I am driven to become an expert in it. For example, I have been a baseball fan all of my life. It is something I find endlessly fascinating. Because of this, I have invested a lot of time into learning everything I can about the sport. As a result, I have an understanding of the game and its economics that surpasses even most baseball journalists. This is admittedly not a hard task; baseball journalists are typically generalist writers, and don't posses much detailed knowledge in the field. They are notoriously ignorant of the sport's intricacies.
I'm going to take the time now to do a QnD (quick n' dirty) explanation of baseball economics. Don't worry, I will demonstrate its relevancy to you and your life.
Major League Baseball is the only business that has an anti-trust exemption. This means that the normal anti-monopoly laws in our constitution do not apply to MLB. As a result, a strong players' union has emerged to make sure that owners do not force wages down as they once did.
The typical MLB player salary is around $3 million. The minimum is around $350,000. There is no cap.
Now, the owners have taken to portraying the players as overpaid crybabies, and have claimed that the cost of labor is coming dangerously close to forcing them out of business.
So what do they do? They ask Joe Q. Taxpayer for money in the form of publically-funded stadiums. They claim that without these stadiums, your city's favorite team will not have the resources to compete with the New York Yankees (who pay substanially more for players than any other team due to their huge flow of revenues) and other rich teams. They ask their fellow owners to subsidize the lower-payroll teams with a share of the richer cities' revenue in order to solve the alleged competitive balance problem between poor and rich cities.
It's a fraud.
They promise their cities that their tax dollars will allow their team to compete. They then make no effort to field a competitive team. They take revenue-sharing payments and pocket them as profit. They then continue to cry poor and ask for more revenue-sharing and stadiums.
None of this fixes the source of competitive imbalance: poor management that has no understanding of baseball economics.
In many respects, the baseball industry has it good. It's really simple to determine smart management from stupid management.
Stupid management pays a declining average-to-middling famous baseball player $3-5 million to fill a hole.
Smart management pays an average-to-middling unknown minor leaguer the league minimum for the same performance.
This is of course how competition lowers costs. If you allow competition, then you will get more efficient production for your dollar. Capitalism at its finest.
Now, let's compare baseball economics to the economics behind socialized health care and education.
First off, let's get one thing clear: there is no such thing as free health care or education. Any money the government spends will be money that is taken out of your check, or added to your rent.
That being said, the government should not be either running or paying for the health care and education systems. Advocating the government's involvement in either shows a lack of economic understanding.
Think about it: health care and education are not new issues. For a long time, there has been outcry that the government has not been pouring enough money into both.
Only, goverment has been pouring billions of dollars into health care and education for years now. So why hasn't it been enough? Why have costs been rising in both fields without sign of stopping?
Simple: the people that sell schools their books, or hospitals their drugs, know full well that to vote against any proposal that sends money to either system is viewed as akin to political suicide. They therefore continue to raise the price of their services because they know that the money will keep coming in.
Look at England if you want to know how well socialized health care works. England does virtually no medical research on cures for diseases and ailments. They can't afford it. All of the money for health care is tied into treatment.
As for our government's involvement in education...there is a reason why the quality of a high school education has slipped to the point where a diploma is almost worthless. There is simply no motivation for schools to increase the quality of their services. Their only concern is to make sure that you don't notice that they're not doing their job. They therefore lower their standards so that you don't complain that your child is failing.
If you don't like it, you have very few options. Private education is prohibitively costly due to high and the affluency of its patrons. You can't change schools without moving. Simply put, you're stuck.
So what do the politicians in power propose? Throw more money at the problem. This is akin to asking for publically-funded sports stadiums and expecting that to solve your revenue issues.
It simply doesn't address the source of our health care and education problems.
The solution? Trust in competition.
Not even twenty years ago, only the most affluent could afford a computer of their own. If for some reason the government deemed it neccessary for every citizen to have a computer, then the costs of a computer would never go down. Why would they? There'd be no reason to.
As in baseball, if you are willing to go through public scrutiny to break the mold, the effiency of your services will increase. If you are willing to let the private market take over for government in health care and education, then competition will be the order of the day. Costs will go down, quality will go up, and everything will be fixed. Yay! Hooray for capitalism!
And no, making rich people pay for it is NOT a solution. People who earn over $250,000 pay approximitly 30% of the taxes while controlling only 15% of all income. And if the rich people's money is going towards education,health care, and all those other things you think they should pay for, then it isn't going towards creating new companies, and therefore new jobs.
Rich people create companies that produce goods or services so they can gain more money. To do so, they hire people like you and me to produce those goods and services. This is how the economy works.
To complete the analogy, having the taxpayers, rich or not, pay for health care and education is like paying Brad Ausmus and Jose Vizcaino $4 million dollars to play baseball for your team. It may give you the warm fuzzies, but the job ends up not getting done, it creates more problems than it solves, and if you were just willing to allow for competition instead of blindly supporting the status quo, you could find a much more efficient way of getting it done.
Dig The D
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