Every Word is True

When the government comes to a business with a new law saying pay X% in taxes this has several effects:

1) some of the money collected has to go to managing the money collected.
2) some of the money collected has to go to enforcement (auditors, sheriffs and guns).
3) there is a regulatory burden in the form of record-keeping for the auditors should they decide to show up. This means that the business has to hire someone to keep the records
4) In the case of complex laws and record-keeping a further expense is incurred in the form of hiring professionals (tax accountants) to help understand and implement the laws.
5) these new costs then have to fit somewhere in the budget of the business.

For item 5) there are several possibilities of how this will happen:

a) the business can take a hit on their profit margin.
b) the business can increase the price of goods/services to account for the new expense.
c) the business can lower wages.
d) the business can NOT raise wages.
e) the business can cut somewhere else.

I would suggest to you, dear reader, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. That government-mandated benefits are shuffled invisibly into the cost of goods and services.

If that's the case, then who benefits? Who really benefits?

Also check out enconostories

In an almost unrelated note, I was watching a documentary on the removal of IEDs in Iraq. I asked myself, would the IEDs be there at all if we were gone? But then I saw something that made it all clear: in one scene the soldiers were unloading giant crates of Gatorade. That's who is winning the war.

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OK, it's later in the day and I stumbled on this. I am very hopeful that people will wake up, get Ron Paul on the Republican ticket so we can get back on track after a hundred years of central planning and bank fraud. In either case it will be wise to live close to the ground.

I'm not saying I agree with this guy entirely. I am much, much more optimistic about the future.



And now a little deeper. I don't normally get this far out, but take a look at these two entirely disparate world views on the same phenomenon. I am not saying that I agree. I am only putting it out there for consideration.

To whit: Naomi seems to be baffled by Obama's seemingly contradictory actions. Her worldview cannot puzzle it out, but in Alex's it makes sense. As a side note, I actually took time to read Naomi's fairly dense book "Shock Doctrine".

A Naomi Klein


B Alex Jones