Gangster government

Michael Barone has spoken out on the subject of "gangster" government many times since that description was first used by him at the beginning of the Obama administration.  Here, here, and here are three such discussions by Barone.  "Gangster" government is really simply a euphemism for statism or totalitarianism of the Mussolini/Hitler variety in which the the state controls all aspects of an economy without taking outright ownership of the means of production.  It does this by edicts, by taxation, and of course increasingly complex regulations all of which inhibit and limit innovation and wealth creation.  There's a reason why all socialist states, all fascist dictatorships have failed in the end.  They can make the trains run  on time for a while, but they cannot innovate and create the environment that produces the Bill Gates, and Steve Jobses who literally create brand new industries that end up creating businesses that create millions of high paying jobs.  There are a number of reasons why the Obama gang should be run out of town this November, but at the top of the list of these reasons is their fundamental lack of understanding of how the free enterprise system, i.e. capitalism, works.  Everyone would do well to remember that when Hoover and FDR began the federal central planning programs in the 1930's designed to put the government in control of the economy to prevent any future depressions, there was no real improvement in unemployment conditions for over 10 years.  It took WWII to put people back to work.  The message:  the government does not create jobs, the government does not create wealth therefore the government does not create a growing, expanding, productive economy.  The Obama people simply don't get this.

A sidebar to this gangster government discussion is the tiresome and largely false mantra of leftists columnists and pundits 24/7 that greedy Wall Street caused the 2007/8 sub-prime mortgage driven financial meltdown and that government must step in and take control of these vampires before they suck all of our collective blood dry.  This is not a complicated nor difficult issue to resolve.  A starting point is this article by Joe Pinto in the AEI Journal.  There's plenty more written about this disaster in this blog in the past.  One thing is clear.  Wall Street played a part in the fiasco, however, that role was largely at the behest of the government at many levels.  What needs reforming here is the liberal notion that a private dwelling and every other material consumer good should be considered a civil right.

Out of Control Compensations

There is justifiable concern in many quarters (including this one) over the often outsized bonus and compensation packages on Wall Street, Corporate America, and even in the professional sports world.  Ten, fifteen, twenty million dollar bonuses and annual sports contracts makes one wonder if the system isn't overloading the pay to producers to the detriment of capitalism,  the only successful and productive economic system for raising living standards the world has ever known .  It's a complicated and difficult issue but at least the extreme compensation we are talking about here is occurring in the private sector where the discipline of profit and loss are at work and owners who permit this compensation can always change it whenever they want.  Outsized compensation packages in the public sector is quite another issue since we're talking about something paid for by taxpayers who can't change what they don't know about.  We all know about the relatively large salaries and retirement benefits (perhaps not by Wall Street standards) paid out to federal lawmakers and sundry federal employees, but transparency regarding  the compensation of city managers,  heads of local community fire, police and other departments is virtually nonexistent.  Some information about this subject has been leaking out recently about abuses about some small towns in California that have gone bankrupt. City managers receiving compensation packages valued at well over 500 thousand dollars per year, firemen and police officers and penitentiary guards with upwards of 200,000 annual salaries plus generous retirement benefits, and so  forth.  One school in Orange County, California, Brandman University, a subsidiary of the better known Chapman University, several years ago created a master of public administration program to study various cities' compensation plans for employees.  This story in the Orange County Register provides major insights about what's going on with public service employee compensation these days and it's not a pretty picture.  To understand what's at the bottom of the constantly rising tax burden, begin by understanding the consequences of these city employees's compensation packages.  It is not a wonder that the majority of graduates of the vaunted California higher education system pick government work as their first career choice.