This is in addition to an article titled “How the left was won”

We are presented with visions of big government beating down big business and helping the small businessman and laborer.  Government tells us that it will protect us by putting reins on Wall Street, requiring expensive drug testing, and regulating hedge funds.  Why then did Barack Obama and the Democratic Party reel in $89 million from Wall Street, over $14 million from big pharma companies, and the support of legendary hedge fund manager, George Soros, during the Presidential campaign in 2008?

What most of us misunderstand is that the regulation that is imposed by big government typically helps big business and hurts small business.  It does so by eliminating the possibility of competition for big companies.  For example, on the surface it would seem that Pfizer, a large pharmaceutical company, would be opposed to the uber-expensive drug testing that is required of the FDA.  After all, this will cost them a great deal when developing new drugs and will harm their bottom line.  However, that is only partially correct.  By having extremely expensive and time-consuming testing measures be required by the government, Pfizer is able to escape any pesky competition that may come from startup drug companies.  That is, a small drug company will not have the capital available to invest millions of dollars and years of time testing a new drug it hopes to sell.  However, Pfizer will have such resources, so it can eliminate the threat of competition and its drugs (along with those of a handful of other large pharmas) will be the only new drugs to hit the market in the future.  Likewise, big Wall Street firms and George Soros benefit from financial regulation because such regulation makes it very difficult for new, innovative firms to afford the costs of such regulation.  As such, the established Wall Street firms and hedge funds do not need to be worried about future competition from new market entrants.  An additional (and more apparent) bonus for Wall Street and Mr. Soros has been the amount of government (read: taxpayer) money that is used to buy worthless assets and prop up failed financial institutions.  Such government investments directly improve the investments of Wall Street firms and Mr. Soros.

By big government I do not necessarily mean democrats – I am referring to all big government.  It is simply the case that democrats promote even bigger government than republicans (remarkably).  The only way to truly keep big business honest and force them to compete fairly with the rest of the market is to sustain a truly free market.  Regulation, taxation, and subsidization will only serve to grow big business and make growth more difficult for small businesses that will innovate and provide more competition.

I, like many of you, have always wondered why it is that liberal economics dominate the ranks of well-educated, intelligent, financially well-off people.  Why people that would benefit from welfare and other transfers of wealth would vote democrat is self-explanatory.  However, the reasoning behind a wealthy businessman, an educated and well paid college professor, or a young person in college or recently removed from college to vote democrat can be perplexing.  These people would generally benefit from free markets and are likely to be well educated enough to understand the negative consequences of government control.  So why do they consistently vote for the left?

In 2005 the Washington Post reported a story entitled, “College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds.” The study points out that 72% of all college professors polled identified themselves as liberal.  Not shockingly, of those professors teaching at “elite” schools, 87% identified themselves as liberal.  If you follow politics and the world of economics you will be well accustomed to hearing of liberal policy and politicians coming out of Yale, Harvard, etc.  Most of the professors at these elite institutions are incredibly accomplished academics and have few real monetary concerns.  Most of them must be well informed on the benefits of free markets and the pitfalls of government, so why do they lean so far left?  This incongruity baffled me for some time, but I believe I have the answer: they are more intelligent than most other people, and they know it.  Because they are so smart, they feel that they are better equipped to make decisions than people with less intellectual ability.  To some degree, they are right; I would rather a Yale economics professor manage my investment portfolio than Jim-Bob from West Virginia (no offense, Jim-Bob).  Regardless, the problem arises when they believe that they can design macro decisions that replace the countless micro decisions that are made in a free market.  No one person, or group of people, is more intelligent or can dictate a more efficient system than the market.  Despite all the brain-power that is held by this select group of people at these elite education institutions, the market’s knowledge, intelligence, and efficiency dwarfs the intellect at Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the Ivy League combined.

Why are college students, typically from well-off families or at a very minimum intelligent enough to make their own way in the world without the help of the government, so rampantly left-leaning?  Here I think there are a few reasons.  The obvious reason stemming from the paragraph above: college campuses are typically more liberal because of the ideals that are taught by more liberal college professors.  But, it goes deeper than that.  Most college students have yet to see the real world.  They have yet to rely completely on their own paycheck and see a huge percentage of it taken away by Uncle Sam.  They have yet to see firsthand the demise of the entrepreneur at the hands of the government.  Perhaps most importantly, they are generally accustomed to having a safety net.  Most college students live in relative squalor, but they still know that if push came to shove they could depend on help from their parents or other family members.  This leads to a fear of not having a safety net and a belief that everyone should be entitled to a safety net of their own.  This is not to say that every college student has a safety net, but most do and I believe a lot of the liberal beliefs of college students stem from said safety net.  One last piece of influence on college students is social issues.  That is, college students generally have more liberal social ideals and believe that gay people should be able to be married and women should be able to have abortions should they choose to do so.  I was in a boat similar to this in my earlier college years.  Like many college students, I was not terribly concerned with the economy because the economy didn’t have any impact on my college student life, so I focused on the social issues.  One nice thing about college “lefties” is that many of them change their opinions.  In fact, as more and more of them learn about economics and the importance of the topic, they tend to shift more toward libertarianism, which satiates their desire for free societies while ensuring free markets.

Now for the real challenge: why does big business love democrats?  We are always told by the media that democrats are trying to reign in big business; the picture is painted of big business going head to head with liberals.  This is one of the greatest misrepresentations in our world today.  As a sort of cliff-hanger, I am going to address this issue in my next article, “Why big business loves big government,” so check back often!

My reasoning behind this article is indeed exploratory, but there is also an ulterior motive.  We should not base our political ideologies or votes on what is believed or said by people that seem more intelligent, knowledgeable, and successful than we are.  Develop your ideologies based on what you think is right and what you are able to reason.  With the rise of reason we will have an increasingly great society.

When I debate my points regarding free markets and free societies I often find myself being criticized by my more left-leaning rival debater for being “heartless” and having no compassion for my fellow man.  If I may be so blunt, I find my positions to hold the highest possible moral ground.  Allow me to explain.

Many people associate morality and compassion with self-sacrifice.  I can completely understand the position; it is admirable when people help others even though it may seem that they are giving something up to do so.  All debates aside regarding whether by giving a bum $20 I am gaining at least $20 worth of satisfaction, thus eliminating any self-sacrifice, self-sacrifice itself is not an enemy of free markets and free societies.  However, because it is debatable whether there is such a thing as voluntary self-sacrifice, we will just call it charity for the remainder of this article.  Charity actually holds a very important role in free markets.  Charity is a great way for free markets to effectively alleviate the human/emotional side of us all within a free society.  An example would be the charities and religious organizations that, with the help of private donations, are able to assist the poor and homeless that may not have been assisted by a profit-seeking entity.

However great charity is, the morality gets perverted when we mistake government for charity.  If I decide it necessary to donate money to a food kitchen while my neighbor decides to donate his money to a university, we will be unlikely to quarrel over our donations and will certainly not demand that the other give to an unfavorable charity or face physical consequences; we both give to charity voluntarily and with zero coercion.  However, government does just the opposite.  A group of people – sometimes small, sometimes an overwhelming majority – decide for society as a whole which governmental policies and programs are good, and force everyone to pony up to support those policies and programs.  For example, I do not believe that giving farmers subsidies is a good policy, but I cannot decide not to give to those farmers, I am forced to by the threat of physical force.  The small group that does enjoy farm subsidies is effectively using the government to extort money from me to line their own pockets.  Farm subsidies may be enjoyed only by a small percentage of us, but the story is the same for policies and programs that most of us voted for or utilize.  Take roads and freeways, for example.  I utilize the roads and freeways and I thank all of those of you that do not drive as much as I do but still pay for me to use the roads.  Is it moral for a person that is “going green” and riding her bike to work every day to still have to pay for me to drive my huge, gas guzzling, carbon fuming truck to and from work and all around town all day?  Is it moral for an anti-war protester to pay for a brand new M4A1 assault rifle that will blow off the head of a man in Afghanistan?

Conversely, the free market ensures us that we will get what we pay for, pay for only what we want, and be left alone outside of that.  The morality of this is self-explanatory.  The trouble people have with the morality of free markets and free societies is on the fringe – when a man cannot go to college because he cannot afford it or get a surgery he needs but cannot afford or face death.  Thankfully, without big government, each of us would have a great deal more money to give to charity.  Granted, some people may abstain from giving and spend their tax money on a yacht, but most people find it in themselves to give to what they believe in; especially when they know Uncle Sam won’t pick up the slack.  Some of the most charitable people in history have been those that utilized the free markets to create gigantic levels of wealth.  What’s more, most large charities operate at efficiencies that are completely unheard of in government and even impressive when compared to companies with profit-motives.  The free market would divert more money to these charities and leave the government with money only to provide protection and justice.

The argument of compassion and morality ultimately comes down to a core set of beliefs all relating to theft.  If you are one that believes theft is a means that can be justified by an end that you find to be just and moral and you believe that the state has the right to utilize theft and the threat of physical force, then you will likely stand on the left side of the aisle.  If, however, you are a believer in the freedom of every man and woman to his or her life, body, and property then you will likely stand up for free markets and free societies.  Call this an oversimplification if you will, but the debate between the left and the right, between wrong and right, always comes down to how one values freedom versus theft and physical force.

Freedom is daunting and intimidating.  With freedom comes self-responsibility and self-responsibility is something we have all become less and less accustomed to.  However, by stripping someone of their self-responsibility and thus stripping them of their freedom, you are doing them no favors.  The worst of us are those that claim it is not only good to steal from most to give to some, but necessary and morally superior to freedom.  Do not fall into the trap of believing that there is a just reason to steal – there never is.  Just as an exercise, next time you speak to someone that is for public health care ask them what percentage of last year’s income they gave to health care organizations that benefited the poor.  Most will not have given anything, and those that gave probably gave far less than you will end up paying in additional taxes.  If it is indeed the case that they have not put their money where their mouth is, ask yourself, “Whose money will they put where their mouth is?”  Where is the morality in that?

It sounds like such an ugly term, “Robber Baron.”  The phrase brings to mind thoughts of abuse and theft.  But who and what exactly did these so called Robber Barons rob?

The most famous Robber Barons were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Each of these men built up remarkable wealth – each would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s currency.  Remarkable feats, so they must have stolen from somebody to get there, right?

Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company who also built up hundreds of billions of dollars (in today’s currency) in wealth, has a famous quote that goes something like, “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”  This is a creed that every robber baron has followed, including Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt.  In a capitalistic free market, as was seen in the time of the Robber Barons, the only way to build true, long-lasting wealth is to offer a product of greater quality and/or lower price than one’s competitors to as many people as possible.  As such, a capitalist is only able to amass wealth by providing his fellow man with something that he would otherwise not be able to enjoy or afford.  Rockefeller did it primarily with oil.  He was able to drill and extract oil and sell it to his customers at lower prices than his competitors could.  This allowed people to operate machinery, grow industry, heat their homes, cook their food, and perform a number of tasks that would have otherwise been too expensive.  By offering people cheaper, more accessible energy products, Mr. Rockefeller was able to amass huge amounts of wealth.  Carnegie did the same thing with Steel and Vanderbilt provided the nation’s people with cheaper, more effective shipping and railroads.  It is impossible, in a free market, to amass the huge amounts of wealth these men did without dramatically improving the lives of a vast number of people – and that is exactly what each man did.

Not only did these Robber Barons improve the lives of their customers, but they provided countless jobs and created growth in the economy.  Carnegie not only provided jobs to his steel workers and administrators, but he also made it possible for men to have jobs laying his steel along Vanderbilt’s railways, building Rockefeller’s oil derricks, manufacturing Ford’s automobiles, or building skyscrapers in Manhattan.  Furthermore, each of the men created huge amounts of wealth for other people that either invested in their respective concerns or purchased their goods and used them to build up companies of their own.  Each Robber Baron created many times the wealth and income that he, himself, took home.

So, it seems that Robber Barons did not really rob anybody – in fact they seemed to have improved the lives of most of the people in this nation.  So why the nasty name?  It must be their unrelenting selfish greed that brought on this negative perception of these magnates.  After all, a man such as John D. Rockefeller cannot build up $320 billion in wealth without greedily hoarding everything he can get his hands on like Ebenezer Scrooge, right?  Wrong.  The Robber Barons, despite their name, were notorious for actually giving away their money.  Never has there been a series of philanthropists such as these.  Each man puts Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bono of U2 to shame.

John D. Rockefeller

•    Throughout his life, he gave a minimum of ten percent of his earnings to education and public health services.
•    Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago with an $80 million grant (1900 money), making it one of the preeminent American universities today.
•    He provided much of the funding for Spelman College (named after his in-laws, who were ardent abolitionists before the Civil War), which was a college in Atlanta for black women.
•    He established what he called his General Education Board, which promoted education at all levels everywhere in the U.S. and was especially active in promoting the education of black children in the South.
•    His donations led to a revolution in medicine with the Flexner Report, which essentially established the medical profession as we know it today.
•    He gave extensively to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Vassar and other universities.
•    He became one of the greatest benefactors of medical science, founding the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which later became Rockefeller University.
•    He founded the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, which eradicated the hookworm disease, which had plagued the Southern United States.
•    He gave $250 million to his own Rockefeller Foundation, which in turn endowed the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, founded the Peking Union Medical College, helped in the World War I war relief, and other great feats.
•    He founded the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial foundation, which supported work in social studies.
•    Later in his life, he was known for walking around town with pockets full of money and would hand it out to children and adults as he went from place to place.

Andrew Carnegie

•    He established public libraries throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries.  In all, he funded approximately 3,000 libraries in 47 U.S. States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and Fiji.
•    He helped fund the University of Birmingham.
•    He founded the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, which became part of Carnegie Mellon University.
•    He founded the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, which was setup to support scientific research and is still advancing science today.
•    He served on the board of Cornell University.
•    He funded the construction of the Hooker telescope, which was the largest telescope in the world for three decades.
•    He founded the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to assist education at Scottish universities.
•    He notoriously established large pension funds for his former employees and later established TIAA-CREF, a pension fund for college professors.
•    He built Carnegie Hall in New York City.
•    He was a large benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute for African-American education and he helped Booker T. Washington create the National Negro Business League.
•    He founded the Carnegie Hero Fund in many nations for the recognition of deeds of heroism.

To go on listing each of the Robber Barons’ philanthropy would be a waste; let us just say there was a lot of it.

Not only did these men provide cheap goods and services, countless jobs, and unprecedented wealth, but they also gave more to charity than anyone before or since.  The free market set the sky as the limit for these men and they capitalized on it.  By doing so, they improved this nation and the lives of its citizens.  It is time we stop referring to these men as “Robber Barons” and call them what they are: Capitalists.

I remember being told on sports teams that it was not winning that mattered, but having a good time. Well, damn it, I have a good time winning! Competition is bad. That’s what our nation is teaching children; it is also what the nation’s teachers’ unions are pushing on our public school system.

If there were one thing I would like the government to spend my money on it would be education (don’t mix my words, I’d still rather it be private, but if . . .). However, we are now spending well over $10,000 per public school student per year. Urban areas typically spend much more. Washington DC spends over $14,000 per student per year. This is more than double what we spent (adjusted for inflation) forty years ago. We constantly hear about underfunded schools being the cause for students’ poor education. “If only we could afford a new computer lab and upgraded gym, then our students would finally get the education they deserve.” Well, spending on education has gone up astronomically, while test scores have remained stagnant. How could this be?

There is one thing that rings true in every walk of life: competition improves everything. Yes, everything. The teachers’ unions of the United States disagree with this law, however. They will have you believe that children are too precious to be caught up in competition. This is why the teachers’ unions are the biggest opponents of voucher systems within public schools around the United States.

Voucher systems attach the money spent on each child’s education to that child and allows the child’s parents to choose where he or she attends school. So, you can decide to send your daughter to the school that has a 40% dropout rate or you can choose to send her to the school that sees 80% of its graduates advance to college. You can even have your daughter go to a private school that feeds directly into Harvard and the state will give your tax dollars to that school instead of the school that sees nearly half its students leave school for the local Jack in the Box. The school you decide to send your daughter to is the school that gets the money from the city/state/feds. This creates a competitive environment for schools in that they must offer your daughter the best education, most impressive facilities, and cheapest cost of attendance in an effort to solicit your bid of support. This competition then leads to every school either improving or closing. As the bad schools close the good schools will grow and new, even better schools will open. The main benefactors of this competition are your child (who will get a better education) and the tax-payers (who will save money because there will be less waste and therefore less spending on education). Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?

Teachers’ unions do not see the voucher system the way sane, rational, freedom-loving Americans do. Teachers’ unions see the voucher system as a threat to job security. As it stands today, most teachers’ unions have negotiated tenure with public school systems. Once a teacher achieves tenure they become virtually impossible to fire and their salaries are fixed to nothing more than seniority and sometimes their level of education. As such, the incentive to log long hours helping to improve the education of students becomes extremely limited. Under a voucher system teachers would be expected to provide the best education possible and would face losing their job if they do not do so. Teachers would also be thrown into a system similar to the world of business where better teaching and results will lead to higher salaries and bonuses, instead of higher pay coming only with seniority. This is scary to someone that has no interest in working hard to improve education and teach younger generations. It is the goal of a teachers’ union to make it so no teacher ever has to worry about his/her job and so they vehemently oppose any system that will create competition amongst schools and teachers (i.e. the voucher system). It takes a special type of organization to accept the duty of educating our nation’s younger generations and block systems that would dramatically improve that education.

Luckily, not all teachers have such little confidence in their ability to teach that they would prefer tenure to the prospect of better instructing students and earning larger salaries. These are the teachers that I want teaching my (eventual) child and these are the teachers that will thrive if we ever do come to our senses and stop listening to the remarkably destructive and malevolent teachers unions.

Private schools do not provide a better education for any other reason than the fact that they must compete with other private schools as well as public schools. In school systems that have instituted voucher systems, the difference in the quality of education between public and private schools becomes increasingly narrow. Competition improves everything.  It is time we make our children’s schools compete. It is time that we see teachers’ unions as the incomprehensible organizations that they are; if a teacher is not confident enough in his abilities to compete with other teachers then he should not be teaching this nation’s children.

Please post your comments slamming my harsh treatment of teachers’ unions below.

“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”
James Madison

One thing I’ve noticed, particularly among members of the Republican Party, is an immense dislike for illegal immigrants.  They view such immigrants as coming to this nation and soaking up all of its finest resources.  The illegal immigrants take advantage of subsidized health care, welfare, social security, and a number of other social programs that our federal and state governments have set up.  The people of the Republican Party generally believe that the illegal immigrants that are here now should be deported back to their naturalized nation and that fences and increased border security should keep out future illegal immigration.

On the other hand we have the democrats that believe that people should be allowed to stay in this nation that are here, we should just put a best effort forth to secure the borders.  They seem to be the “defenders” of illegal immigrants by showing their kind-heartedness.  Democrats generally do not wish to strip illegal immigrants of access to subsidized health care or any other form of social welfare.

As with most political agendas, both views create unintended consequences that end up doing more harm than good.

To understand the issue of immigration only requires the understanding why the term as “illegal immigrant” even exists.  Until the last century, immigration was particularly easy.  So long as you were healthy and able to work, you were allowed in.  The first laws that restricted immigration into the United States arose in the 1790s. Still, anybody and everybody was allowed into the nation to work and be free to pursue happiness, only citizenship was restricted.  The final version, adopted in 1798, did nothing to actually restrict immigration, it simply set up the guideline that people must reside in the United States for fourteen years before becoming a citizen.  From 1798 to 1882 the only laws that were passed in the United States were those that made it easier to become a citizen, still nothing was done to restrict immigration.  In 1882 Congress passed its first laws limiting immigration.  The law limited the number of Chinese nationals that could migrate to the United States in any given year and also banned the entry of “lunatics” and carriers of infectious diseases.  The limit on Chinese nationals was eventually repealed in 1943.  Immigration did not see its first serious hit until 1920 when Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which limited the overall number of people that could immigrate into the United States, broken down by nationality.  This Act was replaced by the Immigration Act of 1924, then the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.  Both replacements simply updated and complicated the quotas.  The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 served to eliminate quotas by nationality and simply limited quotas by hemisphere.  In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed, which, for the first time, levied fines upon businesses that knowingly hired illegal immigrants.  There were more small Acts put into place which intended to hinder illegal immigration and there was of course the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for the construction of a 700 mile fence along the U.S./Mexican border.  As you can see, the United States slowly progressed from having very open and free borders to attempting to shut them down completely.  The United States was not the first nation to attempt to do this; in fact it has been one of the last.

So we finally get to the point, why is immigration illegal?  The only reason, the only incentive for immigration to be made to be illegal is social welfare (some may argue that illegal immigrants take jobs away from citizens, but this argument is very flawed and will not be addressed in this article).  When you and I pay taxes, a large portion of those taxes go toward paying the hospital bills and welfare checks of many illegal immigrants.  This is infuriating to say the least.  Especially when we consider, as we always hear many politicians tell us, that illegal immigrants don’t pay income taxes, and yet they can benefit from all the social welfare.

So what can be done to stop all of this?  Well, most people would say, “Get rid of illegal aliens.”  Let’s consider an example where the United States was able to effectively keep all immigrants from illegally entering the country.  First, our goal would be accomplished, there would not be any more social welfare going to illegal immigrants.  However, this gain comes with devastating costs.  There is the obvious expense of Homeland Security and building a fence.  We already spend billions upon billions on that and would likely have to spend more to make it perfect.  Next we have the expense to business owners that employ illegal immigrants.  Often times there are jobs that most American citizens would not find satisfactory and are unwilling to perform at the wage that those jobs command.  Illegal immigrants, however, are happy to perform those tasks because these are the only jobs available to them given their typical disadvantages in speaking English and education.  If these workers vanished then business owners would have to spend far more on wages to hire American citizens.  These higher wages would bankrupt a number of companies and American citizens that once had high paying jobs would lose their jobs so that other American citizens could have low paying jobs.  Tax revenues would not increase, they would actually decrease because it is no longer the income-tax-paying business owners that are making money, they would have either gone bankrupt or at the very least would be making less and paying less in taxes.  You would have an effect where American workers making very little would replace American workers that were previously making good salaries.  In essence, many Americans with jobs would have to take pay cuts or lose their jobs so that less qualified Americans could have low-paying jobs once held by illegal immigrants.  Compounding on this conundrum is the fact that illegal immigrants spend money, and have specific sets of needs that the market has reacted to meet.  The companies and employees that meet the demands of illegal immigrants would be thrown into a tailspin, further reducing employment and aggregate wages.

We are presented with a serious predicament between keeping illegal immigrants, thus paying some of their bills and expelling those immigrants and facing bankruptcy and lower wages for Americans.  There is, however, a simple solution.  Few people complain about the hard work that illegal immigrants perform without contempt.  Even fewer complain that illegal immigrants gladly work in the blazing sun while Americans work in air-conditioned offices.  What most every anti-illegal-immigration activist complains about is the social welfare that these illegal immigrants are taking advantage of.  Hence, our simple solution: end social welfare.

Just one of the numerous benefits of a society without overwhelming social welfare is that illegal immigration will be of great benefit to that society instead of draining its resources.  Once again people will be singing the praises of immigration, much like James Madison did.  Most importantly, people will once again be able to choose where and how to spend their money without the government deciding for them.

Illegal immigrants do not utilize social welfare because they are bad people who are trying to steal from Americans.  They utilize it for the same reasons that Americans utilize it – if something is given away for free it will almost certainly be abused.  So, next time you hear a story about an illegal alien using social welfare without paying taxes, consider the root of the problem, not its product.