uber | Tom Mullen Talks Freedom

screenshot-2018-08-31-at-92959-am Tucker Carlson is feeling the Bern on at least one well-established left-wing narrative: that corporations are robbing everyday Americans by paying their workers so little that many of them qualify for food stamps or other welfare benefits. Thus, the founders of Amazon, Uber, Walmart, and other corporate behemoths get richer while taxpayers are forced to pay part of their labor costs.

Carlson appears honestly surprised to be saying “Bernie is right,” referring to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who plans to introduce legislation forcing corporations to “pay back” the government by taxing corporations at 100 percent of all food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and other federal assistance paid to their employees.

He shouldn’t be.

Conservatism shares the same hostility to laissez-faire markets as modern liberalism. Both are ultimately collectivist philosophies, hostile to liberty in general, albeit for slightly different reasons, and prone to economic fallacy to rationalize that hostility.

Economic Errors

First, to the economic errors. It’s hard to believe Carlson could get so many things wrong in under five minutes, starting with his general premise. He and Bernie argue the problem is the corporations not paying enough, resulting in taxpayers having to pick up the slack. But business enterprises in a free market are supposed to seek the lowest prices they can find for labor and other inputs. That’s how market economies drive down the costs of consumer goods and make all members of society richer.

The problem isn’t businesses acting in their economic self-interest; it’s the existence of the welfare programs themselves. They are an intervention in the market that distorts the price of labor. If they did not exist, the market would naturally set labor prices higher because employees wouldn’t accept jobs that didn’t pay them enough to cover the necessities currently subsidized by the programs.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

bitcoin Rand Paul’s campaign reported $2.5 million in donations for the entire third quarter, a precipitous drop from his previous reports and a fraction of what rivals Ben Carson ($20 million) and Jeb Bush ($12 million) brought in. That and anemic poll numbershave inspired many to not only pronounce Paul’s presidential campaign dead, but to gleefully declare the so-called “Libertarian Moment” over.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Anyone who believes the presidential election is a barometer of how libertarian America is becoming doesn’t understand libertarianism and isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in the real world. Libertarians don’t believe government solves anything, no matter who is running it. The purest libertarians refuse to vote on principle.

As radical as that might sound, almost half of all eligible American voters behave the same way, if not for the same reasons. Let’s face it, most Americans couldn’t name three policies held by the frontrunner in either party and couldn’t explain one in detail.

This is often ridiculed in the myriad You Tube videos where men and women “on the street” are asked basic policy questions and don’t have a clue what policies their candidates support. You’re supposed to assume they’re stupid.

For the most part, they’re not stupid. They just don’t care. They may say they support this or that candidate when a microphone is shoved in their face, but in reality they live their lives, do their jobs and run their businesses without giving politics a second thought. This is an inherently libertarian worldview and it’s growing.