Big government policies are, of course, antithetical to productive people engaging in useful work. Most people who do a job – find quite obnoxious the giant bites governments take out of their paychecks, efforts and time.
These people are natural allies of the less government movement. But of course, big government and its advocates know this. So governments and their advocates have long been crafting big government policies – with crony outs for productive people.
Removing them as opponents to big government. Or, worse, turning them into champions of it. This is a large swath of what cronyism is.
To wit: Our ridiculous big-government-warped health insurance marketplace. Which was a government-caused mess well before Obamacare. (Yet somehow, big government advocates cited the damage they had already done – as justification for their doing even more damage with Obamacare.)
Obamacare mandates a whole bunch of ridiculous mandatory coverages. For instance: I’m a single guy – and I’m forced to purchase maternity coverage. Very useful for me. And of course, each mandated covered procedure – drives up the cost of each policy.
One of the ongoing government-caused health insurance problems – is the inability to purchase a policy anywhere but in the state in which you reside. Even and especially before Obamacare, different states had different levels and numbers of mandated coverages.
If you live in a ridiculously Leftist state – you have all sorts of mandated coverages that skyrocket your costs. But government locks you into your state – so you can’t purchase a policy in another state with fewer mandates.
These fifty state silos – turn the insurance companies into big government advocates. They go to each state capitol – and lobby for as many mandated procedures as possible. Each new mandate – means more coin for them. More coin extracted from We the People – who are trapped in the government silos.
If we could purchase insurance in other states – it would flip the insurance companies into being less government advocates. Because they would watch their previously trapped customers – leaving them in droves for cheaper policies elsewhere. They’d flood state capitols – this time demanding the legislatures get rid of all of the business-killing mandates.
And so it exactly is in the international marketplace.
The United States is woefully inhospitable to business and businesses. The federal government imposes crushingly high tax rates, a thicket-thick tax code and $2-trillion-per-year in regulatory costs.
No matter how nice to businesses this state or that one is – the Feds have created and imposed a toxic national environment. So businesses – not being populated by titanically stupid people – have been leaving the US in droves.
And then comes global trade. Where the Feds yet again punish domestic businesses:
“(A)ssume that of the $4M X Co. spent to produce the inventory it sold during the year, $2M of that inventory was imported from overseas before ultimately being sold to U.S. consumers. That $2M would be deducted from taxable income as part of cost of goods sold in the above example, giving the corporation a $700,000 benefit ($2M * 35%).”
Get that? The US government is yet again BEGGING companies to be anywhere on the planet except here.
So when these companies – having been driven out of the US by terrible domestic policies – lobby on trade deals, they of course ask for even more advantages to being outside the US.
These otherwise less government advocates – are now for the most part lost as allies in the less government fight. They don’t lobby nearly as hard as they would to reduce US taxes, simplify the US tax code or reduce US regulations – because they aren’t US businesses anymore.
And the trade deals they get the governments to negotiate are ridiculously one-sided – against the US.
The US long ago removed just about all government impediments to things being brought into our country. But we have for decades done next to nothing about the mountains of government impediments to our companies exporting to other countries.
All of which leads to the inexorable. Our otherwise less government allies – are no longer less government allies. They have in droves fled our over-taxed, over-regulated nation – and set up shop everywhere else.
Where they lobby for even more cronyism and big government. They get additional government assistance in the form of sometimes-massive subsidies – and additional protectionism against US products coming in.
Meanwhile, we continue to allow their stuff government-free access to the massive US market these companies left.
Decades of our sliding down this particular razor blade – have landed us in the nightmare mess in which we currently find ourselves.
Huge domestic governments – at every level – that have driven hundreds of thousands of businesses out of the country.
And titanically stupid one-sided trade deals – that make them even more comfortable anywhere on the planet except here.
We need less government – at every level, domestically and internationally.
In no small part because decades of big government – at every level, both domestically and internationally – has turned a whole lot of should-be-domestic-allies in the fight…against us, into big government advocates abroad.
None of which is even remotely good for our economy – or our country.
This first appeared in Red State.