Everything Socialized is Dirt

Jinco Inc.
Newsletter Justin Jinorio

Everything Socialized Is Dirt

Socialism is easy to spot because it has an easily identifiable signature: failure. Socialism reliably produces economic failures when applied nationally (the USSR, China, India, Chile, Vietnam), when applied in modified forms across mixed economies (post-war Britains nationalized industries), and when applied to particular sectors within largely capitalist economies (national health-care programs). Here in America it is failing in education, mortgage markets, public-employee systems, entitlement programs, and soon to be our healthcare system. For Americans who don't think the welfare state riots of France or Greece can happen here, look at the union and Democratic Party spectacle now unfolding in Wisconsin. Today Wisconsin is in a financial hole, operating at a $137 million deficit for the current fiscal year ending June 30. Its future is filled with bigger deficits, projected to be as large as $3.6 billion. The only way to cut into this shortfall is to end the socialized collective bargaining privileges that have landed them the generous salaries and benefits the taxpayers are struggling to pay and do not enjoy in the private sector. But as all things socialized, once it is implemented it is almost always impossible to reverse because of the spoiled temper tantrums made by employees over the cuts in entitlements that most of them don't deserve anyway.

Doing what voters elected him to do, Scott Walker introduced a bill last week that would strip nonfederal government workers in Wisconsin of their collective bargaining license and require them to contribute more to their benefits package like ALL us private sector employees. The bill would require them to contribute 5.8% of salary toward pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. The comparable nationwide employee health-care contribution is 20% and for retirement 7.5% in the private sector. Still, teachers responded as if they took their cue from students, marching like the spoiled entitlement queens that they are on the Capital in Madison, leaving behind trash and tarnished images that someone else will have to clean up. Forty percent of them cut class Wednesday and Thursday, cheating students and taxpayers out of two days of learning. But this is all about the kids right? Like anything socialized, it takes away the competitive forces that insure us citizens that we are provided the best for our money. Competition should be applied to everything, even the employment of teachers, because it is the most efficient method known and is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary force. Any attempt to control prices or wages or quantities of particular commodities or occupations deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective coordination of INDIVIDUAL efforts. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it

demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade-with reason, not force, as their final arbiter-it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability-and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. Socialism corrupts this fare exchange between the men of good will. We are no longer able to obtain the best that money can buy, and the best can no longer be rewarded what they deserve. The lack of competition among teachers is the biggest problem our education system faces today, and on top of that, it makes absolutely no economic sense to pay them or other public-sector employees that which they have not earned. We have struggled in the private sector while they have enjoyed their generous salaries and benefits. It is time to make a change!