Taxing Your Butts

I couldn’t improve on the Wall Street Journal headline for this story of how states are going to extreme steps to ensure that they get their high taxes on cigarettes, even when their residents buy them from other states over the Internet. This is also the start of states taxing their residents for other things that they buy over the ‘net.

I have said this several times before; but it never ceases to amaze me how a large group of people (smokers) can sit by so mildly and allow themselves to be persecuted so harshly by our rulers. The fact that the rulers are literally exploiting addicts’ need for their drug (nicotine) makes this doubly sickening.

KMK

Understanding Capitalism

Too many people think that the main functions of big companies are to provide places to work for people and to support charitable causes. Neither is true. Their purpose is purely to legally earn a decent rate of return for their owners, the shareholders. If they can’t do that, they should shut down.

I obviously had these cold hard facts of the capitalist corporate world drummed into me in my business classes in college. I’m not sure exactly where Joe Bob Briggs (aka John Bloom) learned this, but he has an excellent discussion of it in today’s column. He mentions that, rather than function as jobs programs, the best corporate officers do everything possible to avoid hiring new employees. He makes the very accurate point that an ideally run corporation, the epitome of perfection, would earn income for its owners with zero employees.

If I didn’t know better, I would have suspected that Walter Williams, the premier economics professor in this country wrote this piece. Well done.

KMK

Gutless Wonders

It has long been axiomatic that the topic of Social Security is the third rail of politics. Anyone foolish enough to discuss changing it will be zapped with 50 million volts of electricity and fried to a crisp. Bush started his term in office with a proposal to allow people to divert a very tiny part of the money that would normally be flushed down the SS toilet into privately controlled accounts similar to IRAs. While it was a very wimpy approach to a very big problem, it was at least a step in the right direction.

As always, any possibility of even one dollar less money being sent to DC for our rulers to control is met with sheer gloom and doom reactions from the liberals and their propagandists in the media. Each time the stock market drops, they love to scream that privately controlled accounts would suffer. As I have explained before, this argument is ludicrous because it assumes that everyone will put all of their retirement money into risky stocks. While some people will do this, most prudent investors will opt for safer alternatives, such as bank CDs.

Bush’s brave attempt to broach the subject of personal control of retirement money has been stopped dead in its tracks and his fellow Republicans have been banned from even bringing up what they call the P word, privatization. I must admit that the GOP has an uphill battle in overcoming the liberal media bias and the difficulties in getting the truth out to the people. However, it would be nice to see the GOP with a bit more backbone. They cave in all too easily to have any confidence in their leadership abilities.

KMK