Economics: Free goods and services or actually earning?

The WRight Way

By Ron Wright

 You have heard about recent demands for ”free this or that” because of politically crafted entitlements or other reasons. Back in the 1960s some people were demanding free food and free other things.

The more contemporary Occupy Wallstreet groups resurrected such demands in recent years. An example from a number of “occupiers” emerging from their sidewalk tents included, “the bankers drive around in their BMWs or Mercedes, so I want one too, for free!”

Not free bread or free housing … now it is free luxury automobiles! Or how about free health care? Why not demand anything for free that you can think of?

Free? Give me a break. Name one product or service commercially available that never had anyone apply or perform work to create or deliver it? Who works for free besides a slave? Even a slave has to eat, so someone had to purchase his food. The North Korean government has to beg or threaten the outside world for supplemental food for their starving population, most of whom would qualify as slaves in an absolute sense.

So much for the madhouse called North Korea.

An economic system can be distorted into bizarre forms before collapsing, even if it takes many decades. For the USSR, it took about 72 years of human misery. And certainly a runaway debt machine like the current U.S. administration must crash in some horrific end point where interest demands alone exceed any foreseeable GNP. Consider Germany in 1923, where hyperinflation exploded to more than four trillion Marks per U.S. dollar. A firewood log was more valuable than an equal weight of bundled 100,000 Mark bills.

So for medical care, someone actually expects a doctor to work for nothing? And for food, the farmer works for free, the truck driver who delivers the food works for free and the food market employees all work for nothing so someone can get free food? The tractors and the trucks and the buildings all involved in food delivery were all made for free by workers who worked for nothing. The food delivery vehicles and buildings are supplied with free diesel fuel, free gasoline and free electricity.

One could go on with this fanciful parade, but let’s regain sanity.

You are free to give away or donate anything you want. But there is the difference.

So what do those genius-minded characters expect people who work for a living to do? Just give the moochers their car, their home, the contents of their grocery carts?

Can you image the Occupy Wallstreeters pounding on the front doors of people like George Soros, Michael Boomberg, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry or Al Gore and screaming for their solid gold bathroom faucets and the keys to their Rolls Royces? But then maybe such a spectacle would be interesting to watch. After all, the Occupiers love to rail on those evil hedge fund traders and derivatives moguls. Let’s point them in the right direction.

What other assaults on incentive do working and earning people have to endure?

I have never been close to being wealthy and probably never will be in a temporal sense. I have nothing against billionaires. Economic systems are essentially amoral … they are just a structure. But numbers add up, whether they be interest rates or more complex monetary instruments. At some point, if you have assembled a financial house of cards, expect some dramatic and tragic consequences.

Ron Wright of Cazenovia is a retiree with keen interest in his family, history, politics and his church. He began putting his thoughts on paper a little over a decade ago to share with family and friends. Ron, whose column appears the third edition each month, may be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.