Lately I've become increasingly invested in American politics, even at the point of neglecting the politics here in Japan. The recent political climate has reinvigorated my interest.
A Great Nation
In spite of spending a good deal of time in the US, I never really loved it on a practical level. Everyday living wasn't quite as enjoyable to me as here in Japan where I'm originally from, even though the lifestyle of the average American was far more luxurious than in Japan.
What made me fall in love with America, at least the idea of it, was reading The Federalist Papers.
In these writings, I found a philosophy for a nation that resounded with me. At the heart of many of the writings was the notion that governments were prone to be corrupt along with the majority of the populace which can become tyrannical in nature and trample over the rights of minorities. It turned me from an idealist into a realist about how I viewed government.
The resulting solution was a republic where the majority elects officials, not a direct democracy dominated solely by majority rule, with a system of checks and balances to prevent power from becoming too centralized in one area.
Liberty
Beyond a philosophy for a nation, I found one of the most elegant statements when it came to morality and ethics.
This is among the simplest expressions of ethics that I've ever encountered. Every person should have the freedom and opportunity to pursue their own goals. The only freedom which we should lack is the ability to deprive another individual of doing the same. Government's primary function is to ensure that this does not happen.
Freedom became the highest virtue to me, and I began to understand why Americans put the idea of freedom on a pedestal. I originally found it obnoxious how much freedom was glorified. Afterwards, I understood. There's nothing that humans should glorify more than freedom as I see it now. Poor or rich, I see it as preferable to be free than to be controlled.
On top of this, America has constitutional amendments such as those protecting the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. These do not serve to protect individuals from each other. It's to protect individuals from their government. It limits the powers of what the government can do, effectively leading to a more limited form of government (limited and small is what the framers had in mind).
Hypocrisy
Unfortunately America was also a giant hypocrite for a great period following its founding. It did not offer this freedom to all. Women were far from free, and slaves practically had no freedom at all.
I often see others attributing America's unbelievable success to the deprivation of freedom from these groups, as though such oppression was key to its economic prosperity. It might have been a key towards basic survival, but prosperity is a different matter.
It's hard to tell what might have been if America wasn't so hypocritical during these periods, but the greatest economic prosperity of the nation came about in the 20th century following the abolition of slavery. If slavery contributed so much to economic prosperity, we should have seen a sharp decline in economic growth following that period.
We might also say that it is due to the principles upon which America was founded that it increasingly converged towards a state of offering the same liberties to all. Such may not have been the case if this type of framework was not established, pointing out the blatant hypocrisy.
Usurping Freedom
Unfortunately in spite of being founded on such great principles, America is growing into a giant bureaucratic mess with the government placing its hands all over people's lives and the economy. Central control is increasingly prevailing over the free market.
Issues such as the legalization of marijuana which should be a trivial one if we considered what the founders thought are turning into controversial subjects where people want to regulate what others are free to ingest.
It seems to be getting to a point where there are a number of people wanting to utilize the heavy guns of the government to control what people can say and do.
Most of all, one should remember that involving the government on any such issue is coercing individuals to do things against their will through the threat of violence. No matter where we stand on a subject, it's worth remembering that making the government increasingly regulate human lives comes at the cost of freedom and gives the government more and more authority to utilize violence.
Free Market
Most important to me is the issue of the free market. In this article, I want to provide some links in favor of it. While economics is a very complex subject where economists are divided on various issues, I wanted to offer some counter-arguments to popular ideas that favor a bigger and less limited government.
No matter what people think about the economic effects, hopefully we can at least agree that these policies are inherently Un-American.
Protectionism vs Free Trade
Imagine a country starts being able to manufacture and export state-of-the-art electric cars at $1,000 a car. They are able to achieve such low prices due to a combination of research, innovation, and different economic policies.
Let us say a similar car made in America costs $20,000. To even out the playing field, we favor tariffs which raises the minimum cost of these imported cars so that they cannot dissuade consumers from favoring American cars.
Who benefits from this? Who loses?
Winners: The automobile manufacturers in America. They are granted a government shield of protection from having to compete on an even playing field with another business. They don't have to innovate or come up with wholly new products to stay in competition thanks to the government protection.
Losers: Every single consumer in America who wants to buy a car. They must now pay $20,000+ for a state-of-the-art electric car instead of $1,000. Also included among the losers are those businesses overseas exporting these cars to the US.
Also included as a whole is the American economy since the country exporting cars will also be receiving less American dollars to buy a variety of goods in America. This itself could cost some jobs in areas more diverse and general than the concentrated American automobile industry.
Minimum Wage
It is often with a great misconception that utilizing the government to force employers to pay a minimum wage is going to most benefit the needy.
Most people understand clearly that this deprives employers of their freedom. However, what most people fail to understand is that it also deprives employees of their freedom to bargain against competition.
Thomas Sowell is a economist who has studied this subject intensely, including working for the US Bureau of Labor. He was raised in Harlem which was apparently a safe and decent neighborhood in the 1930s.
According to his interpretation of the economic data, minimum wage priced black laborers out of the market. After facing a history of oppression, black laborers prior to minimum wage laws pricing them out were able to outbid white workers by offering to work for less. Even employers discriminating on nothing more than the basis of skin color couldn't refuse the enticing offer of cheaper labor. The desire for profit is color blind.
Unfortunately with minimum wage, such employees then favored white workers over black workers, pricing black people out of the market. The result was a vicious cycle of escalating unemployment, poverty, and crime among black people.
As a simple though experiment, imagine you are an employer leading a team of workers who communicate regularly with each other. Your profits are not particularly high with most of the distribution of revenue going towards employee wages which are at $10/hour due to a federal minimum wage.
What incentive do you now have to hire an immigrant who speaks poor English among a team of English-speaking workers if you're going to be forced to pay him/her the same amount? Unless you're a particularly charitable type who doesn't mind utilizing sub-optimal business strategies in favor of helping out immigrants, you have no incentive. You're naturally going to discriminate against non-English speakers in favor of a more tightly-knit and cooperative team.
If all such people think the same way, immigrants will be priced out of the market. They may now face unemployment, poverty, and may have to turn to crime. This further leads to people adopting discriminatory attitudes against such minorities which then makes it even harder for them to find work which then leads to more problems.
Regardless of whether we agree with Sowell or not, it's worth noting that minimum wage laws not only deprive the freedom of employees to pay less, but also the freedom of potential employees to offer to work for less.
Affirmative Action
Next we have affirmative action. It almost becomes a necessity as a result of minimum wage laws.
Employers paying minimum wage become biased towards favoring one group of people since they have to pay them the same amount as others. A white male employer might favor employing white males over any other group given that the other groups no longer have the bargaining power to offer to work for less.
In particular there were anti-black construction unions being formed which were forcing black laborers out of the market. This lead to the Department of Labor enforcing racial quotas across the country to force such employers to hire minority groups and meet racial quotas as a form of "positive discrimination".
Unfortunately it's difficult to force someone to do something against their will and expect great results.
According to Sowell, affirmative action became a double-edged blade. Disgruntled employers forced to hire minorities against their will started to favor only the highest-qualified minorities to meet their quotas. This still priced the majority of those in these minority groups out of the market.
Regardless of whether we agree with Sowell, poverty and unemployment among black people escalated and escalated in spite of affirmative action. It also lead to a new type of discrimination for the minority of black people who were successful.
Depriving employers of their freedom can have adverse effects which may have further hurt the people these policies were most intended to help.
Social Security
Here in Japan, we're facing a huge problem with declining birth rates. Why are people panicking over this besides the obvious? One of the less obvious but imminent problems is social security.
As birth rates decline while life expectancies rise, we end up with a problem where there are too few young people to feed and take care of the elderly. Under social security, we need young people to be shagging like bunnies and producing babies left and right.
For those out there who are working and not yet retired, can you support the livelihood of two elderly people on your salary? Can you even support one elderly person?
This is a huge problem which could have been averted if people were simply persuaded to save money for their retirement. At the very least, it would have been mitigated considerably if the government was restricted from spending what they collected and simply gave each person the precise sum they invested back to them years later upon retirement.
Forcing young people against their will, against their freedom, to pay for the elderly may have been a decent idea in the 1950s when the number of elderly people constituted a very small minority. Now it is having disastrous consequences.
Such is often the case when we keep usurping the freedom of individuals. At best the economic consequences are questionable, at worst they are outright disastrous.
The biggest problem is that when these policies have disastrous consequences, people end up turning to the government who created the problem in the first place for further help. The result tends to be further government expansion which leads to even less freedom.
ACA Employer Mandate
The details of the Affordable Care Act give me a headache. It's far from national healthcare which, itself, is a controversial subject. However, from what I can understand, it requires employers with 50+ full-time workers under them to provide health care benefits (employer mandate).
From a full-time employee's perspective, this might sound like a wonderful way to get health benefits. In reality, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
All employers care about is how much it costs for the labor of an employee. If they must pay the bill for health coverage, then this is included as part of the employee's wages. Who really pays for the cost? It's almost always the employee, not the employer.
On top of this, businesses have started limiting the number of hours employees can work to avoid being considered full-time. This allows them to avoid providing the health coverage. The typical strategy is to keep employees working around 27 hours a week (30+ hours would constitute as full-time).
This can interact with minimum wage in a very cruel way towards the employee. Since the employer is not allowed to pay workers less than minimum wage, many avoid the cost of health coverage not by lowering their employees' wages to make up for the healthcare costs, but by lowering the maximum number of hours they're allowed to work each week to avoid the employer mandate.
Now the employee is not only deprived of health coverage but also deprived of being able to work more hours even if they're willing. They're now trapped into earning less than ever before by being forced to work less hours.
This has also prevented some business owners from being able to expand their business beyond 49 employees. Here is an example of a woman who is not wealthy and doesn't even have health insurance herself facing a brick wall in her business due to the employer mandate.
Is it really beneficial to anyone besides the government to force employers to pay for health coverage against their will?
Economic Freedom
Comparatively speaking, and according to multiple freedom indices, America is far from the top when it comes to economic freedom.
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
According to these rankings, at first place is Hong Kong, in second place is Singapore. The United States is actually 17th.
The United States should be among the top. Instead it is falling further and further beyond. There's something very wrong with this picture to me.
The Value of Freedom
What price would you put on your freedom as people slowly give away more and more of it in favor of a larger and larger government with the optimistic view that it will be both noble and effective in its purposes?
No one can say with any level of certainty that a smaller, more limited government leads to the greater prosperity of all citizens than a bigger, more powerful one. Nevertheless, history seems to favor nations that value the freedom of individuals when it comes to prosperity.
This article only touches on a few subjects. There are many more, but I hope this will leave some people on the side that is in favor of less and less freedom with some challenging thoughts.
Is America to set an example to the world as the land of the free, or the land of the controlled? Is it supposed to be a leader of the world or a follower?
Freedom shouldn't be a partisan issue. It shouldn't be a white issue, a black issue, a Hispanic issue, an Asian issue, a male issue, a female issue, etc. It should be an American one.
Perhaps the "controlled" option could be prosperous somehow, some way, with government just growing and growing to the point of providing and regulating everything. Even in this most optimistic scenario, I wouldn't recognize the resulting nation as being American anymore.
What Girls & Guys Said
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3Opinion
Regarding the issue of slavery, trying to view the situation at the time with today's morality will not lead to understanding.
Slavery had existed in nearly every society since before civilization had been created. It also took many forms. That it still existed in some parts of the world in 1776 is not surprising. What is surprising is that it was illegal in some parts of the world in 1776.
Although the Founders had ideals that were not compatible with slavery, they also knew that it was going to end. They had to make a decision: Postpone the conflict to end slavery and form a union, or enter the conflict and not form a union. They wisely chose the former.
Ever since I was a kid learning about history in school, I just couldn't grasp this whole "land of the free" when throughout most of their history the majority of their non-white male population was anything but free.
Nice take.
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