Left and Right

Left and Right

If the left’s not right and the right’s not right then what’s left of our rights?

Supposedly the left favors personal freedom but government control of economic decisions. Allegedly, the right favors economic freedom but government intervention in personal private behavior of adults. So where do we stick people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Castro on this flat political playing field? They demand total control of all decisions, personal and economic, under penalty of death. What about folks like Thomas Jefferson and I who fear the government having any say so in either personal or economic decisions of law abiding, responsible adults? Are we left or right? Obviously, the left right political spectrum is primitive and inadequate to measure one’s political heartbeat. That is why my friend David Nolan created the Nolan chart to accommodate both pro and anti government intervention supporters.

Here is a common mistake that many who claim to be on the left and right regularly make. They believe that we must regulate the number of people who get into our country because too many people will use up all the resources and jobs. But this is backwards thinking and here is why. Wealth (a good or service needed or desired that make living more civilized) is created when human labor is mixed with the land. That is an undeniable, unchangeable economic law. If you have more humans in a given area with access to the land for living and working you will have more wealth created. Sadly, capitalist tax policy is weighed heavily on labor and not on land value. Therefore humans are blocked from having equal access to the land to employ their labor to create wealth and even more importantly store their wealth. So older societies with dense city populations have lots of homelessness and poverty. This occurs in the middle of vast fortunes. But it is not because there are too many people with a finite pool of jobs. It is because there are too many people hoarding urban land who create no actual wealth themselves. Hoarding blocks job creation as well which depresses everyone’s wages. They charge an earth rent for access to the land. All this does is transfer wealth from poorer hands into richer hands. But do not mistake this transfer for the productive goods and services that are actual wealth. Wouldn’t it be better to change tax policy to in effect let as many people as possible work here productively rather than wasting money building walls to keep them out? But we can’t let more people in because of all the free stuff our government gives out to the poor right? Wrong! It is the very government tax policy that is creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass beholding to the very same bureaucracy for hand outs.

Mind what I say Cubanos when it comes time to fix Cuba. We have seen what does and does not work. Communism has been a colossal failure which none can deny. However, the Batista, labor taxation based government that permitted urban land hoarding produced enough poor, unhappy people to get us into this mess in the first place. Cubans have suffered the most but this will make them wise people enlightened by the reality of their failed socialist experiment. If we can implement this Georgist economic reform that I advocate, Cubans WILL become the richest people on the earth by far! Then all we will need to guard against are the excesses brought about by complacency and undisciplined behavior that accompanies wealth. But training one’s self to maintain a correct diet and caloric intake is preferable for a free man than worrying about where your next meal will come from.

Tomás Estrada-Palma