It all starts at the local level. Please get involved.

Pittsburgh knows deficits. In the end, you can’t spend yourself to riches or indebt yourself to wealth. Neither the Republicans or Democrats seem to be capable of real change.

But it can change with Libertarian candidates, and it all starts locally. Vote Pittsburgh Libertarians!

August 25, 2008 6:32 pm EST

Above is a worthy discussion about the anti-consumer / pro big and connected business fraud that is anti-monopoly legislation with Ron Paul. While the video is some 25 years old, the content is perfectly valid today (if not also a testament to the consistency of Ron Paul since then).

A great myth perpetuated by those in government and many in academia is that absent regulation, the free market will do its utmost to increase profits via anti-consumer actions, with one of the biggest crimes being the formation of monopolies. As such, we endure day after day, year after year, ever more corrective reactions from Congress in the form of regulations that we are told will curtail the natural exploitative faults of the free market, thus improving the economy as a result.

Yet, when you dig just a little beneath the surface, you’ll find that’s an assumption built on a faulty premise. What you’ll see is that these many legislated regulatory actions are actually fixing the economic / market reaction to a previous legislated intrusion, and in many cases serve not to be pro consumer, but rather pro-big business and very much anti free market competition. These laws not only often fix prices artificially high (either outright or via anti-trade legislation), they flat out create massive hurdles — bureaucratic or otherwise — that serve as barriers to entry for legitimate free market competition.

A great example today is all the cries for further regulating the credit, banking, housing, and mortgage systems to “prevent further abuse and recklessness.” In reality, the bubble that is bursting was created by a money monopoly granted to the Federal Reserve and its many member banks, who are quite literally entitled to legally counterfeit. They call it fractional reserve banking, but in no uncertain terms the entire banking system engages in the constant and ongoing printing of money and credit out of thin air, which they in turn use to create loans and mega finance deals.

It was the artificial price fixing of credit and money well below the natural market rate that enabled and fueled the housing, mortgage, and credit bubbles into the stratosphere. Had the rate of money instead been free market controlled by a more honest currency, as demand for hot money loans increased, rates would have risen, nipping each of those bubbles in the bud. Instead, the printing presses of the banking system kicked into high gear and the bubble was off to the races.

Now that said bubble is in its corrective phase (yes, painful but natural and necessary to correct the massive clustering of errors it permitted), the Banking system wants to print more money and credit to bail-out the very problems their created thanks to their monopoly on money and credit. Meanwhile, our trusty servants in Congress are getting in the act by engineering stimulus packages while promoting even more legislation that will “fix the banking system.” Others want to regulate ratings agencies who failed to properly measure risk, failing to understand that prior regulation prevented competition from entering the market and restructured / bastardized the system into its current highly corrupted form. Yet the illiterate among us shout loudly from the rooftops, the Capital’s steps, or their media perches blaming “the free market” for creating this folly. Bunk! Absolute Bunk!

Alas, save for one or two in Congress — Ron Paul being the only politician getting any press, and now barely any at all — NOBODY bothers to address the real manufacturers and profiteers of the crisis: The massive banking cartel led by the privately owned Federal Reserve and its many member banks. Their highly lucrative monopoly is preserved, and so too are their highly important contributions and lobbying efforts that keep most of Congress firmly in power.

In other cases “pro competition” legislation creates a ramshackle set of rules that hamstring the particular sector of the economy so badly that the consequent market place is the consumer equivalent of some hodge-podge Frankenstein creature. The health care system in the U.S. is a prime example, where the heavily regulated byproduct — which is nothing but what’s left of the free market attempting to create something usable given the draconian rules governing it — ends up being a real disaster for consumers. Prices keep getting more expensive rather than cheaper, and the consumer continues to feel ever more compromised — which is the exact opposite of the norm in a truly free market.

Meanwhile, those major players that are most politically connected and capable of lobbying are the ones who dominate the industry, while the environment is so hostile to new entries that few bother to attempt to compete. The result? A defacto, legislatively-created monopoly for major hospital conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies, and regional health insurers. All levels of government get into the act, each exacting a toll to gain access, and each limiting the free market from doing what it otherwise might.

And, yet, these same politicians who soak up dolling out favors at the trough have the gal to blame the free market for being inadequate at providing good consumer products when what we’re all stuck with is a Frankenstein of their own making!

Meanwhile, the uninformed and socially motivated consumers and voters see the system only on the surface, and they demand change. The politicians are quick to blame free enterprise, and they propose more solutions to solve the problems created by decades of prior meddling. Meanwhile, steering the new legislation are the same ones benefiting from the old. They’ll have the economies of scale to deal with the new rules, while smaller players will invariably be knocked from the playing field. It’s always the same story.

This is a mess. Remember, if government forcing us into one of their solutions is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question! A true free market (one where businesses, industry trade groups, and other special interests are prohibited from hijacking freedom and economic resources in their favor) is naturally competing with itself to deliver ever more affordable quality to consumers. The natural tendency always is a better product for a lower price as entrepreneurs continually attempt to redefine efficiencies and opportunity in the search for profits.

If you want consumer driven solutions that please the most people, don’t force them into shoe-box solutions created by compromised politicians who are themselves experts only at politics and government. Let the market compete freely and openly, and then — and only then — will order start to be restored to an economy that increasingly is being exposed as systematically rotten to the core, having been slowly eaten from within by special interest parasites steering legislation in their favor.

January 24, 2008

Letters to the Editor
Pittsburgh Business Times
2313 East Carson Street, Suite 200
Pittsburgh, PA 15203

Dear Editor,

With regard to the recent article on the development of the Don Allen site at Baum and Liberty, it was interesting to note that the story is quite different than the story presented in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which it was disclosed that public funding is expected to be involved.

As a customer of Don Allen’s who chose them primarily because of their urban location (I can walk there for service from my house in Oakland), I will be very disappointed if public financing is indeed involved. So far, public funding of “big box” (or at least “bigger box”) developments has cost my neighborhood our local Giant Eagle and hardware store, as well as Rollier’s Hardware in Shadyside. While I wish local entrepreneurs every success in achieving the highest value, this should not be done with the public sector distorting the market and subsidizing what is essentially disinvestment. I will be watching closely to see whether TIF or other funding is involved with this project, and hope that others will do the same. I have learned from decades of experience that the private sector can never compete with the public sector.

In the meantime, I thank the 80 employees of Don Allen for their years of loyal service to their customers and express my personal regret that it seems that the prospect of public financing has helped to make their employer worth more dead than alive.

Sincerely,

Henry Posner III
Chairman

cc: City Councilman Bill Peduto

We thank Mr. Posner for allowing us to publish his LTE about the recent closing of Don Allen. There are several articles on this locally, each providing some detail below.

• Don Allen dealership is being sold — Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Friday, January 4, 2008
• Don Allen to be sold — Pittsburgh Post Gazette Friday, January 04, 2008
• Huge mixed-use development planned for Baum-Liberty — Pittsburgh Business Times, Thursday, January 10, 2008
• Major development riding at Don Allen site — Pittsburgh Post Gazette Friday, January 11, 2008
• Newcomer makes big splash on local development scene — Pittsburgh Business Times, Friday, January 18, 2008

While at the moment, only one suggests public financing will be sought, we’ll be keeping our eyes out.   After all,  the employee’s of Don Allen, nor the dealership itself, should not have their tax dollars used to subsidize their own demise.  Moreover, let’s not forget that there are many other local Pittsburgh natives already paying taxes and in the business in which this new development will compete.  In other words, it’d be morally wrong for their tax dollars to be used to compete with them.

Unfortunately, that’s an all too common problem here in Pittsburgh, and a reason why many local operations close shop.  Newly arriving competition is lured in by the Pittsburgh region’s politicians, who don’t seem to care they’re burying the locals by using tax incentives to put the long-time resident out of work. Other times we end up with the stupidity that was the Lazarus building or the infamous Allegheny Center in the North Side.

Government’s only job should be to get out of the way and certainly not pickpocket hard working residents to lure in their competition.

Pittsburgh residents are all too familiar with “eminent domain”, the constitutionally sanctioned practice where governments take private land for legitimate public uses. Traditionally, that’s meant things like roads and schools. Over the past several decades, however, governments have gone hog wild with eminent domain, routinely condemning property (or freezing its improvement for years like 5th and Forbes with highly publicized threats of confiscation and development plans) and turning it over to well-connected private developers as a way of subsidizing economic development and increasing tax revenues (never mind that the grand promises always come up well short).

Above is another clip from Drew Carey and Reason explaining the problem with an example in National City, California, where the government plans to bulldoze a popular athletic center for struggling kids to pave the way for private developers to build new luxury condos. As tragic and absurd as this may sound, such outrageous affronts to property rights are an almost daily occurrence.

Of course, the Republicans — not being in charge any longer — are pushing for improved pork disclosure, and the democrats are against it, as the video discloses.

Without a doubt, both parties are guilty and this kind of nonsense goes back and forth, year after year. More and more wasteful pork spending is always winding up on the tabs of today’s taxpayers — and their children and grandchildren, who must find some way to pay the insurmountable debt that keeps getting piled onto their backs.

Maybe it really is time for a party that is truly for smaller government and taxpayer relieve — and FULL DISCLOSURE. Why not give us a shout today?

After all, someone who claims superior rights to the fruits of your labor — be it through taxes or how you use your private property — is really claiming rights to own your past labor. Since labor is your life’s effort, by inference these people essentially claim to own a part of you.

That’s powerful stuff our founding fathers generally understood, although they erred by not extending the idea to all people. Watch the video below to understand more on why individual consent to be governed matters, and why libertarians are the only party who support protecting real freedom.