Fill the Census forms out to make sure your community “gets its fair share” from the Federal government.

If we look to the Constitution, a flawed document thought it is, it would seem to indicate that the reason to hold a decennial census is to make sure people in the United States are fairly represented in Congress. In other words, the intention is make sure the democratic process works well and fairly for everyone. Now, we are being told overtly that the reason for the Census is not really to make sure we represent people right, but to make sure we know who to “spread the wealth” to. You see, politics is not about helping us govern ourselves, it is simply about extracting resources from our neighbors to transfer back to ourselves.

Furthermore, think about the mathematical logic of the “urges” to fill the Census forms out – to make sure everyone gets their “fair” share. How can it be that all districts will get their fair share? Many will be taxed more than they will receive in benefits just as many will receive more in benefits than they will be taxed. Is it at all clear that filling out the forms will ensure your community gets more funds? How can every community get a fairer share of funds? Maybe not filling the form out will help your community get less exploited. Perhaps that is possible, no? My sense is that the fine people of Pittsford pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and being honest about our financial situations would seem to put a big fat tax target on our backs. Not that the folks from the Census think anybody is smart enough to figure that out.

Update: Just after posting this I got a “notification” letter in the mail from the census reminding me that my 2010 Census form will be coming in the mail next week. Here is what it says:

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.

First of all, it is not the government’s money – it is your money and my money. At least they are honest about what they do. Second what is this about need? The Census is telling me, indeed trying to scare me, about what I “need.” Without government highways and schools and hospitals I would presumably perish. This scare talk is barely appropriate language for a blog – but when the elites are in office, it is celebrated in official correspondence with “the people.”

ObamaCare’s real cost-control plan boils down to this: First subsidize coverage so much that costs explode, raise taxes as much as possible to pay for it, and when that isn’t enough hand power to an unelected committee to limit treatment and control prices by government order. This is what Democrats are voting for.

The rest here.

By that definition, many modern Progressives, liberals, protectionists, and other obstructionists probably believe that they are not, in fact, sophists. Though invalid their arguments may be, many have probably persuaded themselves that they are not deliberately trying to mislead. In fact, many go so far as to paint those of us who espouse liberty, responsibility and prudence as being quaint cave-dwellers rather than addressing the economic criticisms head on. Such personal attack seems to me, to validate the fact that ideas of the sophists are dead, defunct, wrong, unpopular and unpersuasive. Why else would you have to accuse people like me of advocating for the end of civilization when it is in fact the very classical liberal ideas we teach that we attribute the rise of civilization to?

Don’t get me wrong, I would trade some prosperity for more freedom – but fortunately the real liberal world view does not force me to have to make that choice. It is only the ideas of the leftists sophists that force us to trade prosperity for less freedom – a bad deal indeed.

In any case, here is the online version of Bastiat’s classic.  Here is a glimpse of what you would find in there. In his final chapter on “The Domination by Labor” he writes:

Let us, then, cease this childish practice of comparing industrial competition to war;

…

In a battle, he who is killed is utterly destroyed, and the army is so much the weaker. In industry, a factory closes only when what it produced is replaced, with a surplus besides, by the whole of domestic industry. Imagine a state of affairs in which, for each man killed in action, two spring from the ground full of strength and energy. If there is a planet where such things happen, war, it must be admitted, is conducted there under conditions so different from those we see down here that it no longer deserves even to be called by the same name.

Now, this is the distinguishing characteristic of what has been so inappropriately called industrial warfare.

Let the English and the Belgians lower the price of their iron, if they can; let them keep on lowering it until they send it to us for nothing. They may quite possibly, by this means, extinguish the fire in one of our blast furnaces, i.e., in military parlance, kill one of our soldiers; but I defy them to prevent a thousand other branches of industry from springing up at once, as a necessary consequence of this very cheapness, and becoming more profitable than the one that has been killed.

Our conclusion must be, then, that domination through industrial superiority is impossible and self-contradictory, since every superiority that manifests itself in a nation is transformed into low-cost goods and in the end only imparts strength to all other nations. Let us banish from political economy all expressions borrowed from the military vocabulary: to fight on equal terms, conquer, crush, choke off, be defeated, invasion, tribute. What do these terms signify? Squeeze them, and nothing comes out. Or rather, what comes out is absurd errors and harmful preconceptions. Such expressions are inimical to international co-operation, hinder the formation of a peaceful, ecumenical, and indissoluble union of the peoples of the world, and retard the progress of mankind.109*

The entire volume is choc-full of wit, humor and shockingly simple economics. Its thrust can be boiled down to this: abundance is preferred to scarcity; and the interests of the consumers should matter too. Read it, though I’ll be posting a few of my favorite passages in the coming weeks.

My friend Art Carden writes:

Quoth a Facebook friend, in linking this piece about a proposed ban on salt in New York restaurants:

“Just when I thought people protesting the trans fat ban using a slippery slope argument were being ridiculous, some jackass goes & proves them right.

Art Carden, enjoy the sweet salty taste of vindication.”

I assume this was in reference to my last Forbes piece, which considered bans on trans fats. I think the people who are really vindicated here are Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, who have pointed out that the new paternalism leads us down a slippery slope. Here’s the last of Glen Whitman’s blog posts summarizing the points in the paper.

1. Is it really plausible that anyone was unaware of the health risks from working down there?
2. Were these workers forced to go there?
3. Look at how solid the science is supporting the link between working at the site and getting ill.

Just invoking the term “9/11″ is enough, I guess, to justify any claim you might have. And this whole notion of fighting for what we deserve, well – doesn’t your compensation reflect what you deserve? My pay is lower because of non-wage job characteristics that make it more attractive than having to work outside of academia. Chopping down trees is better paid than other jobs requiring similar skills in order to compensate workers for the extra risk they are taking on in doing those jobs.

By the way, if this guy who made this quote was a carpenter, then why doesn’t he have his own respiratory safety equipment anyway? Does he mean to tell me that on all of those hundreds of other jobs where he is sawing, sanding, painting, etc. that he never used this kind of protection?

1. If you receive a census document, do NOT return it.
2. Put up a special mailbox for UPS and FedEx and see what happens – or better yet, invite UPS or FedEx to leave something in your mailbox. Did you ever wonder why they wouldn’t do such a thing?
3. Petition your local public school district to change the name of its schools. For example, rather than calling my schools the Pittsford PUBLIC Schools, they are more appropriately called the Pittsford GOVERNMENT Schools. You might propose instead to call them the Pittsford TAX FUNDED Schools. Do you think anyone would object? After all, what is the meaning of public?

More on each of these coming soon.