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Writing of this blog is purely an act of selfless effort provided to you because I care that you are informed, educated, entertained and as pissed off as I am on a daily basis. That said, with Mrs. Bald Man in college and a leaky water pump in the Jeep, we have bills to pay.

As a free market capitalist I would never ask for a handout. So I am afraid I must turn to some sponsors. I am sorry for the inconvenience but I promise to only allow products I truly believe in to represent themselves and offer their wares in the hallowed confines that are the pages of No Mato Mi Pavo.

Cash, check or no charge?

Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, before the World Wide Web, when Ronald Reagan was president and cruel, evil and self-serving capitalist ideals abounded, there was a restaurant in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area that began allowing customers to pay the amount they felt their meal was worth. They took all prices off the menu. Initially, customers were leaving money at a level nearly equal to the prices that were formerly on the menu. It didn’t take the J Wellington Wimpy-like moochers long to realize they could not pay Tuesday for a hamburger today and the establishment was forced to abandon the practice. Unfortunately, they waited a bit too long and ended up closing altogether.

Proving there really is nothing new under the sun, the website NWCN.com had a story back in November that, thanks to Michelle Malkin’s phenomenal website has been kept alive. The OpShOp in Seattle allowed customers to pay what they felt an item was worth. It too has closed its doors.

Blogs that I won’t link to have been blaming the closing on the uncaring landlord who, like the evil Snidely Whiplash demanded the rent be paid. I’d guess George Bush was a close second as to the cause of the store’s demise. They also wondered why no Dudley Dorites rode in on white horses with saddlebags of money to keep the store open. The undercurrent of these comments is that conservatives, the only rich people in America, should have stepped up to help.

What these nimrods fail to realize is that, when it comes to pulling the fair Nell off the tracks in the form of a hand up financially, conservatives do some much more frequently than their counterparts on the left. Perhaps the solution to the OpShOps problem would have been for the owner to invest a small amount in a pricing gun. Even a pen and some sticky paper could have helped. With either of these items, she could have placed on every item in the store a fair price that would have included a markup to cover expenses and a profit margin. When it is allowed to flourish unfettered by government intrusion, Capitalism works folks. As evidenced, by the results of the OpShOp’s experiment, more “social” centered societies don’t.

In the “opinions are like buttholes” review of the ballot recount in Minnesota, look here and prepare to lose your lunch. I hope you didn’t have to pay too much for it.

Finally, in the “we are getting to be more like the Russians every day” review, I offer this:




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My patience for this patient's treatment is wearing thin

Is there a doctor in the house? Not a medical doctor but an economic one. One that isn't involved in politics would be preferred as it seems the current crop of economic advisers, specialists and bald headed witch doctors are killing their patient: the United States Economy!

Chief resident Paulson recently announced the patient has stabilized but he's been woefully wrong in his diagnosis before and his suggested method of treatment seems to change weekly. There are still several cancerous tumors growing and I'm afraid the treatment will be worse than this insidious disease.

I know several cancer survivors and recently saw a friend who is undergoing chemotherapy at a mutual friend's wedding. She looked like someone in the battle of her life for her life. Her prognosis, thank God, is good but to judge solely on how she looks you'd think there was no chance.

The entire scope of my medical knowledge was acquired peeking through the slot in the drapes at the cute lady patient next to me in the hospital when I had surgery on my Achilles tendon a few years ago. That stated, it is my extremely simplistic understanding that the theory behind chemotherapy is that it basically kills the patient while killing the cancer. The hope is the cancer dies first. A guy who claimed to be a doctor at the bar last night said that surgery to remove a cancerous tumor is always preferred to this radical solution but, once the cancer has spread so far, there is no other option. I guess it would be somewhat of a malpractice to start with chemo as a first choice.

Right now we've an infirmed capitalist system in our country. Several large tumors have appeared. The treatments the brain surgeons in our government have come up with are more akin to chemotherapy than surgery. By George "what the hell am I thinking" Bush's own admission, he has sacrificed free-market principles in order to save the economy. I refer those of you with public school educations to the preceding paragraph and ask, "Isn't this killing the free-market in an effort to save it?"

Unfortunately, the large tumors of the financial and auto industries are masking an even bigger cancer; big government and the socialist wannabees who are coming to power. They see the chemo of increased spending and government control of the markets as a long term medicine and, once we've been exposed to that virus, the cure is a difficult prescription to fill.

I'm not a licensed doctor but I did stay at Holiday Inn Express last night and I suggest starving the cancer (the economical equivalence of an operation) by letting it fend for itself. There is every chance these industries will cure themselves. Too radical an approach will not save them, it will only delay their inevitable demise.

For those of you unconvinced, I offer the words of someone who, like most people, is a lot smarter than me. I implore you, take seven minutes and watch this. It is very informative and reinforces my opinion that my college admitted socialist Macro Economics professor was full of crap.

What is the sound of an invisible hand clapping?

To paraphrase the adage: the longest blog post starts with a single word. This journey is going to be all over the map but in the end I am not sure it goes anywhere. Let’s just call it an extemporaneous trip of self-expression and free association. Speaking of trips:

I can imagine Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan on a road trip in Heaven. Returning from Hell after toilet papering Karl Marx’s house, they looked at their Atlas and Shrugged. Where did Capitalism go? They’d ask John Galt if they only knew who the hell he was.The United State’s slide toward an economy reminiscent of the stagnant government intruding and nearly socialist models of many European nations should come as no surprise. For years our state run institutions of higher indoctrination have been the home of wayward communists and leftist bomb throwers. They are Party places where state is praised as the savior of the poor and individual accomplishment is frowned upon. And God or Christmas, don’t even go there! Really comrade, do you expect someone who refuses to keep score in a little league game to teach that competition is healthy and that the free market works?


The much maligned free market does, in fact, work. What doesn’t work is government involvement in business. The papers, blogs, radio and television are now atwitter over the need to bail out the auto industry to stave off yet another in the increasing line of falling dominos on the road to financial and economic ruin. Democrats in the Senate are proposing giving the big three auto makers $25 billion dollars and are wooing weak kneed Republican Senators from the Rust Belt to their side. This money will not be free and it will not do anything other than lead us further away from the principles that made this country great: free market capitalism.

Money is control and Congress will demand of the big three that some control be surrendered for it. Concessions like management changes (Obama wants an Auto Czar – don’t you just love the word Czar?), salary concessions and a commitment to make the shitty little electric vehicles that nobody in their right mind would want to own. (Ed. Note: If the whiny deathtraps were any good or were wanted by people, the government wouldn’t have to force Detroit to make them; they’d be making them on their own to keep up with demand; although the Smart Cars do seem to be selling so someone). Once this camel’s nose is under the tent, it won’t be long until even more intrusion follows and as someone who just had to visit the DMV to renew a driver’s license, I know government run institutions run about as well as my dog does on an icy pond. Sure it is funny to watch but it is pretty sad too. The poor thing is way over his head and has no clue how to get off or what to do. Umm, I am talking about the government, not my dog.

More important in all of this is the fact government spending doesn’t work to stimulate private business. Don’t take my word for it. Much smarter minds than mine, besides being found on the kids panel of “Are You Smarter Than A 5^th Grader, have written on this here.

My fear is that the auto bailout is but the next step in our path to socialism. We are like the frog being cooked alive in a pot of slowly warming water. In the kind of creeping socialism espoused by Marx around 150 years ago, our toes and our country are turning red from the heat. Let’s hope the increasingly spiraling expenditures being touted now raise the temperature quickly enough to get everyone croaking in complaint instead of our freedom just plain ole croaking.

There is hope. George W, in his recent address to the G20 stated: “History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much… Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government.''

“The answer is not to try to reinvent that system,'' Bush said. “It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market system.''

Well hooray, huzzah, woo hoo and an atta boy to the President. Good for him but it is about damn time! I guess it is better late than never but this kind of address smacks of a death-bed confession and a grasp for legacy with two short months to go in his eight year tenure. He and Republicans like him enabled much of this slide away from the capitalism he is now claiming to hold so dear. So long as it didn’t fall on deaf ears. But alas it most likely did.

For government may be the pusher of this “everyone is equal and society needs a political fix” drug, but we are the addicts. A not so wise blogger recently posted about the growing number of hungry Oliver Twists standing in line at the orphanage of Monkle Sam asking “Please sir, may I have some more?” in an effort to grab for themselves a bowl full of bailout. In fact, scroll down and you will find it and some relevant links.

When Adam Smith’s now out of sight out of mind theory of the “invisible hand” of capitalism was first coined, people were better than they are today. True champions of industry desired to build long lasting and socially, as well as financially, beneficial companies for the long term. Todays get rich quick at any cost and damn everyone else ideal is providing the fuel for the fire bombs thrown by the “we must restrain unregulated capitalism” crowd. Ideals and actions like those of AIG who, after receiving their 700 billion dollar goose to save them from ruin, decided to still pay bonuses and exorbitant salaries to avoid having their senior management leave. These are same senior managers whose decisions brought the company to the verge of this ruin. Yeah, we sure wouldn’t want them to leave now would we? The mortgage lenders who made loans to people they damn well knew couldn’t afford them (at the direction of the geniuses like Barney Frank in the House). From the parachutes of corporate executives all the way to the “I know I can’t afford it but I want it anyway” borrowers, the golden rule seems to be “give me the money now and I will worry about the future later”.

Ayn Rand was prophetic in her analysis and prediction of how the takers would, well, take. Yes, the heroes in her novels were all about doing what was in their own self-interest; objectivists as her philosophy describes them. And, at the core of capitalism it is self-interest and success that is the fuel for the economic engine. But it is not self-interest at the detriment of others. Unlike a little league game where someone does win and someone does lose (at least when a score is kept), in an economy everyone can be a winner. A rising tide will raise all boats so long as someone isn’t putting holes in other’s hulls in an effort to sink their ships to raise the water level. True capitalists succeed through honest effort, providing goods and services better, faster, cheaper and on their own while providing jobs to hard working individuals. These people shouldn’t be punished. Takers, seek the easy road and handouts in order to get ahead. These people and companies shouldn’t be rewarded. I don’t think, like in Rand’s novel, the forward thinking, creative and productive members of society should segment themselves in some inaccessible mountain valley. They, and all of us, need to reign in the takers, distributionists and “share the wealth” crowd before it is too late.

A couple things need to happen to get us on the right track. One thing is to get government out of the way. Are the auto makers too big to fail? I don’t know but if they do, so be it. Another thing is for all of us to realize there are more important things than our own selves and short term gain. Is it a purpose driven life we should seek? That is up to you. All I know is that if we turn ourselves over to the religion of government, we are all damned.

At least we can go by Karl’s house and watch him clean up the TP.

Whew.
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