Atlas Shrugged movie

Here's a clip showing the passage in which Dagny Taggart meets with a union rep about the John Galt Line:



This movie DEFINITELY needs to come to OKC! Do you hear me, theater owners?

"Right sizing" doesn't cut it

Here's the comment I posted at NewsOK.com this morning in response to Oklahoma state Treasurer Ken Miller's op-ed:

Here's the basic contradiction: "When government is too small, it cannot provide basic enforcement of property rights and personal safety or the infrastructure necessary to facilitate markets."

A small government can provide effective protection of individual rights if it focuses exclusively on doing ONLY that. It's way past time to cut loose the idea that infrastructure is government's responsibility. It's not. Private citizens took care of it before. They could do so again if the government would just get out of the way.

"Public sector size" IS the main problem. It is the source of "non-essential" services & agencies. It is the cause of government inefficiency.

Don't be afraid to cut too much. The federal budget was cut by two-thirds at the end of World War Two. I'm sure some people at the time were sorry to see the government let go of all those lovely tax dollars and the power that went along with it. Fortunately, they were not in the majority.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why fiscal conservatives should reject social conservatism, which leads to more government, not less.

I do agree with Miller's assertion that the term "right sizing" is ambiguous, though I think Governor Fallin made her meaning clear in her State of the State address when she said that "the growth of government shouldn’t outpace growth in the private sector."

This does not sound to me like a commitment to smaller government. Given her recent statements regarding state-based health insurance exchanges, I fear Governor Fallin may be turning out to be another Mitt Romney. She certainly has no understanding of what a genuinely free market is.

(Here's someone who does: Michael F. Cannon - Obamacare Can't Be Fixed, and Now Is the Time to Dismantle It

Rather than beat their plowshares into swords, Obamacare opponents in most state capitols are laying the bureaucratic foundations for the law's new entitlement spending and lending it legitimacy by accepting its debt-financed federal grants.)

What is the proper role of Government?

Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, debates Miles Rapoport, president of Demos, on the proper role of government. The debate took place at New York University on March 10, 2011.

Two fundamental essays by Ayn Rand

Man's Rights

The Nature of Government

We did it before - we CAN do it again!

There's a fantastic Forbes column by Richard Salsman which I wrote about at my other blog, The Morality War, when the column was first published.

Here's (part of) what I wrote about it:

Here's a great column by Richard Salsman who argues that, yes, there really was a time when it was possible to cut the federal budget - and by susbstantially more than the measly 2% or whatever that the Republicans are currently promising:

U.S. federal spending was cut by 5% in the year through July 1960 compared to the year earlier, and cut by 10% during a previous two-year period (1954-1955), but the biggest cut came with the “demobilization” after World War II. Total federal spending was slashed from a peak of $93 billion in 1945 to $55 billion in 1946, $35 billion in 1947 and $30 billion in 1948, before rising again.

The total, three-year reduction in federal outlays after World War II (1945-1948) was 68% of the prior peak spending level.

The fact that the federal budget was cut - and the cuts were initiated by Democrats! - certainly gives the lie to complaints that too much cutting would be catastrophic.

We cut the budget by TWO-THIRDS! AND we survived!

Yes, I get that we had just ended a major war during which we were spending a lot of extra money. But too many people seem to think that an outbreak of peace is no excuse to let go of all those lovely tax dollars - and the power that goes along with them.

This is why I am so heartened by Rand Paul's proposal to cut 4 TRILLION DOLLARS (!!!!!) from the federal budget. Finally, a legislator with the guts to do something genuinely radical! THE biggest threat to American liberty right now is the runaway growth of government, and Senator Paul's proposal addresses this in a genuinely fundamental way that no one else seems willing to even hint at.

This gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, the Tea Party movement will actually amount to something, rather than merely giving social conservatives a platform to promote their tired old agenda which only gives the government more power, not less.

In fact, if Rand Paul was running for President, I'd be ready to vote for him right now!

The wrong foot

On Friday, Mary Fallin signed her very first bill into law as governor:

Governor Mary Fallin Signs Bill Providing Additional Funds to Department of Corrections

Okay, I get that incarcerating criminals is a legitimate function of government. I have no desire to jeapordize public safety by making it harder for the Corrections Department to do its job.

But still, couldn't Governor Fallin find another bill as her very first signing that didn't involve spending more money rather than less?

Argh.

Get out of the way!

Here's what I posted this morning in response to other commenters at "Oklahoma state government spending continues to climb":

Wow! Look at the liberals squirming! "Waaah, don't take our big government away from us! Waaaaah! The country will self destruct!"

You know, there was a time when government spending accounted for only 3% of the country's economy. There was no central bank. No income tax. A MUCH smaller government that stayed pretty much out of the way of private industry - which did so much more of what many today claim are "essential" government services. I look at India & China with their VERY mixed economies and I wonder what OUR growth rate was back then. 5%? 10%? More?

So, all you liberals, corporate welfare addicts & social conservatives: just stay out of our way.

OK?

Dear Matt Pinnell,

I'm glad you're willing to "walk the walk" when it comes to cutting taxes. But I still think "right-sizing government" is too wishy-washy. The only way to make genuine structural cuts in government that have any hope of lasting is to close agencies. That way Democrats can't come back and use the budgets of those agencies as an excuse to spend more tax dollars.

Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit

Tea Party Patriots has posted video of their recent American Policy Summit on their website.

Essential government services

Here's a comment I posted this morning at a NewsOK.com column about the vote to abolish the state's income tax:

Okay, here are some questions which it is probably too late to ask since this column was posted yesterday & probably no one is paying attention anymore but I'm going to ask them anyway.

"services citizens want" What if I don't? Why should I have to pay for services I don't want? Why should I have to pay for services somebody else wants? Why should I have to pay the government for these services if I think somebody else can do a better job of providing them? Why shouldn't I have the option of being able to pay them instead of the government?

The government DOES NOT have to do everything. When it does try to do everything it ends up violating someone's rights. Some people think that's okay. I don't. A government that gets away with violating rights to provide these services will eventually end up violating MY rights.

I would rather have a government that held individual rights to life, liberty, property & the pursuit of happiness to be inviolable and let the free market take care of everything else.

This is the second comment I posted at this piece since it was published yesterday. There is a great deal more that I hope to get around to saying about this issue - the "essential government services" argument is a popular one among those who say the answer to the budget problem is to raise taxes. For now, I'll simply refer those who wish to know more to Ayn Rand's "The Nature of Government".

This morning's tweets

Follow The Oklahoma Capitalist on Twitter @ok_capitalist

OK Senate Votes To Abolish Income Tax http://bit.ly/hY7GK7

Apparently some Democrats in the Oklahoma Senate wanted to play chicken with the Republicans and it backfired on them. A Democrat attached an amendment to a Republican's bill, thinking Republicans weren't really willing to go that far. The amendment? Abolish the state's income tax. Guess what? The Republicans went there.

RT @OklahomaAFP: Deflecting Attention from Lowering Property Tax Cap Misguided and Uncalled For http://bit.ly/dNEi52

What Leonard Sullivan did to Stuart Jolly was pure viciousness. That having been said:

SJR 5 would lower the property tax cap from 5% to 3% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. Well, fine. Is that all?

Which leads me to my next tweet:

How about capping property tax rate increases at 0%? Or better yet, how about eliminating property taxes altogether?

Seriously, why are we even considering increases in tax rates? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can to reduce taxes and thus deprive government of revenue, forcing it to cut back?

This is a trend that has been worrying me ever since the governor's State of the State Address. Instead of talking about reducing the size of government, Fallin stated that she only wanted to restrain growth because "the growth of government shouldn’t outpace growth in the private sector." That doesn't sound like a commitment to smaller government to me, and wishy-washy proposals like SJR 5 don't, either. Could it be that it was precisely this kind of talk that lead Senate Democrats to believe Republicans would blink when they ran a truly radical statement on taxes up the pole?

Thankfully it looks like some Republicans have the nerve to be more ambitious with their cutting than that.

Too much and not enough

You've heard of Oklahoma's "anti-gouging" law that punishes business owners who raise their prices "too high" during "emergencies". Well, here's a story in this morning's Oklahoman about a law that penalizes those who don't raise their prices enough:

The Oklahoma Unfair Sales Act was passed in 1949. It's designed to protect small businesses from the pricing advantages large chains have and hopefully prevent this scenario: retail giant rolls into town, sells goods super cheap, puts little guy out of business, then jacks up their prices.

The story focuses on how the law - which requires stores to sell items at least 6 percent above cost - has prevented Walmart from bringing special pricing to Oklahoma that it makes available elsewhere.

Just one more example of regulation Oklahoma can do without.

"OKC Council to vote on Remington Park’s smoking status"

Well, I don't have a subscription to the Journal Record but it looks to me - just from the title of the story - like the OKC City Council wants the power to micromanage private businesses.

How else to explain their statement supporting a state law that would give local governments sweeping new powers to regulate tobacco?

One more infringement on individual rights - well, actually several more - and one more reason to cut government down to size.

At ALL levels.

The sole moral function of government is to protect individual rights, NOT infringe them.

Opportunity is knocking

The private space industry is finally getting to be serious business: today's announcement by the Southwest Research Institute about its agreement to purchase places on suborbital flights from Virgin Galactic and XCOR make it clear that the so-called "NewSpace" industry is past the giggle stage. Certainly the flurry of news reports filed in response to the announcement would seem to indicate that is the case.

Here in Oklahoma, respectability for commercial space efforts by private entrepreneurs has been held back by the Rocketplane debacle, in which state tax credits were awarded to a company that promised suborbital rides for "space tourists" launched from right here in Oklahoma. Those plans evaporated as the company seemed to do nothing but seek financing for its ever-increasing development costs before finally closing its Oklahoma office, leaving the state with no return on its investment.

But while Rocketplane never took off, Oklahoma did see a small return on its investment in another venture for the NewSpace industry: the Oklahoma Spaceport, which has been used extensively by Texas company Armadillo Aerospace for development and testing of its own privately-financed space vehicles.

Unfortunately, this has not been enough to keep Governor Fallin from announcing that the agency that oversees the Spaceport - the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority - will be shut down due to the state's current budget problems.

It would be a shame if this turned out to be a lost opportunity. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two is designed to be flown twice a day. XCOR's Lynx is said to be shooting for twice that many flights per day. According to some reports, today's announcement by SWRI indicates that the market for suborbital research - powered by flights much cheaper than anything previously available - could ultimately be bigger than the space tourism market.

All those flights are going to need to launch from somewhere. Perhaps the Oklahoma Spaceport could be one such location. What if a private investor or investors were to purchase it - or at least take over operations, thus privatizing it? Oklahoma would thus have the foundation for its own private space industry, catering to the likes of Virgin, XCOR, Armadillo, Blue Origin & Masten Space Systems: currently representing an investment worth $1 billion, certainly not a sum to be giggled about. And it could provide a base for home-grown efforts: not just competitors but support companies, as well - just as Tinker Air Base is supported by its own network of private companies here in the state.

Is anybody looking into this? I hope so.