SOME ECONOMICS

Reduce poverty by reducing government: "The enemies of capitalism and economic freedom shed crocodile tears over poverty. Their policies do not alleviate it but worsen it. They deprive many workers of the very possibility of working, and when those workers are permitted to work, compel them to be confronted with the needless competition of other workers driven from other lines of work by the same kind of policies. And they compel all workers, especially the poorest, to pay needlessly higher prices: all are compelled to pay higher prices insofar as the productivity of labor is held down; and the poorest in particular are compelled to pay higher prices as the result of the same monopolistic privileges that drive their wages down. As I have shown, economic freedom, not government interference, is the means of overcoming poverty"

Moronic "activists": "The Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) has joined up with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to launch a nationwide boycott of Yum Brands Inc. Yum Brands is the owner of many successful fast food chains including; Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, A&W Root Beer, and Taco Bell. TacoBell is where CIW seems to have their beef with Yum Brands. Taco Bell is the largest purchaser of tomatoes from farms in Immokalee South Florida. These farms utilize local migrant laborers to harvest different crops of vegetables including, cucumbers, watermelon, and tomatoes. Most of the migrant laborers are not legal citizens and do not fall within the confines of minimum wage requirements and typical employment regulations. They receive per bushel wages rather than hourly or salaried compensation. For each bushel picked a migrant worker receives an average of 45 - 50 cents. .... Staging a boycott against Taco Bell does not change the guided self interest of taco eating teenagers. In the short run it has the exact opposite effect of its intended purpose. Boycotting Taco Bell lowers the demand for tacos, which in turn lowers the demand for the inputs required to make them, which in turn lowers the prices for wages paid to migrant workers needed to pick tomatoes."

The welfare state rewards liars: "Many bad things can be said about the welfare state -- the political arrangement, as the 19th-century French liberal Frederic Bastiat wrote, by which 'everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.' But one largely unnoticed feature is that it rewards people for suspending their moral sense. Frankly, it makes winners out of liars."

Outsourcing: "What you won't find on the Kerry website are any references to serious studies of outsourcing. The reason is that they all find the issue to be seriously overblown: Outsourcing is responsible for a trivial amount of job loss at most, and is generally a positive for the U.S. economy. Serious studies of outsourcing include ones by former Democratic administration officials."

***********************************