Thursday, August 19, 2010

[speakoutforum] LICENSURE AND CRONYISM

 

Licensure and cronyism destroy Uncle Sam and Fourth Reich(EU). Basil Venitis asserts that all licenses should be abolished, including doctors, lawyers, and marriage. Licensure is an immoral exercise of force, an overly burdensome restraint on trade, a violation of the right to liberty, a mill of kickbacks. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. One of the many reasons why government licensure is incompatible with liberty, therefore, is because it is destructive of economic freedom. No other nation demands more licenses than Greece.

Anyone has the natural right to pursue any means of providing for himself so long as in doing so he does not act fraudulently or otherwise violate the rights of others. The State mandated license turns the free market upside down. It prohibits everyone from producing in a given industry except for those who are granted the privilege of doing so by the State, especially those who provide huge kickbacks to kleptocrats. The State, in such a misery, absorbs all individual rights unto itself and then divvies up some of those rights in any number of ways that increase the flow of kickbacks.

Under a licensing system, such as we have today, if someone attempts to exercise his natural right to provide for himself without the state's nod of approval, which usually comes with kickbacks, that person goes to jail. Imprisonment for supporting oneself in an honest and non-fraudulent manner which does not infringe on the rights of others just doesn't seem right. Preemptive protection is offensive in nature, and therefore, is itself a violation of natural rights. In a free society, it is only after fraud or another violation of rights takes place that the state has the right to intervene on behalf of the consumer.

By means of the licensure power, the State can permit the individual to eat or it can condemn him to starve, unless he gives kickbacks to kleptocrats. So long as the government has the power to issue licenses to live, we cannot claim to be free, and living without freedom is not much of a life. Fortunately, we still have a license to kill unsound and coercive government measures, so let us use that license to regain our right to live.

Greece requires more licenses than any other country. For anything you do in Greece, you have to take permission from the government, a bureaucratic task that requires filling myriad papers. It's impossible to fill all these papers accurately. That's why Greeks either give up or give kickbacks to public employees to accept incomplete piles of papers.

As the Latin expression puts it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This is a phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal, which is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?" It is also sometimes rendered as "Who watches the watchmen?" In Greece, the watchers of watchmen are all corrupt!

Basil Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, points out Greeks, robbed at gunpoint by Graecokleptocrats, survive by schemes, fraud, sinecures, and mugging each other. Rousfeti means expensive political favors, which pervade everything from hiring public employees to property deals. Tax evaders and law breakers receive visits from officials eager to collect kickbacks. In return for leaving the guilty untouched, officials receive fakelaki, envelope containing bribe in cash. The standard rate for kickbacks is 10% of the forfeited penalty. Desperate Greeks now pray for a new dictatorship! Allons enfants de la Grece!

Venitis notes that Gregory means fast in Greek. Gregory's tax is fakelaki for fast service. Without it, you will wait for ever! All Athenians know very well that without Gregory they will have to wait many months before a state IKA physician could see them. If you want a surgery, you will have to give the IKA surgeon at least 5,000 euros kickback, that beloved Gregory! The surgeon would ask you how is Gregory. If you do not present Gregory, you will have to come back to IKA months later to answer the same question. If Gregory is not fat enough, the IKA surgeon might pseudoforget his scissors inside you! Allons enfants de la Grece!

Venitist James Roberts points out backroom deals between members of the governing class and their hand-picked cronies influence the legislative, executive, and regulatory actions of governments around the world. Examples of this ancient form of corruption abound. Government intrusions into the private sector as a partner, financier, or outright owner are not only morally hazardous, but toxic to economic freedom. Such special-interest arrangements directly contradict the principles of freedom, incentives, and opportunity. Citizens of any country need a system of non-discriminatory markets and impartial credit allocation, as well as rewards for individual success, in order to get ahead based on merit and hard work.

Roberts notes it is common these days for those who feel exploited by the system to lash out at capitalism as the cause of their economic woes. When their complaints are examined, however, what stands out is not anger at an actual free-market capitalist system, but frustration with the prospect of an almost insurmountable economic system of privilege based on cronyism. In many parts of the globe, aspiring entrepreneurs, willing to work hard and full of ideas and energy, start out against a stacked deck because they lack political or family connections.

To get ahead based on sheer merit and hard work, citizens of any country need a system that maintains non-discriminatory markets and impartial credit allocation, as well as rewards for individual success. That is the recipe for economic freedom and for the opportunity to escape poverty and build lasting prosperity. Yet in far too many cases the future Sam Waltons, Ray Krocs, and Bill Gateses of the world are trapped in systems dominated by cronyism and corruption, where those with special access to government favors or information and those who already enjoy monopoly power dictate pricing and conditions of service, often becoming extravagantly rich in the process, while denying millions of their countrymen that very same access.

In a true capitalist system success is determined by the market, the best mechanism ever discovered to set the value of goods and services, through the collective buying and selling decisions of all participants in the economy, not only through a select few with special access to government overseers or inside information.

Roberts points out that every day around the world decisions are made by government leaders to insinuate themselves and their bureaucracies as a partner, financier, or outright owner of formerly private corporations and enterprises, sometimes in joint ventures with labor unions. Often this insidious and growing crony capitalism is linked with European corporatist-style industrial policies, hailed by their statist supporters as the public–private wave of the future. Those who study history, however, already know the ending of this story, and it is not a happy one.

When the collective decisions of the marketplace are overridden by government regulations, price setting, or even direct control or state ownership of natural resources, then the system is something quite distinct from free-market capitalism and truly does become the enemy of the little guy.

Depending on the type and extent of government interference in the economy, the system resulting from cronyism might fairly be described as socialist, fascist, or communist. All three substitute government decision making for the collective judgment of the marketplace in allocating resources for production and consumption. Any of these systems can work in theory, although socialism has enjoyed long-term success only in a few Western European societies that are highly cohesive demographically and which enjoy high standards of ethical behavior: Their citizens traditionally have trusted each other and their governments to do the right thing. It is not socialism per se; to the extent that European socialism has succeeded it is thanks to a system that might better be called extended-family capitalism.

Before they were defeated by the economically freer Allied Powers, two of the massive and deadly 20th-century experiments in applied theoretical socialism, fascism and communism, were held together in practice by what could be termed crony-capitalist-like arrangements. Fortunately the vertically collectivist and totalitarian states known as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union finally collapsed onto the ash heap of history, with a big push from the West. They held together as long as they did only by suppression of most human rights. Free-market capitalism, by contrast, has enjoyed long periods of success in a variety of social settings.

The jury is still out on whether Chinese reformers will finally get the upper hand over China's cronyist nomenklatura and princelings, but many European welfare states that did not learn from their sorry history of cronyism, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, for instance, are already facing potential bankruptcy.

From the failed and costly takeover of the British automotive manufacturing sector by a socialist government in the 1970s to the refusal today by the Chinese government to reform its sclerotic state-owned enterprises, the record of statist policies is generally one of commercial failure and a vastly expanded, empowered, and burdensomely expensive public sector staffed by too many meddlesome bureaucrats.

In economically free societies everyone benefits when honest and hard-working men and women, who have confidence that they can retain the fruits of their labors, have incentives to invest and work harder. That confidence is destroyed when the economic system is controlled by a government that directs the largesse and power of the state to those with connections. This sort of corruption is the definition of cronyism.

Roberts notes that cronyism is a form of deviant economic behavior that sucks the fairness, competition, and vitality out of capitalist systems everywhere. Various types of cronyism are reducing economic freedom in every area measured by the Index of Economic Freedom. Those who would defend the free market and aspire to reap its highest rewards must reject all forms of cronyism and insist on policies that empower individuals, avoid discrimination, and ensure open and fair competition for all.

The large expansion of the role of government in the U.S. economy over the last year has included major policies and expenditures that favor special interest groups and those with strong political connections to President Obama or the Democratic Party. Such favoritism is the very definition of cronyism, and will, if unchecked, retard growth and destroy confidence in the U.S. economic system for years to come. Urgent action is needed to restore the even-handedness and fairness of government expenditures, and to roll back and eliminate special interest funding.

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Speeches by Basil Venitis enable audiences to truly learn, and provide fascinating, provocative venitist insights and analysis by slicing right through the political jargon and getting to the heart of the matter. It's no wonder that Basil Venitis is the most frequently cited on the internet and is so often called upon to present venitism and to clarify issues for the public. The many advantages of using Basil Venitis include the magnificent seven:

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