Is Their Approach Viable? Do They Make Sense or No Sense? Part 3 in the Approach to Life series

Are you cautious about what other people want you to believe, do you take what they say with a large pinch of salt? The secret of success is to check out its viability, explore their motivation, and wonder if they're trying to mislead you before making up your mind. If it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is!

Does what they say make any sense?
Don't be taken to the cleaners. Whenever someone tells you something - or wants your vote - you'll change your life by asking yourself: How much will they gain if you believe what they're telling you? Will you also benefit? Are they, in fact, reliable?

Does their history show they're committed to the truth? Have they followed through on their promises in the past? Or have they promised some variation of: "Read my lips, no new taxes!" and then broken their word by increasing taxes?

Are they being right? Do they insist they're telling the truth, despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Do they compromise their integrity by seizing on the smallest trifle that can be interpreted to support their case, while ignoring everything that disproves it, no matter how compelling?

Is their warped secret of success to tell you what you want to hear rather than the awkward truth. Are they deliberately trying to mislead you because they have a large stake in the outcome?

In Dan Hannan's trenchant phrase: You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. Indeed! Appreciating that these financial realities apply to governments just as they do to companies and individuals will change your life. An expanding government has no choice but to expand the ways it parts you from your money.

The Taxes You Pay
You pay many sorts of taxes, not just income taxes and sales taxes. But do you realize the end customer also pays the taxes that businesses pay - they go bankrupt if they don't make a profit. The business pays the taxes initially, but the money for their business taxes, capital gains taxes, carbon taxes, corporate taxes, environmental taxes, excise duties, export duties, extraction taxes, investment taxes, pollution taxes, and tonnage taxes comes from their customers - that's you - by increasing their prices.

Some shameful governments even try to hide their involvement in price increases by making free speech illegal. See link below*.

You also pay social security taxes, property taxes, vehicle taxes, consumption taxes, airline taxes, energy taxes, health care taxes, road taxes, savings taxes, stamp duty, financial taxes, gambling taxes, gift taxes, import taxes, insurance taxes, land taxes, pension taxes, etc., etc.

The Money They Borrow
Tomorrow, you'll also pay for the money the government borrows today. They finance today's spending by mortgaging your future. If, instead, they borrow to invest in a business venture to make a profit, then no problem for either a business or a government.

But why is the government involved in business? The specious argument that they need to be because of the supposed free rider problem - lighthouses and bees, for example - has been long discredited. If it's a viable business with a real return, then the secret of success is to let business handle business.

An entrepreneur with a great idea and the desire to produce wealth will do a far better job than any number of government employees who can neither make a fortune nor go bankrupt. You'll change your life when you understand that since a government employee has no significant stake in the outcome, customer satisfaction is largely irrelevant. Yet bureaucrats are amazingly difficult to fire. You've perhaps had experience of such government failure.

But don't people suddenly become selfless guardians of the public interest as soon as they are appointed or elected? No! Check it out, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to James Buchanan for his work in Public Choice analysis. Professor Buchanan showed that both politicians and bureaucrats behave just as selfishly as the rest of the population in furthering their own interests. They just pretend otherwise.

They Decrease the Purchasing power of your Money
Governments reduce your wealth not just with taxes and borrowing, but also by depreciating the value of the currency: This is general inflation, nowadays misleadingly called quantitive easing!

They usually say it's to buy assets, government bonds to stimulate and grow the economy. But for economic growth, the secret of success is for less people to work for the government, and more people to work in the productive private sector. Unless the government allows you the freedom to create the wealth you desire by keeping more of what you earn, how can you or the economy grow and prosper?

Yet the value of the currency continues to go down. Without the enforced discipline of the gold standard, your money buys less and less each year. A hundred years ago, a business man famously complained that he could no longer buy a decent five-cent cigar. Nowadays it's tough to buy a decent five-dollar cigar. So in the past century, each piece of paper, each dollar bill has lost roughly 99 cents of its purchasing power. Today's dollar just buys what one cent purchased back then.

Do they know how to create wealth?
Are they proposing a wealth tax? Governments well know to tax the things they want less of, like cigarettes and liquor. So, unless a politician is economically illiterate, any proposals for taxing the wealthy must mean he wants less wealth. Curious.

Does a politician have any practical experience in creating wealth? Without experience, how can he know the policies needed for the whole country - including you - to prosper and become more wealthy?

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."

- Professor Thomas Sowell, PhD, incisive American economist, social theory, philosophy. Prolific author in race relations, education, decision-making, and practical economics.

* See Australia's shameful stifling of free speech at:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/the-truth-will-out-on-labo...