By relieving engineers, web designers, chemists, and other high-skilled workers of the need to mow their own lawns, prepare their own meals, wash their own cars, and repair their own leaky faucets, low-skilled workers create more time for high-skilled workers to offer high-value contributions. In short, low-skilled workers frequently complement high-skilled workers – making both kinds of workers more productive.

This should be obvious, but the reason governments can’t stop themselves from inflating real estate bubbles is that taxes based on the “assessed” value of real estate are the lifeblood of most local governments. It’s always in the government’s interest to value real property as high as possible, even if the market thinks differently.

Here is a simple way of looking at the problem with healthcare:
Suppose you were in training for a factory job. But instead of just training for specific tasks, you were expected to learn every aspect of the entire factory before you even started your first day of work. Not only is your training going to be very expensive and time consuming, but the compensation you receive therefore needs to pay for your personal sacrifice. As a result, the once reasonable factory prices now reflect this added burden, and what comes out of the factory is no longer directly affordable by the consumer. I told this story to a friend recently and she got it immediately. “My cousin”, she told me, “in his training to become an opthamologist, had to learn everything about being a doctor first, including a stint in the ER.”

The union’s Mr. Garcia sees no conflict in a union that insists on union labor hiring nonunion people to protest the hiring of nonunion labor.

Nowadays, as a business leader you look at your balance sheet, assess the outlook, and make your investment decisions. You hire workers when you see opportunities, and you fire workers when you face threats. The ratio of threats to opportunities went way up in the latter half of 2008.

States all assume this is the typical garden variety recession quickly cured by the Fed slashing interest rates and sugar-daddy Congress sloshing dollars around. Clearly, that’s not the case as numerous data points (and trillions of dollars in wasted stimulus efforts) have proven. Unemployment is high and it is going to stay that way until the structural problems are addressed. Unfortunately the Obama administration is adding to the structural problems instead of fixing them.

Well, it isn’t 1936 any longer. We live in an age when the word gets out no matter how much camouflage has been used to hide who you are and how you became infused with your deepest ideals and understandings. At bottom what animates the unfolding of the socialist project and the agenda of the Obama regime is the rejection of common principles developed across the ages for whatever “pragmatic” and changing expediency is required to achieve particular immediate ends, especially for particular favored groups. Under Obama we have seen more and more of the economy falling under the direction of arbitrary bureaucratic control
outside of the bounds of the rule of law. And there is no end it sight. The road to serfdom requires little more than that.