One of the primary differences between Republicans and Democrats is how they view economic production. While this difference is quickly dwindling, it is certainly distinctive in that the Republicans tend to favor employers while Democrats seem more concerned with employees. Unfortunately, neither of them really do realize that they should not be concerned with either if we are going to see our economy truly grow again.
On the Republican side, you see a tendency to support, without any apparent insight, the leaders in the private sector. The business owners who ideally work hard at their business in order to produce a better product for you and me. Granted, this is certainly something to be admired because being a business owner is a lot of work with very little to show for it in the end. Sure we hear about the multimillionaires who have all these wonderful things, but the truth is most business owners barely scratch by as they have to pay their employees and take very little away with them.
Unfortunately, not all business owners are created equal. Adam Smith never had good things to say about business owners, mostly because they tend to use whatever means are necessary to get rid of competition. This includes employing the use of government force. On a small scale, you might have an association of hairdressers whose purpose is to regulate hairdressing standards within a city. But usually the members of that group are existing hairdressers who own their own businesses and usually enforce regulations to get rid of others. Less competition means less work for business owners.
When Herman Cain, thoroughly black Republican candidate for President, criticized the Occupy Wall Street movement for their misguided targets, I was inclined to agree with some of what he said, however he was mistaken in his assumption that Wall Street was a free market. If anything, it is corporatism at its finest with a small group of traders who hold sway over the rest of us peons and backed by the force of government regulations and laws.
If any Republican in the debate tonight calls for the repeal of all labor regulations and industry regulations in general, then they are true free market Republicans. Otherwise, they will have exposed themselves as nothing more than corporatist shills who, intentionally or not, distort it with true capitalism.
The Democrats seem more concerned with the workers and often draft legislation supporting such things. But the worker is more often than not victimized by the very legislation that is passed by Congress. It is no coincidence that following the passage of the minimum wage increase that teenage workers went on a decline and were instead replaced by immigrants who don’t know what I’m talking about when I order combo #3 in plain English. This is because the minimum wage lowers the number of workers an employer can hire. So while making businesses pay more for labor (which is unconstitutional), they only ended up bringing us closer and closer to a labor market like France.
The fact is, people will not work for peanuts unless they desire only peanuts. While Democrats like to think they are helping the working man, they tend to only help the union leaders (not the unions themselves) and the employers they are seeking to “punish” for some perceived injustice.
Even worse, both parties assume that government intervention of some kind will fix economic downturns. For the Democrats, it is these make-work projects, which do nothing but teach unskilled people ditch-digging skills which a five-year-old could figure out on his own. The Republicans tend to support corporate lobbies and central banking, which only means the government will choose winners and losers and most of the people who do pick have ties to the companies they are favoring (think Henry “Hack” Paulson and TARP). Sadly, in both cases the government deficit increases and so the national debt gets larger and national default gets closer.
Ultimately, it is not a particular group of laborers who should be favored, but the individual. And since individuals tend to be snowflakes, desiring different things, the best thing the government can do for the individual is not tax breaks or labor regulations but to simply step aside and let things be.
Unfortunately the collective pride of the government men (both in and out of government) refuses to even entertain the idea of doing nothing. And so we will probably face a decade of nasty decline and mounting debt as a a result.