The collapse of the government paradigm

In my Jan. 9 column ("I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization"), I wrote: "What's that? What about those unemployed through no fault of their own? Get rid of all the government interventions in the labor market, including payroll taxes, and jobs would sprout like fungi. Of course, they might not all be government-approved jobs."

A loyal reader objects: "Vin Suprynowicz's words are a code word for abolishing laws and regulations governing worker safety, pay, child labor, benefits, etc. 'Of course, they might not all be government-approved jobs,' he boasts. What kind of jobs would they be? Jobs that pay $5 an hour or less? Unsafe jobs since he no doubt would abolish OSHA? Jobs where you would be forced to work a 16-hour day without overtime? Of course, he would abolish overtime and minimum wages. Jobs without vacation? Twelve-year-olds no doubt could do some jobs because the prohibition of child labor is, under Suprynowicz's way of thinking, government interference in the marketplace.

"If you get laid off or fired, he would have no unemployment benefits. That, in his reactionary mind, that is an incentive not to work. How would business people find employees willing to work at non-goverment-approved jobs at which the employer would pay slave wages?

"And no doubt Suprynowicz would prohibit unions so workers could not organize to improve their lot."

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And so, in a vital first step, those indoctrinated for decades in the inevitability of having the central state dictate every aspect of our lives, including our work, begin to contemplate the collapse of that paradigm.

In fact, especially because the freedom of association is recognized and protected from government interference by the Constitution, trade unions are fine by me. I'd be interested to see any citation in which I've said otherwise.

However, because government has no delegated power to intervene in such matters, we certainly should get rid of federal regulations that allow an outfit such as the UAW to effectively bankrupt an outfit such as General Motors -- and especially wacky, unconstitutional "bailout" interventions like the one that kept GM from shedding its unsustainable union contracts in bankruptcy. Barring such federal tilting of the playing field, trade unions can rarely coerce disastrous financial concessions unless the workers have a true monopoly on rare skills -- like professional athletes.

Why aren't National Football League players protected by OSHA, by the way? There must be some kind of an exemption, or the OSHA inspectors would surely look at knee-injury and concussion statistics and require the game be changed to two-hand touch, forthwith.

At the same time businesses can be fined for failing to label piles of sand as "hazardous materials" (not making that up), who else is exempt, and why? How precisely does OSHA help those who work in our most deadly professions, including deep sea fishing, cab driving and hard-rock mining? Has OSHA been successful in requiring employers to allow cabdrivers to carry handguns for self-defense? Why not? Federal regulations overrule local ordinances, don't they? Check your 14th Amendment, enacted specifically to stop the states from disarming the poor.

I can find no place in the Constitution where the Congress is authorized to interfere in the labor markets, at all. Why should kids who'll never be doctors or physicists be denied the dignity of an apprenticeship in a useful trade? Simply because the government educrats have been allowed to slow down the course of schooling so today's 15-year-old has only the education of a 10-year-old of 100 years ago?

Why should employers be barred from offering "starter" jobs to low-skilled workers at any rate agreeable to both parties? Why do so many trades now require government licenses and permits -- all thinly disguised anti-competitive protection rackets?

Today's massive (and officially understated) unemployment rate is dramatic testimony to the real effect of these government meddlings -- all benefiting the labor unions and others involved in "regulatory capture," but creating nothing but dependency and frustration for the growing class of permanently discouraged job seekers.

What's going to happen when we can no longer support them all on the dole? It's an open secret that many now work in the benefit-free, OSHA-free "gray market," or sell stuff online without collecting or remitting sales taxes. What does that make a brick-and-mortar merchant who still obeys all those costly rules? A sucker, that's what it makes him. A chump.

I have neither the power nor the inclination to "abolish" extra pay for overtime -- I merely find no place in the Constitution where the federal government can require it. (They really don't, by the way. I've worked unpaid overtime most of my adult life.) The matter is thus left subject to voluntary negotiation between worker and employer.

If businesses could hire anyone they choose, under any terms agreeable to the job seeker, unemployment would virtually disappear except among those who choose not to work. Most would continue to earn far above any arbitrary minimum wage, as they do right now.

Employees would be free to buy "unemployment insurance" on the free market if they so desired -- or instead to merely set aside some of their own pay (much higher pay, on average, once employers were unburdened of their current regulatory compliance costs) as "savings for a rainy day."

Is freedom really any more frightening than the economic backlash from overregulation that we now face? Would my correspondent, with his scary visions of small children trapped in coal mines, rather sit on the dole than go ply his trade in a truly free market?

Today, given the tax and regulatory penalties imposed on hard work, you'd have to be insane to start a new business and "create jobs" in this country.

This has become so clear that even Barack Obama now claims he's going to root out and repeal any regulations that hamper business activity and job growth. "Claims," mind you. Should his minions come trooping back, advising that the most helpful steps would be to eliminate the income tax, all payroll tax withholding, the IRS, the EPA, the EEOC, the ADA, and ObamaCare, I believe we can all predict his answer.

His answer would be to squawk, like my correspondent above, that no government edict, no matter how unconstitutional and counterproductive, may ever really be repealed, so long as the original authors took care to give it a nice-sounding name and assert it advances the cause of "economic justice."

To finance their schemes, they gleefully seek to loot the rich, including business owners. Then they scratch their heads in puzzlement as the ranks of lootable businesses continues to curiously thin out, like the population of an unguarded henhouse in fox country.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.