I would like to contribute to the Haitian Earthquake relief effort. But, because of Frank/Reid/Pelosi/Obamanomics - I can’t.
You see, I am (was) self-employed in the residential construction business. My business was amazingly stable during the Bush/Clinton/Bush years. I wasn’t getting rich but just plugging along doing enough business to live my life on my terms. I am an American. That is all most of us want to do – work – raise our families and most of all …… be left alone.
Admittedly, I wasn’t knocking myself out trying to make tons of money. Why should I? So the government can confiscate it; to use it to fund voting felons, illegal aliens and assorted lay abouts and all recipients of the Democrat’s machine largess? Any respectable businessman knows that this is simply more overhead. Produced at my expense? Are you kidding?
No Thanks!
Let me explain. In 2008 my business started out relatively strong – I was busy but not crazy-busy. Then on June 15th the curtain fell – I was like a garage door closing. Night fell. My business was all of a sudden off by 80% ….. I have been treading water ever since. Trying to figure out what I can do to support myself. What new business or job can I create that the miscreants in Washington, D.C. won’t screw up or confiscate its proceeds.
I have no more retirement savings – no more health insurance – I can not collect unemployment insurance because I am self-under-employed and could not collect even if I had structured my business differently by paying myself a salary and employing a few people. I didn’t do that because I know better.
Once you have one employee the government and this state do not care if you are little xyz company or Exxon/Mobil. The mountain of paper work and regulation are almost identical. Worse, if you are a publicly traded company.
I used to do that. I started one of the first “green” businesses in 1972, at the age of twenty-four. That business specialized in insulating existing houses and buildings. This business was created in the wake of the first Arab oil embargo. Heating oil (the preferred home heating fuel in this area) went from $0.17 to over a dollar per gallon, overnight. That business was very successful. I grew it from a one man band, with borrowed pickup truck, into a business needing a crew of a half-dozen or so. The business grossed the last full year that I owned it (1979) slightly less than $400,000.00. That was a lot of money and a very good business in those days, even with Jimmy Carter hyper interest rates and inflation.
But, there was a problem which became evident to me in January of 1980. My bookkeeper alerted me to the fact that we were sending out fifty-nine W-? forms (employee year end tax statements). That represented almost ten complete turnovers of employees! For what? My first thought was - most of them should be paying me for running daycare center for forty year olds – two thirds of them certainly did not care for themselves responsibly. (I can not tell you how many midnight or later phone calls I received for bail, domestic disturbances, etc. etc., etc. You name it. Somehow, I was their new daddy figure.)
The insulation business is admittedly itchy and dirty. Because of that, I paid well above average and tried to help a few key employees out by letting take my work trucks home at night so that they could get to work on time. Only to find out that they were; either stealing tools, outright or moonlighting with my equipment and material!
So much for my being the benevolent dictator – I sold the business and vowed that I would never directly employ anyone again. I am not the only person to have figured this out. This is why the industrial base of the United States now resides in China, India, South Korea and many other countries around the globe.
This is one employer’s story but it illustrates why Democrat big government solutions never work. The useful idiots, the hard leftist constituents of the Party never seem to want to understand this. Why should they? They have the Democrat Party apparatchiks to extort businesses through over taxation and over-regulation or the threat of it. They refer to this as “fundraising”. This is also, Crony Corporatism (not capitalism) the collusion of big business and government working in concert to force out the small businessmen and women of this country. The most glaring example of this was the excessive EPA regulations which forced many mom & pop gas stations out of business all across this country or the EPA (again) stopping the use of Freon I just as DuPont’s patents were expiring.
So, here we are. Haiti, you have suffered a tremendous natural catastrophe. This is horrible. Once again, the good old USA will be your primary rescuer because it is (still) the only country with the military capability and will to do so. It will be the United States Military’s aircraft carriers, hospital ships, MRE’s, helicopters and air transports who will do the heavy lifting and do their utmost to rescue you. Just as they always do. Every time they are called upon. And your politicians (here and there) will turn right around later and Cr%p on them, just as they always do.
The American government will, once again rebuild your country for you; even though our government is in far worse financial shape than yours, for the same reason: theft by our political leadership. It is simply the scale that is different – trillions instead of millions.
Haiti, we have attempted many times to rescue you from your self-made problems. You did not honor your
constitution (thought to have been written with the help of Herbert Hoover) as a result you eventually got the Duvaliers. In 2004, we sent in the U.S. military to save you from Aristede. In fact, as I look at a brief
history of Haiti during the Twentieth Century, it seems to me that we have “helped” you too much.
Ironically, we Americans now need to save ourselves from exactly the same people who have “helped” you: Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. John Conyers, ex-Pres. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama to name a few. The dilemma for me is that I am almost broke: Do I send money to Haiti where it will be wasted / stolen by those enabled and empowered by the American politicians listed above.
Or;
Do I contribute to a Conservative politician here who understands the need for returning to, honoring and enforcing our own Constitution? One, who has a chance of defeating the same Democrat Machine which fully intends to socialize this Country, in an attempt to turn it into just another part of the Third World.
Sorry, Haiti but this is triage at its worst, Sophie’s Choice. It is not quite my last twenty-five dollars but it is my money that I can ill afford to waste.
I am going to spend it trying to keep the light of freedom and liberty on here, in the United States. I am going to spend it trying to defeat our common enemy: the tyranny of all of the ‘isms.
pdba.georgetown.edu
