19A037 How to Help the Needy by Jim Davies, 9/10/2019    

Along my road on the far left, there lives a couple. I don't know them yet, but the wife's car is decorated with stickers urging us all to try ignorance if we think that schools cost too much, and with the most virulent attacks on Trump that I've seen anywhere. The other day I saw a different one on her husband's pickup:

WORKERS NEED
A LIVING WAGE

Well, who can argue with that? Of course they do. If somebody works for less than a wage on which he can live, he won't live; so then he'll die, and the firm he used to work for will have to replace him. It would be a lose-lose deal, so I don't think it ever happens. I wonder why the driver stuck such a truism on his pickup.

I, too, have needs. Having a high self-esteem, and being elderly, I need a Rolls Royce. Without one, I would suffer psychological damage. I don't mean the current models, which are mere sandbox toys for Saudi princes, but the proper, elegant kind current until the early 1980s and which can now be picked up for about the price of a new Kia. Hey, I'm not greedy!

The only drawback is that being 40 years old they need a fair bit of maintenance, and my bones are too stiff to get under them so I'll also need a chauffeur / mechanic to go with it; and I might as well have his wife as a housekeeper, for the same old bones are ill suited to physical labor about the house.

I also need a lady friend, but won't add that to my Needs List because I expect the Rolls Royce to double as a handy chick magnet.

So, how are these needs to be met; a living wage for the worker, and a Rolls for me? That pickup driver didn't spend all that money on a b-sticker for no reason, and given his wife's inverted understanding of the government school monopoly I'll take a wild guess that he wants someone to force employers to pay higher wages. He perceives a need, his knees jerk, and he calls for guns to be held to their heads. In a democracy, that's how needs are met.

There are quite a lot of artisans like him and some of them gang up in trade unions and those unions are not poor and their coffers are open to any Pol who will ensure enactment of the necessary legislation. So it could happen. Again.

But there are also quite a lot of Retired Persons like me, and the AARP is a kind of union too, and has a deal of political clout. Why should it not make sure that its members are decently equipped with luxury transport of their choice, along with free maintenance, and a housekeeper to make sure all is kept clean? After all there's plenty of money yet that can be squeezed out of the taxpayer, and if they should ever squeal too loudly, more can readily be printed. That's how needs are met.

Or rather, that's how government meets needs.

After its day has passed, how will the resulting zero government society meet needs? - there are two ways, and only two.

The first is by gift. An employee feels underpaid, and appeals for a supplement to his wage, and generous folk like the pickup driver on the Far Left digs into his wallet and makes him a donation. Or for my own needs, I might tap in to one of the charities like the American Society for the Relief of Distressed Gentlefolk and get them to arrange for the Rolls. Or failing all that, either of us could get the needed money the old-fashioned way: by inheriting it. Perfectly fair, and in the coming ZGS it will be rather common, for most people will, never having been taxed, have plenty left at the end of their lives to donate to worthy causes, especially their children.

The other, and dominant, way is by voluntary exchange.

An employee will tell his boss that he likes the work but feels he's being paid too little. A discussion will ensue, and if the boss thinks the person is giving him a better bargain than he can find from any replacement, a raise will follow; if not, the worker will shop around for a boss who needs him more. The labor market at work; it requires only that there be plenty of competitors hiring.

No taxes will prevent the accumulation of wealth or the building of a family fortune over more than one generation, and those facts are what will enable curmudgeons like me to retire in the luxury we deserve - including, of course, a little ol' Rolls Royce. This requires only that we do take advantage of the freedom to invest savings well, and ample precedent from the 19th and earlier centuries tells us that such thrift will be commonplace.

There will be some deserving poor, whom Nature has not equipped to look after themselves in such ways, and there always have been, and always before the word "entitlement" was so viciously twisted, they were cared for with compassion by the many able to help. Compassion has still not quite been extinguished and will rapidly resurrect after sanity has, with freedom, been restored.