Thursday, April 2, 2009

Mercantilism Is Almost Here

The government is out of control.

This week, the president fired the CEO of General Motors.

Everyone outside of the looniest lefty ought to cringe when the federal government starts hiring and firing private sector employees.

The reasoning given was that the bailout money could only go forward with fresh leadership. Even the Democratic governor of Michigan expressed outrage over this unprecedented move. Almost ignored was the forced merger of Chrysler with Fiat.

Government money gives the government the right to interfere with a private corporation? Maybe so. However, it means that said corporation will be saddled with bad economic decisions made for political reasons. Is it more cost effective to put a new plant in right to work Tennessee or union oriented Pennsylvania? The Democratic powers that be will insist on helping their allies. And since they have so much invested in GM, they would by necessity have to discriminate aaint independent Ford.

Mercantilism means that the government is not a referee, but a player in the economy. As a player, it has interests to defend. Those independent of the government get shut out and honest competition dwindles.

Mercantilism was one of the reasons why America broke free of Britain. We wanted a fair economic system where competition was not rigged. In 1776, Adam Smith called it capitalism. Barack Obama's "change" is leading us full circle back to the bad old days of mercantilism.

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