The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek tops the Amazon.com Best Selling List!

I can think of no better way to kick off TheGovernmentCheese.com than with the news that a classic from 1944 is now the best selling book for a week at Amazon.com. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize in Economics and was known as a philosopher and an economist.

A comment by Hayek about his work stands out to me as very interesting...

[T]he spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.

These days the demonization of various industries because they 'make money' is totally misguided. Question to ask yourself; "Has a poor person ever given you a job?"

In tough economic times, fingers invariably end up pointed at this company or that company with moaning about how much money they are making. It gets worse when the Government walks in and starts this finger pointing, as this usually is followed up with some form of legislation to either raise taxes on that 'evil' profit or to eliminate the company's ability to make that money. The unintended consequence of this 'money grab' by Big Government is less jobs, as that company in order to maintain profitability, tightens its belt. This belt tightening most of the time comes in the form of layoffs.

Over the past two years as the stock market and economy took a nose dive, more than 8 million jobs have been lost here in the United States. The stock market bounced back and many companies have been beating analyst estimates for their earnings while missing analyst estimates for sales/revenues. How are these companies beating their earnings number with lower sales during such a dismal economic period?

They are firing people - hence the 8 million recently unemployed. Let's expand our scope past just the traditional definition of a company and include small businesses owned by private citizens (the largest job creating group in the United States over the past twenty years) as JOBS are what we need today. A small business owner's 'salary' or 'income' is basically his business profit. If you tax this business owner at a higher rate what do you think the response will be? I'll tell you what it will be; "Let's see, where can I save some money? Who can I fire?" This business owners response is certainly not going to be; "Great! Higher taxes! I like less money! Who can I hire tomorrow?"

Now let us look at what happens with the money that the Government collects by raising taxes... Some of these funds could be spent on providing relief to the unemployed. This is a responsible use as there needs to be a saftey net in society where getting laid off is not ultimately a death sentence through starvation. Some of these funds could be used to CREATE jobs. One way NOT to try to create a job is for the Government to hire people, with the proper way to CREATE a job being using the money to stimulate private sector job creation. Of course this begs the question as to why the Government even raised taxes in the first place which helped destroy jobs.

It is impossible for the Government to CREATE a job. The tax money that the Government takes out of the economy destroys jobs and we all know governmental spending is not too efficient. If the Government takes $50,000 from the private sector via taxes and creates a $50,000 a year job, while the private sector cuts a job (or even a part time job, half a job, etc...) your net result is job loss. This is not even considering the fact that collecting the taxes, paying the current government employee to interview, train and hire a new employee, and all the other magnificent ways governmental agencies have figured out that waste money, ends up reducing that $50,000 taken out of the economy. And the job loss light keeps blinking...

Taken to an extreme where the Government employs everyone and controls private business, we are no longer employees... we are serfs.

Another saying here - just for kicks; "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions"