This story is interesting: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/right-out-of-atlas-shrugged-hear-an-exasperated-alabama-businessman-tell-the-feds-im-just-quitting/
“Nearly every day without fail…men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just…you know…what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I see these guys—I see them with tears in their eyes—looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So…basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.”
Who is being exploited here? Politically callous politicians are “protecting” the rights of miners, at the expense of preventing them from getting jobs. Particularly in our own day and age, accidents and reputations spread rapidly. It is never in the interest of any mine to operate sloppily, even if they can still get people to work there.
Regulations are costs. Red tape is a cost. Taxes are costs. All businessmen have to have profits to counterbalance costs, or there is no point in getting out of bed. This point is inescapable.
The more costs there are, the more profits there have to be. From this it follows as day follows night that the more expensive government makes it to do business, the less business will be done, and that the less business is done, the less jobs there will be.
In my view, the corporate tax rate should be zero. Not reduced, but zero. I understand the need for taxes and for local, state and Federal government. We cannot do without government: otherwise, there would have been no need to write the Constitution.
Correspondingly, then, income tax rates would need to be increased. This would happen, though, in a condition of burgening employment, since corporate capital now paid the government would be freed up for job creating business expansions.
With regard to my tagline, who benefits in Alabama? The workers don’t. The business owner doesn’t. Self evidently: the regulators and politicians who vote them funding. Government employees get handsome salaries, life-long jobs, and very generous pensions. These are NICE jobs, if you can get them.
And what happens to them if, for example, we largely entrust safety to mine owners? The rationale for the jobs is gone. They no longer have jobs.
These are the people to whom we are entrusting the enforcement of regulations: people who HAVE to find things to do, or else they will eventually have their funding cut.