"Bad Economics Destroys Wealth"
by John Wilder
"Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray! Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not every fact is exciting.
I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap. By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags. That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending. For airbags.
So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life. (drumroll) About $10 million dollars per life saved.
That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?
This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site. So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.
Hit the brakes too hard? Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver. Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!
The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.
If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy. That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.
The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags? I’m the bad guy. Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.
To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.
A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.
In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do. For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.
Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.
Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.
Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.
The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.
We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on...airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed. But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy."
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