By Evelyn Pyburn

So Billings, Montana has been noted as a place where people work hard.

Good job!

For all the things we are noted for this is perhaps the best. It’s been my observation over the years that human beings in general seem not only to like to work, but we are hard-wired to work. Whether we intend it or not, hardworking people thrive better than those who don’t, can’t or won’t work.

And, not only do we as individuals do better — in our standard of living, mentally and physically — but all that hard work contributes greatly to a happy, vibrant and robust community in which to live.

And more than that, it is the unleashing of all the ingenuity, creativity and productivity that is involved in work that makes us the strongest nation in the world, of all time. It was the unleashing of citizens to live, create and produce, as we choose, that allowed all that we enjoy in life to happen, while at the same time helping to support everyone around us. It was because of a government that placed individual liberty as a priority that we have choices and opportunity for happiness – to be the best of who we are.

Considering how much our work means to us it is rather confusing about why it tends to be so maligned. The weekends are greeted with glee, we seek means of avoiding work, look forward to retirement, and often complain about our work. Somehow that too must be part of our nature – perhaps the disdain is what incentivizes us to create and generate efficiencies that allow us to create more and to have time to direct to other efforts we enjoy even more.

A good indicator that even when we don’t have to, we still want to work is that most people upon “retirement” are quickly involved in some other endeavor, whether they call it work or not. I hear it from retirees all the time – “I am busier now than I have ever been.”

And in seeing the implosion that happens to those who are not so engaged, one must conclude that there is something about work that is important. Quite frequently when young people – perhaps a very talented singer who quickly rises to stardom and wealth — we see them self-destruct on drugs or flounder in aimlessness; perhaps that is an indicator that we need to be engaged in things that challenge us and gives us purpose no matter our status in life.

Perhaps not having a purpose that involves work is what generates a malaise that leaves so many anxious about how the world sees them or who live in chronic anxiety about the future or are consumed with anger that seems to have no focus.

Perhaps it is absolutely necessary to have that occasional moment of euphoria when we accomplish something — achieve a goal — and can sigh and say, “Ahh!”

By Evelyn Pyburn

It was quite disappointing to read the Governor’s Housing Task Force report and find not a single mention of property rights. It is after all the colossal violation of property rights that contributes most significantly to the imposition of costly regulations that make housing unaffordable.

The closest they came to giving even the slightest nod to property rights was a statement that said, “… homebuyers have the right to build and live on smaller pieces of land if they choose.” No dah! What an amazing discovery – in a free country, no less.

The task force was most accurate in identifying that the root of the problem of costly housing emanates mostly from local municipalities where “professionals” ply their trade of violating property rights and imposing utopian ideals and their costs upon citizens – which is usually rubber stamped by city administrators and councils in pursuit of special interests or lack the courage to stand up for the rights of property owners.

When you have bureaucrats telling citizens what kind of fence they have to have on their property and where to put it, or that they have to plant trees and what kind of trees, or how wide their garage door has to be and where it has to be, whether they can put an apartment in their basement, install a basketball hoop, have a three story building, conduct business in their building or how to build a deck – REALLY! at some point they are violating the right to determine how to use the property for which the property owner paid.

Those kinds of restrictions would never happen if government — at all levels —  respected the citizens they serve – if government recognized the Constitution and citizen rights.

I remember some years ago, William Perry Pendley, an attorney and property rights advocate, and former president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, saying  that almost all regulations are unconstitutional but they remain in force because no one has ever challenged them. That’s why the recent Chevron court decision was greeted with such applause by the business and private sectors – – it laid bare that fact.

If getting permitted in the process of building a house can add as much as 20 – 30 or 40 percent to the overall cost, which was cited as a problem by the task force, maybe the answer isn’t to try to get bureaucrats to respond quicker but to recognize that the person who OWNS the property shouldn’t have to ask permissions of someone who does not OWN the property. The bureaucrats certainly shouldn’t be dictating the minutia of what the property owner CHOOSES to do, right down to the details of fences, landscaping or paint colors!!!

Of course there are issues of safety and interconnecting with utilities,  traffic, etc. that have to be dealt with in collaboration with government officials, but they are not the things that make housing unaffordable. And even for issues of esthetics or other communal concerns there are processes that can be pursued that do not violate individual rights – but they most often do impose costs upon those who are trying to push the cost onto someone else. And, further, let’s bear in mind while all these regulations impose economic losses on many property owners there are others who position themselves and promote such regulations to enrich themselves in one way or another.

Anyone who understands how the free market works should truly be scratching their head as to why we even have a housing crisis. Any time there is a market demand for any kind of commodity or service, the market – ie. entrepreneurs and producers – usually responds so quickly that most consumers have been served long before politicians and bureaucrats can hold their first committee meeting. Anytime that does not happen there is usually only one reason – government. Even when it doesn’t appear to be government, if one digs deep enough they find it is government.

That local government is at the root of the problem is most unfortunate because those are the people least likely to want to address the problem.  There were occasional mentions, by the task force, that even though local governments had the authority to act, in some cases the State may have to take action. But, there were also objections from those worried about losing “local control.”

There is no need to lose local control, not if local leaders take up the challenge and address their local regulations with a total focus on removing unnecessary edicts and costs and letting the market (ie. homeowners) determine the product. That will undoubtedly require some different leadership – citizen leaders, not bureaucrats offering “model” solutions from on –high. We need a group of people who understand markets and respect property rights, as well as knowing what the barriers are – those who have been most often ignored in the past. 

But if that cannot be achieved and solving the problem must become the role of the State – then lets gett’er done. 

By Evelyn Pyburn

So, how dare a political candidate even mention the concept of privatization!

When people started asking me about Republican candidate Tim Sheehy’s comments about privatizing health care, etc. as though it was an outrageous thing to say, my answer has been, “I only wish I thought he intended to do it.”

More than anything, though, I was most amazed at people’s response to it. Even that Senator Jon Tester should be so over the cliff as to think it would be a persuasive argument against his opponent! Not that it isn’t obvious that Tester is all for government controls, and fully in league with the socialists or Marxists, but I didn’t realize that the public in general would be so horrified about privatization that it could be used convincingly in a political debate in the United States of America. How truly sad and disappointing about the state of things in our country.

 We were never meant to be a county in which government ran or controlled the economy. The government was supposed to be as separate from the economy as it is from religion. The reason should be readily apparent in the current state of affairs. Most of the issues that trouble us today, including the very existence of “the swamp,” are manifestations of government controlling economic activity.

The real reason politicians and government leaders hate and fear Donald Trump is because he poses a threat to a system that has made a great many of them very rich in the selling of favors, pilfering, bribing, embezzling and other means of appropriating the unearned. President Biden and his son are not alone. They were simply more brazen than most.

But it is still hard to believe and disheartening that so many average Americans do not have greater appreciation for the amazing success and grand achievements that they have all been part of, as participants of the private sector. They are the private sector! They are the ones that Sen. Tester is disparaging.

The US is the strong, successful and desirable place to live that it is because of the private sector – not because of government. In fact, given the staggering mountain of regulations and tyrannical threats from government, that the private sector – the producers in our country – must deal with, it is most accurate to say that it’s in spite of the government that the private sector continues to produce.

One must understand that the government has nothing – absolutely nothing —  that it didn’t first confiscate from its citizens. Government creates absolutely nothing and advances our standard of living not at all. Everything that politicians are always eager to take credit for is not their doing one iota. They must always first take from the private sector which often means the disruption and destruction of the efforts of the private sector.

That is why all the other “isms” fail so quickly. To be in charge, the authoritarian regimes must destroy the very means – the creativity, ingenuity, and productivity – – of its citizens that it otherwise depends upon. If citizens are allowed to retain the personal, individual power they must have in order to produce, then there is nothing for the power mongers to appropriate and upon which to build any kind of pretense of supremacy.

I am sure that much of the reason that appreciation of the private sector has diminished so significantly is that we have been generations removed from a real free market, and those generations have no knowledge of it. They have certainly been taught nothing about it in government schools, and so intertwined is government in our daily lives, many people can’t imagine how we would manage without it.

And, sadly, it is undoubtedly true, as so many others aspects of American life is demonstrating, there is an ever greater lack of the moral integrity which spawns the free market AND which the free market spawns.

Much of the support of government programs came from and continues to be advanced by people seeking the unearned. The woman pleading for government health care in the Tester ads says as much. She wants free health care – knowing full well that it is not free — knowing that the unearned wealth for which she grabs must first be extracted from other citizens – from her neighbors.

People have responded saying “but without the government no one can afford health care.” But that is exactly what government intervention spawns. The only reason most people can’t afford health care is because the government has made it unaffordable. If you want to make any commodity unaffordable, just get the government involved. In my life time, there was a time, in which people could afford their own health care – and insurance was something of a novelty.

The recent experience with the COVID epidemic revealed, most excruciating, exactly how much government runs our medical system and what has come of it when hospitals and medical professionals bow more deeply to government than to their patients. Because of that there has been an increasing exodus, by medical professionals from government dominated institutions, who are going back to the private sector; and one of the first things they are reporting is how greatly they can reduce their prices.

Can you imagine how incredibly affordable health care might be if the people in the business ran their business without government intrusions, regulations, mandates, edicts, price controls, etc. Health care would be eminently affordable for most people. And, remember, before government programs, hospitals were often built, managed and supported, specifically to serve the poor, by philanthropic institutions – they too are part of the private sector.

A return to private markets in medical care would mean more options, better care and, yes, lower costs.

So if Tim Sheehy is a believer in the private sector more power to him. So am I. And, tsk, tsk, tsk that Sen. Jon Tester is not.

By Evelyn Pyburn

The price of something conveys a message.

Looking at the price of a can of soup is a message. Deciphering that message might be complicated but attempting to arbitrarily change it will not change the facts it attempts to convey.

If the price has increased it may be saying the cost of the labor has increased. Or perhaps that the cost of the gas in the truck that brought it to the grocery store has gone up. If it has dropped in price perhaps it is saying there is a glut of canned soup on the market.  Or, maybe it is saying that no one else is making cans of soup and therefore customers have no choice but to buy this brand.

If one is buying an orange, a sky high price could be conveying that a late freeze destroyed much of the orange crop. Or that an infestation of bugs did so. Or perhaps that there are few people willing to pick oranges and labor costs are higher, or perhaps that the quality of the orange isn’t that great and the price has to be lowered to sell it.

All those things, individually or in concert with one another, dictates the utilitarian cost of everything we buy – or sell. How it works at a very basic level is not complicated. In fact, it is so simple that it feels almost condescending to write an explanation, but apparently some people need explanations.

In a free society, the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree upon. If the buyer refuses to purchase at what the seller is asking, then there is a message in that. And, the seller better pay attention. He may have just been informed that someone else can produce it for less, or that there is more of that product available than there are buyers to buy it. It’s a message that can change from one locale to another, and from day to day, or even minute to minute. It’s so multi-faceted and world encompassing that probably even God has trouble keeping tract – but not so our prospective presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Everyone involved, even in a slight way in business, knows they have to pay attention to all those many messages, if they are to survive in the business world. To ignore or mistake any one of those messages could spell doom for your business or your household budget. It’s a huge challenge just for the owner of one small business – but apparently it’s nothing for Kamala to manage the entire world of economics.

Kamala seems not to realize that if someone capriciously and arbitrarily sets prices without relationship to any facts of the reality that it takes to create a product or service, they will destroy markets. That means they are destroying the means of human survival in the modern day world.

Mandatory price and wage controls – being told what to sell a product for or what the value of your labor is  — is also a message – a message that comes with a club, which has absolutely nothing to do with the market.

If you arbitrarily limit the price on a loaf of bread, you do not lower the cost of bread. You assure that there will be no more bread. Who makes bread when they can’t recover the cost for labor and materials to make it?

And while the fundamental basics of a single transaction is the same the world around, trying to manage all of the world’s transactions is not. Just think of the billions of such transactions that happen every single day in the world, for billions of products and services, by billions of people, and then imagine how every little transaction has its own ripple effect of information and impacts in the economy, world around. What human being can track all that, much less know how to manipulate it all, for any specific outcome? Well, apparently presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris can, which makes her most amazing.

She hasn’t been the only one, however. President Richard Nixon, in the early 70s tried the same thing. Fortunately, he understood his folly within just a couple years, and while having undoubtedly harmed thousands of individual citizens he abandoned the policy before destroying the whole economy. But one would really hope that people with such a profound lack of economic understanding would never rise to such high levels in government.

One has to wonder if Kamal Harris would ever figure it out or even see the disaster that would surely befall us all. One has to suspect she would see the consequences as being unrelated, Perhaps they would appear as inexplicable and mysterious as many of our other current leaders and “experts” seem to view inflation.

Economic literature is full of explanations — not only about why price and wage controls don’t work, but what has happened in the past when someone else tried it. Most of those same books also explain that high prices is what happens when you inflate the money supply. Apparently, that’s another read that Kamala missed.

Of course, governments and bureaucrats are already deep into manipulating markets. That they screw things up quite frequently usually passes unremarked upon. It’s another strange and mystical manifestation that just happens. No one traces it back to some stupid regulation or arbitrary restraint on the market. Apparently mystical and strange things happen all the time in the market place, just like they seem to do in how people rise to power.