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.

By Evelyn Pyburn

One really can’t look at the events of the world today without realizing that there are forces coming from every direction trying to destroy our country. As bit by bit government chips away at our lives, we must realize that the effort has actually been going on for a long time, but it has largely failed. The US is still the largest economy in the world and it is still growing daily.

A lot of people do not make the connection between our economy and our freedom but the power mongers do. That’s why so many of their attempted restraints focus on the activities of business and how people use their time and property. How we use those things determines our level of production, and that is the strength of the US far more so than armies. That’s what makes armies possible.

To cripple our ability to produce is what the savvy power mongers are trying to do with most every new law,  with every shut down, with every law suit, with every distortion of history, and twisting of common sense.

And it shouldn’t be surprising that  many of those efforts are focused as attacks on the availability of  cheap and abundant energy. There’s only one thing more important to the success of our economy than energy and that’s property rights – the right of every individual to own property, to own what they produce, to own their own life.

Americans go to work every day to acquire property just so they can be independent.

But, as vital as property rights are to our personal and national well being, there is astounding little public discourse about them.

Regulations that erode them are incorporated into local laws with hardly a comment – they are called regulations.

Judges who rule to destroy private property in favor of empowering government or the collective, are publically applauded, and few people are aware that they are cheering their own demise.

Individual property rights, as our forefathers provided for in the US Constitution, give each citizen great strength in how they function in society and in dealing with politics.

Our individual property rights are unique in human history and their creation unleashed a force in civilization never before seen, and never duplicated by any other country since, despite their proven effectiveness in achieving what every foreign despot – as well as many domestic ones – claim is their goal — a higher standard of living for the citizens.

That’s no accidental oversight on their part, they know full well what they need to do to retain power. The despots of the world who collaborate in the great effort to bring the US down, know full well that they could achieve the same level of economic success as the US, if they too granted the same level of private property rights for their citizens. That that has never happened says most clearly that their true interest is in gaining power over others.

It’s been claimed that ‘private property is standing room for the individual’ for very good reason.

So as individual citizens, if it is our freedom and our standard of living we want to preserve, we should be focused on preserving this most coveted of rights. We must fully understand the depth of its importance and defend it at every turn.

Property includes all that we value and that which has value. It includes ideas, the cash in our pocket or savings in the bank. Our means of protection, our homes and our businesses. When a thief takes any of those things, because of the degree that our individual wellbeing can depend upon them, it makes theft a most heinous crime. There was a good reason that they used to hang horse thieves.

We should understand that when we purchase a parcel of land we do not purchase a pile of dirt to put in our pocket but we purchase the RIGHT to determine how to use it. A property owner has the legal right to determine whether to grow wheat upon that land or build a building. It is the ability to make those choices that they purchased, not a pile of dirt. The owner of property has the legal stance to resell that right, lease all or part of it to others or improve its value in some manner they think fit, even if their neighbors or the government disagrees.

Any effort to minimize the property owner’s ability to make those decisions is a taking of the right he has acquired. Without that legal power a property is nothing. It has no value.

So when neighbors (and all too often government) gather together to try to stop a property owner from doing what he wants to do on a parcel of property — when they are imposing their choices upon how that property is used they are taking a value from the owner. In legal terminology that is exactly what it is called – “a takings”.

In most circumstances when someone takes the property of another it is called theft, but I guess for the sake of civil decorum judges and lawyers prefer calling it a takings – but a theft is exactly what is happening. And it is rampant. Every day we hear about one group or gang taking away all or some of this value from others. And the really amazing thing is they can stand up in righteous indignation to declare they should be allowed to conduct such a theft.

In the name of scenic views, preserving history, the environment, or to protect their own property values, they have no compunction about conducting such acts of theft. And quite often the legal system supports these acts of thefts even though there is a much easier way to resolve the issue. Buy the property. Purchase the right to determine how to use it, just as the existing owner had to do.

Oh that’s not so easy if you don’t have the money. When you don’t have the value needed to legally determine how to use the property. What makes you think it was any easier for the existing owner to acquire the right to determine how to use the property? That is the value you attempt to take at no cost to yourself!

If you want to have control about what happens on a piece of property next to your house, your farm, or your business there’s a very simple straightforward way to do it. Buy that control. Buy that right. There are very savvy business people who do that every day. They purchase a property just so they can assure some future use won’t have a detrimental effect on their business or their home.

If you want to preserve the view of the neighboring landscape owned by a farmer, property rights can allow that to happen probably cheaper than a court case. One can pay the property owner some lesser sum to guarantee he won’t build a granary there or some company can’t pay him to build a cell tower. There are numerous legal mechanisms that can be used to control such things – agreements, contracts, covenants etc. and the glorious thing is they recognize everyone’s property rights – but they don’t allow “takings.”

More importantly, the very nature of exercising legal property rights and the people involved are acting to preserve the integrity of private property rights which is by far the greatest value to be preserved for everyone’s sake.

By Evelyn Pyburn

The current news about growth in entrepreneurship and the dynamics of start-up companies should be seen as a very positive turn of events. It’s not that entrepreneurship is a new idea or phenomenon, it’s that a whole new group of people are seeing it and understanding it for the first time and coming to appreciate it in a way they never would let themselves when it is called “Capitalism”.

Some think it’s a new discovery and are sincerely excited. If that is what it takes to get people to understand and embrace free markets and economic freedom, more power to them.

An article about entrepreneurship in New Orleans quoted one entrepreneur as saying, ““The remarkable thing about a startup in New Orleans is that there are two passions at play. It’s really normal for a startup company or a new company to get excited about the mission of the business… But ….this other passion, this other thing . . . is the importance of contributing to the community, that our work was really helping the community, and job by job, hour by hour, rebuilding something.”

“This Other Thing” has always been there, and there has always been a group of advocates trying to explain this beauty of free markets, of Capitalism.

Given that the country has been slipping more toward controlled markets and socialism, free market advocates apparently were not very good at making their argument. Or maybe it is just true that the betterment of mankind is not what some people want, they want power over others – true capitalism does not deliver that. Maybe that is why most political economic development efforts tend to pursue crony-capitalism, rejecting free market avenues.

Entrepreneurship, start-ups, capital investment in new and growing enterprises – no matter what it’s called, has ALWAYS created new products and services that serve the broader public good, created jobs, provided livings, generated new wealth and built the foundation of economies. This has ALWAYS, ALWAYS been true and it is true for every business and productive effort in the private sector no matter its size, purpose or level of success. Even a business failure often contributes to the broader community.

While we can lament that the basics of economics aren’t taught to American students, we should also understand, neither is history. There is no factual presentation of history that could miss the fact that the success, power and wealth of the US are not a matter of happenstance, geography or power of some politician. It is the product of freedom – free enterprise – capitalism – the existence of an environment in which citizens can freely and voluntarily exchange, value for value with each other, to their mutual benefit.

That this is being discovered anew by younger generations who have been taught that electricity is a right and not a luxury, or that milk comes from the grocery store, speaks to the failure of older generations to educate.

The sudden popularity of the dynamics of free enterprise may just be demonstrating the importance of marketing. It turns out that the reality of what happens with the growth of entrepreneurship may not be as persuasive as simple terminology – a fact that others seem to be recognizing.

Dr. Jay Richards explained how free markets achieve all the benefits that socialists commonly claim are their goals, but yet they eschew the most perfect system ever known to deliver those life-affirming benefits. He said that he didn’t like calling this miraculous process, “Capitalism”, because it so poorly relates to what it is. He suggested calling it anything other than Capitalism – free markets or free enterprise.

His point makes sense, because it is true, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet – and what happens in a free market economy — what entrepreneurs achieve — is absolutely sweet.

By Evelyn Pyburn

As we see, in our own fair cities, massive apartment buildings towering above the streets for blocks and blocks, looking more like prison walls than a place to live, we have to realize that life has changed for each and every citizen in the United States. And, it is a dilemma of our own making – the cause for which our “leaders” are stubbornly refusing to correct even though they have accurately identified the cause.

I recall watching movies filmed in other countries with scenes of shoebox style apartment buildings lining streets for huge quadrants of a city – stark and dreary and depressing places — and I thought “that’s because their standard of living is so far below that of ours in the US.” Seeing the same thing now in the US as the acceptable solution to a nationwide housing shortage, has to be for the same reason. We are being pushed into a lower standard of living.

All the other reasons that are often given, such as development costs, rising costs of construction, supply line shortages, etc. point to but one problem – artificial disruptions in the market – disruptions that are caused by centralized planning and political manipulations. That conclusion is inescapable, if one understands that the free market is inexorable. The free market responds to “supply and demand” faster than the blink of an eye, if not artificially prohibited by regulators and politicians. In fact, if one watches closely, one sees that keeping up with rapid market changes is the biggest challenge for those trying to control it.

So the question: “Why isn’t the market responding to the huge, huge demand for housing?” There is only one answer, market barriers, which means but one thing — government.

That was in fact the answer that the special committee established by Montana’s governor came up with, after studying the matter. Regulations!

The conclusion should not have been surprising if one listens to builders and contractors and industry professionals. At every opportunity, for many, many years, they have proclaimed as much. During the last effort to “re-code” building regulations in Billings, input from the building industry was essentially shut out in favor of those who use the codes to achieve goals other than affordable or “safe” housing. For them the codes are not there to serve housing or traffic safety, but to fulfill quests for power over others, esthetic wishes, ideologies, and partisan goals of bureaucrats. They are imposed from the top down, without regard to cost, property rights, or any other kind of loss to the consumer.

No one should be surprised at the committee’s conclusion about over regulation, but what is astounding is how little they recommended for change. While building codes — mandating the placement of every board and nail, building shapes and size, fencing and landscaping — easily fill volumes of legal language, the committee found very little that should be changed in that area. Basically, their biggest conclusion was that regulations need to be changed so that builders can more easily build the high-rise, shoebox, wall apartments, which seems to be the future envisioned of how peons should live. No more quaint little cottages on tree-lined streets with flowers and picket fences, with children and pets and neighbors playing and visiting in the yards.

Shoebox apartments are NOT what consumers are demanding, but it is what the regulators of supply are insisting we accept. This is not the market place at work. It is government controlling the people. Given a free market, and the freedom to innovate, create and experiment, and protection of property rights, there is no doubt that the building industry would solve the housing crisis in a nanosecond. The free market ALWAYS works. But first it needs to be free.