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.

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.