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Steve Hayward at Power Line with a great post on politicians who see the light. He tells the story of David Bonior, former Dem congressman who started a business and suddenly had an understanding of the effects of regulations. Immediately I thought of George McGovern’s similar experiences as the 1972 Dem candidate for president also went into business. I was going to go looking for the letter he sent to the Journal, but Hayward found that too. First we’ll have Hayward.
I know, being on the Left means you’re a slow learner by definition, but still, the story reported the other day that former leftist Congressman David Bonior (D-Michigan) has become an entrepreneur and discovered, lo and behold!— regulations are slow and costly! From the Washington Post earlier this week:
Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.
“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.” (Emphasis added.) …
Here’s the Bonior article from WaPo.
David Bonior is a hungry entrepreneur bent on making money.
David Bonior ?
The former Michigan Democratic congressman, liberal pit bull, academic, antiwar firebrand and labor-union BFF has undergone an epiphany, making him simpatico with businesses and the profit motive.
He has invested at least $1 million, by my estimate, building two family-owned Washington restaurants, the second of which, Agua 301, is near Nationals Park and only a line drive from the Anacostia River. His first eatery, Zest Bistro, opened on Capitol Hill four years ago.
“It’s the American Dream,” he said of his new career.
Over tasty Caesar salad and tacos at Agua 301, the mild-mannered, thoughtful Bonior — chastened by local regulators and fickle weather — sounds more born-again capitalist than fire-breathing lefty.
“Small-business people work very hard,” said the 68-year-old, who has spent most of his life in government. “If you are a small-business guy, you are out there and not as protected as a government employee. They struggle every day. A snow day, a government worker is off. A restaurant person takes a hit from that snow day. This winter was very, very tough on the [restaurant] industry.” …
A contributor to the Detroit News reacts.
About the only way to get a die-hard liberal politician to understand how the economy of business really works is to require them to run an actual business. Case in point: Former Congressman David Bonior. As reported in the Washington Post, Bonior has taken the plunge and become a business owner. Among the more ironic of his observations is this gem: “Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.”
For almost three decades, Congressman Bonior did have the power. He used it to increase the regulatory burden on business – especially small business. How delightful that he finally figured out what we, small business-people, were trying to tell him during those years was true. Not that it does us a whole lot of good now. …
Here’s George McGovern.
… My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.
For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.
Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.
Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening. …
Thomas Sowell with a three part series on the costs of liberalism. Here he writes on the effects of regs that limit growth.
… One couple who had lived in their 1,200 square foot home in Palo Alto for 20 years decided to sell it, and posted an asking price just under $1.3 million.
Competition for that house forced the selling price up to $1.7 million.
Another Palo Alto house, this one with 1,292 square feet of space, is on the market for $2,285,000. It was built in 1895.
Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.
How does this tie in with liberalism?
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.
Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.
Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.
What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.
Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions. …
Next, Sowell writes on liberals and disarmament.
Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.
Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.
We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.
At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don’t get invaded?
Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine’s request for weapons with which to defend itself.
As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences. …
Mr. Sowell closes with the liberal inequality dreck.
… If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals.
Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama’s leftist policies.
This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government “disability” payments.
There is a sweeping array of other government subsidies, whether in money or in kind, which together allow many people to receive greater benefits than they could earn by working at low-skilled jobs. Is it surprising that the labor force participation rate is lower than it has been in decades?
In short, when people don’t have to earn incomes, they are less likely to earn incomes — or, at least, to earn incomes in legal and visible ways that could threaten their government benefits.
Most of the households in the bottom 20 percent of income earners have nobody working. There are more heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent than in the bottom 20 percent.
What this means statistically is that liberals can throw around numbers on how many people are living in “poverty” — defined in terms of income received, not in terms of goods and services provided by the government. …