My oldest turned seventeen last month.  To commemorate the occasion, she and I watched “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”  I’d taken her to her first (allegedly) rated-R movie a couple years ago to see the quite-good “Baby Driver,” but this was Tarantino.

Brad Pitt won an Oscar for portraying Cliff Booth, the personal stuntman for Leonardo DiCaprio’s struggling actor Rick Dalton.  Early on, Cliff consoles Rick after Rick interprets a dinner meeting as a signal that he is officially a “has-been.”  The next morning as he’s dropping Rick off on set, Cliff reassures him that “you’re Rick (expletive) Dalton.  Don’t you forget it.”

I turned to my daughter and said “(Rick)’s his meal ticket,” to which she responded “Huh?” 

The coronavirus scare has laid bare the tradeoffs acceptable to many in a time of crisis, real or perceived.  Of particular notice is the blasé attitude that “economies can be rebuilt.”

This outlook usually emanates from those without much work experience, or folks who make their living in non-market activities.  Surprisingly however, some commercially successful wage-earners don’t totally get it either. 

I occasionally hear hints of such presumptuous cluelessness in casual conversation, but just grin silently.  A recent one really got my attention though.

I was chatting with a group of friends, a mix of successful employees and successful employers.  Though I usually eschew ascribing political labels to individuals, it’s safe to say all involved would feel at home in the Thomas Massie/Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party.

Or so I thought.

After the exchange got a bit heated, one of the employees declared that he did indeed build the company for which he works.  Shortly after a couple double-takes and “you didn’t build that” zingers thrown his way, the conversation ended.

That was unfortunate, because he never answered a question I put to him: “have you ever considered going into business for yourself, taking your clients with you?”  If he has, I have to imagine the reason he decided not to boils down to one word: risk.

As Cliff was driving Rick home from the aforementioned dinner, he showed humility when he told Rick that, given his own mediocre career, he couldn’t relate to Rick’s anxiety.  Sadly, too many people lack Cliff’s self-awareness. 

In reality, we wage-earners are free agents.  It’s true that, particularly over a long period of time, our skills become baked-in.  Nonetheless, with prudent living, there are always affordable options to change gears if necessary, or desired.

Entrepreneurs/business owners, who I do not see expressing similarly nonchalant sentiments about the economy (despite health vulnerabilities of their own), are different.

Many times they give up a regular paycheck to pursue an idea they have, perhaps leveraging themselves after they’ve exhausted personal savings.  They have to take a flyer on some of the rest of us whom they hope will help their venture succeed.

Some have to deal with high and/or regular turnover of low-skilled labor, while others have to keep their highly-skilled employees sufficiently compensated lest they get lured away; or worse, poached by a competitor.

All the while, they have to make sure the customer is happy with the product or service.

And those are the pleasant dilemmas.

When demand, and subsequently revenue dries up as a result of an industry and/or economic downturn, they have to conserve resources to ride out the storm.  Unfortunately, that means they can’t compensate all their staff.  Hence, they face the unenviable task of letting some go.

Having personally endured five rounds of layoffs (once as a casualty), experience has informed me that the pop culture portrayal of “The Man” as being cold-blooded is sensationalized rubbish. 

It’s not hyperbole to say that a person’s business is like one of her children.  It’s of nearly equal, though different importance.  In fact, an interdependency exists.  She can’t simply walk away during down times.  She has to nurse it back to health. 

There’s the note on the building that must be paid.  There’s capital investment to maintain.  There are vendor/customer relationships to preserve.  Her family depends upon her having the fortitude to keep the enterprise afloat.

That’s what rides on her shoulders, while we move from one job to another. 

Sure, she could join the workforce just like the rest of us, and she’d likely make a damn fine employee somewhere.  But what a waste of talent that would be. 
 
When we study the four factors of production (land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability), my students learn that the latter is the spark that brings the first three into productive use.  Much labor and capital arguably wouldn’t even exist without it.

Certainly “economies can be rebuilt,” but assuming it’ll just happen reflects a level of flippant naiveté similar to that which supposes entrepreneurs should factor government-shutdown-by-fiat into their risk calculation.

Now that she’s seventeen, I’ve told my daughter to help herself to the rest of my Tarantino collection.  Hopefully I’ll be around when she pulls out “Jackie Brown” and/or “Inglorious Basterds.”  As for his groundbreaking sophomore effort “Pulp Fiction,” she’ll have to watch that one without me.  I don’t want to watch that one scene (readers know) with my baby girl. 
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If she does see it, I’ll be able to analogize for her that scene to the preceding discussion as an example of how the attitude of one segment of society toward another segment is “pretty (expletive) far from OK.”

Anyone who pays passing attention to politics is probably familiar with former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s suggestion that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  Though to my knowledge rarely so explicitly stated before, it surprised no armchair geneticists who have learned how embedded in the DNA of democrats are desires to control the lives of others.

Unfortunately, too many republicans are vulnerable to the same.  That’s likely why San Antonio Express-News “Smart Money” columnist Michael Taylor believes a universal basic income (UBI) is imminent.

A UBI is when government sends every citizen a regular cash payment.  Mr. Taylor humorously declared Andrew Yang, who campaigned on the issue, the winner of the 2020 democratic presidential nomination, even though he dropped out in February.

Mr. Taylor trips up a bit however in making his case.

The vessel by which he thinks this new strain of welfare will become reality is the direct payment made to some families via the $2 trillion “stimulus” passed into law to mitigate the financial fallout resulting from the coronavirus-induced shutdowns. 

Mr. Taylor asserts that such a “cash transfer is a previously untried solution to alleviating the effects of a recession.” 
To the contrary, Uncle Sam did just that in response to the dot.com bust and the financial crisis.  Neither proved effective when judged against the intent of their respective passage, the vast majority having been saved or used for debt reduction instead of being spent.

To be sure, we’re in a different situation now, with government literally cutting off peoples’ means of supporting themselves and their families.  By the same token, it informs Mr. Taylor’s prediction.  Nevertheless, it’s depressing that he “can imagine” the oncoming recession lasting through the summer.

When did faith in a free society’s enterprising market system give way to self-fulfilling prophecies of doom?  What’s more, why are so many conservatives joining this chorus?  Mr. Taylor cites Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who proposed sending $1,000 to Americans, through either unemployment insurance or tax rebates, “for the duration of the crisis.” 

Coincidentally, one of the more prominent selling points of a UBI is that we live in the a world akin to that in which Cyberdine Systems’ Skynet is going to take over and flood society with Terminators.  “BOO!  ROBOTS!”

Mr. Taylor errs again when he attempts to buttress his prediction by citing Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend.  As he alludes to, this fund is tied to revenue from the state’s #1 industry, oil and gas.  The comparison suffers however, from the same flaws that trip up proponents of socialism: scale and federalism.

There’s a silly meme floating around stating that, while we’re sending our folks a one-time payment, England and Denmark are paying a certain percentage of their citizens’ salaries, and Canada is sending their people a couple grand every month.  I responded with the numbers 327, 56, 6 and 38.

Those are the populations (in the millions) of those countries, respectively.  This is the bit pertinent info that seems to elude BernBots.   

Alaska is our third-least populous state.  Like the Scandanavian countries socialists drool over, their population pales in comparison with the U.S.  This is where we benefit from the federalist system set up by the Founding Fathers.  States can enact almost whatever policy they want without foisting their failures on the rest, though the latter are free to mimic successes. 

While he teases the reason some conservatives find a UBI appealing, that it would not “require giant bureaucracies” of the welfare programs it would ideally replace, to label it a “small-government idea” because of its “simplicity” is woefully off the mark. 

There is nothing “small-government” about any state program that requires for its existence the taxation of resources, particularly in our convoluted way, from the productive private sector. 

And that’s to say nothing of what French political economist Frederic Bastiat would have called the “not seen” innovations that never happened due to such confiscation. 

Alas, politicians have little incentive to worry about such tradeoffs.  They need not be bothered about the negative consequences of putting taxpayer revenue at stake for something that polls well in focus groups.  This includes republicans like Sen. Cotton.

The Wall Street Journal recently reminded readers that conservatives regularly fight an uphill battle against democrats who “define their lives through politics.”  They have to be more politician-y in order to counter the left’s brazen appeal to people’s base instincts, those that need to be coddled, and assured that their struggles “are not their fault,” but rather that of “The Man.” 

Moreover, the envy that consumes the left inoculates them from a sense of morality that would prevent them from commandeering the earnings of productive citizens. 

The GOP has a handful of principled members for sure, and some whose experience in business no doubt instilled in them an aversion to treating resources willy-nilly, and assuming that government is a benevolent partner.

There are others however, whose background consists of nothing but government, or law, or academia. 

Their experience dealing with scarce resources is nearly non-existent.  They’ve never had to create value, best their competitors, on a limited budget, under the threat of losing it all.  They’ve either ridden piggyback on businesses via lawsuits, or fallen back on taxpayers.

That makes them more susceptible to snake oil like a UBI.

Incidentally, the aforementioned editorial was a salute to Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn on the news of his retirement in 2014.  The Journal ran it again in memoriam, as Dr. Coburn succumbed to prostate cancer. 

Few elected officials respected the taxpayer more, holding his colleagues’ feet to the fire regarding their profligate ways.  We need more folks like him who have the ability to say one of the simplest words in the English language.
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“No.”