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Parting Shots

By Wm. R. Lowry
Editor & Publisher, MiBiz
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note-able quotes
“Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.”
— Samuel Gompers

“Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.”
— Rutherford B. Hayes

“One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.”
— Charles Horton Cooley, American sociologist, son of Thomas M. Cooley

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”
— Abraham Lincoln

pork & beans
This just in ... The Michigan Agri-Business Association just called on Michigan to declare feral swine an invasive species that endangers Michigan’s pork industry and the jobs it produces. Feral swine are known to be prolific disease transmitters, especially pseudo-rabies. While the disease was eradicated nationwide in 2004, it has been known to cause severe economic devastation.

Another invasive species causing severe economic devastation — and continued joblessness — is known as “government.” Its victim? Free Enterprise in America.

Government impediments, including excessive taxation, overregulation, and threatening future legislation (today’s insidious trifecta: healthcare, cap and trade, and checkcard) are largely overshadowing the limited growth opportunities the current economic climate presents. These issues, in addition to credit availability, must be corrected in order to motivate business to aggressively pursue growth and the resulting job creation.

In light of governments’ deaf ears and relentless ideologue-driven supersizing and chestbeating over its alien pseudo-economics of wealth redistribution, business is now deploying a tactic from another’s toolbox — the strike. Not against employees nor customers — and not by choice — but a job creation slowdown staged against government bureaucrats who are hellbent to erase the ‘free’ from free enterprise. “The government can supply no substitute for enterprise,”  insisted Calvin Coolidge.

History reveals that in 1883 cowboys went on strike. One of the demands was better food—fewer beans, perhaps.

How does pork & beans strike you?

note-able quotes
“I believe that without free enterprise there can be no democracy”
— Dwight Eisenhower

“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith

“The wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be successful.”
— Calvin Coolidge

“Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.”
— Andrew Jackson

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