Anarcho-capitalism

Monday night at around 8:00pm, I had just gotten home from a very long day. In my e-mail was some follow-up information on the decline of one of my favorite areas in the country to live in — Niagara/Buffalo. I’ve always loved Buffalo because of the nature oddities that Lake Erie bring it: mild summers (never exceeding 100 degrees in history), and great snowy winters. Buffalo was one of the top cities in the country to live in in 1900, with a growing economy and a prosperour population. After reading the 6 line e-mail Monday night, I realized I needed to return to the city that I’ve avoided since 2001. The Freaky Blonde and I jumped in her car, loaded up with gas, beef jerky, water and supplies, and hit the road. 9 hours later we were in Buffalo, non-stop. 5am traffic was non-existant, as I’d learn traffic all day would be. I was shocked at what I saw. I’d known things were bad, but I didn’t realize things could get this bad, not in America. The trip was a 26.5 hour tale of hilarity, considering that I can be the least responsible person in the world when it comes to traveling. One of my rules for travel is to not just travel light, travel empty. I don’t take any prescription drugs, I don’t wear glasses, and I don’t worry about my needs — everywhere I go I find things to bring back, and taking clutter with means I’ll have less room for those rare, exciting items. Going to Buffalo is no different than going to Hong Kong for me, so of course I left empty handed. That also means no camera (a great Nikon D50 with optional lenses), no phone charger and no laptop. Doh. Had I brought my camera (or had my phone had more than 1 bar of battery left), I’d have taken photos of the tragedy of Buffalo, but alas it was not meant to be. I’ll have a follow up trip in a few weeks to interview the remaining people I had met — people who just can’t let a dead horse be.

Buffalo has an amazing history. It was one of the most popular hubs on the Erie Canal (the west point) which allowed it to grow and flourish until the St. Lawrence Seaway gave boats a better path to follow. Even with the loss of business for their major port, the secondary industries soon took over — steel, automaking and all sorts of labor-intensive machining and manufacturing. The hard workers of the port were perfect for the next generation of economic wealth: creating goods for the world. America was ahead of the pack in building cars and items out of steel: not only did we have enormous natural resources for iron and the secondary elements used to process it, but we had hard workers willing to build their futures so that their children could excel in whatever career they wanted to. We didn’t have the socialist mechanisms of Europe nor the communist ones of Asia, we didn’t give people an option to be lazy and overvalued: hard work paid off, and the lazy suffered as the lazy should. If you had a problem, you had family, friends, and faith to back you up. Those who decided to shrug off the 3 F’s would learn at life’s end that the best backup for life’s problems is having a community to belong to. Buffalo was a community, with blossoming families and businesses in a town known for its weather comfort and job opportunities. The story ends with the automaking industry, which quickly grew to take advantage of the number of pro-labor and pro-corporate laws that were created at the start of the New Deal era. Rather than continue to work to lower the price of labor and raise the quality of a product, the automakers felt that their unique combination of excellent natural resources and a powerful labor union would keep them on top forever. Other nations were shrugging off communism and socialism, focusing on learning from the people that left to work in America. Many of these countries would be considered beneath third world today, with povery and paternalism evident in even the lives of the “wealthy.” And the Americans knew that they’d never lose control of the situation — they made the goods, they set the price, they absorbed the financial wealth of the world and nothing could stop them. They were wrong. As the Europeans started to build vehicles in their own nations, the industries found ways to cut costs. Yes some corners were cut, but with new companies and new technologies that is to be expected. Cutting corners to cut costs was a balance that allowed local firms to sell vehicles to local citizens, and slowly build up wealth to focus on higher quality (and higher costs). Why build expensive cars when your customers can’t afford them? Why build enhanced safety when the average consumer was just happy to have a car — it increased their livelihood even if they weren’t as safe as the U.S. cars. In the 70s, the U.S. government took notice — there was a new threat on the horizon. Rather than letting the U.S. car makers lose some traction and become more efficient (a few bankruptcies in your market will help that), the government started to protect them. Every pro-union law and every steel-making protectionist tariff increased the ballot vote tally for the politician who stretched their Constitutional limits. A few dollars out of the pocket of the average American taxpayer wouldn’t be noticed, but the billions created for the industry would keep the politician in power. This is the norm with paternalism — more power without seeing the unintended consequences. The unintended consequence of propping up steel and automaking in the 70s is that no one learned efficiency and money saving techniques. Rather than making an autoworker a commodity (finding better workers at a lower price so new jobs and technologies could be focused on with the saved money), they made the autoworker a child — support the autoworker (and steelworker) from cradle to grave. Had the U.S. tried to save horseshoers and gaslamp lighters, I think we’d be without lightbulbs and tractors. The cause can be sold in such a positive light that it is difficult to denounce the negatives or one would be considered a traitor to their country. Instead of finding newer, cheaper labor and letting those dollars flow into new markets and producing more product, we slacked. Looking at the 1996 basic Ford pickup (around US$13,000 then) and the same model in 2006 (US$24,000 now) we see the problem — more cost, very little in terms of real value increases. Looking at a Toyota Corolla in 1996 (US$13,000 then) and the 2006 model today (US$14,500 now), we can see how we got our rears handed to us — and this is 20-30 years after the paternal treatment. I walked the streets of Buffalo — just a few blocks from the downtown district. At noon, there were about 15 people walking near the downtown district: the restaurants were empty, the parking lots barely touched by cars, a surprise considering that I live near towns 1/10th the size of Buffalo and they have booming downtowns. As I walked away from the district, everywhere I looked I saw ghetto. 3 blocks from city hall was an entire block of commercial and retail properties boarded up. We couldn’t believe the lack of anything for the average consumer — which means that there is no one to consume. We both wanted to purchase car chargers for our cell phones, but in the entire city of Buffalo people looked at me like I was from the future. “Where’s the local cell phone shop?” There was no answer. No one knew. In my small town there are 3 on one block. We thought about crashing at a hotel for a few hours, but none was to be found. The few hotels that existed were mostly booked with political cronies and the like — they were well overpriced considering who was paying the tab. Even the nice Adam’s Mark hotel looked decrepid, a sign of its lack of clientele compared to Adam’s Mark hotels around the country. The only nice buildings were the DMV and City Hall, plus the HBSC banking building. Everything else had cracked windows, rank smells, and usually had a “For Sale” sign in the window. Commercial property is usually never for sale — leasing is that lucrative. In Buffalo, no one wants the property, many look abandoned with no sign or even a door. Some had entire brick fronts missing, with just plywood propping up the roof in the front. It was like a bombed out neighborhood, but this was a booming now not a few decades ago. In 2003, Buffalo went bankrupt, as did Erie County that it heads. The State of New York created the Buffalo Financial Stability Authority, a pseudo-corporation dedicated to “fixing” Buffalo and the Niagara region. Instead of fixing anything, it replaced private market jobs with public ones, created new public jobs to burden the remaining businesses and consumers. 50 years of Democrat rule ended up with welfare everywhere, The Freaky Blonde saw a family leaving the welfare agency and jump into a new Lexus. These were not poor folk, just ones who knew the system. Register your car out of state and New York will not spend the money to find it. The newest mayor to be elected did so in a large victory, keeping the city in the hands of the Democrats (the GOP would likely be no better, but the GOP candidate did call for a huge downsizing in city services to give much needed tax relief and incentive for companies to return). The new mayor’s plan calls for more public jobs — with most of those working in the old jobs being the voting base for the new mayor. The BFSA created a wage freeze — no more wage increases in Buffalo, until the problem goes away. Unfortunately it isn’t the low wages that are the problem, it is the lack of any money at all in the economy that makes things worse. Decades of preferential laws are still on the books even though the companies are long gone — incredibly high barriers to opening a business prevent anyone new from investing. Most entrepreneurs are afraid of losing their businesses to a state takeover if they succeed. The BFSA has over US$100 million in bonds available to it, but the money isn’t being used productively, as tax money never is. They want to spend it on more charter schools for the remaining population of under-educated welfare kids who’ve known nothing else. They want to spend it on business plans that will never get approved unless the plans are submitted by those in power for the decades. The BFSA will vacuum what is left of pride and joy in responsible work from the remaining populace, leaving my favorite city in the East to shame and ruin. I’m planning over 200 hours of research into Buffalo in the coming months, and will continue this article with a series on the shame of government at all levels. They all colluded to help their voting base, and now the voting base of hard-working laborers has been replaced with a voting base of government employees working for no one. Discuss this article at the anarcho-capitalism forum.