In fact, after neglecting the massive highway system we have built in this country for decades, it would now cost well over two trillion dollars to catch up on maintenance and repairs. That’s according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives U.S. infrastructure a grade of “D.” The U.S. Department of transportation acknowledges that a large proportion of our bridges are structurally deficient. Li himself came from Hong Kong and wondered why the roads and bridges here were in such poor shape compared to those in his homeland.

The weather here is worse, but the more important factor seems to be that we built more than we can afford to maintain. In fact, in almost any scenario, by the time we spent the over two trillion necessary to catch up, there would be hundreds of billions more to do. It may just be too much to afford, and Victor Li suggests that new technology is the only solution.

Although new technology can always help, I want to suggest another solution. Let’s stop building and building without regard to the future expenses we create.

Imagine a family that wins two hundred thousand dollars in a lottery, and spends it all on a new car, a boat, a cabin, three large dogs and motorcycles for all the kids. Though they didn’t go into debt, now that the money is gone they are in worse financial shape than ever. Why? Because they are back to living from paycheck to paycheck, but with the added costs of feeding the dogs, repairing boats and motorcycles, paying taxes and insurance on a cabin, paying fees and insurance on the car, boat and motorcycles, and veterinary bills for the new pets as well.

This is easy to see on the level of a family. Even “smart” shoppers who for example, buy a used recreational vehicle for a sixth of what a new one would cost, don’t always think about the future expenses the ownership of this toy will impose. But we make this mistake as a society as well. A new park, for example, can be a wonderful addition to a city, but don’t believe the price tag is the one quoted in the papers. That’s just the up-front price. Forever more the city will also have the cost of maintaining that park. It may well be worth it, but how do we honestly make such a decision as voters if we don’t consider those ongoing expenses?

I think we built too many roads and too many bridges in the United States. Would life be so different if we had fewer places to cross rivers in the first place, or three routes to our destination instead of five? Probably not. We may have to seriously consider removing some bridges and closing some roads, but the more important lesson is to stop making the same mistake going forward. Stop creating a heavier and heavier burden for future taxpayers (which include ourselves).

Interestingly, the new concrete invented by Victor Li (still a few years from being used) will cut the cost of maintenance in half, but be much more expensive up front. This is the kind of thing we need to look at - paying more now to reduce future expenses, and if we can’t afford to do that we should probably wait - just as a family should wait until they are ready for the initial cost and ongoing expense of a new pet or boat.

The example that reminded me of this is a recent government-ordered recall of over five million window blinds or shades. They happen to have the two strings that are use to pull them open connected as one. The resulting loop at the bottom has been responsible for several deaths of children by strangulation.

Given the number of these string loops out there on blinds and shades this is a rare event, but nonetheless serious. It seems reasonable to do something about it. Here’s a solution: Cut the loop at the bottom so there are two strings, just like the two strings on my own blinds and most others (they work just fine that way).

I guess it is assumed that citizen consumers are not quite capable of doing something that simple, or that some of them won’t go to the trouble to buy scissors or a knife. Otherwise the Consumer Product Safety Commission could just notify all buyers of the danger and what to do about it. Instead, they force the recall of millions of perfectly good blinds that have one easily corrected problem.

Now I know that some who read this will think, “but not all parents will do it, and we need to protect the kids.” They are right that we need to protect the kids. On the other hand, does it seem a safe assumption that if they are not willing to take a minute to cut a few string loops they will probably not be the type of parent to pay attention to recall notices and spend hours uninstalling their blinds to send them back to the manufacturer? I think you get the point.

The government agency (the CPSC) could have notified all buyers to cut the cords to make them safe. They could have simultaneously ordered companies to no longer have loops that can strangle kids. There was no real need to impose millions in costs on the companies to take all those otherwise functional blinds back and refund or replace them. Those costs, by the way, are passed on to all of us who buy things such as these.

As a society we like to go through the motions of enforcing rules that are supposed to protect us, even if they are without much real value. We have come to the point where most people want a government that acts like a parent, on the assumption that we are all children. But actions like this that costs millions of dollars and probably save no lives show that we who want protection are the same people we think can protect us.

Big brother, mother and father will inevitably be all the same kids you went to school with. Do you really want them deciding so many things for you?

The Meaning Of Money

It is about the purpose of money, the philosophical issues, and all the deeper questions, although it also covers making it, saving it, investing it and such. Now, let’s look at some creative ways to manage your money.

I know two people who bought a home and moved in together. They planned to spit all the household costs. As you may know, this can be a source of tension despite intentions. For example, a bill comes in and one person likes to pay quickly while the other usually waits until it is almost late (or until it is late). Or one doesn’t have the money set aside and so the bill must be covered by one and a debt created. It gets complicated.

Their solution? They added up all the regular expenses they expected for a year. This included mortgage payment, gas and electric bills, garbage collection, and even the newspaper. They then divided that by 52, and each put that much money in a jar in the cupboard. They put an extra $100 each in it to start their “household fund.”

Whenever a bill came, either one of the two could write a check for it and get reimbursed from the jar. And no one had to save for the monthly mortgage payment or unexpectedly high heating bill. They each simply put $95 cash in the jar each week (small home) when they received their paychecks. The jar covered all the bills as they came in.

Other Money Management Ideas

Some people try to keep their pockets empty in order to spend less. Another approach is to budget a certain amount for impulse purchases and just put that much in your wallet at the start of each week. When it runs out you have to wait until the refill day.

For those that really have a hard time budgeting, and aren’t willing to learn, here’s a money management trick that can help. When you have extra money (overtime that week or whatever) use it to stock up on absolute essentials. These are things like toilet paper, canned foods, and shampoo. In this way, when times are tougher you’ll at least have some of your needs covered already, and doing this also prevents you from spending as much on unecessary things.

If you ever have had an unexpected car repair or other large unplanned expense, and were short on the money to pay for it, here’s a solution. First, stop thinking of these things as surprises. Heaters break, televisions die, and you get sick. The only really unexpected part is the timing. You know these things will happen, and you can probably look back and see how much these “surprises” cost over the last five years. Add 50% to that and divide by 260.

That tells you how much you need to put into your emergency fund every week to be ready for the unexpected. Make it a separate bank account and tap into it only for things that were not foreseeable (as far as timing), and are over $200. If there seems to be more than you need after a while you can transfer the excess into an investment or retirement account annually.

There is another way to approach these things that has more to do with budgeting for truly important goals. We often put off our dreams and don’t save for them. Suppose you want to go trekking in Nepal someday, and you have figured it will cost about $4,200 for two weeks (if you haven’t even estimated the cost it is more of a wish than a goal).

Start an account for this goal and pick a reasonable amount to add to it each week. If you deposit $40 into it weekly you’ll have the money needed in 105 weeks - just about two years. Now, no matter what happens, put that $40 in there every week, even if it means paying bills late. There are two important ideas here.

The first is that necessities eat away at dreams if we let them, so don’t.

The second is that we generally manage to survive even if we have less than we think we need. if you were making $40 less each week you would still somehow be alive in two years, right? So this get’s back to the first idea: don’t let seeming necessities cancel your goals.

I have one last money management idea that is very common as an idea but not used enough. It is to track every penny you spend for two months. You’ll be surprised at what you learn, and motivated to change your habits towards using money for what really matters to you.

The Associated Press on September 29, 2009, reported on the case of a woman in Michigan who watched her neighbors children for them. They had to go to work, so several left their kids with Lisa Snyder for about an hour each morning until the school bus picked them up. A few days into the school year, though, Snyder received a letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services. She was informed that if she continued, she’d be violating the law, since she did not have a license to operate a day care center. In other words, she could go to jail for helping her neighbors.

Virtually everyone agrees that this is unfair, including the Governor, who is calling for a change in the law. However, changing the law will not resolve the more fundamental problem with using law and force to regulate behavior of supposedly “free” individuals. The current law limits caring for non-related children to four weeks annually without a license. Change it to allow an hour each morning and there will inevitably be a case where someone is watching their neighbors kids for two hours. Should that peson then be thrown in jail?

Let’s just get back to the core idea of licensing day care. Suppose a person watches children for money and does them no harm, but has no license. The service is apreciated by the parents using it, who know the operator is unlicensed, but trust him or her nonetheless. Should that person be sent to jail?

In a moment I’ll tell you what I’ve decided about these issues of law and politics. But first I have to point out that all law proceeds from the point of a gun. It may not appear that way if you go along following all the rules, but if you break them, enforcement is not done by a polite request that you put yourself in jail if you feel like it. The threat of force is always there and the guns to back it up are. They have to be or laws would be meaningless. There are certainly laws I wouldn’t obey if it not for the guns and threat of their use.

Since law requires force or at least the threat of it, it seems that we should be very careful about what laws we make, right?

Now, when I read that news story I had to ask myself a question which became the basis for my politics of personal responsibility. If I knew of a neighbor who was watching kids without a day care license, and no one else was available to enforce the law, would it be right for me to go and use force to drag her off and lock her up? My answer is no. I wouldn’t do it, and I couldn’t justify it in any way - even if I was a police officer. It would be wrong.

Now, if I am not willing to do from an ethical standpoint, how could it be right for me to support a law that results in others doing that? It isn’t right. There is no moral justification for hiring others to do what is morally wrong for me to do. There is no special exemption from ethics by way of majority vote as a way to make law. That gets me to my own new rule:

If it is morally wrong for me to do something, it is morally wrong for me to vote for a law that seeks to do the same thing or to support such laws.

It is too easy to accept the given, but think back for a moment to before day care was licensed. Suppose that a woman was watching children for a fee. The parents are happy with the arrangement and she does no harm - if she does there are laws for that.

Now, I come along and say she has to have my permission to do this just because I think it’s a good idea for her and others doing this to have some training or monitoring (or whatever my excuse for power is). She disagrees and doesn’t obtain my permission slip or license, so go into her home with a gun to head and put her in a jail cell as punishment.

I can’t see how I could be right in doing that. Force a human being to live in a cage because she doesn’t have my “permission” to do watch kidds for parents who want her to? And if I can’t find any right to assume this power over her, I don’t see any way it becomes right if I get together with others to hire others (our government) to do it.

It is a simple rule, and it is easy to see in our hearts that what we have no right to do does not become right by a vote. But we are above all else a hypocritical people when it comes to issues of law and control. For example, most of us have broken some law that covers a “victimless crime” (what a twisted concept) or have friends who have, yet we have no intention of turning in our friends nor ourselves. Yet we are perfectly content to see the “bad” law breakers - you know, the ones that are not like us - locked up for their “crimes.”

It is time for a politics of personal responsibility.

Note: In case you missed it, I have a new website. It is all about the meaning of money. How to make it, save it and invest it, but above all how to think about it. Here’s a link to the site:

The Meaning Of Money

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To rush is to be mentally compelled to do things faster. It is an anxious state of mind that can’t honestly be said to be necessary. Lets look at how it arises and then consider a new perspective that can help us get past this stress-causing habit. The words and understanding are mine, but the following explanation is inspired by the writings of Guy Finley.

Anxiety about things not yet done or about what might happen if you don’t get moving faster isn’t caused by those things or events or potential bad consequences. You’ll be able to see this when you can “turn around” and watch your own mind at work. There are parts of us internally, in our minds, that cause the anxiety and stress. You can call this what you like, but I’ll use the term “lower self” in order to explain.

The lower self is a mind within your mind, full of beliefs that cause you pain and suffering. In the case of rushing, it tells you that things outside you are the problem, the real cause of your anxiety. It says you have to answer to the things it points to, meaning you have to move faster, get this or that done now - or else! It hints, suggests or screams that something valuable will be lost if you don’t participate in this self-created drama.

There are ways to gain insight into the functioning of this lower self, to become more self aware. One of them that Guy Finley recommends is to purposely stop or slow down when you most feel the need to rush. This can jolt you awake inside, allowing you to consciously see what is going on. Do tis and the explanation above will make more sense.

Think about it for a moment even now, and you can start to see how ridiculous rushing is. Your mind convinces you that you need to be worried and move faster. Why? To get to that appointment so you won’t lose a sale? To meet a deadline so you pass a class or keep a job? So things to so don’t pile up faster than you can do them? Whatever the reason, the lower self says you need to feel this anxiety so you can accomplish something that will what? Buy you some peace of mind?

You see, whatever the goal, whether making money, finishing a project, getting things in order, it is supposed to “make things better,” right? The mind paints a picture of a future when everything is finally arranged and you can relax and have some peace of mind. And all you have to do to get there is to stop relaxing and give up your peace of mind in favor of a state of anxious rushing - over and over again. That sounds almost insane, doesn’t it?

You may understand this intellectually, but it is in truly seeing it in operation inside you that you really get it. That’s when you realize that all your anxiety and struggling with what is outside you cannot fix a problem that originates in a part of the mind or lower self that you have mistakenly identified with. Slow down and become conscious of the drama in your mind and you can choose to act from someplace above the nonsense.

But hurry up!!!

You may laugh, but you could actually find yourself rushing to learn how not to rush. This comes from following an idea versus the more natural intelligence of seeing the truth and acting from what is seen. More on that another time. In the meantime, there are two products that I recommend if you want help with this kind of “self work.” You’ll find links to both below.

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For today’s post I want to suggest some new ways to provide yourself with housing. Some of you who are reading this already own a home and perhaps have no plans to move anytime soon. Others are perhaps renting and not sure if you want to buy. Let me start by saying that those are certainly not the only two options.

I once lived in a shed. Why? Because it was behind the home that I owned and was renting out and I needed a place to live after a break up (many years ago) and I wanted the rental income to continue and also didn’t want to make the renters (friends) move too quickly. That’s a long story made short, but the details that matter are about the numbers.

The home cost me less than $20,000 and was paid off. The shed cost me $200 to build with recylcled materials. It had a bed, a heater, a window, a hotplate and carpeting. All I needed to go in the house for was showers and to use the toilet.

I’m not recommending it, but it meant that the seemingly small income of $10,000 I had that year paid all the bills and left me with money to travel overseas, where I met the most beautiful woman, who later became my wife (we’ve been married for eight years now). In other words, there are many alternative ways to house oneself that people are often not aware of.

By the way, I later added a small efficiency apartment to the home mentioned so I could rent out the three bedrooms for $300 per month each. I also rented out that shed for $45 weekly. That made my home more than cheap. It was an income and a free place to live.

More Creative Housing Options

A friend once lived in a tent in a state park for months on end in order to avoid high rent and save some money from the casino job he had. Then when winter came and rents in the cheap hotels on the beach dropped (it was a summer resort town) he moved indoors.

I have seen lakes and reservoirs full of houseboats down south. I asked about it and discovered that many people choose to live on their boats both to be on the water and to avoid property taxes.

I have also known people who live in other people’s houses without paying rent in exchange for working on or around the house.

As my wife and I traveled around the country on several extended home-hunting trips, we met people who lived in recreational vehicles, school buses and vans.

Here are a few more ways you can put a roof over your head:

Rent a room. This can be a cheap and temporary solution while you save money for a better place.

Rent an office. In some areas an office with a shower rents for less than an apartment. You can make it home (quietly) and run a business too.

Mobile homes. Renting them costs as much as renting an apartment in many areas, but you can often buy one cheap and pay only lot rent. I just saw a decent one (almost bought it as an investment) for $2,500 in a park that charged only $200 rent per month.

Babysit houses. There are websites and newsletters that list houses, cabins and other properties that people need caretakers for. Sometimes this is for a week or two, sometimes for long periods of time, and you either get free rent or sometimes even a small stipend.

Couch surfing. there are also websites where people offer there couches to travelers. If you like to travel and can usually find work, you could move around the world in this way.

Hostels. Unlike a hotel, where you rent a room, in a hostel you rent a bed for the night or week or month. Some people use these as long term homes if there is work in the area.

Caves. Okay, I really wouldn’t recommend this, but I did read a story about a man who lived in a cave for a year while commuting to town on a bicycle.

Mansions. If you don’t have the money to buy a mansion on the beach with a swimming pool, you can always get a job in one that includes a room or servant’s house.

What else? Train cars and even shipping containers have been converted into living space. Abandoned buildings have been “squatted” in. Igloos, cars and tepees come to mind. I’m sure there are more creative housing options than what I have covered here. And I’ll have more in this “creative life series” soon.

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Now, it is no surprise that companies will make environmentally-friendly changes when it means more profit. We don’t have to believe that they are interested in making such changes for the sake of the environment itself, although they will likely hint at that in their marketing. Nor do we need them to have any concern for a clean environment.

If we want a livable planet, we need only be sure that people pay the real costs of the things they do. In other words, motives of profit and/or loss are enough if our laws, regulations and public policies allow them to work. Let’s look at a couple examples.

Oil

If we want to reduce air pollution by reducing the amount of oil we burn, there are a couple perfectly fair policy changes that we can implement. They increase the cost of using that oil so it’s closer to the true price. Start with the gas tax. It covers about 30% of the costs of maintaining our roads and highways. Triple it so we pay the real cost. As we learned in the summer of 2008, when the price goes high enough people do drive less.

Second, we can stop subsidizing the oil industry through cheap leases on public lands and lax requirements for cleaning up after themselves. After all, if you granted a company permission to drill in your backyard, you would charge full market rates and require that they leave the land clean when done, right? If they don’t pay full price and they leave the land less valuable, the taxpayer eats the loss, once again hiding the true cost of that oil. And again, if the true cost is in the price, we will use less.

Finally, can we agree that a puff of smoke in the air doesn’t kill? In other words, there is some level of “use” of the air that is safe. Let real science (not politics) determine what that level is, and then design reasonable regulations to limit pollution to that level. If that makes cars more expensive it is only because we are paying closer to the true cost for using the car - as we should - instead of hiding and passing on some costs in the form of health problems from excessive air pollution.

Water

There are towns in the western United States that will run out of water in my lifetime. If they are small they will disappear. If they are large enough, they will find expensive ways to get more water, but the consumer will not pay the full cost. That is the problem, and points to the solution.

First, I think we can all agree that even if we set aside the environmental damage, it makes no sense to use water from an aquifer faster than it can replenish itself naturally. It’s like spending your money faster than you’re making it or eating up the seeds for next year’s crops. It’s just plain stupid, isn’t it?

So how do we limit the use of water to a sustainable level and so avoid the future destruction of whole communities and their environments? The political way is to create scapegoats of those who want to wash their cars or have green lawns, and pass laws about who can use water for what and when. This has happened already in many areas. Meanwhile the water is still being used up.

A better way is to make people pay the true cost of water. Obviously water usage would go down if the price were three or ten times as high. Raise the price until the usage goes down to a level of sustainability. That price represents the truth about the situation, after all.

Then if it costs $4,000 annually to water a big green lawn in Phoenix, let people do it. If people have to spend $4 for water just to wash their SUVs in their own driveways - they are free to do so. Not only are they allowed, but there is nothing wrong with those lawns or car washes because the owners are paying the true cost for the sustainable use of that water.

If need be the first six hundred gallons monthly per meter could be discounted so basic usage for drinking and cleaning are not too expensive for the poor. Of course that would mean the larger users are slightly subsidizing the smaller ones, but it would probably be a political necessity. At least the towns would not have to die for a lack of water.

Everything

Stop putting roads into national forests for free for lumber companies, and so subsidizing the cost of lumber. Perhaps if we paid the true cost instead of hiding some of it in general taxes, we would build smaller homes - very good for the environment.

Stop giving big welfare checks in the form of agricultural subsidies to wealthy cotton farmers and they might stop using up the water to grow thousands of acres of cotton in the desert around Safford Arizona. Again we hide the true cost of cotton, paying part of it through taxes.

We allow farmers up and down the Mississippi to dump toxic chemicals on their fields - which then run off into the Gulf, creating a dead zone a hundred miles across where fishermen used to make a living. In other words they pass along part of the cost of growing their crops to the fishermen who lose their income. If reasonable regulations that keep chemical contamination of the water to safe levels mean a 20% increase in vegetable prices, that’s only fair - it’s the true cost.

There may be an anti-human element in some extreme environmental philosophies. But virtually all of us can agree that it makes no sense to poop where we eat, and that we don’t have the right to dump our garbage on others. And at a minimum we want an environment that supports healthy human life. A good start is to acknowledge the true costs of having that - and start paying them directly. That gets our own self-interested motivations in line with what works.

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Suppose a politician long ago said “vote for me and I’ll force future generations to pay for you to quit working and relax.” People vote for him, and the “social security program” is created. To make it look fair people pay into the plan as though it is a retirement fund. But that’s for appearances only, since the money is actually never set aside nor invested, and in any case the payout is eventually far more than what individuals pay into it.

Generations pass, and we come to today. The money is all spent - it was spent all along the way as each dollar was taken in. So there is no fund, and the only way the promise is kept to those who stop working is to make those who are working hand over ever larger chunks of what they have earned. We know this - at least intellectually.

We also can clearly see that although some people are unable to work when they get old, there is no logical reason for people to stop working and start living off of others at a specified age. Retirement age is an invented concept (I just hired a 74-year-old to dig a ditch for me). After all, 30-year-olds can be crippled and unable to work while 90-year-olds run thriving businesses. However, most of us don’t want to see nor understand what this suggests.

I have to repeat again that there is no “fund” to draw the money from. A government lending the money to itself is not an investment any more than if you lent yourself your entire 401K for a vacation and then bragged that you’re getting a great rate from yourself and so will retire rich someday. This is an important point, because it suggests that this is actually just another welfare program by which those working now have their money taken and given to others.

Even if you are in favor of some welfare, is it fair to take money from the poor young guy working at the gas station and trying to raise a family just so a couple with a million dollars in assets can quit working and sit on the beach in Florida spending it on margaritas? Should those who are relatively wealthy be allowed to feed their slot-machine addictions off of those who are relatively poor and working hard to survive?

I can guess what arguments are forming in readers’ minds. It was a promise by the government? A “social” contract? If billions in Ethiopian government bonds from the 1940s were discovered and the only way to repay them now was to enslave and starve the people living now, would that be right? Extreme example? Of course, but it’s only a matter of degree. How poor does a man have to be before it is wrong for the rich to keep taking his money to enhance their lifestyles?

Now, back to doing the right thing. Some of you might agree with what this suggests politically. You might be okay with calling the system welfare and limiting it to those who truly need it. But what about if it’s time for you to collect - or getting close to that time? I predict that it will get harder for you to remember any arguments against the system then.

There are many ways to look at this, and intelligent people can argue for or against almost anything. But it is hard to imagine a person who is about to get free money for the rest of his or her life still being able to look at this issue honestly and objectively. Is it right to take the money knowing that waitresses and blackack dealers and street cleaners have to work even harder so you can have that extra cash every month? I don’t really know.

I might argue that as long as you are paying taxes in other ways it is just a refund of sorts. See how easy it is to find a way to make it okay? Too easy, and though I am just using social security as an example here the point is that it isn’t easy to do the right thing if we can’t even trust our own minds to now what it is. It would be nice if man was the truth-seeking animal, but more often he is just the rationaliser - and so good at it.

This, by the way, is why we have the current spectacle of people yelling complaints about government health care while on medicare. Although consistency is not an automatic virtue, it does sometimes suggest sincerity in the search for truth, but it sure doesn’t exist much when direct self-interest enters the argument. Right wing Republicans think it is wrong to take money from a small businessman, for example, to pay for a poor person’s doctor visit, but they don’t mind making the working poor pay for their childrens’ education through public schools - even into college with government grants.

No, it’s not easy to do the right thing. In fact, doing the right thing requires us to know what’s right, which requires us to seriously doubt our “reasoning” and challenge anything and everything we believe (how else could we discover false beliefs?). This requires a level of self observation and self awareness that few have, and few choose to develop, but it is the only way we can begin to see truth that is not distorted by all the stuff going on below consciousness. Come to think of it, though this seems to have gone far beyond the political start of this post, a commitment to exactly that sort of self-work might be the only long-term and lasting solution to political problems that plague us.

Health Insurance Reform - New Solutions

But in this post I want to suggest some more radical ideas for making the system more affordable for everyone. Specifically, I want to start with this: Stop licensing doctors and other health care professionals. Stop regulating who can offer what services.

This sounds a lot more extreme than it actually is. After all, would you go to a surgeon who could only say, “Well, I read about this procedure so I think I can do it?” No, you would want one with training. And if he had a medical degree on the wall but didn;t actually earn it he would rightfully go to jail for fraud.

On the other hand, if a legal license was not necessary, a training facility could certainly turn out nurse practitioners in six months of intensive training, and these would be qualified to treat minor injuries and illnesses in clinics that they could easily open. Lower barriers to entry would get a lot more people involved in providing health care in new ways like this, and so costs would go down.

For a good example that is easy to understand, look at having your teeth cleaned. If you have had this done in recent years you know that dental hygienists do the cleaning most of the time now. But they cannot do it in their own office. A licensed dentist must be there. This is why it costs $60 for that thirty minute cleaning, even though the hygienist is making only $12 per hour.

Now if the law did not prohibit it, a smart hygienist could open a service just for cleaning teeth. He or she might do a dozen cleanings or more daily at $30 and even after overhead and payments for the necessary tools make a net profit of $160 daily. I’ll do the math for you: The costs of dental cleaning is cut in half for the consumer while the hygienists wage/profit goes up to $20 hourly.

We don’t here about any solutions like these that allow for true innovation in the area of medical care. If we do mention them people bring up safety issues, apparently unaware of two facts:

1. Medical care is already far more dangerous than people know.

2. Licensing is not primarily about safety, but about providing the control necessary to keep wages and profits up in an industry.

I mentioned the idea of eliminating licensing requirements to a friend, and he brought up the fact that there would be fake doctors out there. I said this is serious fraud and they would go to jail when caught. He mentioned that some are practicing without a license now and don’t get caught for years. He made my point perfectly: the current system does not in any way guarantee safety. However, because it provides the politically necessary illusion of greater safety we spend more time researching which large screen television to buy than checking into the track records of the doctors who we hire - despite the obvious logic that out of any 100 heart surgeons one has to have the worst record of success (and fifty have to be in the bottom 50%).

Now, once you understand that people would still demand actual training as a doctor before hiring one, and that many hospitals would probably require the same credentials as they do now (minus the piece of paper that the law currently requires), it isn’t so scary is it? If you have the money you already have the ability to go yet another step and search out the best doctor in his field - and that has nothing to do with legal requirements. But think of the possibilities this opens up!

A man trained intensively for six months specifically in treating sprains and minor injuries could open a clinic and charge half of what clinics charge now for treatment. With such specialization he might even do a better job than doctors who were trained for eight years in all areas of medical care. If a case was beyond his abilities he would just refer you on to someone else - as is done now anyhow. If it was a true emergency he would sent you to the hospital emergency - as is done now.

I won’t go on too much further with this. If you are intelligent and creative you can easily imagine a hundred ways to provide better and cheaper medical care if there were no laws to prevent people from doing so.

But there is one last issue that is worth bringing up. It has to do with the concepts of crime and law. True crime is a concept that certainly goes beyond illegality. Many crimes have been committed that were legal at the time, and many perfectly innocent actions have been illegal at times. So if we want to do what is right we cannot be constrained by the concept of legality. Now, with that in mind, let’s suppose the following scenario:

A woman who didn’t have the money to finish nursing school nonetheless has a real talent for caring for people and their injuries. She charges a modest fee for treating the cuts and scrapes of children of poor neighbors who can’t afford a regular doctor. She never presents herself as having attended medical school nor as having a medical license, so her customers are not deceived or taken advantage of - they know what they are getting. She refers serious cases to the local hospital.

Is she committing a crime? If the customers know what they’re getting and want it, do we have the right to get between the two parties and say it isn’t allowed? Furthermore, for helping to heal their children at a lower cost, but without government permission, do we have the right to take away her freedom and put her in a cage for years?

It’s an important question because all licensing assumes  that no matter what consenting people want to agree to between themselves, the rest of us through our governments have a right to not only prevent such freely entered agreements but to imprison people for daring to assume such freedoms. I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.

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Let me give you a quick example. One item in the brochure is a Toshiba 26-inch LCD TV. I went online just now and found that you can buy one for $399, not to mention that you can buy cheaper brands in that size as well. So what does it cost you to own one by making payments? Just $18 per week, the advertising says. But look at the small print, which the law must require.

“Total of all payments: $1,637.08.” That’s right. You get to pay four times as much as a cash buyer. By the way, at $18 per week you could save the $399 to pay cash in about five months. You pay the extra $1,200 for having it now.

It doesn’t make sense any way you look at it. Even if you paid for the TV using a credit card that charged you 24% interest and then made payments of $18 weekly on the credit card it would be paid off in less than seven months and for a total of less than $500 - less than a third of what you pay to own it through the rent-to-own place.

Part of me thinks “what a great business!” But then I remember that it only works because of ignorance and irresponsibility. In fact, I’m not sure I can come up with a good argument or scenario to show why it is worth it to pay four times as much for things in order to have them right now, so I might have a hard time with the sales part of the business.

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