Thursday, March 28, 2019

Governor Murphy’s Plan to ‘Make New Jersey Great Again’

The message from New Jersey’s “progressive” Governor Phil Murphy is--Your life belongs to me, so I will take care of you. In a NJ Star-Ledger guest column, Governor: My 2020 budget will continue investments in education, NJ Transit, ensure tax fairness, Murphy wrote:

As governor, my job is to lay the framework upon which New Jersey’s future is written. That story must be one in which the middle class expands and thrives, businesses grow, and investments are made.

On Tuesday, I will present a new budget that will help us write this story by prioritizing our single greatest asset: our people. This budget will be the blueprint for making our middle class more secure, and for building the ramp that will carry more families into its ranks.

Our budget will restore responsible fiscal stewardship, invest in our people and communities, and ensure tax fairness for middle-class families taking it on the chin from rising inequality and President Trump’s harmful federal tax changes.

Prosperity requires prudence, responsibility, and a vision for the future.

This is a sampling. A lot is vague. But we know that “investment” means government spending other people’s money, not private people spending their own. And of course, there is the obligatory attack on “inequality”--”middle-class families taking it on the chin from rising inequality”--the same middle class that buys the goods and fills the jobs created by “the rich”. Exactly how someone else’s unequal economic achievements represent a danger to my chin has always escaped me.

I posted these comments:

This article reads more like a plan to grow the welfare class, not the middle class. What does “middle class” mean? The middle class is marked by individual self-reliance, not dependence; earning, not handouts. Middle class status is achieved by personal effort, not given. Prosperity is driven by individuals motivated by their own self-improvement, not some collective “vision.”

NJ residents are not “our people”—and their wealth is not “ours”—for politicians to control, tax, and buy. The state doesn’t own the people. They are not “assets” to be used for the purpose of some collective political scheme to “Make NJ Great Again.”

Prosperity’s first requirement is individual freedom and independence, not submission. Since the theme of this article centers around investment, education, and business growth, let me offer a concrete proposal--universal school choice, so people can invest their own education tax dollars as they see fit for their own children. Imagine the business growth as the field of education is opened up to entrepreneurship. The government is ours, not the other way around, and it should leave us more free to secure our own legitimate middle class status. Government’s job is to secure our rights, not economic level, equally, so each person person can make of their lives what they will. Educational freedom is a good place to start.

Related Reading:




Related Viewing:

John Tamny discusses the genius of capitalism and why rising wealth inequality is a great thing in front of a packed audience at Oklahoma State University!  [Youtube: The Unrelenting Beauty of Wealth Inequality

1 comment:

Mike Kevitt said...

The New Jersey 'government' fundamentally disagrees with the ideas and philosophy expressed in this posting. Apparently, most of the people do, too, and they nuzzle up intimately with that 'government'. Now, who has the guns or the overwhelming more, and more powerful, guns? Which philosophy and set of ideas are backed by force? The force is backing a pseudo-philosophy and set of ideas, not a philosophy and set of ideas. The regime operating out of Trenton is not a government. It's a pseudo-government. In a word it's a criminal regime by criminal plan. It's about too late to call a spade a spade to any effect, but we must do so anyway. In any state and in the whole country as well as in New Jersey, we will surely get heat for this, but we must give more heat back, in kind.