Thank You Everybody

Posted on May 19, 2012 by admin

The Americans Elect process has officially come to an end. Thank you everybody for your support.

Unfortunately none of the Americans Elect candidates reached the threshold of support necessary to qualify for the next step in their selection process, and so Americans Elect has ended its nominating process without selecting a candidate. However from a personal standpoint the process was most enjoyable. With the help of my friends I rose to #7 on the Americans Elect list, getting at least a bit of attention for my ideas, and as you all know I do love another opportunity to write about obscure tax policy.

So again, thank you everybody for the kind support.

Blake Ashby

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Taxation Transparency

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Blake Ashby

You know what I’d like to see on my tax return? A box that has me calculate the percentage of my income I paid in taxes. And right next to that calculation I’d like to see a little table that showed the average percentages paid last year by people at different income levels and the percentage of overall tax revenues paid by that income level. The table would be split out by people below the poverty line, two or three categories for the working poor and the middle class and then a category for people that earn more than $500,000 a year.

The information is out there already somewhere, but you have to look for it. Tax filing time would be the perfect time for the government to put this information in front of people – it’s the one time of year almost everyone is paying attention to what government costs them. The private sector has developed sophisticated strategies for getting information in front of consumers when they are most open to it – why shouldn’t the government do the same?

To my mind, a role of government is to give people the tools they need to take control of their lives. This covers a lot of areas, from insuring a good public education to requiring lenders to disclose the full cost of taking out a loan. However it’s not limited to the private sector – part of taking control of one’s life is also taking control of one’s government. Our federal government should give us the information we need to understand what government does, how much it costs and how much we contribute towards that cost. Government should provide the same transparency it requires of lenders. An informed consumer, whether of big screen TVs or of government, is a better consumer.

It’s an eye opening experience to see how much of one’s paycheck actually goes to pay for the government services we consume. It would also change the political debate in our country. Every four years politicians talk about taxation in a highly charged atmosphere, with both sides selectively pulling out figures to support their biases. I’m tired of right-wingers complaining about high tax rates – most wealthy people pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than the middle class. And I’m tired of left-wingers complaining about the wealthy not doing their part – even at a lower percentage rate, most of the taxes collected come from the upper income levels. Showing every tax payer every year what percentage they pay and how that compares to people at their income level and different income levels won’t by itself change anything, but at the very least it will make for a much more informed discussion about our tax code.

Sometimes we get caught up in thinking about the grand changes that government can implement to impact society. Occasionally there are changes that have a significant impact – mandating seatbelts in cars led to a significant decline in the number of people dying in traffic accidents. But change happens on a smaller scale too. Every year thousands of street and highway departments evaluate accident rates and make adjustments in speed limits, signage and lighting to reduce accidents at a particular intersection. These thousands of small decisions save hundreds of lives every year. This is the reality of government – most change comes from the cumulative effect of thousands of small decisions, small actions.

Adding tax percentage information to our tax returns is one of those small actions. It won’t change the world overnight, but it will, over time, lead to a more sophisticated citizenship. Our country is based on the premise that each individual has an equal right to participate in our government. Creating a more informed population needs to be a constant goal – we must give our citizens transparency into government, in as many ways as possible, to help them take better control of their government.

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Romney as a Conservative

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Blake Ashby

What I wish Romney would say…

Of all the things I thought I would have to do in this election, proving to Republican voters that I was conservative wasn’t one of them. I have been a Conservative my whole life.

At its most fundamental level, Conservatism is a way of looking at the world – we look at the world as we think it is, not as we wish it to be. Conservatives want a better world, just like Liberals. When people on the left talk about the better world government can create, we aren’t against that better world. But the starting point for any policy needs to be recognition of the way things actually are, not the way we want them to be. And if you base policies on the real world, what our experience shows us is the way things are, then pretty quickly you get to a realization of the limitations of government power – in the real world, the government can’t usually create that better world. This really is what differentiates Conservatives from Liberals – Conservatives live in the real world.

I have lived in the real world my whole life. I have helped grow businesses in the real world, and yes I have helped close failing businesses in the real world. I have met a state budget in the real world. I am Conservative in the most fundamental way – I am a realist.

It is because I am a realist that I am optimistic about the future of the United States. Obviously I have serious concerns about the direction of our nation and the competence of our current president. Yes, our nation faces challenges. Yes, we have problems. But I sincerely believe that we do have answers, in the real world.

Many of the problems we face are because government pursues policies that are based on the world as Liberals would like it to be. Right now we are having a debate on whether or not to allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The people that oppose the pipeline want a world in which we are not dependent on polluting fossil fuels. I agree, such a world would be wonderful. But that is not the world we live in – that is not a policy based on reality. We are dependent on fossil fuels, and yes some of them are dirtier than others, but in the real world we need the oil. The administration’s opposition to the pipeline is based on the world as Liberals want it to be, not the world as it is. The real world answer is that we need to allow the Keystone Pipeline to continue. Its not a perfect answer – it doesn’t reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But it addresses problems in the world as it actually is.

And it’s not just the pipeline. For most of the challenges facing our country, there are real world solutions – we have an answer for almost every challenge. They might not be easy answers, they might not be glamorous answers, but we do have answers. Its hard for me not to be hopeful, because if know if we go back to basing our policies on the real world, we can fix what is wrong with our country.

I have had advisors tell me I need to be angrier when I talk about what is wrong with our country, that voters are angry and I need to be angry as well. I can tell you, from real world experience, that anger is not an effective emotion for a leader. Anger makes leaders say silly, counterproductive things. It might feel good when you say it, but the statements usually do more harm than good and keep us from moving toward our goals. I understand the frustration and even anger with public education. But does anyone think that a real world solution is to close a hundred thousand schools and return 50 million children to home schooling? Does anybody actually think that is a good idea? Angry comments from people trying to be our leaders hurt the cause of conservatism – they take attention away from real world solutions.

And at a practical level, angry people do not win elections. Ronald Reagan wasn’t angry. George Bush wasn’t angry. Because voters know that angry people do not make good leaders. I’m not angry, and I never have been. I know a few of you are concerned that my positions on issues have evolved over the years and that is certainly true for most of us as we gain life experiences. But my character has not changed. The person I am has not changed. My whole life I have been a hopeful, resolute Conservative. And I am still hopeful. I actually believe we can get our country back on track and create a better world for our children and grandchildren.

If you are looking for an angry candidate, then I am not your guy – I will never be the angry candidate. But if you are looking for a Conservative president that can actually make a difference, then I am your man. I am the resolute, experienced Conservative Republican that can actually change the course of this great nation.

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iPhones, Democracy and International Trade

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Blake Ashby

In response to a New York Times article on conditions at iPhone manufacturing facilities, Apple has announced that it will hire an organization to investigate working conditions at iPhone factories. Apple’s situation offers a perfect example of the challenges of international trade with a mix of democratic and non-democratic trading partners, and why the long term viability of our global economy depends on the democratization of China.

The low wages, long hours and harsh conditions in the Chinese factories are similar to those Europe and the U.S. a hundred years ago, and were some of the reasons Karl Marx thought workers would eventually overthrow capitalism. But instead of revolution democracy forced an evolution, a moderation of capitalism. The political process caused a redistribution of the some of the benefits of industrialism, increasing wages for workers. Laws were passed on workplace safety and shorter work weeks. Eventually laws were passed to cause manufacturing facilities to have to clean up after their production processes. The world we live in today exists because we used democracy to insure that industrialism benefited everyone.

Needless to say, creating a better world costs money. Cleaning up the corrosive chemicals used in many manufacturing facilities can be expensive. Treating workers like humans can slow down production. Paying workers enough to live and letting them have time off to enjoy their earnings increase the cost of production as well. But would anybody really want to return to the world where workers regularly died in manufacturing plants, where rivers sometimes caught fire because of industrial waste, and millions of people lived at the edge of starvation?

Every democracy in the world has gone through this process: as workers gain a voice in the political system they use legislation to improve their working conditions and their lives. Non-democratic countries don’t go through this process. Without the right to vote, the basic right to choose their government, workers lack the lever to improve their lives. Conditions in China for most workers are harsh, wages are very low and their country is increasingly being turned into an industrial wasteland.

While this makes for a very unpleasant life for the workers, it does keep manufacturing costs down – if a company doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up after itself or paying living wages, the cost of production is significantly reduced. As a result, in a global economy manufacturing jobs will always tend to flow from democratic countries to non-democratic countries. And while the non-democratic countries capture a larger share of the global manufacturing jobs, they also contribute less to global demand – because the political system has not forced a redistribution of the benefits of industrialism, their workers have far less money to buy other countries’ goods.

Its nice to think that manufacturing jobs don’t really matter anymore, that we have moved to a “post-industrial information economy”. But all countries have to be able to keep their population employed. Making information will never create as many jobs as making things, and not all workers have the desire or proclivity to be information workers. Without manufacturing jobs our country – no country – will long be able to keep its population employed or its standard of living from dropping. A country which consumes but doesn’t produce will eventually go broke.

President Bush, for all of his difficulties, did get one thing right – we need to consistently promote the spread of democracy. Yes, it is morally right that all individuals have an equal say in their government, whether they are Chinese or American. But as importantly it is an economic imperative – the long-term viability of the U.S. economy depends on a democratic China. The international trade model only works if all of the trading partners are democratic.

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The Challenge of Righting Wrongs

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Blake Ashby

The recently announced $20 billion bank mortgage settlement will help several million people, providing a little bit of cash to those who lost homes and reducing loan amounts and interest for those still in their homes. While undoubtedly much appreciated by the recipients and a great election year headline, the program illustrates the challenges of many government efforts to right wrongs.

We talk about the impact of the housing bubble, but whom did it actually impact? The bubble started in about 2001. If you bought your home before 2001 and still own it, then the bubble didn’t really affect you. The value of your home shot up during the bubble, and came back down after the bubble, but your finances weren’t really impacted. If anything, the bubble helped you a little by driving down interest rates and allowing you to save money by refinancing.

Unless of course, when you re-financed you also tapped into the higher appraised value of your home and increased your loan amount. In this case when the bubble burst you might have been left with a mortgage that was more than the value of the home. Should you be eligible for loan modification? Yes, your house might be underwater, but on the other hand the bank actually wrote you a check – you got to put the cash from the bigger mortgage in your pocket.

What if you bought a house at the peak of the bubble? When the bubble burst, your home was worth less than you paid for it, and less than your mortgage. Should only people who bought their houses during the bubble be eligible for the loan modification? But most people who bought homes during the bubble also sold homes during the bubble, also at an inflated value. Should we limit their participation in the loan reduction program to the difference in price between their previous home and current home? Should we limit participation to just first time buyers?

Its easy to talk about bankers preying on people by getting them to buy ever more expensive homes at inflated values until the bubble collapsed and left them underwater on their mortgages. But many of the people that were harmed by the bubble often benefitted from it as well, in the form of larger houses, lines of credit used to buy boats and finance vacation homes, second mortgages used to buy additional properties. It’s likely that many of the people that benefit from the mortgage program will be those that did foolish things to start with. It will be interesting to see how the government decides who deserves to be helped.

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The Crazy Uncle Wins Again

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Blake Ashby

Sigh… for one brief moment, one happy, brief moment, it seemed the Republican Party was returning to its roots as the Daddy Party. But unfortunately the Crazy Uncle won again.

It is shorthand for lots of things, but we used to call the Democrats the Mommy Party and the Republicans the Daddy Party. The Democrats had the compassion and heart, the emotion. And the Republicans brought things back to the hard-nosed facts, the need to actually pay the bills and take out the trash while we were pursuing our dreams. It was a good dynamic for our political system for many decades.

Part of being the Daddy Party was having a realistic view of government. Republicans used to view government as an important tool to create an environment that fostered commerce. We needed government to do things like insure an adequate money supply and cost-effective interstate transport, to make sure that someone in New Jersey would feel comfortable eating meat slaughtered and packaged in Nebraska and yes even to make sure that banks fully disclosed their risks. Republicans recognized that the many tens of thousands of things the government did were critical to creating and growing a national economy.

Back when the party had a more realistic view of government, this view provided a narrative for campaigns: Republicans were the people that could make the government work better. The Democratic candidate might pull your heart strings, but the Republican candidate was better qualified to make sure the trash got picked up on time and on budget. Yes, as strange as it sounds now, Republicans used to campaign on something called “competence”.

But for the Crazy Uncle, competence carries an ideological risk: If the government could many things well, then maybe people would think it could do everything well, and if government could do everything well people might start clamoring for Socialism. Socialism, I tell you, Socialism!

Socialism has never been a risk in our country, and never will be. But slowly the Crazy Uncle view of government came to dominate the Republican Party. It was easier to put into a slogan – “Government is the Problem, not the Solution” and far, far more exciting than a campaign based on getting the trash collected on time and on budget. Somehow, within the Republican Party, “competence” became a sign of ideological impurity. The Crazy Uncle wants to see government fail at everything it tries (other than national defense), just to prove that socialism is not an option.

You can say all sorts of things about Romney, and it’s easy to make fun of his efforts to convince people he was once a poor, struggling worker. But the one thing he has proven, over and over again, is competence. He might have inherited some of his opportunities, but he ran a company that made money. It might have been liberal Massachusetts, but he ran a state, on budget, and got things done. And when the 2002 Winter Olympics were heading towards a financial disaster, he stepped in and guided them to a great event that actually paid for itself.

But sadly, competence has now become Romney’s campaign liability, proof that he is wishy washy. The Crazy Uncle seems on the verge of again overwhelming the boring, competent Dad. It’s a sad day for the Republican Party and our country.

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The Internet and Freedom

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Blake Ashby

The intent of the Stop Online Piracy Act is certainly commendable, allowing intellectual property owners to protect their property. However the law as written has a chance to undermine one of the great advances of individual freedom, access to the Internet.

We don’t often think about it, but communications is a form of power. If we can communicate with enough people we can rally them around a common cause, whether to protest capitalist income inequality or socialist healthcare legislation or to seek a change in government.

For most of history, the state has effectively controlled access to communications. In a less connected world, communication required physical proximity – you had to be near enough to someone for them to hear you talking. To communicate to many people, you needed to be in a location with many people. The place to find many people was the town or city square. But the state controlled this physical space – the state could keep people from talking in the town square. By controlling an individual’s ability to talk to multiple people the state could effectively control ideas and actions.

Technology has long had an impact on communications. We don’t think about it this way, but the first communications technology was the tree stump. By stepping onto a stump, a speaker was able to have his or her voice carry over a much greater area and so be heard by a much larger number of people. The invention of the printing press changed both communications and the balance of power between individuals and the state. Suddenly it was possible for a person to share their thoughts with someone they weren’t standing next to – the printing press removed the need for physical proximity to be able to communicate.

But there was still the need for the distribution of that printed material – someone had to take the pamphlets from town to town to distribute them. Electronic communications was yet another leap forward. No longer was it necessary to take the printed pamphlets to the next city. Now content could be electronically sent to the next city and printed there. A television show could reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people. We forget, but one of the turning points in our involvement with Vietnam was when Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor, publicly expressed concern about the war. That broadcast, seen by tens of millions, helped change the public’s perception of the Vietnam war.

For all of the potential of broadcast TV to reach the masses, the vast majority of people don’t have the ability to access this outlet to share their own thoughts. Further, because the broadcast spectrum is licensed by the state, the state still has the ultimate control over what can be broadcast. The Internet, by contrast, is truly a democratized communications channel. Any person who can gain access to a connected computer, at home, at work, or even at the public library, can in theory communicate with tens of millions of people instantaneously. The Internet is the one mass communications outlet that really is accessible to almost everyone in our country.

Communications from the masses certainly brings with it its own social dynamics and challenges and is ripe for all kinds of different abuses. Because of the Internet a significant portion of our population thinks President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. But because of the Internet many more millions of people are aware of growing income inequality in the United States. The Internet effectively opens up the marketplace of ideas to almost anyone who has an idea, whether or not they are part of the state.

The Stop Online Piracy Act isn’t actually targeting the dissemination and discussion of ideas over the Internet. However the protections it affords content owners, including their ability to come close to shutting off access to sites they believe are pirating, is a very large step towards putting in place the processes needed to control any kind of content – it is a slippery slope that again puts the state in charge of the public square, at the potential cost to individual freedom.

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Do the Poor Get Screwed?

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Blake Ashby

One of the things that annoys Republicans is that very liberal Democrats seem to have this underlying assumption that poor people get screwed by the system. Actually it’s just the opposite – comparatively, the poor benefit more from democratic capitalism than any other class.

Without question all classes benefit from democracy and the rule of law. But without democracy the poor in most countries lead truly horrific lives. Non-democratic countries are far less likely to have a safety net, allowing many of the poor to live in abject poverty with starvation a very real possibility. Without the rule of law the poor are far more likely to be abused by the state and even by the rich. This combination of extreme poverty and lack of legal protection reduces the poor in many countries almost to the status of serfs, their lives and livelihood dependent upon the whims of a local government official or their town’s wealthy family.

No matter how bad one thinks the poor have it in the U.S., we don’t let them starve to death and we protect them against arbitrarily being killed by the state or their richer neighbors. Many of the protections built into our system – welfare, public education, the protection of laws, voting rights – are specifically designed to protect the poor from the harshest outcomes and to give them the ability to effectively participate in our society. The rich see their lives improve under democracy as well. But the poor, because we remove the possibility of starvation and being arbitrarily killed by the state or their richer fellow citizens, realize a far greater comparative gain.

Somewhere my dear friend Ms. Vega is saying to herself “Ah, Mr. Ashby, but what about democratic socialism?” Democratic socialism has never actually existed. Despite the pronouncements of Republican presidential candidates, there are no socialist countries in Western Europe. Socialism is when the state owns the means of productions, the factories producing the goods that are consumed. In all of the western European countries the means of production are owned by the private sector. These countries might have more robust safety nets, but they all have democratic capitalist systems. If the poor get screwed by democratic capitalism, they are getting screwed in France also.

A great number of countries have tried socialism in the past, but all of them specifically denied the need for democracy. When we think of democratic capitalism, we tend to think of capitalism as the engine that creates wealth and democracy as the engine that redistributes the wealth. Socialists thought that socialism would actually create more wealth than capitalism, because energy wasn’t being wasted on needless competition. Yes, its true, Karl Marx thought socialism would make countries richer. Because there would be more wealth created, and because all of the factories would be owned by the state, there would be enough to go around for everybody. Without the wide disparities in income there would be much less social unrest and no need for the instrument of democracy to redistribute the wealth or protect the lower class.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way – not only did socialism not produce greater wealth, it also didn’t end the disparities in rewards that Marx thought the source of so much social turmoil. Marx thought that the benefits of industrialism accrued to the owners of the means of production. But more accurately they accrue to the controllers of the means of production. Even if the state formally owned the factories, they still had to be run by someone. Socialism effectively hides the class system behind the guise of state ownership but it doesn’t end it. The controllers of industrialism still did far better than the workers. In most socialist countries the workers were extremely poor.

So democratic capitalism is it – there is no better system out there, and no system that takes better care of the poor. The very liberal democrats who think the poor are getting screwed and secretly long for a different system are fooling themselves.

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BLACK MALES AND OPPORTUNITY

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Blake Ashby
I’m not writing about the way things ought to be, I’m writing about the way I think things were, and to a lesser degree still are. Although we have made significant progress over the past fifty years, black males in the U.S. are still afforded fewer opportunities than whites and even black women.

In our society men are afforded more opportunities than women – opportunities to gain skills, take jobs, generate wealth and accumulate power. In the gentle phrasing, we have a patriarchal society. In the harsh phrasing, this is sexism. Sexism is certainly far less than it used to be, but I don’t talk to many women who think our society has moved completely beyond sexism and achieved true equality of the sexes.

Sexism works at two levels. In a sexist society, ordinary women aren’t assumed to be capable of competing with men. They are offered fewer opportunities because men assume they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of them anyway. But extraordinary women were offered fewer opportunities as well.

At some point, life is a zero sum game – there is only so much to go around, so many jobs, so much wealth, etc. This means that there are often winners and losers, and one person’s gain is another person’s loss. Life is a competition. Sexism has the effect of lessening the number of competitors. When our society was more sexist, extraordinary women were denied opportunities because they might perform so well as to undermine the whole notion of the inherent superior ability of males.

Racism still exists as well, again, far less than it used to be but still there. Blacks are afforded fewer opportunities than whites. Racism follows the pattern of sexism. Ordinary blacks weren’t offered opportunities because many whites believed they wouldn’t be able to act on them anyway. And extraordinary blacks were denied opportunities because their success would undermine the whole idea of the superiority of whites.

If sexism trumped racism, then the social hierarchy would place black males below white males but above women. But in our society racism trumps sexism and the combination of the two upends the social hierarchy for blacks. Males in a sexist society view females as less competition. White males don’t worry about competition from most females, whether white or black. But because men were viewed as inherently more able, black men were seen as far more dangerous to the continuance of white superiority. Because men are viewed as more competition, black makes were afforded even fewer opportunities than black females.

So in essence the insertion of racism into sexism caused the social hierarchy to flip for blacks – black women, because they were women and less threatening, were afforded more opportunities than black males. Black males, because they were viewed as more likely to upend the racial hierarchy, were afforded fewer opportunities than black females.

“Society” is the accumulated actions of tens and hundreds of millions of individuals. Even when sexism and racism were more prevalent there were certainly many white males who treated women and blacks equally, who went out of their way to offer opportunities to people regardless of sex and race. And we have made significant progress on both over the past fifty years. Extraordinary women and blacks perhaps don’t have the same degree of opportunity afforded extraordinary white males, but the gap is far narrower than it used to be and at this point in our history I don’t think anyone would argue that an extraordinary woman or black male is unable to seize control of her or his life.

However I am not convinced that we have managed to extend equal opportunities to ordinary black males. This isn’t an abstract argument. The vibrancy of our country is dependent upon tapping into the potential of all strata of our society. Potential does not respect the boundaries or sex, race or class – it is spread throughout our society. The continued dynamism of our country is dependent upon tapping into the potential and energy of all levels of our society. As we approach Martin Luther King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that the future of our country depends on continuing to make progress on racism – we need to make sure that ordinary black males have the equal ability to participate in our society.
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How Stupid Should We Let People Be?

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Blake Ashby

With Obama’s recess appointment of a director, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now operational. Government is again wading into one of the harder questions our society must decide: How stupid we should let people be?

We don’t think about it this way but the health of our economy is in part dependent upon participation by people that lack financial sophistication. If a person had to pass a test on the meaning of “Force Majeure” before taking out a loan there would be far fewer homes, cars and boats sold. Financial regulation is designed to give the financially unsophisticated the ability and comfort level they need to be able to borrow money to build their lives and pursue their dreams, even if the dream is just a new jet ski. Although aspects of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau legislation are controversial the financial services industry has been supportive of some level of financial oversight to allow and promote broader participation by the financially unsophisticated.

Generally, financial oversight covers two areas: making sure people get the important facts right up front and protecting people from doing something truly stupid – keeping people from borrowing money if repaying that money will cause extreme hardship or even financial ruin. The “facts up front” part isn’t all that controversial – putting the interest rate, term and closing costs on the front page of a loan document is agreeable to pretty much everybody. The “keeping people from doing something stupid” part, however is both hard to define and controversial. The effective annual interest rate for some payday loans is 400%. People who take out payday loans pay a very high cost to borrow the money for a short period of time and for many it puts them on a path of eventual financial ruin. The electricity still eventually gets turned off, they lose their car and their job and eventually wind up destitute. Even with full disclosure of the cost of the loan, the combination of human optimism and lack of sophistication regularly makes people do things that, in retrospect, make them think to themselves “Oh my God that was stupid, what was I thinking?”

So how stupid should we let people be? If we had a truly naked individualism, the answer is “As stupid as they want to be”. We would let people do the truly stupid things that will in all likelihood have a terrible outcome. We would expect that some people would be forced into bankruptcy by taking out a payday loan with a 400% annual interest rate, or that some people would die from getting drunk and popping wheelies on their cycle without wearing a helmet.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t let people die because of their stupidity. The person who bankrupts himself? We give him welfare and food stamps to make sure he doesn’t starve to death. We pay the $200,000 in emergency room bills to save the foolish drunk biker. And “individual” is only a partial description of reality – each individual is part of a family and community that usually shares the cost of the person’s stupidity. Relatives wind up taking care of the motorcycle rider, or chipping in cash to keep the bankrupt person above water. Like it or not, society, small and large, winds up paying for the cost of an individual’s stupidity.

This isn’t an easy question and there are no easy answers. I’m pretty sure there are thousands of people who have taken out a payday loan to keep the electric on, and then because of the fees and interest on the loan were unable to make their mortgage payment and eventually lost their home. But there are probably a few that had an opportunity to buy a used car at a steep discount and sold the car at enough of a profit to pay back the loan and still come out far ahead. Maybe that one payday loan was the starting point of a mini-empire.

Again, this is the challenge – one person’s stupidity is another person’s high risk startup funding strategy. In balancing the rights of the individual against the rights of society there are no easy answers. But it is a conversation that needs to be had.

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