Rick Kelo Discusses Religious Freedom

Every individual person makes their own moral decisions.  However, says Rick Kelo -  a West Point graduate, tax recruiter and social thinker - there are really two types of morality.

"There's the morality people use to govern their own individual choices as they go through life," says Richard Kelo.  "Then separately there's the morality that pertains to our interactions with other people.   The problem is when people try to take things they've settled on as personally moral and force other people to adopt their choices as the way we all interact with one another in society," he continues.

The Wedding Cake
Consider the now-famous example of the prejudice wedding cake baker who refuses to make cakes for same sex weddings.  What is the proper way to view this?

According to Kelo if we use force to compel the cake baker to make a cake, then we are imposing our own personal morality on him.  Instead, says Rick Kelo, "In the relations between people we have to remember to view our fellow man as someone to be persuaded.  To be reasoned with and convinced, but not to be coerced and forced to live his life by our personal code of morality."

In interactions between people we must remember not to steam-roll people who don't think like us.  The world is big enough for more than one wedding cake baker.

Rick Kelo

Rick Kelo Speaks on Venezuelan Socialism

When Hugo Chavez re-wrote the Venezuelan Constitution he called for a Socialist society made up of worker-owned cooperatives.  As Venezuelan Socialism collapses all around us Rick Kelo feels this is an important point to drive home.  Especially because American Socialists like Bernie Sanders often try to disguise their agenda by claiming they merely favor an economy of worker co-ops.  If we tasked them with writing a socialist constitution it would come out exactly like Venezuela:

Article 118:The right of workers and the community to develop associations of social and participative nature such as cooperatives, savings funds, mutual funds and other forms of association is recognized. These associations may develop any kind of economic activities in accordance with the law. The law shall recognize the specificity of these organizations, especially those relating the cooperative, the associated work and the generation of collective benefits.
The state shall promote and protect these associations destined to improve the popular economic alternative.

Article 308:
The State shall protect and promote small and medium-sized manufacturers, cooperatives, savings funds, family-owned businesses, small businesses and any other form of community association for purposes of work, savings and consumption under an arrangement of collective ownership, to strengthen the country's economic development, based on the initiative of the people

Rick Kelo points out the deception of Socialists,"Co-ops already exist freely in capitalist economies.  You can see farming, banking and other types of co-ops in most towns around America.  So the claim we need Socialism in order to get co-ops is ridiculous on it's face."

Rick Kelo - West Point grad and Tax Recruiter

Rick Kelo on the 2 Ways to Organize Society

None of us is an island.  We all spend every waking moment of our lives as an individual, but also living in a society of individuals.  This is an unavoidable aspect of human existence.  So how should we best organize our interactions with one another?

Rick Kelo, a West Point graduate and outspoken liberal philosopher notes that there are ultimately only 2 ways to organize the economic activity of huge groups of people.  They're either:

1. The voluntary way, named Capitalism
2. The coercive way, named Socialism.

In the voluntary way, says Rick Kelo, consumers voluntarily choosing which entrepreneur most meets their needs.  The consumer decides which business owner will become rich and successful and which will fail. 

The only other way to organize society is by violence, coercion & force as the substitute of peaceful, voluntary cooperation.  For a government to seize private property and declare it their own as Venezuela did to their nation's oil or the USSR did to Russia's farms.

Rick Kelo

Rick Kelo Considers Economic Mobility

Rick Kelo is concerened that most Americans are unaware, due to the problem-inventing / fear-mongering from politicians who need something to promise to fix in order to get votes, that economic mobility in our country is very high.

Rick Kelo

Someone born into the lower class, which in economics refers to the bottom quintile of income distribution, is more likely to reach a higher income quintile than they are to remain in the lower class they were born into, notes Richard Kelo.

Rick Kelo also noted that many of the persistent & gripping effects of inter-generational poverty stem from interventions against the market.  The governmental welfare apparatus has become literally a machine for producing poor people & keeping them poor due to the fact it is loaded what public choice economists call 'perverse incentives.'  The government monopoly on schools is just as bad.  Ask yourself this: when you go into a poor neighborhood you will see many fancy cars.  You will not see any fancy schools.

The difference?

Cars are provided by markets, schools by government.

Rick Kelo - Market Socialism

Ever heard the term "Market Socialism"?  It is a method Socialists invented to try and show their system could work.  Under "market socialism" citizens are given rationing tickets to redeem for extra goods whenever an excess develops.  Socialists believe this will allow shop managers to adjust the number of rationing tickets needed to buy a certain good.  The premise behind this argument was that it would establish a functioning market where the availability of goods was governed by a market with supply & demand.'

Market Socialism in action in Venezuela

Socialist Venezuela is using this method right now.  In 2014 they began issuing food cards to be used for all grocery purchases.  Rick Kelo, an outspoken advocate of human freedom, has examined Socialist's claims that this system can actually implement a market economy inside a Socialist system.

He responds that rationing tickets don't replace money because in a free market economy money is earned by satisfying the needs of others.  Also prices are not set by trial and error, as in Market Socialism, but rather by entrepreneurs who own businesses anticipating the price.  The way entrepreneurs anticipate prices is by already knowing the cost of all of their inputs.  In a Socialist economy where the State owns all the means of production there is no market for raw materials and factories and all the things that go into making a finished good.  So the grocery store operator in Market Socialist Venezuela has no way to approximate his cost of goods sold to decide what price to set for the things on the shelf.

Rick Kelo - A Thought on Monopolies

Rick Kelo

What most people picture when thinking of a monopoly is a big company.  But sheer bigness alone isn't enough for a company to be a monopoly.  In order to function as a monopoly a company has to be able to withhold supply from the market in order to drive the price up.  When they can accrue a higher profit than the firm would be able to earn in the market that extra is what's known as a "monopoly profit."

In studying the history of anti-trusts Rick Kelo noticed that the majority of the monopolies in the 20th century existed in socialist countries.  Every case of actual monopoly only existed when the government granted either:

1. Special protection from domestic competition.  For example PDSVA in Venezuela has no domestic competition because the State seizes any domestic oil and gifts it to PDSVA.
2. Tariffs or import restrictions that grant protection from being under-cut by foreign competition.  Standard Oil, in America, was able to grow large because a very high tariff on kerosene protected them from foreign competition.

When we research monopolies, as Rick Kelo did, an odd pattern emerges.  We discover that very few so-called monopolies in America in the 20th century were actually monopolies.  They were accused of being monopoly based on sheer bigness alone, but even Standard Oil never withheld supply in order to raise prices.  Kerosene prices went from over 30 cents a gallon in 1869 (when Standard Oil began to grow) to a mere 8 cents a gallon by the 1880s.

Richard Kelo - the real trickle down in politics

Ever heard the term "trickle down economics"?  It was a pejorative, kind of a high-brow insult, aimed at those during the Reagan administration who advocated reducing tax rates on the wealthy on the grounds eventually the benefit would "trickle down" to everyone.

However, the real theory of trickle down is what's advocated by Socialists. They claim that giving all money & resources to the control of a government will create a benefit that trickles down to the middle class and the poor.

Both are equally absurd says Rick Kelo, a public finance expert.  Instead of advocating policies aimed at redistributing private property from one group to another he suggests leaving people in peace.  Then they can voluntarily cooperate with one another.  An entrepreneur can invent a way to better people's lives, and if consumers feel they're made better off by purchasing it they will.

Rick Kelo