Black Friday

As I stand in line at kohl’s at 418 in the morning, behind a line of people so long and winding I can’t see the register, I now have a moment to reflect on the significance of black Friday. This wonderful day of shopping bliss where everybody gets up in the wee early hours in the morning to put themselves into that first bit of Christmas debt, and get the stores back into the black and out of the red. You see, black Friday acts as more than just a buying surge. It is a chief economic indicator of the nation at large; think of it as Punxsutawney Phil meets Allan Greenspan. If the people (who will in this case be represented by Phil) see their shadow, don’t wake up and have a bad shopping day it means the recession continues as all self-fulfilling prophecies do, if however Phil goes shopping then things may potentially get better, and while the recession doesn’t necessarily pass it is certainly a good sign.

Just walking around here, the raw amount of people is amazingly large. The most similar experience I have to such human traffic is either last black Friday or else the 9/12 rally in D.C. However in this circumstance I feel it is akin to the rush on the banks in the U.S.A. or maybe even the breadlines in Soviet Russia, either one of those are not good things. Now I am very much a supply side capitalist so I would like to explain how all of this is a function of supply and demand at work.

Let’s start with Soviet Russia, not to bore you with statistics, but in 1917 Russia was the world’s largest exporter of grain. Russia and Ukraine practically fed the world. By 1987 just 70 years later they were the world’s largest importer of grain. Well how is that possible? You might ask. The land didn’t change, global warming wasn’t invented yet? Well you are certainly right, what did happen was; the government took the supply of a good into their own hands. The amount of a certain product is kept low so that the price is artificially high; in this case the product was bread. There are many reasons for doing this.
1.) As everybody knows poverty is a great equalizer. When you are poor you are all equal. That’s what I call communism at work
2.) Hunger is a great equalizer. When you are all hungry you are all equal. That is what I call communism at work
3.) Nobody worked the fields. Let’s face facts its communism. Do you get paid more if you work harder? NO! So why do you care. Do you get paid less if you work poorly? NO! so who cares.
Now you may be noticing some parallels, one in particular; poverty as an equalizer. Well lets expand on that concept and see what we find shall we? Cap and Tax; making products more expensive to create makes them more expensive to the consumer; therefore we see that there is less money in the hands of the consumer. Value Added Tax: More cost to buy, less money in consumers wallets. Higher taxes for government, Tarp programs etc. and the list goes on and on.

What if we take this a step further and analyze Government Motors whose majority share holders are the United States government and The Union. Well the nature of the modern day union is job security and benefits for employees. But with that job security comes, the inability/difficulty to simply fire an employee. Once upon a time during the lassies faire period of the industrial revolution, unions designed to get employees fair compensation, and safe work environment were a wonderful thing. Unfortunately as most people know once a bureaucracy is started it is difficult to stop it. The union has changed from a means to help the worker, into a hindrance against him. The union is a business which survives for its own good. Unions in effect stall business by forcing companies to exceed their budgets, making them unable to provide goods at competitive prices. I bet that if you asked any displaced auto-worker whether he would be willing to forgo a couple things so he could have his old job, he would be more than willing to accept. But that’s too late, people don’t own the car companies anymore, now the greatest bureaucracy of all owns the car company, that being the U.S. government. Why don’t you write a letter to GM C.E.O. Barack Obama and tell me if you get a response?
So, why did I Bring all this up?

To show parallels. In the USSR the government owned industry and people didn’t get fired. U.S./Union Government Motors is a singing example of the U.S.A. rounding the bend into socialism.

Now back to Black Friday! I would like all of the readers to imagine a dismal future, one where it is not the stores who keep supplies of low priced goods artificially low to drive a buying frenzy but rather the government keeping a consistent grip on the supply of goods driving prices up and equalizing people through poverty. This may be a stretch, it may not ever happen or it could come sooner than you think. But think about it this way, the ground work is already here. Think about government run industries, think about all encompassing unions, and think about the government preparing to take command of 1/8th of the U.S. economy via the health care reforms. I say these things not to frighten, but to warn. No matter what happens, the America we give to our children is not the one that we grew up in.

With all this in mind please keep this capitalist holiday as it is a capitalist holiday, but let’s keep it as a once a year occurrence instead of letting the pandemonium spread like a plague. Let’s keep it black Friday, not Red every day.
Remember you are in control of your nation’s destiny and until next time: You’re on notice!