Surely you’ve heard the latest ridiculous commentary on the free market system from President Obama in which he aligns himself with the slackers and ne’er do wells in the Occupy Whatever movement.  He claims he believes in the free market but drops this nugget: “it was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it”. 

Let’s take this at a basic level: if someone in a free market system takes something, they do so via one of several means:

1. They exchange something – usually currency – for it at a value that the market bears.  Priced too high, the goods or services won’t be sold or bought in sufficient quantity.  Priced too low and one runs the risk of overselling beyond capacity (i.e. shortages of product), one violates the mandate from the company’s shareholders and misses creating a better return on their investment, etc.
2. It is given away for free – well, there is generally no such thing as a “free lunch”.  Largely things given for free are incentives.  They can be part of an advertising campaign intended to raise the market’s awareness of the product or service or maybe an effort to create interest in the product.  It could be a “hook” to try to get the consumer interested in the service/product.
3. It is stolen – shoplifted for a physical product, acquired thru fraud or deceit for a service or embezzeled from a company.  Regardless, this option is illegal and should be prosecuted and no one on either side of the aisle is debating that.

President Obama and the Democrats that will echo this meme and the OWS clowns believe that companies profiting is a bad thing.  It’s funny because when you take it into a different realm, they respond differently.  Recently, on my morning drive, I was tuned into a local sports talk radio station.  The hosts had a nationally recognized sports author and commentator on who has clearly made his liberal position clear in comments and public statements.  However, the question was posed – based on the current Albert Pujols’ contract news from the winter baseball meetings – whether there are any athletes who are worth 10-year guaranteed contracts for obscene amounts of money like !?!1eleventy!1!!##@! million per year.  The nationally recognized, liberal guest responded essentially: it doesn’t matter if there are, it’s what the market will bear.  What!?!?! 

Yes, there are bad elements, criminals, evil people in corporate America.  Yes, they will take advantage of people.  But this is a severe minority of the free market.  There are bad elements in many industries that the current administration isn’t focusing on.  Corporate America is the wealth engine for the country.  Damaging that with increased regulations that slow economic growth to try to address problems, some of which stem from government intervention into the free market system (i.e. pressuring credit agencies to artificially and temporarily raise credit scores of individuals to allow riskier mortgages) is not the way forward.

Twisting and spinning what happens in corporate America by those who don’t understand it – largely because the education system in America doesn’t teach basic ecnonomic principles and understanding – and have never or rarely worked in that environment is laughable.  And we should all be laughing next November when they still don’t get it and they don’t get the office to try to keep propagating this crap.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.