MARK MY WORDS
SEEING RED
BY MARK WARDEN

On a recent trip to Eastern Europe, I saw firsthand the legacy of two generations of communism: high taxes, bloated bureaucracy, high unemployment, slow economic development and investment, and a general feeling of dependency on “the state.”

In Berlin, former capital of East Germany, unemployment stands around 20 percent. Yet when somebody loses his job, he receives unemployment pay for two full years. Taxes that the employer must pay on the employee are so high that they discourage new hires. And the maddening maze of bureaucratic regulations that one must follow in order to start a business is more hassle than potential entrepreneurs are willing to endure.

After decades of (attempted) central planning of the economy during communist rule, it is difficult for many workers to be proactive and take initiative to participate in a free-market economy. So besides real, material obstacles to productive activity, the city faces a general mentality of dependency by its inhabitants. 

In Prague, Czech Republic, I had the pleasure of walking through the “Museum of Communism.” While accompanied by statues of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, along with pictures of them in all their authoritarian glory, I was looking for some corollary to what’s happening in the United States and Nevada. I didn’t have to look very far, with propaganda posters exalting the worker over evil factory owners (think labor unions and minimum wage laws), and glorifying state-run schools which encouraged homogeneity and atheism (think near-monopolistic public schools teaching “environmentalism” and “self-esteem” instead of critical thinking and deductive reasoning).

Back here in Nevada, I’m wondering: Are we heading in the same direction with ever-increasing government involvement in our lives? 

With continued expansion of the government service sector, eventually there will be so many laws that every day each one of us will, unknowingly, break one. And there will be some inspector, officer, agent or bureaucrat who will be charged with finding violators so that he can justify his position and help pay for his salary. Ever-more regulations, restrictions, compliance measures and monitors will be put in place to help find non-conformers in order to feed the beast.

The public sector is growing at an alarming rate in Nevada. With increases in wages, benefit, and retirement packages outstripping their private-sector counterparts, employees of city, county and state agencies are riding the gravy train at taxpayer expense. And they have willing accomplices in the state legislature, conspiring each biennium to further expand the scope, power and cost of so-called public or social services. 

Do we see an end to this expansion of the statist mentality? Not when the public sector employee unions send their paid lobbyists to Carson City at a rate far higher than lobbyists who represent businesses, free markets or taxpayers. These guys know how to play the game, and they play it well. 

Looking at our fair state in comparison to other locales gives us a good perspective. The big question is can Nevada avoid the paths of California or ex-communist Europe. LW