How Occupational Licensing Stifles the Economy
Imagine a world where you need government permission to braid hair, paint walls, or even arrange flowers. This isn’t a dystopian novel—it’s the reality for millions of American workers trapped by excessive occupational licensing laws.
Take the state of Michigan for example. In the 1950s, only 5% of Michigan workers needed a license to perform their jobs. Today, that figure has ballooned to nearly 30% of the workforce. This trend is not just limited to specialized fields but extends to 178 occupations in the state. If you want to be a manicurist apprentice or a hair braiding teacher, you need the corresponding government stamped license.
These licenses, some of which cost over $4,000, have produced a predictably unfortunate result. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy estimates that Michigan’s licensing laws result in up to 125,000 fewer jobs and cost the state economy over $10 billion annually. Michigan suffers from unnecessary barriers to entry so the government can accrue licensing fees.
While some argue that licensing protects consumers, research indicates that licensing laws can increase consumer prices by up to 30%. This price inflation stems from various factors, including the passing on of licensing costs to consumers and reduced competition in licensed fields. The burden of a licensing system extends to taxpayers as well. Administering and enforcing licensing regulations across 180 occupations costs Michigan alone hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Extensive occupational licensing also hampers worker’s locational mobility. The House Regulatory Reform Committee estimates that stringent occupational licensing reduces geographic mobility by as much as 7%. This lack of reciprocity can prevent skilled workers from switching states, depriving the potential area of valuable talent and expertise.
Occupational licensing also has a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations. For example, a study by the Institute for Justice found that the average license for lower-income occupations in Michigan requires $242 in fees, 255 days of education and experience, and two exams. For single mothers seeking to improve their economic situation, these barriers are often insurmountable.
And yet according to the Archbridge Institute, Michigan has less occupational licensing requirements than the average U.S. state. Nationally, occupational licensing reduces employment growth by about 20% in licensed positions. This translates to millions of jobs lost across the country. Additionally, licensing requirements increase consumer costs by an estimated 3% to 16% for various services, including childcare, dental care, and optometry.
Occupational licensing also exacerbates income inequality. While it may raise wages for licensed professionals, it makes it more difficult for unlicensed workers to earn a living. The effects are particularly harsh on minorities and disadvantaged groups. For instance, licensing of barbers reduces the probability of a black individual working as a barber by 17.3%. In total, licensing decreases the labor supply of Black men in licensed occupations by up to 19% and Black women by up to 22%. These statistics underscore the far-reaching consequences of occupational licensing, extending beyond simple economic metrics to issues of social equity and opportunity.
Part of this disparity is due to reduced social mobility. A study by the Brookings Institution found that states with more burdensome licensing laws have lower rates of economic mobility. This means that individuals born into lower-income families in these states have a harder time moving up the economic ladder. The National Bureau of Economic Research echoes this sentiment, reporting that higher licensing requirements are associated with an 8% monthly decrease in social mobility.
When so many occupations, the source of livelihood for millions of Americans, are subject to such strict restraints, crippling economic consequences follow. While in some fields, some certification is necessary, the excessive fees and time requirements for many of the nation’s licenses do far more harm than good. The increased consumer safety from an extra 20 hours of required hair braiding practice is not worth a hundred thousand jobs and billions in losses.
Politicians should begin by both reducing the number of occupations requiring licenses and establishing less stringent requirements for the remaining licensed fields. Through this change, our nation will take a step toward economic and social prosperity for all of its citizens, instead of furthering a pattern of inadequate policy making.
Alex Jones Issues Emergency Warning: If Not Stopped, The Globalists Will Collapse Civilization And Create Hell On Earth
JD Vance: ‘Giving Kamala Control Over Inflation Policy Is Like Giving Epstein Control Over Human Trafficking Policy’
Alex Jones gives his take on J.D. Vance’s remarks comparing Kamala Harris’s disastrous economic policies to late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
JD Vance, “Giving Kamala Control Over Inflation Policy Is Like Giving Epstein Control Over Human Trafficking Policy” pic.twitter.com/lWMHnaz13X
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) August 19, 2024
Carry Trade Trap: The Real Reason Why The Fed Has Waited So Long To Cut Rates
In 2022 there was considerable debate among alternative economists what the Federal Reserve was likely to do in the face of rising stagflation. There were people who argued that the Fed would capitulate to stock market demands, stop raising interest rates and return to QE. These analysts operated on the assumption that the central bank WANTS to save the US economy from substantial deflationary crisis and that they will happily print money forever in order to delay such an event.
Some of us, however, understand that the Fed is not loyal to the US economy, nor is it necessarily interested in self preservation as an institution. In 2022 in my article ‘It’s A Fact That Needs Repeating: The Federal Reserve Is A Suicide Bomber’ I predicted:
“This leads us to the final question – What happens next? That’s easy to answer: The fed continues to hike rates well into next year and will not reverse course or capitulate and return to stimulus. The dovish predictions were wrong. The people that said the Fed would not raise rates were wrong. The people that said the Fed would never remove support from stock markets were wrong. This process is ongoing and the effects will grow as the months pass, but those that were hoping for a manic return to the days of bailouts and QE are going to be deeply disappointed.”
This prediction proved correct. I noted at the time that the Fed is not following its own program, it’s following a global program coordinated by the IMF and BIS. In order to understand why the Fed does the things it does, one must accept that they don’t care about the current world order. They care about facilitating a new world order.
Of course, part of that agenda requires that the central bankers never receive blame for their role in any economic crisis. They have no problem blowing up the system as long as there’s a convenient scapegoat. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.
I usually don’t put much energy into tracking stocks because I see them as a side show. Equities are primarily built on delusions, false hopes and unchecked fiat and the bubble will pop when those delusions are inevitably dashed by reality. Stock markets are not a leading indicator; they are a trailing indicator and they crash long after numerous other alarms have been triggered. That said, every once in a while the smoke and mirrors lift and you can get a glimpse of what is really happening behind the scenes.
The central bank has removed the primary backstop supporting US and European markets – The low interest rates that were feeding cheap money into corporate buybacks. Despite endless spin and false data from the Biden Administration the deflationary side of the crisis is starting to rear its ugly head.
A weaker-than-expected jobs report last week has fueled concerns about a potential economic recession and calls for an interest rate cut. Employers hired 114,000 workers last month, falling well short of economist expectations of 185,000 jobs, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed. The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3%, the highest level since October 2021. It’s only going to get worse from now on and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an unemployment avalanche in 2025.
Keep in mind that BLS jobs data has been rigged by the Biden White House for years; the majority of jobs “created” during Biden’s term are low wage part-time jobs and most have been going to illegal immigrants, not to American citizens. The same illegal immigrants that Biden has allowed into the country through open border and amnesty policies.
This trend is only going accelerate by winter. Why? Because the effects of the high interest rates are taking hold. It happens slow at first, then all at once. But how have stocks remained so high during this time period? A recent market shock may help us to understand…
As noted, the August stock slump has been partly driven by weaker-than-expected U.S. economic data at the end of last week. The readings led investors to worry that the Federal Reserve may be behind the curve in cutting interest rates to fend off a recession. But why does the Fed continue to keep rates high if this is the case?
There are two reasons.
First, as I have mentioned over and over since 2018, the end of QE and the raising of interest rates is a Catch-22; a trap. Not for the Fed, but for the US economy. Our financial system has become so addicted to cheap money from the central bank that it can barely function without it. We are seeing the addict begin to crash. Covid stimulus held up the system for another few years, but now that hit of sweet helicopter money is fading and the high is over.
At the same time we’re being crushed with a stagflationary hydraulic press. Prices continue to climb on most necessities and the cumulative inflation is around 30% (officially) on average since 2021. Compare grocery receipts from 2020 to today, though, and you’ll find a 30% to 100% increase in prices on most necessary goods and services.
The establishment (and the DNC) has been operating on the narrative that inflation has been defeated. The Fed knows that this is a lie. The moment they cut rates inflation will spike again and the illusion will be exposed. There’s FAR too many dollars floating around chasing too few goods. For those that believe a rate cut is in the works to support the Kamala Harris campaign, I would suggest such a move might actually hurt her chances (whatever those chances may be) because her entire economic platform requires doubling down on the “success” of Bidenomics. If CPI spikes again in October then her campaign is sunk.
Of course, over 54% of mainstream economists and investors polled now expect a rate cut next month and some Fed officials have mentioned the possibility. I remain doubtful, but it will certainly make the election cycle even more interesting if they do.
The second issue is what appears to be a “carry trade trap.”
Carry trades refer to operations in which investors borrow in a currency with low interest rates, such as the Japanese yen, and reinvest the proceeds in higher-yielding assets elsewhere (the US). The strategy is a considerable driver of US stock markets and has kept stocks alive despite the Fed’s removal of QE.
This month’s stock plunge was triggered by fears that the Bank of Japan might hike interest rates, coupled with expectations that the Fed will cut rates in the near term due to the recession threat. This would kill the carry trade that has kept stocks going. To prevent a destructive carry trade unwind the Fed would have to coordinate with the BOJ and introduce a new stimulus program to soften the blow. But as I mentioned above, if the Fed returns to QE inflation will skyrocket yet again.
The public will demand an explanation as to how it’s possible for there to be deflation in markets and jobs and inflation in prices all at the same time? The Fed won’t have answers for them. It’s a Catch-22 on top of a Catch-22.
I believe there is no way out of this situation and that central banks deliberately maneuvered the US into this predicament. The only thing left for them to do is pull the plug when the timing is most advantageous. After the elections makes the most sense, especially if conservatives come out on top and there is a red sweep in 2025. Then, the whole mess can be wrapped up and thrown in their laps.
One thing the events of this month prove is that the system is so unstable that even a hint of a change in the status quo could mean disaster. Don’t assume that banks will keep trying to kick the can down the road; they’re operating on a timeline that serves the interests of the global establishment, not the American public.
Alex Jones Issues Emergency Warning: If Not Stopped, The Globalists Will Collapse Civilization And Create Hell On Earth
What’s Really Happening with Mpox
The Mpox Emergency
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
Alex Jones Issues Emergency Warning: If Not Stopped, The Globalists Will Collapse Civilization And Create Hell On Earth
Cattle Ranchers and Dairy Farmers Push Back, Reject WHO’s ‘Bird Flu’ Testing Demands
Cattle ranchers and dairy farmers across the US are quietly defying the WHO’s pandemic protocols, barring inspectors from their farms and refusing to test their animals for bird flu. The last time we reviewed the […]
The post Cattle Ranchers and Dairy Farmers Push Back, Reject WHO’s ‘Bird Flu’ Testing Demands appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Cartoon Depicts Democrats’ Massive Gaslighting Efforts to Protect Kamala Following Biden Coup
A humorous animation portrays Democrats’ deceptive sleight of hand as they pulled Joe Biden off the party’s presidential ticket, swapping him for an even more problematic candidate, Kamala Harris.
In the latest animated political cartoon from @FreedomToons, a giant DNC robot appears in public and declares the unelected Harris the Democrat nominee.
Border Czar Kamala Harris tells us about her exciting and original platform! pic.twitter.com/Yj02TUqpn3
— FreedomToons (@Freedom_Toons) August 13, 2024
When one astute citizen asks why she’s the nominee given her disastrous tenure as Biden’s “border czar,” the robot declares she was never the border czar while a Kamala caricature beats him over the head with a mallet.
The concerned citizen next asks about Harris’ history of helping post bail for rioters who helped destroy Minneapolis in 2020, showing a screenshot of Harris’ X post. However, the robot quickly destroys the evidence.
If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020
When the informed member of the public points out she was also dubbed the “most liberal senator” by govtrack.us, a page later deleted by the supposedly non-partisan site, the robot claims she’s actually conservative.
“You can’t gaslight voters into…” the person begins to say, before getting cut off by the robot saying, “KAMALA HARRIS IS CONSERVATIVE. SHE WAS RANKED THE MOST CONSERVATIVE SENATOR.”
“How can you erase her entire history?” the voter asks as Kamala morphs into her ultimate form.
The animation provides an excellent summary of the media’s efforts to gaslight and propagandize the public into believing Kamala is a viable candidate.
FreedomToons has previously produced Alex Jones animations.
Infonity Wars (spoilers) – What REALLY happened to Alex Jones?https://t.co/CuKXc1m9Z0 pic.twitter.com/IaMNITj2Ng
— Seamus (FreedomToons) (@seamus_coughlin) August 23, 2018