Rick Kelo - Property from the Ground Up

Have you ever considered how you come to own something?  How do we decide who owns what?  Property is such an integral part of who we are.  Even a little kid playing with another in a woods full of sticks will reply, "Hey, that's mine!" if the other child takes the stick he's using.

All of the choices we make about what we're going to do rest ultimately on who owns something.  When we say you have freedom of speech, for example, that really means freedom to speak at a place you own.  You can't go to the front of a movie theater and start giving a speech during a movie, but if you rent a conference room at a hotel you can do so.  Why?  Because you first acquired an ownership right (through a contract, a form of property) to use the hotel conference room, but not the movie theater.

Rick Kelo

Rick Kelo is a well-educated, hard-working businessman, but also a noted Classic Liberal thinker.  He describes the system of laws that would constitutes a property right in a free market economy by considering first that all private property rests upon a legal pattern of ownership follows:

Labor: self-owned
Land: owned by homesteading
Goods: owned by producing
Labor, land, goods: owned by contract (as in the case of employment)
Gift: owned by unilateral transfer
Exchange: owned by bilateral transfer

Rick Kelo - Pricing in Fascist Economies

Fascism is one of the two forms of Command Economy (the other being Socialism).  In his studies of economics Rick Kelo noticed that the price of consumer goods - the individual items that you and I buy at the store - are usually not controlled by the State.

Rick Kelo, a Chicago Tax Recruiter

"There have been a great many command economies where the State did not set the price of consumption goods.  Nazi Germany is one example as is the USSR through the majority of it's history, ignoring several lesser periods of price controls," Kelo remarks.

The price of consumption goods does not matter.  Not economically in any event.  In any command economy, whether socialist or fascist, there can never be rational pricing for consumer goods.  In Fascist economies State officials often tell the business owners what to produce.  Some times they do it directly by an order, and other times indirectly by a regulation that sets a production quota not to be exceeded.  However, business owners in a fascist economy can still look to other market economies for guides on pricing.  But, they can never actually know the proper price for consumer goods because they have no pricing for the capital goods that were used to make those consumer items.

It is because of the absence of a rational pricing mechanism, Richard Kelo feels, that we frequently see state-mandated prices for consumer goods in command economies.

Rick Kelo Explains the Command Economies

There are two forms of command economies: fascism & socialism.  Command economy shouldn't imply socialist economy necessarily.  All socialist economies are command economies, but not that all command economies are socialist.  The presence of a Command Economy is irrelevant to the form of political organization as well, it by definition refers only to the form of economic organization.

The main point of confusion for some occurs in separating political systems from economic ones.  A country can have a totalitarian political system and a free market economy.  It's not terribly common but there's nothing about having a free market economy that requires political freedom.  However, in reverse it is necessary to have economic freedom in order to have political freedom.  Rick Kelo teaches that a country cannot have a command economy and have political freedom because the very imposition of a command economy requires an absence of political freedom in order to impose.

For example how can their be freedom of the press when the government owns the presses?

Richard Kelo

Rick Kelo - Labor Unions & Yellow Dog Laws

A lot of people wonder whether labor unions are inconsistent with a free market.  Does a free market economy mean there can't be unions?  Rick Kelo is a labor specialist who works as the head of talent acquisition at a tax recruiting firm in Chicago.  When asked about his view of unions Rick noted, "I am not anti-union.  I am opposed only to unions in so much as they rely on grants of monopoly privilege in order to extract economic rents.  For example, in America today union dues are almost always a sign of monopoly power at work."

Nothing about the presence of labor unions is inconsistent with capitalism.

Rick Kelo - expert in tax talent acquisition

In a totally free market employers are free to purchase labor from their employees in any arrangement they prefer.  Labor is a competitive resource that must be bid away from competition (including every alternate possible use).  So even in a totally free market some employers would prefer to rely on union membership to help them attract talent.  Others will find it preferable to use a non-union method of organization.

Unions themselves aren't incompatible with a free society or a free market.  The thing that is incompatible with a free society, and a free market, is dictating that only certain forms of employment are allowed or dictating that certain forms are not allowed.  Rick Kelo finds it equally as immoral to outlaw unions as to make them mandatory.