No doubt the Founders would not have needed Ben Franklin’s invention of bifocals to see the contrast and irony – and the towering insult in the very existence of this federal agency.
National Pulse March 21 reported that the Trump Administration is intent on nearly halving the tax parasites of the insultingly titled “Small Business Administration”:
“President Donald J. Trump’s push to reduce federal government waste, fraud, and abuse will see the Small Business Administration (SBA) reduce its workforce by over 40 percent. The impending cuts, which aim to save more than $435 million annually, will impact roughly 6,500 bureaucrats.”
This, the SBA, created by the big-government-loving, Constitution-insulting Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 with the signing of the “Small Business Act,” because, of course, nothing says “devotion to small independent market participants” than a giant new arm of the U.S. government that will politicize more and more of the market.
Indeed, littered throughout the legislation are glittering falsehoods and platitudes, such as the claim that the legislation will "aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation."
The collectivism is obvious. And the irony is obvious, and has become even more glaring as the SBA has grown like a blood-sucking tick on the hide of the American business beast.
Of course, historians cannot blame solely Eisenhower and the Congress of that time for this bruise on American liberty. The SBA was preceded by the also-unconstitutional, socialist/fascist, Roosevelt-Era, Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and the Eisenhower move might have been viewed as a politically savvy move to portray the opportunistic and bloated government as caring about “small business.”
And, thanks, no doubt, to the tendency of government to expand, thanks to the generational normalcy bias of civilians who grow up long after an agency has been created (thus, seeing them assume its validity and not question its unconstitutional nature), thanks to the “rent-seeking” feedback loop that entices special interests to promote politicians who will prod bureaucracies to hand benefits such as subsidies or protection against foreign competition to those interests, and thanks to what, in some cases, becomes a revolving door between businesses and the agencies, the Wall Street Journal notes that this “small business” bureaucracy is not very small.
“The extensive workforce reduction and restructuring will take the SBA, an agency with more than 6,500 employees, back to prepandemic staffing levels by eliminating around 2,700 positions. The cuts will affect nonessential roles at the agency, and include voluntary resignations and the expiration of appointments made during the Covid-19 pandemic, the people said.”
In any context, the term “nonessential” is subjective, and what is deemed essential work only can be defined by individuals expressing their preferences in a free market, but, within the constitutional context, no aspect of the “Small Business Administration” is allowed unless the Constitution is amended.
Perhaps Mr. Trump could acknowledge that fact and go a little further in the SBA cuts – and eliminate the entire swampy sponge.
And, with all due respect to the Wall Street Journal, this writer would be remiss if he did not mention two facts about the purported “pandemic.”
First, no one can say whether the COVID19 phenomenon was a “pandemic” because in 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) changed the definition of the word to focus on “prevalence” of a virus, rather than lethality, allowing the term to be improperly applied to outbreaks that might be less deadly than permitted under the previous standard for the term.
Second, the U.S. government literally paid medical establishments to report as deaths “from COVID” many deaths that never could be proven to have been caused by COVID. None other than CORONAVirus Vixen Deborah Birx admitted this in April of 2020.
Related: Report: Feds Didn’t Investigate MILLIONS of Potentially Fraudulent PPP Loans | MRCTV
But, as the WSJ reports, the SBA fed off the massive “COVID Response” in 2020 that saw huge federal subsidies of businesses in what President Trump and his D and R allies called the “PPP loans” packed inside the $2 TRILLION “CARES Act," also in April of 2020.
“The SBA expanded in size during the Covid-19 pandemic to support programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program, and other small-business initiatives put in place during the Biden administration.”
Notice how the WSJ does not note what I mentioned to you, which is the name of Donald Trump. By not mentioning his presence and backing from the White House prior to Biden entering office, the editors of the Wall Street Journal might give readers the impression that Mr. Trump was not involved in the huge explosion of the SBA.
Yet, now, the Trump Administration is pushing its “reform” rhetoric hard. Perhaps they have learned from previous mistakes, but the lack of any apology is glaring.
“SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said in a video posted to social media on Friday that the agency is ‘done wasting millions of tax dollars’ and that the Trump administration will ‘right size the agency to transform the SBA into a high-efficiency engine for America’s entrepreneurs and taxpayers.’”
It is not her place or Mr. Trump’s place to “transform” the SBA into anything other than a FORMER federal agency. Not only is it unconstitutional, it warps and redirects what should be market decisions made by free individuals who ought to assess investment opportunities and invest or avoid a venture based on their own free will.
Fascism and mercantilism are not supposed to be part of the market environment in the United States, and in every nation where they have been tried, they lead to disaster.
But FDR adored collectivism, and Eisenhower did not break from that political path when they started the SBA.
Thus, the WSJ notes that the SBA:
“…runs loan programs to provide small companies with capital, helps small businesses win federal contracts and funds local centers where entrepreneurs receive counseling, technical assistance and other support.”
That is fantasy-land. Such decisions are supposed to be up to civilians, risking their OWN capital, not bureaucrats throwing around our money.
The Paycheck Protection Program is just the most recent and most glaring example of this important difference. Americans quickly learned that the “PPP” handed out billions to corporations and business owners who never paid back, the money went to giant corporations that had sub-corporations fitting the model of the PPP, which paid its tax-redirections to companies with “500 or fewer” workers.
But what might one expect from a federal government that has huge incentives to expand and hand out tax money and money given to it by the Federal Reserve? The bureaucrats and politicians populating the DC leviathan don’t even recognize the irony that their huge bureaucracy of the SBA, created to “help small business,” is part of the largest government in the history of mankind.
“The layoffs mark another big downsizing of a federal agency through a plan encouraged by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that aims to reduce the size of government by $1 trillion this fiscal year. The U.S. government is America’s largest employer, with 2.4 million civilian workers as of January, excluding the postal service.”
It would be nice if the feds reduced the size of the U.S. government. The new budget does not do that. It increases spending.
But, we can hope. A reduction would decrease the burden on taxpayers and also reduce the need for feds to grab money through the issuance of bonds (purchased by the Federal Reserve, by U.S. government agencies, and by foreign investors).
Yes, let’s see the government made more efficient. But focusing on “efficiency” misses the fact that if the President, Congress, the Judiciary, and the bureaucracy abided by the Constitution, the bureaucracy would necessarily be smaller.
And we would be freer.