Excuse the delay. I was busy Monday, gathering approvals for a new "job" I hope to be starting soon. It is actually, not a job, per se, but an opportunity to serve, working with a "hospice" organization, attending to fellow veterans in their last days. Then, Tuesday, I took friend of mine who lives in nearby Pleasant Hill, to the Nashville airport to pick up her son, arriving from Arizona - by way of Charlotte, NC. I thought that was interesting. The new airport facility in Nashville is not - interesting. No signs, no help for someone who had not been there in almost ten years. Yesterday, I saw my "cancer" doctor for my "Eligard" shot, the third of the four I well get, one every three months. Apparently, they are doing a good job. I feel great - even gaining back some of the weight I lost last year.
So now, listen to Paul Otelini, former President of the Intel Corporation on "Restoring American Prosperity".
"It seems that hardly a summer passes nowadays without a story about how an enterprising child, somewhere has had his or her budding entrepreneurial hopes dashed by some bureaucrat shutting down their lemonade stand. Recently, we have seen this same drama play out on a large stage with regulatory moves to impede Web-based "disruptive" businesses like Uber, the innovative transportation service that has had to battle entrenched taxi cartels and sympathetic regulators. America is becoming an increasingly difficult place to do business, small or large.
We can and must do better. We must put in place a comprehensive approach to allowing free markets to function and capital to flow. Markets should determine the success or failure of businesses. What we need is neither hard nor unknown. First, review all of our regulations from the Federal to the local level to insure they make it easier to start and run businesses and employ workers while maintaining the essentials of health and safety that we have come to expect. Second, create competitive tax rates that incentivize U.S, companies to operate here and foreign companies to locate here.
Simply put, make America the best place to open and run a business. Unleash the competitive spirit of America workers and entrepreneurs to do what they do better than anyone, create new products and technologies that improve the human condition. This edition of the Wall Street Journal celebrates 125 years of its existence. I can imagine how readers of that first edition would react to our world today. They would certainly be amazed at the living standards we have and the wonderful gadgets we employ. But I think they would be appalled at how difficult we make it for people to dream their dream, including that lemonade stand on the corner."
So I have to ask, how do we do this? My answer would be to send elected representatives to Congress who would embrace Mr. Otellini's thoughts. That might be easy, IF we had an electorate that understood the advantages of a truly competitive market place. The hardest part would be finding the people - or a computerized program, that could sort through the millions upon millions of tax codes and employment regulations that would need to be evaluated before we could enact such program. I get this gut feeling that I won't be around to see that day.
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