Here is an example of how the free market has benefited some of the people here in Utah, as well as around the country. When I started as a dentist, I purchased a very nice office from the bank because the previous dentist had gone under due to the competitive nature of dentistry here in Utah. For the first four months my brother John and sister Lisa gave me loans to keep my practice afloat. I needed to figure out a way to make this practice profitable quickly or I too would lose this practice.
I invested in learning how to place implants, then offered them at a lower price than that of my competitors and the implant patients (with the help of John’s marketing expertise) started flooding in. For the first time, I didn’t need to take out loans to make payroll for my staff. For those of you not familiar with the dental implant process, it takes 3-6 months for an implant to heal normally before you can place crowns or bridges on them to replace a tooth or teeth.
After a few months, we started placing the crowns and bridges on all of the implants and the lab fee was getting up to $15,000/month and we couldn’t afford to pay that and stay afloat. I needed to figure out a way to get rid of that expense or lose the practice, so I again invested into learning how to make my own crowns and bridges and was able to save my practice from going under.
I now have combined these two little pieces of knowledge into a product I call the 3 on 6 which stands for 3 bridges on 6 implants. The competitors in this market offer a product called All on 4 for which they charge usually between $50,000-80,000 for a full mouth. Because I was able to figure out how to lower my expenses so well I offer this full mouth restoration for $20,000 which I believe to be a better restoration in every way, which makes people willing to fly here from all over the country to get their dental work done.
So in short: Because of my struggle to survive, I have come up with things that benefit many people and keep my business afloat.
One of my competitors is the government. It gives “free” dental work to people while taxing us to pay for it. The dentists that work in these offices are told what they can and can’t do based on what the government will pay for. Do you believe that if the government had total control of the dental industry that there would be any innovation? The dentists that work in these offices have little motivation to innovate, only to figure out how to get patients in and out faster in order to make the small amounts of money they are given from the government go further. The government decides which procedures are necessary, which it will pay for, and which it will not. The dentist and the patient don’t decide which procedures are in the best interest of the patient, the government already has.
These principles are the same in any industry. If we take away the motivation/necessity to innovate, we cease to do so. Sometimes it will be scary, and sometimes people will fail, but sometimes, people will become super successful and those people create jobs for many others. Placing higher taxes on these hard working entrepreneurs and creating more government laws and restrictions, only lessens our ability to grow and create more jobs. Instead it puts more power into the hands of people who don’t have to figure out how to make ends meat. An industry that is constantly requiring more money with little to no accountability. Becoming a profitable business is a difficult task which a large percentage of people attempting to do fail. Every step of growing my business has been a very difficult struggle with the possibility of not being able to pay my employees if I fail. Having the government run businesses without the stress of failure causing them to improve the way they do things, causes them to perpetuate horrible ways of doing things, and the burden lies upon us to further fund all of their failing ventures.
I just ordered some dental chairs from China for my new dental practice. They have been sitting in a warehouse in California for a month. Finally my shipping company, that has been storing these chairs for us for free, let us know that the FDA has disapproved of these chairs so we will have to continue to wait before we can open our new office. Thank you FDA for protecting America from sitting in chairs made in China, slowing my ability to hire more dentists and create more productive jobs, so that you can use the money I pay you in taxes to give someone an unproductive job of telling me that my chairs are unsuitable to sit it.
The purpose of our government is to help grow and protect our economy, not to compete in it or slow its progress.
The world has grown in its ability to feed billions of people, thanks to the free market economy of the US spreading, and thanks to the production of this country creating jobs for people around the world. As we weaken the people that make this country great and their ability to trade and barter with the world, we weaken the world and its ability to feed its people.
However wicked the most wicked corporation has ever been, it has never killed millions of people. It doesn’t take long for a wicked government to kill millions of people. It begins with taking away the freedom of its people, which results in a transfer of power (money) from the people to the government.
I like this quote by William Legget. Whenever a Government assumes the power of discriminating between the different classes of the community, it becomes, in effect, the arbiter of their prosperity, and exercises a power not contemplated by any intelligent people in delegating their sovereignty to their rulers. It then becomes the great regulator of the profits of every species of industry, and reduces men from a dependence on their own exertions, to a dependence on the caprices of their Government. Governments possess no delegated right to tamper with individual industry a single hair’s-breadth beyond what is essential to protect the rights of person and property.
In the exercise of this power of intermeddling with the private pursuits and individual occupations of the citizen, a Government may at pleasure elevate one class and depress another; it may one day legislate exclusively for the farmer, the next for the mechanic, and the third for the manufacturer, who all thus become the mere puppets of legislative cobbling and tinkering, instead of independent citizens, relying on their own resources for their prosperity. It assumes the functions which belong alone to an overruling Providence, and affects to become the universal dispenser of good and evil.
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