Colorado bureaucrats and politicians are expanding their war on businesses in the state, threatening the recovery.
Economists with the University of Colorado at Boulder Leeds School of Business thinks Colorado job growth will outpace the rest of the nation next year, the Denver Post reports. Mostly these jobs will be in the service sector, the report predicts. Manufacturers will shed jobs. (Of course this is all just fancy guesswork.) To the extent that jobs depend on “green” subsidies, they are counterproductive and precarious anyway.
Bureaucratic controls tend to stifle capital-heavy businesses disproportionately, which helps explain why the service sector looks relatively appealing. But even the service sector will be hit by anti-business policies. Consider three recent news stories.
The Denver Post reports that the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment is joining up with the federal Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service to punish businesses who dare to hire independent contractors. Of course, this is only a “problem” because of all the anti-businesses controls that curtail direct hires, starting with the grotesque payroll tax.
If we actually cared about restoring a strong economy, we’d roll back those employment controls, not expanding them.
The Daily Camera reports that the Boulder city council may stick firms with a “business software tax.” Allegedly this closes a “loophole” (but freedom is not a loophole!).
If we actually cared about restoring a strong economy, we’d eliminate software taxes across the board, not expand them.
Steamboat Daily reports that the Routt County Board of Commissioners is trying to hamper the production of oil and natural gas. (Thanks to theDenver Post for mentioning both those other papers’ stories.)
If we actually cared about restoring a strong economy, we’d eliminate the arbitrary controls hampering the state’s energy industry, preserving only those government actions based on protecting actual property rights from objectively verifiable harms through a legally sound process.
But of course most of Colordo’s bureaucrats and politicians care not a whit about restoring a strong economy. They’re too busy wielding arbitrary power over others.