Viruses and Parasites: Will New Jersey Recover?

By Joshua A. Sotomayor-Einstein

America will get through the Covidviral crisis. With the suspension of many bad regulations, some of which limited the supply of lifesaving medical supplies; the might of American industry producing vital medical equipment; the truckers driving long distances with few rest stops open; the farmers and farmhands keeping their fellow Americans in quarantine fed; and food store and pharmacy employees, forgoing the safety of their homes in heavily hit urban areas high in Covid cases, stocking the stores so that we can keep a bit of normalcy while we fight this unseen enemy; we will prevail. We will never forget and long remember the front-line troops of this war, the EMTs, doctors, and nurses working 12-plus hour shifts in environments none of us would want to.

But if we are to recover financially after we do so medically, now more than ever it is necessary for New Jersey’s economic future to reform the punitive system of public pilfering and overspending that even before the Covid epidemic kept our state’s economy from job generation and prosperity. America will recover from the onslaught of the Covidvirus, which has already taken the lives of too many as we flatten the curve, produce more lifesaving equipment, search for treatments, and heaven willing, develop a vaccine. But New Jersey will not recover economically, and its residents will not be able to rebuild financially until massive radical structural and systemic changes are implemented across the board.

The Covidviral crisis and the probable economic storm coming in its wake are no excusefor inaction in building a healthier state economy that works for the people and lets them build wealth. From top to bottom the legal corruption that plagues our state, robs residents in the working and middle classes of the time they need to invest, unnecessarily adds to the efforts they must inject, and steals value they produce. This baked-in statewide macro-economic looting redistributes the new value created, sweat equity invested, and money earned, by the working and middle classes to the parasitic class – the politically connected, machine party bosses, and their retainers/loyalists.

Government will always have some element of the politically connected getting special treatment by supposedly unbiased enforcers of the law, zoning offices, inspection regimes or other bureaucracy engaged in government mandated compliance. Every political system will see some accumulation of power, both formally and informally, in political bosses who pull strings to get friendly businesses, large and small, favorable treatment. Every system will see businesses, political bosses, and special interest pressure groups working to get “public” employment for those who pay them homage. Any system of human organization can tolerate these parasitic behaviors only to the degree that they do not threaten to kill the hosts off which they feed – the working and middle classand job generation.

But even prior to the Covidviral epidemic, New Jersey’s economy was already on life support. Buoyed not by the rob-the-people and reckless spending policies of the parasitic class occupying seats of power, but by our geographic proximity to New York City, Philadelphia, and the Atlantic Coast, our state economy was flat-lining with rising costs of living chasing residents to places anywhere else. If we have not liberated the working and middle masses from the parasitic class after the Covidcrisis, New Jersey will have signed a Do Not Resuscitate order for the state economy.

New Jersey has long ago passed the safe load limit on how much parasitism it could carry – the legally sanctioned siphoning off of the people’s money into the pockets of the politicians, their corporate friends, and to those who ostensibly work for the public but are loyal first and foremost to those that got them their job. As a result, before the Covidviral epidemic and subsequent statewide economic shut down, New Jersey was lagging behind the nation in job generation, ease at which a resident could start a new business, state GDP growth, average income growth, and more. New Jersey was leading most of the country in red tape, the ratio of tax payer supported “public” employees, property taxes, and one of the nation’s greatest migrations out of state by residents.

To heal our state economically after we have recovered medically, we need a broad spectrum holistic response that puts New Jersey residents not just on a footing to catch up with the wage growth and job generation the majority of the nation was seeing before Covid, but that can leap frog it and do even better after. To that end we must right size state, county, and local government, clip the wings of the parasitic class, and reign in the robbery and reckless spending which drives the fines that are income, property, and sales taxes, permit fees, occupational licensing costs and more.

The current crisis is demonstrable evidence that so many government edicts are by definition nonessential lest they would not be even temporarily waved. This begs the question, why does government involuntarily take money out of your wallet, i.e. steal, to do nonessential tasks to begin with? From municipal permit applications to replace a broken toilet, allowing bars to sell to-go bottle service, suspending car ticketing regimes that primarily acted as punitive measures targeting the poorer, and much more; the many regulations that enable the parasitic class to extort and manipulate the working and middle class as well as advantage their desired supporting segments, have been temporarily suspended by many local governments.

These regulatory weapons, all aimed at the people and always first enacted in the name of public safety and now suspended under that same banner, are in actuality meant to empower the parasitic class, generate value-demolishing jobs for their political retainers, and favor established business interests who can and do donate politically. The lists of regulations suspended across the country due to the Covidepidemic are just the tip of the destructive regulatory iceberg. Some have actually made the Covidviral epidemic more dangerous. For example, limited hospital bed supply is not a result of a free market fairer playing field, but rather the result of New Jersey being a CON (Certificate of Need) state. CON is a legally mandatory process preventing healthcare providers from expanding bed capacity or adding medical departments based on their own judgement and which restricts when and where new hospitals can be built. Rather, under the reckless CON government regulations, a healthcare provider must go through a lengthy, expensive, and difficult process to advocate to a cartel made of government minders and other competing healthcare providers, who in times not of epidemic, have acted to stop potential new competitors and artificially limited the number of hospital beds.

Our nation will rebuild after Covid. We will mourn the losses of too many fellow Americans and we will celebrate the new American heroes who kept us fed, a stocked the supermarkets, kept the supplies coming, and most of all – who were on the front lines healing our country. But before the economic crisis settles in its wake, we must plan for America’s comeback and we in New Jersey cannot repeat the mistakes of the past.

Joshua A. Sotomayor-Einstein, of Hoboken, is the New Jersey Republican State Committeeman from Hudson County.