Gun Control Reduces Crime??

Gun Control Legislation promises to reduce gun crime, after all, if there are less guns in peoples possession there should be less gun crimes right? Wrong. This weeks ‘K’s Law’ will explore the how and the why Gun Control Legislation does the EXACT OPPOSITE of reducing gun crime.

There is a difference between armed criminals and armed law-abiding citizens. The key distinction is the term “law-abiding”. A criminal doesn’t care what laws are on the books about guns. If he wants a gun, he’ll get one regardless of the law.

“But thats why we need gun laws to make it harder for criminals to buy guns!” The reality is criminals don’t buy their guns from “law-abiding” businesses either. They buy them from other criminals who thumb their nose at the law. All gun control laws do is discourage “law-abiding” citizens from owning guns. Which is a scary thing. As the law-abiding citizenry is disarmed it makes it even easier for criminals to perpetrate gun crime.

The truth is, guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens stop more gun violence than anything else. Sometimes all that is necessary is to show that you have a gun, and a ‘would-be’ gun crime is over before it starts. Of course, we seldom hear about these situations because how many ‘crimes’ are reported that never happened?

A criminal fears an armed victim much more than the police. The police are trained to use deadly force only as a last resort while the victim of theft or rape will move to protect themselves immediately. When a criminal knows his victim may be armed he will most likely move on to easier prey. He’ll go where he knows there are no guns, like schools, no carry zones and areas with strict gun control laws.

Once again, we see K’s Law in action. Well intended gun control laws actually result in MORE gun crime not less.

Tax the Rich to Doctor the Poor

50 Million uninsured may agree, free health insurance paid for by the rich would be ideal. This week’s ‘K’s Law’ will explore how legislation designed to help the uninsured will surely make life worse for them.

The law currently being pushed through the congress would levy a tax on individuals earning $200,000 or more per year and couples earning $250,000 or more per year. This tax would raise the 600 billion dollars necessary to provide health insurance to the uninsured. The theory behind the legislation would be to make health care better for the currently uninsured.

When people who are paying for insurance realize there is a free plan available they will soon cancel their private policies and rightfully so, their momma’s didn’t raise no dummies. In addition, companies who are providing insurance for employees will also be incentivised to drop their health plans knowing their employees can get coverage from the public plan. The public plan will soon be overflowing with people.

Scott Gottlieb of The Wall Street Journal Reports:

As patients shift to a lower-paying government plan, doctors’ incomes will decline by as much as 15% to 20% depending on their specialty. Physician income declines will be accompanied by regulations that will make practicing medicine more costly, creating a double whammy of lower revenue and higher practice costs, especially for primary-care doctors who generally operate busy practices and work on thinner margins. For example, doctors will face expenses to deploy pricey electronic prescribing tools and computerized health records that are mandated under the Obama plan. For most doctors these capital costs won’t be fully covered by the subsidies provided by the plan.

Government insurance programs also shift compliance costs directly onto doctors by encumbering them with rules requiring expensive staffing and documentation. It’s a way for government health programs like Medicare to control charges. The rules are backed up with threats of arbitrary probes targeting documentation infractions. There will also be disproportionate fines, giving doctors and hospitals reason to overspend on their back offices to avoid reprisals.

The 60% of doctors who are self-employed will be hardest hit. That includes specialists, such as dermatologists and surgeons, who see a lot of private patients. But it also includes tens of thousands of primary-care doctors, the very physicians the Obama administration says need the most help.

Doctors will consolidate into larger practices to spread overhead costs, and they’ll cram more patients into tight schedules to make up in volume what’s lost in margin. Visits will be shortened and new appointments harder to secure.

Right or wrong, more doctors will close their practices to new patients, especially patients carrying lower paying insurance such as Medicaid. Some doctors will opt out of the system entirely, going “cash only.” If too many doctors take this route the government could step in — as in Canada, for example — to effectively outlaw private-only medical practice.

Inevitably, this legislation will cause the availability and quality of health care to drop significantly. Those people who were previously uninsured will undoubtedly now have worse health care.

It was the intention of the law to make health better for the uninsured, but as always, K’s law holds true.

Minimum Wage

With the new minimum wage law set to take effect on July 1st 2009, it will make for an interesting study into the effects of K’s Law.

Legislators love raising the “minimum” wage because it makes them look like they really care about the nations least skilled laborers. The intention of the minimum wage law is to make life better for the people on the bottom end of the wage scale. The theory is, if we force employers to pay their employees more, life will be better for the employees. Let’s discover if this is true.

There is a sandwich shop not far from here which serves out-of-the-ordinary tasty subs. The four young ladies working behind the counter earn minimum wage. When the wage increase hits next month, the manager will be faced with a tough decision. In order to maintain profitability and keep serving subs she will either have to raise her prices (and lose valuable customers) or let one or more of her workers go (increasing the workload of the others).

If she chooses to let someone go it will most likely be the least skilled worker. Life will definitely be worse for this young lady as she will be out of work. In addition, the remaining workers will be forced to pick up the slack making life worse for them.

“But won’t the remaining workers be getting more money?” I hear you say? True, but because of that they will have the incentive to stay working at minimum wage instead of increasing their skills and seeking a better paying job. What’s more, when they take their new earnings to buy pizza across the street they may find the owner has raised his prices rather than layoff workers. Their new money is worth less in the marketplace.

It is the intention of the law to make life better for the least skilled workers, but instead the law eliminates jobs and incentivises workers to stay at lower paid jobs instead of making their own lives better by increasing their skills and getting better jobs.

Minimum wage does the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it is intended to do making life worse for everyone.

K’s Law

The law of gravity has always existed. But it wasn’t until the acute observations of gravity by Isaac Newton were recorded that we had a sound understanding as to how the law worked and how it affected us. Natural laws such as gravity are irrefutable, and the law of gravity affects us all the same whether we like it or not.

By the same token, acute observation of social and political issues will lead to equally irrefutable laws that govern the nature of our social and politcal structure. These laws apply to us as a society whether we acknowledge them or not. Acute observation of government in action and what occurs as a result of this action, has precipitated one such law. K’s Law.

K’s law states that “Any act, legislation, restriction or regulation by a government body, will always result in the EXACT OPPOSITE outcome of what was originally intended.” In other words, when government makes a law intended to make life better for someone, it inevitably makes life worse for that person.

In this weekly column, we’ll observe K’s Law in action and discover how it affects our life whether we like it or not.