Libertarian Party of San Francisco News

Never content to rest until San Francisco’s government runs every aspect of our lives, supervisors Malia Cohen and Sandra Fewer recently requested the formation of a municipal city bank task force to study and advance the idea of a San Francisco public bank.  The idea has been around since the financial crisis of 2008 and is catching on more these days with the problem of legalized recreational pot in California and banking laws like the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 that obligate financial institutions to report suspicious activity, which includes pot financial transactions that are still illegal under federal law.  While it is understandable that the new law has created a problem with the incompatibility of current banking laws (a problem created by government), is it really necessary for

A public park in San Francisco's SOMA district has been sitting closed behind a fence for almost all of 2017, with chain link fence segments installed in February replaced with a $145,000 black iron barrier in June.

Because, you know, if those in power didn't do things like saying they're going to use taxpayer money for improving parks, then "improve" them by closing them so you can't use them, it would create a public health risk – people seeing a well-functioning government might die of shock! Freedom is dangerous.

Supervisor Jane Kim is at it again. Not content to rest on the laurel of her “victory” of making San Francisco City College tuition-free by introducing last year’s successful ballot measure W (dubbed the Mansion Tax), she’s found another way to make San Francisco more “affordable.” She recently asked the city controller to analyze the costs of providing universal childcare in San Francisco, and she plans to introduce a ballot measure for the November 2018 election that will offer “affordable” childcare for all. Kim wants a system that would reduce childcare costs for San Francisco families to just 10% of their income.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would lead to mass starvation. If things had continued as they did for thousands of years previously, he might have been right. Fortunately, the advent of the Industrial Revolution dramatically boosted productivity, and gains in productivity haven't let up since. In recent times, global productivity has increased by an estimated 1.8% per year between 1964 and 2014. With improvements in technology and know-how, a single worker today can typically produce what it would have taken dozens to produce a few hundred years ago in the same amount of time, resulting in much better standards of living for most people than were the norm in Malthus's era.

A worker in the United States today earns more in 10 minutes, in terms of buying power, than subsistence workers, such as the English mill workers that Fredrick Engels wrote about in 1844, earned in a 12-hour day. Or to put it another way, "each farmer (in the United States) in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950." In other words, to produce the same amount of output, less than 10% as many employees are needed in agriculture as was the case half a century ago. And that's only over the past 50 years. Go back 200 years or more, and the gains are even more dramatic. While agriculture, once the occupation of 90% of Americans, has particularly benefitted from technological changes that enhanced productivity, many other economic sectors have seen similar increases.

So how have gains in productivity affected government operations – law enforcement, for instance? How much more crime do today's police departments prevent, with how many fewer officers, compared to their pre-Industrial counterparts?