Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
Categories
Frank Knight
Author: Redactor
Categories
Poddy, Jan 16
On January 16, 1930, conservative writer Norman Podhoretz was born.
We’re told that “economic inequality” is on the rise.
Ronald Bailey, at Reason’s site, does a pretty good job of setting the record straight. The rich may be getting richer, but the poor aren’t getting poorer.
Further, “the rich” aren’t the same folks one year to the next. There is still income mobility in America. Some poor folks become super-rich; a majority of super-rich “1-percent-ers” will fall out of that 1-percent category. Over time, most folks move from one quintile to at least the next.
What prevents widespread understanding of this? Intellectual muddles. The difference between income and wealth often get fuzzed up, for example. Take two high-income workers, earning the same pay: The one who saves will wind up with much more wealth than the other who spends it all. And rates of savings vary radically from person to person.
As does everything else.
Making things more complicated? Government policy. Bailouts are now an integral feature to aid some of the rich, to prevent their losses (we’re told) from spreading “financial contagion.”
Considering the moral hazard involved, I’d say “financial contagion” is endemic . . . on a whole different level.
And the same President Obama today decrying income inequality was yesterday bailing out rich folks.
A question for the inequality obsessed: Since the War on Poverty really set in, poverty rates have leveled off and even worsened (that is, the numbers of the officially impoverished have increased, despite increases in after-tax/after-subsidy incomes) — could you be missing the moral hazard that any sort of bailout portends?
Real economic justice, as I suggested in my most recent weekend column, is just that, justice. Establishment of good rules, no special privileges.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Graph on this page shows income per household, courtesy Cafe Hayek. Caution: Households changed complexion radically in the 1960s-1980s.
Categories
Norman Podhoretz
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
Categories
Society’s Interest
“Shame on Republicans for blocking the resumption of long-term unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans,” writes Democratic Party cheerleader and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.
“And shame on Democrats for letting them,” he adds, meaning that talking-head Ds on your TV set aren’t currently bloviating enough about this R treachery to suit Mr. Robinson . . . as if more is even frighteningly possible.
Robinson calls the GOP resistance to the extension of benefits paid beyond 52 weeks an “exercise in gratuitous inhumanity.” He tells of folks who lost good jobs during the ongoing economic unpleasantness, who have been looking for work unsuccessfully for over a year. “They are people whose lives have been buffeted by forces beyond their control,” he explains.
True enough, agonizing enough. Only a fool wouldn’t consider that, as I so often heard growing up, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Robinson then asks, “Isn’t it in society’s interest to give them a chance?”
Well, what is that chance? A functioning, diverse job-creating market economy — not a politician-centered redistribution regime.
Robinson argues that (a) unemployment benefit payments will create jobs (so that unemployment, in a roundabout way, creates employment?), (b) it’s been done before (compelling, eh?), and (c) that the $25 billion dollar price tag is “little more than a rounding error.”
Which brings us back to the Democrats.
Republicans demand that Democrats prioritize spending — since money doesn’t grow on taxpayers — and find enough cuts to offset this itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy “rounding error.”
The answering silence? Profound.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Paul Feyerabend
Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge.
On January 15, 1777, New Connecticut (present day Vermont) declared its independence.
Categories
Jan 14 New Years Day
January 14 is New Year’s Day according to the old, Julian Calendar. On January 14, 1514, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull against slavery. On the same date in 1639, the first written constitution to create a government, the “Fundamental Orders,” was adopted in Connecticut.
One of the great things about the Obamacare fiasco is that we get to revisit many of the left’s talking points for the last half-century and more — and hand the points right back, underlined.
How many times have we heard about market failure? A relentless litany.
Today’s topic? Government failure.
How many times have we been told that markets aren’t as important as we think, since what really matters is managerial know-how? The “visible hand” and all that. It was a book, if not a movie. And its basic message was that a few college-grad experts — highly trained technocrats, all — mattered more than competition. Government experts have the information. They have the skills. The techniques are known. Don’t give us any of that “free market” mumbo-jumbo, they say.
And yet, while the federal government’s efforts to build a usable healthcare.gov website proved feckless, lame and wildly expensive, Obamacare’s increasingly unbelievable proponents kept the patter going. Some states were doing just fine, they offered. Maryland, for instance.
Well, no.
The Old Line State has had just as much trouble in its new line of pushing online medical insurance policies as other governments. Biggest problem? You mean, other than not being able to put up a usable website on schedule? Or getting only four people signed up on launch day?
The Washington Post informs us that state officials ignored warnings that “no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan” for its scheduled launch.
The evidence is in. Want a new market “exchange”? Don’t turn to government.
Rely, instead, on folks competing in the real market.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Paul Feyerabend
Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.