Author: Redactor

Categories
national politics & policies

Pat Paternalism

Ever since Demosthenes choked up a pebble, politicians have been trying to improve their persuasion techniques.

The new “nudge” initiative is, in that context, not new.

Our glorious leaders in Washington are in the process of cooking up a “Behavioral Insights Team,” which will research behavioral economics, psychology and allied fields for new ways to nudge we, the people, to do what they, the rulers, want.

Ominous?

It’s a revival of the fashionable “libertarian paternalism” of a few years back. The idea is to find ways to encourage “good behavior” by providing the right contexts, juxtapositions, and options for citizens as they interface with their beloved overlords.

Excuse me: beloved public servants.

Businesses have used similar techniques. What do you think the art of product placement near cash registers is but a “nudging” of consumers to “impulse buy”?

Folks in government smilingly shrug off any ominous odor of intimidation: placing organ donor options on drivers’ licenses is a fine example of the technique. They want to extend such practices to encourage us to save, drive safely, pay taxes., etc., etc.

But how well behaved are our paternalistic manipulators? After all, as Greg Gutfeld pointed out on Red Eye or The Five (they blend in my mind), the reason they must encourage people to save is that the incentives to save have been undermined by other government policies. And people would pay taxes more readily if taxes were easier to understand . . .

The paternalism is obvious. The context anything but “libertarian.” But, all in all, much worse things have come out of Washington in recent years.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

William Leggett

If the clause of the Constitution under which the Post Office establishment exists were struck from the instrument to-morrow, is any one weak enough to suppose that the activity of commerce would not soon supply a system of its own?

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Thought

Milton Friedman

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.

Categories
media and media people too much government

Cuban Luxury

The New York Times has an odd title for its report on the slowly increasing disposable income in some incipiently quasi-post-Communist corners of Cuban society: “Slowly, Cuba Is Developing an Appetite for Spending.”

What a starving man lacks is not the appetite for food.

It is true that in any production-killing statist society, people may suppress ambitions and desires in psychological self-defense. But they hear about what they’re missing. If wealth and opportunity are allowed to begin to return, it is not “appetite” that revives only slowly and tentatively. It’s long-range planning of production, accumulating of capital, engagement in previously outlawed forms of trade. People must wonder whether the new hints of freedom will be expanded or capriciously reversed.

What counts as indulgence in the new Cuba? Watching a 3-D movie not on the big screen of a theatre, but on a 55-inch screen in an apartment. “This is novel — at least in Cuba,” says Manuel Alejandro, a Havana resident who recently saw his second 3-D movie on that 55-inch screen.

But those with disposable income to spend on a living-room movie theater, backyard swimming pool or car washes “are strictly a minority in Cuba, where the state pays its four million workers [in a country with an estimated 11 million people] an average salary of $19 a month.”

Most Cubans “live humbly.” For them, the slow development of economic freedom at the margins of the failed communist utopia is way too slow.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Tweet, Tweet, Zoom

Recently, Peter Thiel, a very interesting mover and shaker in today’s most vibrant markets, criticized the upshot of today’s technology: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That’s a slam at Twitter, a free service that somehow makes enough to stay afloat.

The lack of flying cars, though: Is that a problem?

Joshua Gans thinks we should ask ourselves whether we really want flying cars. You know, in our heart of hearts. After all, kids want to be Superman.

Markets only deliver the possible.

And much of what they deliver we hadn’t thought of before: iPods/iPhones/iPads weren’t really dreamed about much, outside of Dick Tracy/Star Trek fandom.

As for Twitter, Gans says it’s “a new communications protocol and more than just social media,” which makes it “more than merely trivial.” I’m sure he’s right. But I still keep kicking myself: whose time is worth so little that it’s worth complaining about free stuff?

Thiel’s focus is on technology, not markets — but it is the market that brings us stuff. Free markets are not “free” as in no price, they are free as in being unencumbered by busybody regulators, prohibitionists, and thieves. Such markets strike me as amazingly effective at providing a wide range of goods to the rich and the poor and everyone in-between. Hobbled, subsidized markets, on the other hand, exhibit Tweetable perversities — and usually serve the rich better than the poor.

Still, a lot of folks complain about what markets have to offer. I don’t get that, either. Hey, I reject most offers. So can they.

I say we stick to complaining about offers we can’t refuse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

William Leggett

It ought to be one of the leading objects of the democracy of this country for many years to come to diminish the power of the general and several state governments, not to increase it.

Categories
Thought

Alexis de Tocqueville

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Categories
general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Give PSA’s a Chance?

After the George Zimmerman verdict, a slice of the country protested, insisting on the guilt of the exonerated Zimmerman. The president went on air and pled “for understanding.” And Fox’s Bill O’Reilly took the occasion to chide the country’s black leadership for not doing the right kind of Public Service Announcements.

Much of what O’Reilly said was on target. The high rates of unwed parenthood in the African-American community — 73 percent — and the consequent predominance of single-parent households lies at the heart of many problems.

Yet, neither O’Reilly’s idea of PSAs “telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant,” nor President Obama’s efforts to give young black men “the sense that their country cares about them,” would likely change behavior.

Black unemployment and rates of illegitimate births were lower half a century ago than white rates. What happened?

Black Americans were hardest hit by the rise of the welfare state.

First, raising minimum wages placed low-skilled workers at a disadvantage, with each wage floor hike doing more damage.

Second, the general switch in state aid from assistance to intact families to aid to mothers with dependent children took away a major disincentive for irresponsible sexual practices. Throw in the sexual revolution, and you have a powder keg.

Third, the War on Drugs established the market conditions for illegal activity, and encouraged the formation of gangs. Drugs made users unfit for most work, while providing a lucrative draw for those wanting to advance economically.

None of this is a mystery. But sadly, I fear America’s black leadership would rather do Bill O’Reilly’s PSA’s than really address these problems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

William Leggett

As a general rule, the prosperity of rational men depends on themselves. Their talents and their virtues shape their fortunes. They are therefore the best judges of their own affairs, and should be permitted to seek their own happiness in their own way, untrammelled by the capricious interference of legislative bungling, so long as they do not violate the equal rights of others, nor transgress the general laws for the security of person and property.

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links

Townhall: Get Well Soon, Mayor Filner

Send your sympathies to San Diego’s beleaguered mayor. Click on over to Townhall for this weekend’s Common Sense column. Come back here for a few more gulps.