Category: too much government

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture property rights too much government

Big Government Apologetics

fragile, socialism

Journalists play different roles.

Too few report. Too many engage in elaborate apologetics for favored causes.

Like big government.

Take this headline: “Venezuela’s Crisis Is Rooted In Oil Prices — and Authoritarianism.”

Guess: reporting, or bending over backwards to save socialism?

The article’s summary of the decline and fall of Venezuela is accurate insofar as it indicates assaults on liberty, including nationalizations and monetary inflation. But neither “oil prices” nor dependence on oil spawned Venezuela’s crisis.

Every industry, city and nation will experience unfavorable markets, now and then. But what’s fundamental is their “antifragility.” And, news to journalists: socialist societies are fragile in ways that freer societies are not.

Suppose Venezuela had had a free market when oil prices dropped so precipitously. People would then have shifted, however grumpily, into enterprises now more profitable than drilling for and distributing oil.

It is no blunder to specialize, to exploit comparative advantages in knowledge, skills or resources, and to engage in local, regional or international trade. It’s fine even if an economy’s production and exports ends up being dominated by just one good. What matters is whether people are free or burdened by government controls. If the latter, how hard does government make it to cope with changing circumstances?

Unhampered market prices supply the information and incentives needed to adapt to all kinds of changes. But if an economy is chronically distorted and calcified by government controls, it becomes much harder to adapt … and much harder to survive.

Today’s journalists routinely adapt facts to story, rather than adjust stories to reality. Guys, give up the ideological apologetics. Go back to reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

More of the Same?

USMCA, NAFTA, Trump, free trade, harbor scene, protectionism, tariffs,

For those who hated NAFTA, and have supported Donald Trump in his complaints about “the very bad deal” that the North American Free Trade Agreement [allegedly] has been, I ask: what was bad about NAFTA that isn’t in Donald Trump’s new version, the United States-​Mexico-​Canada Agreement?

Actual question. I am not in the least bit interested in gotchas, here. I am willing to celebrate USMCA when (a) I can make sense of it and (b) it proves not just more of the same.

The thing I liked best about NAFTA was that it had “Free Trade” in the title. I like free trade. Trade is good; freedom is good. It is not generally bad to trade with Mexico and Canada — for Mexicans, Canadians, and Americans. I simply have trouble believing that politicians and their aides (along with overly-​friendly lobbyists) know better than market competition what the terms of those zillions of deals should be.

But I freely admit, what I didn’t like about NAFTA was that there was more “free trade” in the title than in the agreement itself.

NAFTA was managed trade. 

As far as I can make out, so is USMCA.

Oddly, I just heard two of the three Daily Wire guys* praising USMCA for setting quotas on how much of what can be produced where.

Quotas and mandates and the like are not free trade.

“Managed trade” is just another way of saying “protectionism.” Savvy politicians don’t even like calling it “managed trade.” They call it “fair trade.” 

Free trade is fair enough. Politicians’ “fair trade” isn’t free enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles, recent podcasts: dailywire​.com.

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Illustration: Dutch free traders in Harbor Scene by Abraham Storck  (1644 – 1708)

 

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

Censorship for Unity

British Labour MP Lucy Powell, censorship, UK

“Social media has given extremists a new tool with which to recruit and radicalise,” writes British Labour MP Lucy Powell in The Guardian. 

And just where are people “being exposed to extremist material”?

On Facebook!

“Instead of small meetings in pubs or obscure websites in the darkest corners of the internet,” she explains, “our favourite social media site is increasingly where hate is cultivated.”

Sharing ideas that she opposes is dangerous because they quickly spread. But her main ire is directed against private “Facebook groups,” an environment she argues “normalises these hateful views” because “critics are removed from the groups.”

Apparently, the problem with Facebook is that it is open — and that it is closed. Facebook is something new and dangerous because everybody uses it. Yet, because it allows closed groups, it is something very much like … “small meetings in pubs.”

Ms. Powell has, naturally enough, proposed a bill. “The responsibility to regulate these social media platforms falls on the government,” she asserts. “I believe we can force those who run these echo chambers to stamp out the evil that is currently so prominent.”

Like any politician, she talks up unity, of course. She demands the government prevent social media from “being hijacked by those who instead wish to divide.” 

But remember, she is a member of a political party that opposes other parties. She is trying to suppress divisions that exist. The implication of her agenda is a one-​party state, where opposition is suppressed.*

By censorship.

A word she somehow neglects to use.

Online extremism, she writes, “is something we are frighteningly unequipped to deal with.”

I’d say she is frighteningly equipped.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Social media critic Dave Cullen notices that MP Lucy Powell admits that there is a huge personal element here: she is a politician who doesn’t like criticism.

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Illustration by JG

 

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Retreat to Atlanta

California, Yamaha, brain drain, business, escape, taxes

“California is the place you oughta be” — or so sang Jerry Scoggins for The Beverly Hillbillies. That may still hold true, if you are an oil millionaire retiring to a pleasant climate.

But if you are trying to make your fortune, the direction is outbound.

Take, for example, the case of Yamaha Motor USA.

The company’s big bike sales — motorcycles 500cc and up — went way down during the last dozen months, 19 percent. And since Yamaha’s operations are in California, hits to revenue like that intersect alarmingly with ongoing hits to the cost of doing business. 

Which explains the decision to move the company to “just outside of Atlanta, Georgia,” as reported by Jensen Beeler in Asphalt & Rubber.

“It should be an obvious statement that California is an expensive place to operate a business,” Beeler explains. “The state isn’t known as being a tax haven for corporations, the property values are high, which means buildings are expensive, and the standard of living for Los Angeles is one of the highest in America, which means that employees have to be paid a premium as well.”

And Beeler’s report does not even mention the state’s regulatory burden.

Problem? Southern California is “where the bulk of the motorcycle industry resides,” and Yamaha will face some difficulty being so distant from its industry’s major talent pool.* But there are a few automotive and motorcycle companies in Georgia, so Yamaha is not alone.

Indeed, if politicians continue to wreak havoc on their business sector, the Golden State bike industry will lose more than just Yamaha.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The company will keep “a small cadre of Yamaha employees” behind in Cypress, California, focusing on testing and racing.

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Illustration by JGill (running silhouette from Max Pixel)

 

Categories
general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

An Evil Ism

socialism, Antifa, means, ends, refutation, fascism, intentions

With “democratic socialism” again on the rise, a refresher course in history seems apt: socialism has demonstrated the strong tendency to end up in totalitarian tyranny, poverty, and genocide.

As I mentioned on Monday, Reason’s Nick Gillespie suspects that this response is not very convincing to people tempted by socialism. But really, why not? What about a history of horror could be appealing?

Which is why the question “Do Socialists Mean Well?” as answered by Grant Babcock, might help. Babcock answers in the negative.* “Socialism is not ultimately an end but a means. And as a means, socialism is evil.”

With an evil means, one’s chosen end is irrelevant, because of other results. “If I told you I wanted to end homelessness, you might say I had good intentions,” Babcock explains. But if he confessed to seek that end “by conscripting the homeless into the army … [n]ot only should you say I have bad intentions, you shouldn’t give me any moral credit for saying I want to end homelessness.”

True. But Babcock has to engage in his extended argument about means because, for purposes of his essay, anyway, he began with the premise that while fascists are evil because they seek directly to harm some people, socialists do not.

Uh, really? Most socialists make much of taking from “the rich,” however they define the rich — as “the one percent” or “the privileged,” etc.

Call it expropriation; call it theft: that’s a lot of anger and ill will directed to one group of people.

In that way, the appeal of socialism is too much like the appeal of fascism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Babcock, by the way, denies the label “socialist” to social democrats who call themselves “democratic socialists” — by definition. On this matter, see “Bernie’s Slippery Definition of Democratic Socialism” and “Is Denmark Socialist?” on this site.

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Categories
ideological culture Popular too much government

The Irony Law of Socialism

Under capitalism, said the old socialists, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Today’s socialists admit this hoary “immiseration thesis” is old hat.

“The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor,” explains City University of New York Professor Corey Robin in the New York Times. “It’s that it makes us unfree.”

Unfree?

Nick Gillespie at Reason tries to make sense of that breathtaking inversion of the usual anti-​socialist argument, which Gillespie characterizes as the invocation of “Stalin, the Great Leap Forward, or even Hugo Chavez.”*

But is there really anything new here? 

“When my well-​being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination,” writes the tax-​funded socialist professor. He wants “to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale,” which is so very not new. It’s reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which imagined rescue “from that sordid necessity of living for others.”

How real-​world socialism “frees” us, though, is palpably oppressive: by burdening business and labor and trade with taxes, prohibitions, regulations.

And constant bullying. 

The ironies abound, too. Gillespie notes that “Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez may rail against the gig economy, but just like Bernie and Warren she uses Uber every chance she gets.” Jim Carrey praises “free” medicine in Canada, acknowledging no costs.

The cost of “free stuff” is actual freedom. And the cost of actual freedom is paying for what you get, and not getting what you won’t pay for.

That’s the Irony Law of Socialism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Gillespie also says it is unpersuasive. Well, unpersuasive to whom? As always, many arguments for the truth are necessary.

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