Category: free trade & free markets

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

A Nickel’s Worth of Freedom

“If we are going to pay for your contraceptives,” said Rush Limbaugh on air, referring to Ms. Sandra Fluke’s congressional testimony, “and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

In my Townhall column this weekend, “’Tis a Pity He’s a Boor,” I responded with a “No, thanks.” But I did defend what I took to be the point Rush was trying to make: “The issue isn’t about contraceptives, but the right to choose . . . on your own nickel.”

The flak Rush received became an avalanche of advertiser pull-outs from his show. And an apology.

And this all points to something interesting about freedom.

Rush has freedom of speech. He would still have it if every advertiser in the world refused to touch him and he took to blogging. His freedom requires no one to support him. Free speech doesn’t force anyone to listen – or advertise.

Similarly, Ms. Fluke has freedom of association, sexually and otherwise, including her relationships with the university in question and its contracted insurance company. But such freedom doesn’t obligate her school or insurance company or other consumers (through passed-on costs) to pay for her contraceptives. We all have freedom.

The same freedom of contract that allows advertisers to drop Rush’s show also allows businesses to choose employee benefit plans, workers to choose where they will work, and insurance companies to decide what terms they will offer.

Or it should. And in the specific case of contraception coverage did, until the Obama Administration dictated otherwise.

Several nasty words ago, that’s what started this brouhaha.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

Closed: No Competition

Ancient societies were mostly closed societies. Modern society (at least as conceived by most of America’s “founding fathers”) was to be something very different: open.

But today there’s way too much “managed” competition, basically closing out businesses not on some insider list.

Julie Crowe, a veteran of the armed forces and lifelong resident of Bloomington, Illinois, wanted to start up a van ride service, mainly to drive party-going Illinois State students safely home. There are big buses for Bloomington revelers, but no vans.  Her new service would have provided interesting competition for existing outfits, and her idea of providing safer, more personal, comfier rides home — arguably better than taxicabs, and certainly better than the buses — smacks of a plausible business plan.

But the city denied her a permit to even try, on the grounds that her proposal wasn’t “in the public interest.”

Preposterous, of course. Or, as her lawyer, Jacob Huebert, puts it,

How can city planners know the “right” number of vehicles to serve the community? They can’t possibly know that, any more than they can know the right number of supermarkets or the right number of restaurants.

Huebert is associate counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute, which has as its stated goal ensuring “that the rights to earn a living and to start a business, which are essential to a free and prosperous society, are available not just to a politically privileged few, but to all.”

A great cause. The “eternal vigilance” required to establish and maintain a free, open society means challenging idiotic government encroachments one case at a time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

A Kickstarter in the Pants

Wikipedia surprised a lot of people, changed a lot of minds: Online collaboration can accomplish great things. Following Wikipedia, other interactive, collaborative, not-quite-commercial Web-based projects have offered more evidence that the Internet can transform everyday life.

Take Kickstarter.com. It’s really ramped up to something impressive, as Carl Franzen points out at Talking Points Memo:

One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.

Lots of folks around the world — including shirttail acquaintances of mine — have successfully used the Internet service to fund outré projects. Basically, they drew up proposals and placed them on Kickstarter, and people the world over chipped in to get the projects off the ground. As Franzen explains, all sorts of projects find funding that way, “everything from iPod Nano watches to children’s books on reproduction.”

While I look at this as a great development, another way in which free peoples can get good things done without government, not everyone is so positive — the above-quoted Strickler, for instance: “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”

Or maybe not. Maybe Kickstarter is pointing towards the right way to fund projects that, before the Internet, were hard to invest in or otherwise sponsor.

Maybe it’s about time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling free trade & free markets

Will They Ever Learn?

In which industries do prices and costs rise fastest? Those in which government is most involved.

The process is no mystery. Regulate supply by limiting entry into the business — to “increase quality,” of course — will raise prices, as producers behave oligopolistically. Government does this with health care providers, and have done so increasingly for the last century. If, at the same time, you subsidize the consumption, that amounts to increasing demand, which also puts upward pressure on prices. This has been accelerated in America since the beginning of Medicare, and with each additional healthcare program.

Typical government intervention double whammy.

Higher education is also not exempt from the play of supply and demand. One policy advocate’s explanation of this, which you can read excerpted, online, at National Review’s site, is worth considering. He explains what happens as vendors rake in profits under a regulated-and-subsidized system: they

sponsor crowd-pleasing sports events on weekends, building public goodwill. Other profits are used to hire professional lobbyists to plead for both more subsidies and more freedom to set prices. You also convince the government to allow you and other incumbent . . . sellers to form a private organization with the authority to decide whether new sellers can become “approved . . . vendors” for the purposes of receiving public subsidies. Unsurprisingly, few new sellers are approved.

Predictably, the analysis is followed by halfway measures that don’t lead to a free market in education at all. That’s just too radical.

Education policy wonks, like educators themselves, seem never to learn . . . economics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

Stark Protectionism

The markets of the ancient world were often sewn up by kings and courts and priesthoods. In Egypt or Assyria or Rome, you had to pay off a guild to practice a trade, at least if yours was a common craft, and even ask permission of the sovereign.

Closed entry was the norm, and it certainly contributed to the age’s forbidding pyramid of wealth (which overshadows present One Percenter concerns): Vast hordes of the very poor and the “just scraping by”; tradesmen; slaves to the landed and wealthy; and then the very few rich and powerful. In Europe, this system opened up, in fits and starts, after the fall of Rome, but the basic idea was retained in the policy of mercantilism, against which Anders Chydenius, Adam Smith, and the exponents of laissez faire argued so persuasively. The social advantages of competition for customers and laborers and capital became widely recognized.

And yet free trade never won full sway anywhere.

Cut to today. Dateline: St. Louis, Missouri.

Michael Munie

Michael Munie wanted to go into the moving business, but needed the permission of . . . his competitors.

This, the very opposite of “free enterprise,” is the living embodiment of mercantilist “public-private” collusion, where the state secures existing businesses from “upstart” competitors in what Timothy Sandefur calls “an especially stark example of legislative protectionism.”

So, best wishes to Mr. Munie’s lawsuit, Munie v. Skouby, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has helped him bring it. Freedom requires the breaking down of barriers to business entry. Always has. Always will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture political challengers

New Orbits for Old

A recent study using something called “gravitational microlensing” suggests that every star has at least one planet. There are a lot of planets out there. So there “must” be Earth-similar planets. And “therefore” life. Intelligent life. And, and, and . . .

Back on Earth, the search for intelligence amongst the Republican presidential candidates (not to mention the Democratic incumbent) is a more haphazard affair. We lack that crucial microlensing.
Mars, the red planet
Yesterday I noted a peculiar alignment: Ron Paul defending Mitt Romney, with the other Republican wannabes piling against Romney in a disgraceful showing of anti-capitalism. Rep. Paul defended Romney not out of Republican loyalty, but out of principle. Does this suggest an affinity between the two, heretofore unnoticed?

Maybe. On the face of it, Romney doesn’t seem all that dissimilar from Barack Obama – not in foreign policy, surely not in big government instincts (the purveyors of unconstitutional medical regulations, each) — but his work in business does suggest that Romney might be an improvement on Obama, if elected. Marginally moving towards Paul’s apogee.

But the country needs more than just a marginal improvement, right now. Another centrist — even one who understands the social utility of the hostile takeover — won’t balance budgets. Not when the Washington orbit remains retrograde, unable to stop spending and borrowing like tomorrow is somebody else’s problem.

Which is why Ron Paul’s candidacy will retain traction for many primaries to come. Since our problems are the mainstream, Paul fills the need for something extra-mainstream — and, to normal political folks, that will undoubtedly seem “extra-terrestrial.”

In Washington, all intelligent life lies beyond the usual orbits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

Firing People for Fun & Profit

After winning the New Hampshire primary last night, Mitt Romney charged that “some desperate Republicans” have joined forces with President Obama “to put free enterprise on trial.”

Newt Gingrich calls Romney a “vulture capitalist” and blasted his work as CEO of Bain Capital as “bankrupting companies and laying off employees.” Rick Perry snidely attacked Mitt for “all the jobs that he killed,” adding “I’m sure he was worried he would run out of pink slips.”
Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney
A Wall Street Journal report quoted Jon Huntsman: “What is clear is [Mr. Romney] likes firing people.”

So, did Romney say “I like being able to fire people”? What he said was, “I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

I, too, like being able to fire companies who don’t adequately supply the services I demand.

Yet, what about Romney’s work at Bain Capital?

Bain Capital took firms having trouble making a profit and attempted to make them more profitable. Sometimes that meant cutting back the work force to avoid bankruptcy, where everyone would lose their jobs. Sometimes it meant cutting up a company and its assets and selling them to entrepreneurs who could do better.

Not all businesses succeed. No surprise, then, that politicians used to spending a seemingly unlimited supply of other people’s money regardless of performance fail to understand this simple reality.

To his credit, Ron Paul defended Romney, saying of Gingrich, Huntsman and Perry, “I think they’re wrong. They are either just demagoguing or they don’t have the vaguest idea how the market works.”

Or both.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Downs and Ups

We hear more about inequality when times get tough than when the economy is booming.

This suggests most people are satisfied with positive growth, but that, when the opposite occurs, some fall back to covetousness and envy. When dissatisfied, we look around for someone to blame.

So what’s roadblocking the long-run upward trend?

There’s the recent bust in the ol’ boom-and-bust. But there’s a deeper problem here. Maybe.

Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman, notes that America’s upward mobility is stymied by a whole heckuva lot of government intervention . . . and that a New York Times story about how Americans “enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe” should surprise no one, for America isn’t “the land of the free” and Europe isn’t exactly  “socialist” — it’s more a case that the “economies of America, Canada, and Europe are all variations of corporatism, in which government power primarily benefits the well-connected and well-to-do.”

America differs from Europe in the particulars of its interventionism, not in kind.

Still, things could be worse. Veronique de Rugy, writing in the February Reason (not yet online), shows that downward mobility was in evidence pre-Bailouts. Of 1999’s 675,000 millionaires, only 38,000 remained millionaires in 2007.

That, surely, is enough 1 percenter income decline to satisfy your worst schadenfreude.

On a brighter note, de Rugy insists there’s still dynamism in the American economy, and that the lowest income earners had, during the same pre-bust period, made substantial gains.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Ups and Downs

Inflationism is the ideology of increasing the money supply to spur economic activity and “growth.” In the 19th century, economists were generally against it, though certain “innovators” (cranks) thought that increasing the supply of money would “increase aggregate demand” with no bad repercussions. “Cross of gold” kind of nonsense; “free silver” idiocy.

In the 20th century, alas, inflationism went mainstream.

Today, a few respectable economists — high-profilers like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and U.C. Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, for example — embrace inflationism. Occasionally their arguments sound sophisticated, but all are just warmed-over rehashes of very old errors.

It’s the economic equivalent of the “perpetual motion machine”: the eternal quest to get something for nothing, progress on the cheap. It inevitably fails — but only after fooling people by “working” for a while.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh, discussing declining housing prices, notes that “it’s becoming harder for the Fed, HUD, the Treasury Department and the National Association of Realtors to pretend the 25-year real estate inflation was anything but a $15 trillion rip-off.” He welcomes the deflation of housing prices. The idea that one’s house should increase in value by always increasing in price — that’s really just a recipe for social disaster. It endured as long as it did only “through government subsidized debt.”

Thank Congress; thank their Fannie and their Freddie; thank the inflationist Fed.

“Creating” money and loosening credit tends to nudge up prices . . . but not all prices equally. It signals people to over-invest in certain sectors, often real estate. This creates a sector boom . . . that then must “bust.”

The alternative? The honesty of sound money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency

Secret Censorship

“There are so many things about this story that are crazy,” according to a detailed and exasperated report at Techdirt.com, “it’s difficult to know where to start.”

What story? The one you’ve probably heard nothing about.

Back in late 2010, the federal government seized Dajaz1.com, a popular Internet blog devoted to hip hop. The Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shut down the website domain claiming it was infringing on music copyrights. ICE “put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals.”

The government then failed to abide by the legal requirements for filing an asset forfeiture case, conducting a secret legal effort, instead. Motions, hearings, and court decisions were filed in secret and placed under “seal,” denying the website owners and their attorney any opportunity for challenge.

Freedom of speech? Due process of law? Obliterated. And yet, earlier this month, the government admitted it had no legitimate case, no probable cause to go after this website in the first place, and, after a year of censorship, finally returned the web domain to its rightful owners.

That a website can be seized by our government, without a charge being publicly made and the crime proven in a fair and open court of law, is absolutely frightening.

What’s even scarier, though, is that legislation currently being considered by Congress — Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act — would give the federal government even more sweeping powers to regulate and control the Internet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.