Category: free trade & free markets

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

Ride the Market Express

What’s the biggest expense for people in the lowest income bracket? Housing? Food? Medical care?

No.

It’s transportation.

Across all income levels, transportation comes in as the second largest expenditure. It’s a big deal.

Places to go; people to see. Often, it’s business to do. Our way of life depends on moving things and people around.

The Washington Post headlined a recent story, “Infrastructure is a priority, survey shows, but paying for it isn’t.” The implication? Americans want a free lunch.

That’s bad. But not true.

The Post should have made it clear that people are specifically skeptical about “paying for it” through higher taxes. The Rockefeller Foundation Infrastructure Survey found that over 70 percent of us oppose raising the gas tax, 64 percent are against adding tolls to existing highways, and 58 percent aghast at the thought of a tax on each mile driven.

However, the survey’s most interesting number was 78 — that’s the overwhelming percentage of Americans who want private sector investment in transportation projects. As consumers, we know we’re not responsible for all the costs and cost overruns involved in bringing most products or services to market. When we decide to purchase something we do pay some of these costs, but not before. Privatizing transportation would allow market forces like “price” and “consumer demand” to get better transportation to market, with investors — not consumers — taking the bulk of the risk.

Or we could let politicians and bureaucrats continue to make things worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

The Real Reaganism

Last week Americans honored the late Ronald Reagan on the occasion of his 100th birthday. There was one man who certainly made a difference.

Reagan’s cumulative pressing of his core belief in freedom and free markets was more important than any single accomplishment — or mistake. His dogged commitment to the principles of freedom changed the course of history, even as Reagan, the politician, didn’t always live up to his lofty beliefs. As president, he ran up (then) record budget deficits and he flip-flopped on draft registration, for example.

Still, as much as President Reagan could fall short, his legacy grows sweeter over time, in part because of a second major idea. He believed that the common sense of the people was far more capable and worthy of trust in making the important decisions we face than are politicians left to their own devices.

That’s why Mr. Reagan took time from his 1980 campaign to send a letter to New Jersey activist Sam Perelli, who was lobbying his state’s legislators to establish a process where citizens could put issues on the ballot. “George Bush and I congratulate you on your efforts to attain, for the people of New Jersey, the right to initiative and referendum,” Reagan wrote. “We urge you to keep up your fight and we endorse your efforts.”

Mr. Reagan is remembered for his faith in freedom and in our democratic ability to defend that freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

Defrosting the Obamalogic

I thought I was done talking about Obama’s Chamber of Commerce speech. But the Mises Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker has tackled another goofy element in it. The president claimed that government regulators “make our lives better” and “often spark competition and innovation.” In his example, the government’s “modest” regulatory targets imposed “a couple decades ago” allegedly mean that “a typical fridge now costs half as much and uses a quarter of the energy that it once did — and you don’t have to defrost.”

One wonders what profit-seeking folks like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, Edisons and Fords did without regulatory impetus. Hide the innovations people are happy to pay for until regulators come along and force entrepreneurs to make money from them?

As it happens, there’s a history to refrigerators. Patents for auto-defrosting fridges were first issued in 1928, and by 1951 these fridges were making their way into homes. In the 1970s they proliferated. As Tucker explains, this is normal market practice. “A company found a way to package [frost-free freezers] as a luxury good available in some markets. Another company saw the advance and emulated it. . . .”

Nobody had to point guns at fridge makers.

In “Blow Hot, Blow Cold,” Robert H. Miller reveals the usual way government “helps progress” — by struggling to rebuild what it previously destroyed. Example? The electric-generating windmill industry that the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act so handily suppressed.

Progress is built into markets. Governments? Not so much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

Practicing Competence Without a License

You just can’t win. Well, you can; but if you do win — or even just make a decent go of it — that only proves you’re cheating.

Before you object, please take a breath. Note the sterling sentences, above, with subjects and predicates and everything. I must be practicing grammar without a license! At least, that’s what the charge would be if I were to dispute the syntax of pronouncement from the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

See, an official at NCDOT has accused David Cox, a member of a citizens group, of “practicing engineering without a license.” This was not just colorful rhetoric. The accuser filed a complaint with the state licensing bureau.

Cox’s group wants city and state officials to authorize traffic lights at a couple intersections. The Department of Transportation hired an engineering consultant to demonstrate that the traffic lights are unnecessary. In response, Cox helped prepare a sophisticated counter-analysis with diagrams and traffic projections. Cox, a computer scientist, did such a great job that he allegedly crossed the line from legal bumbling to illegal knows-what-he’s-doing.

I shan’t tear this notion to bits myself. You’re no doubt doing so in your head, and without first obtaining governmental permission — you outlaw! I will say that in this case, “practicing engineering without a license” might as well mean “petitioning of government without a license.”

But we don’t need licenses for that. We have the right. A constitutionally recognized right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

Do the Business, People!

What can we do to help commerce? the French finance minister asked a group of businessmen in the late 17th century. The reply became famous — was, indeed, the snappy comeback heard ’round the world: “Laissez-nous faire!”

Let us be; leave us alone.

Or: Get out of the way! No onerous taxes, no playing favorites with subsidies or regulations or “protection.”

It’s unlikely that President Obama keeps the works of the French Physiocrats, or later “political economy” writers, by his bedside. Speaking before the Chamber of Commerce recently, he enjoined businessmen to “hire and invest,” “get in the game,” etc.

“Ultimately,” he explained, “winning the future is not just about what the government can do to help you succeed. It’s about what you can do to help America succeed.”

Stop dithering! Hire!

But what competent capitalist, enjoying a huge and lasting increase in demand, and having the means to hire new employees to help meet it, would refuse to do so? Obama speaks as if “helping the economy” were the point of getting staff. No. One hires to produce, sell and make money. This does “help the economy”; it is the economy. But companies only hurt themselves and the economy if they hire persons not yet needed just to “win the future.”

Responding to Obama’s remarks, Harold Jackson, CEO of Buffalo Supply, says it’s “a little outside the bounds to suggest that if we hire people we don’t need, there will be more demand.”

A little? Understatement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government U.S. Constitution

Not His Job

President Obama will address the State of the Union, today, speaking before Congress. These annual efforts are almost uniformly unbearable, with too much applause and too much rah-rah-boy politicking. And far too little thought.

Scuttlebutt has it that the president will concentrate on the economy, on “jobs.”

After the sea change of the last election, one might hope that he’d stay on topic and address constitutionally-mandated issues of his office.

“Jobs” are none of his business. “Jobs” — by which I mean the number of people employed this way or that out there in the non-governmental sector, and by which he means the number of jobs total, including those paid for out of taxpayer expense — should not be his chief worry.

No president in recent memory has excelled by fiddling with policy to micromanage “the economy.” No one knows this stuff. Not even college professors specializing in macroeconomics.

What government operatives know is how to get elected, stay in office. How to preen for television cameras, read a prompter.

You know, the essentials.

But they cannot possibly know enough to “run the economy.”

And yet, Obama talks about making the country “more competitive.” Oh, come on. Just open up trade — which promotes widespread co-operation as well as competition — stop micromanaging the money supply through the Fed, make regulations fit a rule of law and not a vast bureaucratic command system, and let it go. Let individuals and businesses worry about “competiveness.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

What Gets Lost in Washington

The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates.

It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-course race . . . as I argued yesterday.

Meanwhile, how the anti-Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too.

Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Though “job-killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-through plan.

Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.

Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.

Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it.

That common-sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

A Light Bulb of an Idea

Suppose you knew that a heavily-demanded, glow-giving product, cherished for more than a century, was about to become illegal. And suppose you wished to continue being a USER (gulp) of this product and maybe even a DEALER of it (double-gulp) after the ban takes effect.

What would you do?

Stock up.

Cato Institute analyst Doug Bandow recently and publicly stated, quite bluntly, that he will “become an entrepreneur — as a black market operator.”

So why is a dignified fellow like Bandow descending to such a desperate measure?

He likes light bulbs, and, 100-watt incandescent light bulbs will be illegal in this land of the free come January 2012, with lower-wattage incandescent bulbs prohibited a year later.

Bandow prefers incandescent bulbs to fluorescent bulbs because of the softer light they offer, among other reasons. And he dislikes the market-mangling already happening because of the impending prohibition.

Never mind which form of artificial light is better for which purposes by the lights of mere consumers. Those calculations are all individual and freedom-dependent. Meanwhile, “politicians in Washington believe they know best and are determined to inconvenience the public in the name of saving energy.”

At Townhall, back in 2007, I wrote about the government-mandated switch to fluorescents. I didn’t bring up the idea of a black market in light bulbs, but I did insist that some of us would “rather fight than . . . have them tell us how to switch.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Pay the Boatman

Attack the outsider — the first resort of the unarmed arguer.

My Townhall column praising Washington State anti-tax activist Tim Eyman raised the ire of Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat. He insinuates that it’s easy for me to like Eyman, for I never need to “catch the late boat after a Mariners game,” since I live in Virginia and Eyman’s initiatives affect the Evergreen State’s ferries.

Westneat complains that a voter-approved Eyman measure reducing car taxes took away the main source of subsidy (he doesn’t use that word) for Puget Sound’s ferry system. Turning common-sense responsibility on its head, he writes, “instead of levying a tax across a broad group (all car owners), as we did pre-Eyman to help pay for ferries, the costs now are increasingly heaped on a narrow group — the ferry riders themselves.”

Horrors! People paying for what they use!

Westneat seems to be into financial irresponsibility. “Yes, [the system] wastes money sometimes. What big organization doesn’t?” Nice dismissal of the incompetence and corruption in a state-run biz that cannot even account for its cash.

When the ferries were taken over from private business by the state, it was, he says, because of the previous owners’ “usurious 30-percent fare hikes.” Not mentioned? This followed the cessation of Seattle’s wartime shipworks, and a huge decrease in demand.

Some folks sure apply basic economic insights selectively. Dispersing costs, concentrating benefits? That they idolize. Economies of scale? Their arguments run aground.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

Study War Some More?

Some people love spending so much they’d kill to do it.

A while back, Paul Krugman, today’s leading Keynesian shill, trotted out the old chestnut that World War II brought America out of the Great Depression. In The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, Steve Horwitz provides a concise, reasoned response:

Wealth increases when people are able to engage in exchanges they believe will be mutually beneficial. The production of new goods that consumers wish to purchase is the beginning of this process.

And borrowing from future generations to spend on goods not connected “to the desires of consumers, but rather to the desire of the politically powerful” doesn’t work.

Krugman talks war not because he wants one, but because he thinks government spending is so important that he’ll take what he can get, “even if the spending isn’t particularly wise.”

He misses the point.

The malaise that holds back recovery after a shock like the Implosion of 2008 isn’t lack of spending as such — it’s lack of confidence. Capitalism depends on trillions of separate plans and desires working together. When investors are wary of investing and consumers — fearing the future — don’t know what they can really afford to buy, no amount of “jump start” splurging will repair the engine.

At the end of World War II conscripts were freed, wage and price controls were abandoned, and a sense of victory permeated everything — and the Great Depression ended. Finally.

The lesson? End wars. Curtail regulations. Free up the system.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.