Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Three Cheers for Robert Murphy

Here’s something worth three cheers. Possibly four.

Robert Murphy is a prolific young economist of the free-market “Austrian” school of economics, which has a vibrant online presence at Mises.org, the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

In October, Murphy decided to challenge Paul Krugman, the prominent economics professor, author and New York Times columnist, to a debate on Keynesian versus Austrian business cycle theory. After all, as Nobel-Prize-winning economist and partisan left-wing scribbler, Krugman tends to insist on policies the opposite of what any reasonable economic conclusion might be.

Krugman’s extremist, Big Government über alles positions should make for a great fireworks display in a well-attended debate with the scrupulously sane and reasonable Murphy. Point-counterpoint. The debate would also be a great venue for Murphy to publicize the sorely needed Austrian explanation of why massive governmental perversion of capital structure and market incentives ain’t exactly the best way to foster economic growth.

Murphy launched an Internet campaign, complete with goofy (and funny) animated YouTube video, to pressure Krugman. Murphy is asking folks to pledge a sum to the Fresh Food Program at a New York food bank that would be collected only if Krugman does debate him.

At last count, pledges have topped $50,000.

I hope Krugman agrees. Feeding hungry people is a good cause, and so is saving the economy from annihilation by Krugmanesque economics.

Meantime, give Murphy at least three huzzahs for pluck.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Hair-razing!

“Hands up! Drop the clippers! Step awayyyyyyy from the barber chair!”

That might not be exactly what the deputies and inspectors, under color of bureaucratic authority, warbled as they raided at least nine barber shops in Orange County, Florida. But armed men did invade the central-Florida shops in August and September, and without warrants.

They did arrest “criminal” thatch dispatchers for handling hair despite lack of a license.

The “authority” here was that of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, whose inspectors were aided in their quest to protect the public from bad trim jobs by the dozen-plus deputies joining the raids. In a few cases, pot or guns were found along with maleficent lack of licensure. But the pretext was to clamp down on unauthorized peaceful means of making a living.

In one raid, the barbers of the assailed shop all did have current licenses, but had to sit around in handcuffs while that fact was confirmed.

The Orlando Sentinel notes that most of the 37 people arrested as a result of the “unprecedented” raids were charged with only the misdemeanor of “barbering without a license.” It’s not obvious why anybody would want to divert resources from real crime fighting to conduct such idiotic assaults. Nobody really thinks that barbers habitually graduate from illegal buzz cuts to home invasions and murders.

I hope the victims consider suing. That might help prevent this travesty from happening again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

How They Did It

For 70 days, 33 Chilean miners were trapped a half mile below the surface of the earth —  “swallowed into the bowels of hell,” as one miner says — waiting for rescue. A billion viewers watched as they finally began to emerge to safety.

A fierce determination at both ends of the slowly constructed shaft aided the rescue. The miners had to outlast the first few weeks of despair, when they had scant information about the rescue mission. Throughout the ordeal they maintained the mine and their own morale. The rescuers had to figure out how to first get supplies to the miners and then create the narrow but stable shaft through which the miners could escape, as all 33 of them did.

A less-noted aspect of the story is that the rescue could not have happened without technology that did not exist even a quarter century ago. This included everything from the powerful drill bit donated by Center Rock Inc., a Pennsylvania company, to copper-fiber socks that consumed foot bacteria. But especially that drill bit.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger observes that Center Rock’s drill bit exists because of the firm’s pursuit of profit in an economy where pursuit of profit is possible. It exists because of what Henninger calls the “profit=innovation” dynamic. Indeed, capitalism saves lives every day; markets make our lives better and sometimes makes our lives possible.

You don’t have to mine very hard to get a moral out of the story.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Brains in Crisis

The Atlantic offers a fascinating portrait of the Honorable Ron Paul in “The Tea Party’s Brain.” Its blurb neatly explains the subject’s significance: “One way to measure the surprising . . . rise of the Tea Party is to chart the relative position of Ron Paul, who has never flinched from his beliefs. He’s not alone anymore.”

But I want to focus not on writer Joshua Green’s take on Ron Paul but on Austrian economics — which Rep. Paul, almost alone in Washington, supports — and economic policy regarding crises:

The Austrian school . . . had fallen away after the Great Depression, which it claimed was caused by an expansion of the money supply and could be met only with chastened submission as the market corrected itself. Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, offered similar counsel, famously urging Hoover to “liquidate” and “purge the rottenness out of the system.” But this failed to stop the catastrophe.

From Green’s statement you would think that President Hoover had accepted Mellon’s advice. He had not. Hoover often took pride in the fact that he did all sorts of things to prevent prices from coming down — from “liquidating” — after 1929.

Green followed the above-quoted passage with a plug for strong, activist government to pry the economy out of crisis. In light of the facts? Not so persuasive.

A truth for Tea Party brains: The Great Depression featured a spendthrift, meddling Republican prez followed by an even more spendthrift, more meddlesome Democrat.

A pattern history now repeats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

A Wealth of Joblessness

Did you know that the unemployment rate — as high as it is — is actually very much understated? It doesn’t include those who are out of work but have given up trying to find a job.

This puzzles me.

Oh, I see the rationale for not counting those who have abandoned their job searches (the information gets harder to collect and maintain, and you enter into the farther regions of statistics), but, nevertheless, they certainly do remain unemployed.

What puzzles me is the ability to remain permanently jobless. I don’t think my wife would let me make that choice. And even if she did, without income where would we get the money to pay the mortgage or buy food?

There’s unemployment insurance, which helps tide folks over when they lose a job. Yet, a condition for receiving unemployment benefits is continuing to actively seek a new job.

Like many, we could fall back on family and friends. But I’d feel bad enough about that if I was pounding the pavement every day in search of gainful employment. I can’t imagine doing so without any intention of landing a position and getting back on my own two feet.

So what can we conclude about folks who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one? There are apparently a lot of rich folks out of work.

This yields the unwelcome-to-many conclusion that, in America, everyone is rich. Inequality notwithstanding.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Going After the Gold

What does gold have to do with medical care? Ingested, it’s a poison. It’s not often used in treatment.

So why did the Obama administration place a provision further regulating the buying and selling of gold into the Democrats’ medical reform legislation?

Economist Thomas Sowell explains, in a recent column, why politicians are obsessed with the yellow metal. Before FDR, gold provided a check against politicians’ desire to spend the money government could “just print.” Because, in those long-ago days, paper dollars were backed by gold, Americans would cash the paper in for gold when it looked like the Treasury had gone on a printing spree. So inflation (the increase of the supply of money, and the consequent diminishing of its value, leading to increasing prices) was checked.

In 1933, FDR confiscated most of America’s circulating (and hoarded) gold, and Nixon took us off the gold standard completely in the ’70s, morphing our monetary system into a pure fiat (inflationary) standard.

Also in Nixon’s time, it became legal, again, for Americans to own gold.

So why make it harder, now, to trade in gold — when gold is not money?

Because investors, in times of inflation and crisis, turn to gold as a hedge. Against politicians, basically. And, says Sowell, “the Obama administration sees people’s freedom to buy and sell gold as something that can limit what the government can do.”

Gold, like freedom, “cramps the government’s style.”

That speaks volumes about gold . . . and “Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism too much government

A Tour of Over-Regulation

Want a measure of the regulatory state run amok?

Recently in the Washington Post, Robert McNamara of the Institute for Justice informed us that “In the 1950s, only about one out of every 20 Americans needed a license to pursue the occupation of their choice. Today, that number is one out of every three.”

Wow. A lot more hoops to jump through to get a job or start a business.

Want to add insult to injury? The actual regulation McNamara was writing about makes it illegal — punishable by three months in the local jail in our nation’s capital — to “describe . . . any place or point of interest in the District to any person” as part of a tour without first getting a license.

And the license process is no picnic, either. Sure, this past summer the city did repeal the rule requiring a doctor’s certification that the aspiring guide is not a drunkard. But there remain plenty of stupid regulations, including new ones that require guides to be proficient in English. And yes, that applies even to guides who talk to those benighted folk who speak foreign languages.

Applicants must also pass a test on their knowledge of “various facets of Washington life, including architecture, history and regulations.”

Tour guides must be expert in “regulations.”

Even the Washington Post headlined its editorial, “Tour de farce,” suggesting that a system of “voluntary certification” would work better than big government rules.

Yes. That’s right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

A Million Jobs, Gone

You’re fired! Now get a real job.

Does this sound mean?

It’s just what Cuba’s biggest employer plans to say between now and March — fire half a million workers and tell them to find other jobs, or (better yet) go to work for themselves.

After March, another half million will be given pink slips.

Or so say the Castro Bros., who are, in effect, the chief employers in Cuba.

Just like a despot, you might say. But hey: The country is broke, and the initial hiring of everybody by the government (which Fidel ran for scores of years, and his brother, Raul, now runs) was, itself, despotic. Thankfully, as more and more outlets of the “Cuban Communist Corp.” go under, the Cuban commissars say they will ease up on the regulations that now prohibit small, entrepreneurial businesses.

Of the many comments I’ve read about this, I was amused most by Tom Knapp’s. After drily noting that it is the Castros who will build down government, not Republicans in the U.S., he explained how the commies had kept their transportation going all these years: By maintaing old American cars from the ’40s and ’50s. Now that trade restrictions will likely be eased, those well-kept-up vintage cars could help “finance an explosion of economic prosperity just by tapping the U.S. classic car collectors’ market.”

Hope so.

And I hope the newly fired will transition to a slightly freer economy without too much trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Good FDA, Bad FDA

You’re sick and need medicine that has proved its benefits to you. Will the Food and Drug Administration let you use it?

The FDA recently extracted $600 million from Allergan, makers of Botox, for promoting uses for Botox different from those for which it was approved. It’s not illegal to use the drug for unapproved uses; it’s just illegal, sometimes, to tell you about those other uses. This, despite the fact that the First Amendment doesn’t exclude members of the pharmaceutical industry.

Now we’re hearing that the FDA has flip-flopped about letting people use midodrine, which quells dizziness. Back in 1996, midodrine was approved under “an abbreviated process,” one too brief to determine whether it really helps with dizziness. So, recently the agency outlawed sales of midodrine until its effectiveness could be shown. But — oops! — during the intervening 14 years, patients have come to depend on it. These patients swamped the FDA with complaints. So now the agency, in good-cop mode, says, okay okay, you can use it.

Thus, if you can persuade bureaucrats to let you medicate yourself as you and your doctor see fit, you get to do so. If not . . . sorry.

The New York Times talks about the “tough choices” facing the FDA, since banning a drug can mean “stranding desperate patients.” Congress should represent patients by stripping the agency of any power whatever to dictate when and how we may act to improve our own health.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Nothing Doing

When you don’t know what to do, the thing to do is nothing.

Well, maybe.

Economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, notes that we recovered from downturns in the economy more quickly before the federal government took it upon itself to fix things. The first major fix was with the Great Depression. Which dragged on and on.

Today, our leaders have spent trillions of borrowed money to fix the economy, with poor results.

Sowell’s column is great, right up until near the end, when his plea for politicians to “do nothing” ignores a lot of . . . something.

After the huge 1987 stock-market crash, he explains, President Reagan did nothing. But then “the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.”

But were those 20 years really so benign? Activity by presidents, by Congress and most of all by the Federal Reserve set up the systemic problems that led to the Crash of 2008. Consumer price inflation was low during Sowell’s Reagan-blessed period, but all the while the Fed was feeding first a dot-com bubble and then a housing bubble. And it engaged in a series of bailouts of financial institutions.

Maybe Reagan and later politicians didn’t do enough in the “do nothing” department. They should have reined in (or abolished) the Fed. They should have abandoned “too big to fail.” They should have stopped subsidizing creditors in busts and home-owners in booms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.