Category: free trade & free markets

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

An Ideological Cure?

Sometimes doctors need a stiff belt of medicine too.

Scot Echols, a  reader of Glenn Reynolds’s “Instapundit” blog, wrote in to say that while he appreciated a recent piece by Reynolds hailing capitalism, he thought it had not sufficiently stressed how capitalism fosters the creation of value.

“Value is created when someone does something for [others] better, faster, or cheaper than they can do it themselves,” Echols wrote. Then he related an anecdote about his doctor, whom he had gone to see about a sore throat. His doctor ranted about how “we need communism or a benevolent dictator to solve all of society’s problems.”

Sore throat notwithstanding, Echols responded, saying that he could either treat a sore throat himself with a regimen of gargling and garlic or pay $80 for a consultation and quick-acting antibiotics, reducing a two-week treatment to twenty minutes. His doctor’s knowledge and ability thus create value for him, value worth paying for. Because of such value creation, physicians gain wealth that enables them to drive nicer cars and live in nicer places than many of their receptionists can.

His doctor had no reply, but perhaps did understand a little better just how the kind of value-killing society he’d been dreaming about might not allow him to enjoy the nice things he had now; also, that the freedom to give value and be rewarded for it is a good thing.

Let’s hope the cure sticks. Let’s hope it spreads.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom

Wonders Never Cease

James May is one of the stars of a BBC television show called Top Gear. He’s the long-haired fellow who argues about cars with the show’s short chap and the host, a big, loud gentleman. May often serves as both the scholar and the avatar of common sense. And then, occasionally, his enthusiasm veers off into a pleasant madness.

Ah, television.

On TopGear.com he offers a fine essay on the joys of how things just work. He needed a new brake caliper for his aging auto, ordered it, and put it right in. “Nothing remarkable about that.” And yet, he has the wit to see that “nothing remarkable” is not quite right. Actually, he goes on, “it’s a matter for extreme wonderment.”

Precision isn’t easy. And yet precision is what we have, to amazing degrees, in the cars we rely upon.

In the manner of Adam Smith — who, in 1776’s Wealth of Nations, celebrated the complexity of building something as simple as a pin — May opines, “That something as complex as a car can be owned by ordinary people is, I think, one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It can be attributed to improved standards of living,” he concludes, and is “bloody marvelous.”

Yes. We may take things like cars for granted, but they aren’t “a given.” Their very existence depends on worldwide markets and a great degree of freedom.

Which we must also not take for granted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Forcing You to Pay for Bad News

Poor old-media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition.

What to do . . . aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work?

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering. . . .”

It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!

For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.”

It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”

Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths.

How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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free trade & free markets too much government

Metro Plays Hooky Roulette

Government-run mass transit is not merely a tragedy of inefficiency, in Washington, DC, the Metro has proved itself a danger to life and limb.

Five Metro workers have been killed on the job in roughly the last year. Before that, a June 2009 Metro train accident that killed nine people and injured seventy more. In a June 27 Townhall.com column, I lamented that even after all these deadly accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board complained there remain “significant deficiencies in their safety culture.”

Now, thanks to a Washington Examiner report we find out that Metro’s deficiencies start right at the top. During the last 18 months, six of Metro’s 14 appointed board members have no-showed for at least 20 percent of the meetings.

Vice Chairman Marcell Solomon, the board’s highest paid member, missed over half the meetings. Of course, D.C. Councilman Michael Brown was worse, skipping out on two-thirds of the meetings in the same 18-month period.

If this were a private business it would be going belly up from paying out large settlements for the death and destruction it has wrecked across the region, or shut down for gross mismanagement equal to gross negligence.

But Councilman Brown says he’s improved this year, only missing half the meetings. “My attendance hasn’t been great,” Brown concedes, “but my engagement has always been there.”

Metro trains keep rolling dangerously down the tracks with a politicized management that is asleep at the switch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets too much government

The Alternative to the Public Option

The congressional “progressive” caucus still wants to impose a public health insurance option, allegedly to “reduce the deficit.”

According to caucus kingpin Raul Grijalva, deficit hawks are “hypocrites” for predicting that government spending would balloon were a public option imposed. Their “excuse . . . that it was going to be too expensive is phony,” according to Congressman Grijalva.

The progressives’ notion seems to be that accelerating the pell-mell government takeover of the medical delivery industry is the very best thing one could do to reduce the deficit.

If that’s the case, then why not also “reduce the deficit” with respect to other sectors of the economy in which government spends any money at all — that is, in any economic sector — by launching a government takeover that eventually swamps private markets altogether?

By “progressive” logic, communizing the whole economy must be the best way to foster fiscal sobriety in DC.

Absurd, I know.

Perhaps Grijalva’s deceived by his franking privilege. The public option for postal delivery works so well. For him. For the rest of us, we have to pay the billions the USPS loses every year.

The solution to the USPS’s constant, persistent failure is not to regulate and nationalize Fed-Ex and UPS and every other alternative.

Real progress requires the opposite of Grijalva’s “progressivism”: Pry government out of both health care and postal delivery. This is not a radical idea. It is only . . . well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Full Flush of Equality

Years and years ago, it was often said against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment that it would prohibit separate toilets. Under the ERA, men and women would have to use the same public restrooms.

Properly interpreted, nothing of the kind should have happened. The text of the ERA stated that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” One does not have a right to a toilet, really, so it shouldn’t have affected restroom construction.

But leaping to absurdity is, alas, a propensity of government. In Minnesota, today, the state’s Department of Human Rights has declared that the offering of a “ladies’ night” by taverns and bars, etc, is illegal, discriminating (as it does) on the basis of sex.

Economist Robert Murphy has carefully explained why price discrimination is not bad — why it is common and why it benefits us. By setting up “ladies’ nights,” certain businesses attract female customers and (shock of all shocks) male customers, too . . . men actually eager to pay extra, if only to be around women.

I don’t see much point in explaining the philosophical basis for not getting carried away over the “sexual/gender discrimination” involved in this. But it may be good that the ERA fizzled in 1982. It would have been twisted by bureaucrats in state after state, and we’d all endure uncomfortable encounters in public toilets throughout the land.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Hooray for IJ

Let a thousand floral arrangements bloom.

Louisiana has just abolished the “demonstration” section of the state’s licensing exam for florists. The new law came in response to a lawsuit by florists working with the Institute for Justice. IJ argued that the four-hour demonstration requirement was “arbitrary, subjective and antiquated,” and allowed state-licensed florists to determine the fate of their future competitors.

The outcome represents yet another victory for the “merry band of libertarian litigators” who regularly do battle “in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government. . . .”

Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice has successfully fought to lift caps on the number of licensed taxis in Minneapolis; eliminate laws around the country that prevent competition in every kind of occupation, from animal husbandry and interior design to hair braiding and pest control; restore freedom of speech undermined by vague and arbitrary campaign finance regulation in Florida and enemies of property rights in Tennessee; protect businessmen and home owners from eminent domain abuse in Arizona and Ohio.

IJ’s many successful efforts to defend the rights of individuals are having a major impact. Looking back over the many installments of Common Sense, I find that I mention this group’s work again and again.

With good reason. They keep fighting the good fight, and winning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Wide-Eyed Wackiness

Where to begin? How about the very first sentence of the New York Times article hailing passage of the Dodd-Frank financial bill? According to the illustrious fishwrap, “sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation” reflects “a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.”

We’ve seen some liberalization of financial dealings over the years. It was once illegal to own gold. Travelers can be glad of the rise of interstate banking after governments began to permit it in the 1980s.

But have politicians really offered nothing but “wide-eyed admiration” for “Wall Street” for “decades”? Has the federal government really been hands-off till now?

Take Senators Dodd and Frank. They were out front pushing home ownership on people who could not afford homes, with multiple programs and legislative packages. This bubble-making process was further inflated (quite literally) by the Federal Reserve’s cheap credit policies. Many lenders, encouraged by government-provided (but perverse) incentives, jumped onto the Irresponsibility Bandwagon in the run-up to collapse.

So how can the “solution” be additional bailout authority . . . which will further encourage bankers and others to invest unwisely?

And the new regulations — these, too, are supposed to help? We don’t even know what they are yet, because bureaucrats have yet to write them, as specified (vaguely) by Congress. In addition to their burden, they will allow pols to shake down Wall Street for years to come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets Ninth Amendment rights too much government

Farm at Your Own Risk

Some of the most vicious threats to individual rights and liberty occur not on the federal but on the local level. Clint Bolick, an attorney who has combated many local governmental assaults on citizens around the country, once wrote a book to make the point entitled Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty.

Example? Consider the zany local edict issued in the little town of Lake Elmo, Minnesota. The Institute for Justice — Bolick’s old stomping ground — informs us that the city council there has begun “enforcing a law that makes it illegal for farmers to sell products from their own land unless they were grown within Lake Elmo.”

Two of the farmers being threatened with fines and 90 days in jail are Richard and Eileen Bergman, who have tilled the land in Lake Elmo for almost four decades. They grow pumpkins. But part of their farm extends beyond the city limits, and most of their pumpkins grow on that out-of-Elmo part.

The Institute for Justice has filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the town’s ban on out of-of-town pumpkins. Council members who support the ban must have some ludicrous theory about how such totalitarian edicts goose the local economy. But the ban is certainly no good for folks stopped from buying and selling what they want to buy and sell.

And how, pray tell, do you promote local farming by throwing local farmers in jail?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Winners and Losers in Sports and Government

Sports excite because of the contest: There are winners and losers. But in making “big shows,” some promoters make losers of us all.

South Africa’s sticker price for hosting the World Cup was marked up past $4 billion to nearly $6 billion. The games generated fewer billions in revenue, but the taxpayers of South Africa, one-fourth of whom are out of work, will see little return on their massive investment.

So why would politicians want to “invest” only to lose?

They can’t resist the hoopla. They get to throw a big show with someone else’s bucks. And if some of the money they throw around reaches their pals’ businesses, all the better.

Around the world, governments vie to spend tax money like South Africa just did. In America, we have our city-funded/state-funded sports stadiums. And remember when our president flew across the globe to pitch for the Chicago Olympics?

Rather than soccer fans paying for soccer, baseball fans for baseball, etc., taxpayers support soccer at the expense of those who find the game tedious, baseball fans helped at the expense of opera lovers, etc.

But considering the wages paid to athletes and the profits made by team owners, these subsidies flow bigger not so much from fan to fan but from regular folks to the rich.

Governments are supposed to serve us all. It ruins the game when governments pick sides through subsidies. That way we all lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.