Category: ideological culture

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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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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture

Happy Common Sense Day

Credit George Washington for mobilizing our military to win the Revolutionary War. It was Thomas Paine, though, who did the most to mobilize the people in support of the cause of freedom and independence from Britain. He did it with his stirring pamphlet, Common Sense.

Originally published anonymously on this very date 235 years ago, and addressed to “the Inhabitants of America,” Paine’s polemic circulated to a higher percentage of the American population than any book save the Bible.
Happy Common Sense Day
One reason for its success was Paine’s style, which was much more accessible to the common person than most political writing of that time. In fact, Common Sense was read aloud in public, allowing citizens who lacked letters to engage in the debate over separation from the British empire — some seven months before the Declaration of Independence.

Common Sense attacked both the evils of monarchy, generally, noting that “Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins . . .” and the British monarchy specifically, referring to William the Conqueror as a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”

Paine’s pamphlet cogently endorsed republican forms of future government. “Society in every state is a blessing,” he wrote, “but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one. . . .”

More than two centuries after its publication, Paine’s message still rings prophetic: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

That remains true. And Paine’s mission remains ours: To resist tyranny, to “prepare an asylum for mankind.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Want, Fear and Freedom

On this day in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address in which he proclaimed, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”Freedom of Speech

Two of those four freedoms — of speech and worship — are enshrined in our First Amendment. But the other two were new: “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.”
Freedom of Worship
No one desires people to go wanting or folks to be afraid, of course, though sometimes fear can usefully spur us to take corrective action. But while government can capably protect freedom of speech and religion, it cannot magically wipe out want or fear.
Freedom from Want
Wants are unlimited; fears can be, too.

When a child wakes up crying from a nightmare, do we need a government program? When a fellow member of the “Me Generation” fervently desires a new iPad, should Uncle Sam provide it?

FDR wasn’t talking about iPads or bad dreams, but his new notions were so loose and fuzzy that they changed the conception of government from a limited association protecting our individual ability to pursue happiness into an unlimited institution powerful enough to create a society without want or fear.
Freedom from Fear
Government has a role in protecting us from invasion or attack, from crime, but it cannot provide freedom from fear. Government has a role in protecting our economic freedom to produce and trade, to engage in commerce, but it cannot fulfill our every want.

We lose what we can achieve when we demand what cannot be given to us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture too much government

Two Decades Later

Twenty years ago yesterday, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as head of the Soviet Union. It was a momentous occasion. It was also slightly comic, since he was resigning from a government that didn’t quite exist any longer.

December 25, 1991, was the last day of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It was the end of an age. The republics that had allied to form the original empire withdrew their support and formed a new union, the Commonwealth of Independent States.

This was one of history’s most momentous developments — or “undevelopments”?

The abandonment of Marxian communism — indeed, of state socialism — marked a turning point in ideological thought, too. Total government control of economic life had been a joke — a miserable, bitter joke — within the Soviet Union during its heyday. The news of its demonstrated unfeasibility shocked the protected sensibilities of the West’s intelligentsia, even eliciting startling confessions from professional socialist rah-rah boys like Robert Heilbroner, who publicly admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.

For my first 30 years of life, the Cold War with the Soviet Union dominated the newspapers and our imaginations. And then it collapsed. Surprisingly quickly.

As Russians take to the streets to protest Putin’s revealed corruption, and as the United States of America itself buckles under the weight of its own “internal contradictions” — that is, the attempt to live on debt alone — the lesson becomes clear: The mighty can fall.

Radical change becomes possible, even where impregnability was previously assumed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

The “Obamacare” Conspiracy

Some “unintended consequences” aren’t.

The order of the market is an unintended consequence of market participation. By buying and selling, we’re just trying to get what we want. But we also send signals that help other folks accommodate our values and plans, which then allows markets to form some semblance of orderliness.

In government, on the other hand, laws get advanced to help this person or that, or whole groups of people. But economists often note that the actual consequences of many policies are at great variance with their advertised benefits. These often negative outcomes we term (following F.A. Hayek) the “unintended consequences.”

It’s worth noting that sometimes politicians do intend those hidden, bad consequences.

Economist David Henderson brings up an instance of this:

One insurance agent I spoke to speculated that politicians and other government officials who support these regulations not only understand these effects, but also like them. Why? Because they cause more people to go without insurance and thus create a demand for government-provided insurance.

Henderson then cites a provision of Obamacare, now kicking in: Regulations mandating medical insurance companies to spend a prescribed percentage of premiums “on actual medical care.” The result will be, almost certainly, the demise of whole hunks of the health insurance industry.

Thereby increasing political demands for government-provided insurance.

Some of the folks who concocted this regulation, and some who voted for it, certainly knew the likely result. And welcomed it.

Politicians are not equally clueless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Lies and Denials

Politics is often the art of lying about the effects of policy, and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Prevaricator-in-Chief, is a master politician. As consumer-price inflation hits a 27 percent per annum rate, he blames capitalism.

One report summarizes his position: “Mr. Chavez said the market had become a perverse mechanism where the big monopolies, the big trans-nationals, and the bourgeoisie, dominate and ransack the people.”

So he’s extended price controls from staples to all sorts of goods, with some prices being immediately subjected to a rate freeze. Big firms will have to report costs to the government, so bureaucrats can determine a “fair price.”

Were it not a ratcheting up of oppression and hardship, I’d say this is all getting rather funny. Price controls notoriously fail to achieve what they aim. In the United States, Nixon-era wage and price controls set stagflation into overdrive. Long lines at the gas pumps, shortages in supermarkets, and rising prices. What a mess.

There’s good theory to explain why price floors and price ceilings cause major problems. But according to the head of the country’s price control board, “The law of supply and demand is a lie.”

Hugo and his cronies deny the relevance of the central bank’s doubling the volume of money in circulation since late 2007. Supply of money increases? No possible effect on skyrocketing prices, supply and demand being a lie, you see.

Meanwhile, people have begun to hoard products. It’s now almost impossible to even find coffee in Venezuelan stores.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

You’re the Top

Rob Walton is rich, $21 billion rich.

An email I received yesterday from the folks at Wal-Mart Watch (WMW) implores me to click to a website to vote for Mr. Walton as “the worst of the 1 percent . . . the person who is doing the most with their wealth to exploit the rest of the country.”

Could this be true?

“The Waltons inherited that wealth,” WMW says, “much of it was created by paying many workers at poverty-level wages, offering poor benefits, and lowering conditions in the supply chain by demanding ever-lower prices.”

Count me out.

Even Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, had the right to give his wealth to whomever he wished, especially his children. Besides, as chairman of Wal-Mart for 20 years now, Rob’s earned plenty on his own.

The email forgets to mention that Wal-Mart provides more to the poor through lower prices than the federal government provides through food stamps.

And hey, didn’t workers at Wal-Mart apply for — and freely accept — their jobs? How many “living-wage” jobs has WMW created?

The sentence in bold type signals the real gripe, I bet: Rob Walton has transgressed by supporting causes that “advance a right wing agenda.” The Walton Family Foundation (of which he’s a board member) has donated to the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, school choice groups, and others.

Horrors! If Rob Walton is the worst of the 1 percent, the self-appointed vanguard of the 99 percent ought to occupy a mirror.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture incumbents

Frankly Speaking

Representative Barney Frank’s recently announced retirement is not exactly a shock. His sense of timing may be better than most of his incumbent colleagues. Perhaps he smells something repellent slouching towards Washington: a secondary bust, another kick in the economy’s collective pants.

Funny, his timing had been a little slow soon after the Crash of 2008, when he protested that it hadn’t been he who had been pushing cheap mortgages and a policy of lax mortgage standards — oh no! — or he who had just recently proclaimed Fannie and Freddie to be doing just fine, thank you.

The New York Times, dubbing him a “top liberal,” cited redistricting as the major spark for his decision. Then it went on to quote Rep. Frank as blaming Newt Gingrich and the “conservative news media” for uglying up the tone in Washington, calling the present ideological climate a “bitter divide.”

Of course, before the Internet and Fox News, a near-monolithic liberal slant dominated major media. Adding an offsetting bias might have made it tougher for Frank, but surely the new toughness reflects actual American opinion better than the previous left-leaning cultural hegemony ever did.

Frank amusingly claims he has, now, but “one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.” I bet he tweets soon.

Summarizing the advantages of not running for re-election, he explained that he would no longer “have to try to pretend to be nice to people” he doesn’t like.

No more Mr. Nice Guy? No more Mr. Clean?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Occupy the State of Nature

Ideas have consequences. That’s a famous maxim of conservative theorist Richard Weaver, a thinker who was big when I was little. He was right. Ideas do have consequences, and different ideas have distinct consequences.

One can sometimes judge ideas by the consequences of trying to articulate them and put them into practice.

A few weeks ago one of the more seemingly absurd statements about the Occupy movement, the “99 percenters,” went viral. Doug “Media Virus” Rushkoff argued that the movement should not be counted as “a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living.” He said that the prototypers (can’t call them “protestors,” now, can I?) “are actually forging a robust micro-society of working groups, each one developing new approaches — or reviving old approaches — to long running problems.”

Read his argument for yourself. To me, it seems a bit too much in the old Charles Reich/Theodore Roszak school of counterculture-pushing.

Worse yet, Rushkoff’s explanation doesn’t fit well with the facts on the ground. The movement has gotten increasingly ugly and violent, as has been widely reported, but which the folks at Reason.com handily synopsize . . . giving Shikha Dalmia an excuse to conjure up the Hobbesian specter of the life of man in a state of nature: nasty, brutish, and short.

And yet, evidence suggests that people do co-operate without oversight, at least during emergencies, pretty well.

But not, I think, if their ideas scream out for special treatment and subsidy and against others’ success.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Better Late Than Never?

“Too little, too late.” I am not alone to suspect that the Occupy movement — the 99 percenters — started its protest against corporate greed and government cronyism several years too late.

Where were the Occupiers when the Tea Party protests started?

Dancing in the streets over the Obama presidency? Many Occupiers may have lagged because they thought that “their man” could and would clean up corruption and make Washington work for the everyone — or at least the “middle class.”

The “too late” charge can be directed against the Tea Party, though — and has been, repeatedly. The Tea Partyers waited to organize until a liberal Democrat was in the White House, one who saw Bush’s big government and, well, raised it.

Many would admit, later, how not “theirs” Bush was. Still, few protested Bush’s big government push.

To the Tea Party’s credit, it was first — kicked off by Rick Santelli’s CNBC “tea party rant” in early 2009, against the upsurge of bailouts for banks, car companies, home-buyers, you name it, as well as the very idea of government stimulus. (Though I ranted earlier.)

The time to protest cronyism and corruption in American government? The moment one opens one’s eyes to political reality.

Maybe the great age of protest has finally come.

I hope it’s not too late.

It always seems like citizens should have stood up to abuse of power sooner, but being late to the action is no excuse not to stand up now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.