Any restraint on private property rights shifts the balance of power from impersonal attributes toward personal attributes and toward behavior that political authorities approve. That is a fundamental reason for preference of a system of strong private property rights: private property rights protect individual liberty.
Over at Townhall.com, the most recent Common Sense column explores recent legislative chicanery on a subject near and dear to Paul Jacob and to many of his readers: term limits. And yes, Republicans are finding ways of making their party less significant, less electable. The enemy is not just the Democratic Party. Not by a long shot.
Stop on over, then come back here for some extra reading:
Here, Nobel Laureate in Economics Vernon Smith introduces his colleague Steve Gjerstad on why the Fed’s early-in-the-millennium policy to induce a housing bubble “went awry”:
Smith and Gjerstad are working on a book on the Great Recession, and Gjerstad provides, here, a data-heavy discussion, and uses that data to show why Keynesian policy doesn’t work. Gjerstad makes an especially interesting comparisons between Japan and Finland. Well worth sitting through the whole lecture.
The fundamental purpose of property rights, and their fundamental accomplishment, is that they eliminate destructive competition for control of economic resources. Well-defined and well-protected property rights replace competition by violence with competition by peaceful means.
First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or . . . the K-12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.
“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”
Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?
Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”
Of course.
What does Melissa Harris-Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.
Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
For decades social critics in the United States and throughout the Western world have complained that “property” rights too often take precedence over “human” rights, with the result that people are treated unequally and have unequal opportunities. Inequality exists in any society. But the purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage. Property rights are human rights.
Flint, Michigan, has seemed like a hopeless case for a long time. Even before Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, Flint was undergoing deindustrialization. Politicians resisted, promising to reverse the trend. Failure after failure, they still desperately prove themselves interested in trying something, anything, to make the town “seem” vibrant and “cutting edge.”
Most recently, the Flint Mass Transportation Authority has exerted its rhetoric, its dreams, and its grant-writing skills to nab a $2.4 million bus.
The hydrogen fuel cell technology transit bureaucrats have set their eyes upon is quite leading edge, and I guess it seems a bargain, what with the recent drop in prices (“$3.5 million a few years ago,” according to the Michigan Capitol Confidential).
But the town could buy nine diesel buses for the same money, and it’s not as if they’re rolling in dough. Flint has had to order out for emergency management, suffering a tax base plagued by an official (read: underestimated) unemployment rate of 18 percent.
So, of course, the transit authority hopes to pull in federal “stimulus” funds.
Ask yourself, though: how would a new, expensive bus stimulate Flint’s economy? Luxury buses running on outré technology don’t exactly inspire businesses to invest in otherwise depressed towns.
As a rule, only rich people can afford leading-edge technology.
Sad to say, folks in government behave like rich people.
Only worse. Folks in government behave like rich people spending other people’s money.
And, now more than ever, the citizens of Flint can’t afford such conspicuous consumption.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The consequences of borrowing to fund welfare states have been getting more obviously destructive. In the European Union, the fates of governments with still a few years to go to pay the piper are tethered to the fates of even more wildly profligate states.
Yet the solution most EU officials propose, aside from more tax hikes, is to lend and borrow even more. Whole governments go on the welfare roll. The countries delivering the loans in turn “borrow” from their own unwilling citizens.
When will it end?
Maybe never, if the precedent being pondered by the innovative government of Portugal is implemented and gains traction.
A court there has ruled that it’s unconstitutional for Portugal to save money by cutting the salaries of government employees. (Perfectly all right to hike taxes, though.) So the government is thinking of end-running the decision by paying workers part of their salaries in treasury bills instead of the usual funny money.
The logic is stunning. Obviously, we can pay everything we owe just by issuing IOUs! Not since Rumpelstiltskin wove straw into more straw has anybody fashioned something this magical.
Nobody need ever go bankrupt again so long as we all keep issuing IOUs to vendors and creditors. All the bad consequences of bad practices will maybe just disappear through this expedient! Incredible!!!
Maybe I’ll call up my credit-card company to explain how this works. Once I figure it out myself, that is.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Reviewer David Pogue knows technology but often botches business ethics. Writing about T-Mobile’s decision to liberalize its cellular contact, he asserts that “the two-year contract” to which T-Mobile is offering an alternative “is an anti-competitive, anti-innovation greed machine.” He gets his dander up:
The Great Cellphone Subsidy Con is indefensible no matter how you slice it — why should you keep paying the carrier for the price of a phone you’ve fully repaid? . . . Those practices should stomp right across your outrage threshold.
Maybe outrage is called for . . . by Pogue’s demand for outrage. It’s outrageous.
Companies need not compete on every level, to every aspect of a service, in order to offer customers a real alternative. And no particular voluntary market arrangement is inherently “anticompetitive,” for it cannot in itself prevent anybody from offering costumers something different. (Only government force, a major factor not discussed by Pogue, can block competitors from competing in particular ways.) Nothing about multi-year cell contracts prevented Tracfone and others from offering prepaid plans. Or prevented T-Mobile from offering its new plan.
Or a different alternate.
Pogue’s accusations of greedy “anti-competitiveness” can be and are made with equal injustice against any successful business. But there is no set amount of revenue greater than a company’s costs beyond which profits suddenly change colors, from moral to immoral.
And nothing is wrong with pursuit of profit per se, just as there is nothing wrong with pursuing an expected benefit by purchasing products and services, popular or un-.
People expect gains when they trade. If they see no benefit, they can just say no.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Americans get riled up by the slightest things.
As numerous Facebook posts pointed out last week, feminists across the country were incensed that their beloved president complimented a prominent woman on her looks . . . yet remained unfazed by that same presidents’ policy of killing innocent women and children with drone strikes. Amongst conservatives, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly got harsh condemnations for using the phrase “thump the Bible,” despite “The No Spin Zone” host’s long service in defense of what he calls “Judeo-Christian” culture, and his lack of any malign intent. And, in sports news, Rutgers Coach Mike Rice got the pink slip for his violent, offensive treatment of his players . . .
But there’s no “but” with this story, except as identified by Nick Gillespie at Reason.com: “there’s another, more subtle and yet more profound way that Division I college sports is abusing most college students at most schools . . . even if they never suit up for a practice or attend a single varsity competition of any sort.”
What is Gillespie driving at? Subsidy. Particularly, subsidies from government-subsidized student payments:
The vast majority of colleges — public and private — massively subsidize varsity sports directly out of mandatory student fees and other school funds. Despite the ability of top-tier teams to earn a lot of revenue via television contracts, ticket sales, merchandise sales, and other activities, most schools still hit up students in both direct and indirect ways.
Gillespie gives us some disturbing numbers: In 2011, Rutgers siphoned off $9 million in student fees and $19.4 million in general school funds while producing about $23 million in non-donation revenue. George Mason University students pay $12 million a year for sports teams that pulled in much less than a million. Only eight Division I schools balk at subsidizing their athletics departments.
I love college sports. It’s sad to think that they are corrupting academic economies, just as pro sports corrupt city and metropolitan economics around the country. All by reliance upon subsidy . . . that sports programs can do without.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.