“And are we doing okay?”
Waiters have all started talking like preschool teachers in the past several years. It is perplexing. It makes me want to do something shocking and violent, but instead I usually just reply with something like:
“Well, we are, last we checked, not, in fact, plural. And we are therefore slightly confused by our insistence upon addressing us as though we had a mouse — or mice? — in our pocket.”
(I only do this if I am alone, inasmuch as it tends to make dinner conversation awkward when your date shrinks into her seat in mortification.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “You and Who Else?”, National Review, 2016-10-02.
July 28, 2018
QotD: “And are we doing okay?”
Comments Off on QotD: “And are we doing okay?”
July 25, 2018
QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It’s just what politicians do.
But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to get more sales, outright lies with a radio ad that promises that everyone who buys any piece of furniture from Acme will get half of the purchase price refunded in 12 months. “Wow! Darn good deal!” consumers think. They flock to Acme and buy furniture.
One year later, Acme customers submit their applications for the refunds of half of the purchase prices they each paid. But these customers, rather than getting what Acme promised, instead get a note from Acme explaining that the promise of a refund was made in jest; it was designed only to get more consumers to buy furniture from Acme. “But don’t worry!” the letter from Acme continues, “you’re still better off having bought furniture from Acme than from any of Acme’s competitors. Trust me on this! Yours Sincerely,….”
From time to time unscrupulous (and, typically, also really stupid or myopic) business people pull fraudulent stunts such as this one. Yet – rightly – no one excuses these stunts as being par for the course in business. One reason, of course, is that such stunts are not par for the course in private business; far from it. But such stunts are indeed par for the course in politics. And yet, despite this reality, we are constantly told that businesses operating in competitive markets cannot be trusted to behave honestly unless they are regulated by politicians and bureaucrats operating in political ‘markets.’
Politicians lie and such lying is excused because it’s normal. But it’s not normal; it’s not normal in the private sector; it’s normal only in the very abnormal world of politics.
Don Boudreaux, “Politicians Lie Openly and Such Behavior Is Excused Because It’s ‘Normal’”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-05.
Comments Off on QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
July 24, 2018
The impact of licensing on previously unlicensed jobs
In the current Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb looks at the recent outrage at Jeff Bezos and Amazon and recounts how at least one job he’d done in the past is now closed off to casual entrants due to the growth of licensing:
Let us imagine a natural order — that is, a world without states, or at least a world without the extended patterns of state-intervention that now exists. In such a world, wage labour would continue to exist. There are benefits in working for someone else. An employee commits to a contract of permanent service, in return for which he receives reasonable certainty of payment. Not everyone is or wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone finds it suitable to keep looking for unsatisfied wants and the most rewarding means of satisfying those wants. This being said, there would probably be much less wage labour than there is now.
If the present order of things does little to deter men like Mr Bezos, it does much to deter little people from starting little businesses — little business that sometimes replace, but more often supplement employed income. When I was much younger, the easiest way I found of making extra money was to drive a mini-cab. I went to the nearest cabbing office. I showed my clean driving licence. I showed a certificate of hire and reward insurance. I handed over £25 rent for the week, and was given a two-way radio and a cabbing number. That evening, I was taking prostitutes to their clients and pushing drunks up their garden paths. You cannot do this nowadays. Cabbing is licensed and regulated. It costs thousands to get a licence, and the regulations about age and type of vehicle add tens of thousands more to the costs of entry. You cannot get into cabbing unless you can pay these entry costs, and unless you are able to pay them back by working there full-time and long-term. A casual business has been made into a profession.
This is an example of which I have personal knowledge. But there is a vast range of little businesses that bring some money to little people. They have nearly all been placed out of reach. The effect is to increase the supply of unskilled labour seeking employment. Think of a supply and demand diagram. Shift the supply curve to the right. Make it more elastic. Money wages will be lower than they would otherwise be. Conditions of work — and these are part of the overall wage — will be worse. Make laws to prevent the market from clearing, and there will be more unemployment.
A further point I mention without choosing to develop is mass-immigration. This is not the kind of movement you would see in a natural order, where virtually the whole cost of entry and adjustment fell on the individual entrant. It is a movement encouraged and subsidised by the State — encouraged by institutional political correctness, and subsidised by laws that amount to forced association. The effect in economic terms is again on the supply curve for labour.
I have no reason to believe that Mr Bezos and Amazon have done anything to bring about this state of affairs. They simply operate in the labour market as they find it. No one is forced to work for Amazon. Amazon is not a legal monopoly, and has no power to force down wages. It pays at least the going rate. It is not a charity, and cannot be expected to behave as a charity. Blaming Amazon for how it pays and treats its workers makes no more sense than blaming a clock for telling the time.
He also touches on the state-created legal situation of limited liability:
I turn to the objection that Amazon is a limited liability company. This is an objection I accept. Limited liability companies exist because of a grant of privilege by the State. They are treated as persons, responsible for their own debts. Their owners have no liability beyond the value of the shares they own. This grant allows companies to gain more investment capital than they otherwise might. It allows them to grow larger and to exist for longer than they otherwise might. It allows even the most entrepreneurial company to turn gradually into a private bureaucracy, trading favours with the various state bureaucracies. Limited liability turns business into the economic arm of a malign ruling class.
So far as Amazon benefits from limited liability, it is an illegitimate enterprise. But this is not the end of the matter. Amazon almost certainly could exist without limited liability. It would instead have raised its investment capital by selling bonds. It would then only be in form what it plainly is in substance — that is, a projection of its owner’s ambition to achieve greatness. It would still have grown large, and it would have grown large by giving its customers what they want.
Comments Off on The impact of licensing on previously unlicensed jobs
July 19, 2018
Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex
Matthew D. Mitchell comments on some of the problems with government contractors and their all-too-cosy relationship with the government officials who hand out the public’s funds:
… as economist Luigi Zingales explains in his book, A Capitalism for the People, governments contracting with private interests has its own set of risks:
The problem with many public-private partnerships is best captured by a comment that George Bernard Shaw once made to a beautiful ballerina. She had proposed that they have a child together so that the child could possess his brain and her beauty; Shaw replied that he feared the child would have her brain and his beauty. Similarly, public-private partnerships often wind up with the social goals of the private sector and the efficiency of the public one. In these partnerships, Republican and Democratic politicians and businesspeople frequently cooperate toward just one goal: their own profit.
When President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” he was concerned that certain firms selling to the government might obtain untoward privilege, twisting public resources to serve private ends. It is telling that one of those contractors, Lockheed Aircraft, would become the first company to be bailed out by Congress in 1971.
For many observers, the George W. Bush administration’s “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater appeared to exemplify the sort of deals that Eisenhower had warned of. It is true that federal regulations explicitly permit contracts without open bidding in certain circumstances, such as when only one firm is capable of providing a certain service or when there is an unusual or compelling emergency. In any case, a report issued by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in 2011 estimated that contractor fraud and abuse during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost taxpayers an estimated $31 to $60 billion. This includes, but is not limited to:
requirements that were excessive when established and/or not adjusted in a timely fashion; poor performance by contractors that required costly rework; ill-conceived projects that did not fit the cultural, political, and economic mores of the society they were meant to serve; security and other costs that were not anticipated due to lack of proper planning; questionable and unsupported payments to contractors that take years to reconcile; ineffective government oversight; and losses through lack of competition.
Governments may also award contracts to perform a service that has more to do with serving a parochial interest than with providing a benefit to the paying public. For example, Congress may order the Pentagon to procure more tanks even though the Pentagon itself says the tanks aren’t needed. Paying General Dynamics hundreds of millions of dollars to produce unneeded tanks in order to protect jobs in particular congressional districts may be an abuse even if the underlying process by which the contract was awarded is legitimate.
Comments Off on Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex
July 18, 2018
QotD: Understanding how company profits can be used
In its fight against company tax cuts, [the Australian] Labor [Party] peddles the myth that company tax cuts are a windfall for big businesses and their shareholders, this week even launching ads suggesting [Australian PM] Malcolm Turnbull supports company tax cuts because he’ll personally benefit as an investor.
It’s a myth easily debunked. Think about it. What exactly can a company do with the extra money retained from paying less tax? It can only spend profits in two ways: paying dividends to shareholders or spending more on its operations.
Dividends are subject to tax, including withholding tax for foreign shareholders. Suggesting Turnbull or any other investor will get a windfall is a blatant lie.
In fact, many shareholders will pay more tax to make up the greater difference between the company tax rate and their own tax rate. That’s how dividend imputation works, as Labor well knows.
Alternatively, the company can spend more on things like technology, plant and equipment, funding research and development, expanding its sales force or opening new shopfronts or branches. In other words, more money paid in wages to workers and buying goods and services from suppliers.
All of that spending is also taxed. Workers pay income tax. GST [Goods and Services Tax] is collected on goods and services. Suppliers pay company tax or income tax themselves.
Lower company tax simply allows a business to use more of its money on something productive before the money is collected by government.
Nyunggai Warren Mundine, “Bill Shorten’s Labor would kill the reforms of Hawke and Keating”, Financial Review, 2018-06-26.
Comments Off on QotD: Understanding how company profits can be used
July 14, 2018
Trump’s tariffs are working
Tim Worstall explains that the recent US price hikes in washing machines is exactly what the Trump administration wanted:
The part of import tariffs that all too many fail to understand is that it is consumers being “protected” by them who actually pay them. That is, import tariffs on foreign goods entering the United States are paid by those inside the United States. Or, as we can also put it, Trump’s tariffs are making Americans poorer. This isn’t a known to be desired effect of economic policy.
However, it’s important to note that the real burden doesn’t come from the rise in price of the imports. It’s what the domestic producers do to us all in the absence of that foreign competition which is important:
The clear and obvious effect of import tariffs – Credit, BLS, via Mark Perry and AEI, by permission
If you’re unfortunate enough to be shopping for a new washing machine, you can thank the Trump tariffs on imported washing machines, washing machine parts, steel and aluminum for the largest three-month price increase — 16.4% from February to May this year — in the 40-year history of the BLS series for Major Appliances: Laundry Equipment that started in January 1978 (see chart above). In the May CPI report (see Table 2), the one-month increase in the CPI for Laundry Equipment of 7.4% in May followed a 9.6% increase in April, and in both months was the largest monthly price increase of any of the 300 individual CPI categories or sub-categories. For the month of May, the 7.4% increase in the washing machine series was twice the increase of the next highest increase of 3.7% for educational books and supplies (mostly college textbooks).
What’s worse than this price rise is that this is planned. This is the desired outcome from the people who imposed these taxes.
Comments Off on Trump’s tariffs are working
July 9, 2018
We used to joke about the “Pre-Fab Four”, but now every major artist is pre-fab
Not only pre-fabricated, but with a global audience that has been trained to like their music in advance. You could go so far as to say they’ve been brainwashed into liking it. ESR commented on this and shared the following video.
Not just a get-off-my-lawn rant, very exact information on how modern production techniques and producers’ economic incentives squeeze the life and variety out of popular music.
I actually didn’t know how bad it had gotten out there, I never hear any of this chart-topping crap because I select my music from niche genres without lyrics – instrumental prog metal, jazz fusion, space ambient. I thought that was just me, but maybe such strict selectivity is what one has to do to avoid being inundated in garbage these days.
July 7, 2018
The bad economics of rooftop solar installations
Norman Rogers points out where the numbers don’t add up for many jurisdictions’ domestic solar power schemes:
Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.
A modest proposal:
We’ve all heard about “shop local” and “get your food from local farmers, not distant corporate farms.” Lots of people have apple trees in their backyards. Often they can’t begin to eat or give away all the apples. In the meantime, big supermarkets sell corporate apples for one dollar a pound and up. I propose that people with backyard apples be able to take them to the supermarket and sell them to the supermarket for the same price at which the supermarket is selling apples. Furthermore, they should be able to take them at any time and receive payment. If the store gets too many local apples, it can reduce its purchase of corporate apples.
My apple proposal may seem ill advised, but that is exactly how rooftop solar power works. The homeowner gets to displace power from the power company, and if the homeowner has more power than he needs, the power company is obligated to purchase it, often for the same retail price at which it sells electricity. That policy is called net metering. In order to accommodate the homeowner’s electric power, the utility has to throttle down some other power plant that produces power at a lower wholesale price.
The exact arrangements for accepting rooftop solar vary by jurisdiction. In some places, net metering is restricted in one way or another.
A large-scale natural gas-generating plant can supply electricity for around 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Rooftop solar electricity costs, without subsidies, around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, or five times as much. Average retail rates for electricity in most places are between 8 cents and 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. Yet, paradoxically, the homeowner can often reduce this electric bill by installing rooftop solar.
It is actually worse than forcing the power company to take 30-cent electricity that it could get from a natural gas plant for 6 cents. When the company throttles down a natural gas plant to make room for rooftop electricity, it is not saving six cents, because it already has paid for the gas plant. All it saves is the marginal fuel that is saved when the plant is throttled down to make room for the rooftop electricity. The saving in fuel is about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. So 30-cent electricity displaces grid electricity and saves two cents.
Comments Off on The bad economics of rooftop solar installations
July 6, 2018
“That’s what governments are for — get in a man’s way”
Veronique de Rugy says that the 4th of July is a good time to reflect on the American Founding Fathers fighting to gain independence from a distant tyrannical government … and the rest of the year is devoted to coping with a less-distant but no-less tyrannical government in Washington:
Consider the oil and gas industry. Over the years, the federal government has adopted many regulations meant to hinder the industry. As Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, reminds me, one such regulation is the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, which makes it more expensive to ship oil and natural gas from coast to coast. Then there are the past administrations’ outright moratoriums on drilling in certain areas of America’s coasts, which massively increases the cost of doing business. As Loris notes, there are many costly bureaucratic delays in issuing leases and processing applications for permits to drill (APDs), which stalls production on federal lands. On average, the federal processing of APDs in the last year of the Obama administration was 257 days, while state processing is typically 30 days or less.
Since Uncle Sam has a lot of regulations in place to make the operations of domestic oil and gas companies more costly, why is the biggest beneficiary of loans from the federal government export credit agency (the U.S. Export-Import Bank) the gigantic Mexico state-owned oil and gas company Pemex? Between 2007 and 2013 (the most complete data set we have), Pemex received over $7 billion in loans backed by American taxpayers to buy U.S. goods. Thanks to Uncle Sam, this discounted borrowing power gives Pemex a leg up on its competition with domestic oil and gas companies.
Then there’s the Trump administration tariffs. These import taxes on foreign goods coming from Europe, China, and other countries have not only raised the cost of doing business but also triggered retaliatory measures from foreign governments. For instance, the farm industry is paying a steep price from the tariffs on steel because they increase the cost of farm machinery, lowering profit margins. Farmers are also hurt by the European, Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese governments that have imposed retaliatory export restrictions on U.S. farm products. Many small farms are calling for help to survive. It’s so bad that the entire Iowa congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump on June 25 in which it called the tariffs “catastrophic for Iowa’s economy.”
Quote in the headline from Firefly episode “Serenity, Part 1”.
Comments Off on “That’s what governments are for — get in a man’s way”
July 4, 2018
Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers
From the abstract of a recent study:
Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.
Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.
This certainly matches my own experiences working at companies that changed their offices to more open or fully open spaces. The accountants may have loved the new spaces as being less expensive, but one of the key advantages claimed for open designs does not appear to be true.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
Comments Off on Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers
July 1, 2018
A point about historical advisors in films
Lindybeige
Published on 24 Mar 2011In which I relate an anecdote which is fairly depressingly illuminating when it comes to how much Hollywood really cares about historical authenticitude.
Comments Off on A point about historical advisors in films
June 30, 2018
Enriching the public in ways that do not show up in the GDP calculations
Tim Worstall looks at the calls to regulate the big tech firms and points out that we already get a very good deal on “free stuff” that isn’t reflected in standard economic statistics:
It won’t have escaped your attention that rather large numbers of people are calling for the regulation of the tech companies. The Amazon, Google, Facebook (Apple and Microsoft often added, just because they’re large) nexus have lots of power over markets and thus therefore – well, therefore something. My own prejudice here is that certain people just cannot look at centres of power and or money without insisting that they, the complainers, should be the ones exercising that power and determining the disposition of that money. Thus much of the drive for “democratic” regulation of the economy more generally, the self proclaimed democrats being the ones who would end up with the power. The advantage of this analysis being that it does describe reality, the same people do end up making the same arguments about different companies over time. Mere prominence brings the demand for control.
The economist on this subject is Jean Tirole. His Nobel was for exploring this very subject, tech companies and the two sided market. Google, for example, sells the search engine to us and us to the advertisers. The tech here is different, obviously, but the underlying economics is the same as that of the free newspaper.
Tirole’s a new book out and there are a number of interesting points to be had from it:
Yes, on the whole consumers tend to get a good deal, because we use wonderful services — like Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and Waze — for free. To be certain, we are not paid for the valuable data we provide to the platforms, as for example Eric Posner and Glen Weyl remind us in their recent book Radical Markets. But on the whole, our living standards have substantially improved thanks to the digital revolution.
From which we can extract a few points. We’re richer, we really are. Substantially richer and yet in a manner that normal economic statistics entirely fail to capture. As Hal Varian has pointed out, GDP doesn’t deal well with free. Near all of those benefits of the digital revolution are coming to us for free and so aren’t recorded in that GDP. So, we’re richer yet the numbers say we’re not. In that is much of the explanation of slow economic growth these days, even of slow real wage growth. We’re just not counting what is happening to our living standards.
But we can and should go further than that. If the above is true then we’re very much less unequal than we’re recording. Stuff that’s free is, obviously enough, distributed rather more evenly among the population than extant monetary incomes. You, me and Bill Gates all have access to exactly the same amount of Facebook at the same price. We’re entirely equal in that sense. Bill’s actually poorer concerning search engines, stuck for emotional reasons with Bing as he is while we get to use Google or DuckDuckGo. Our standard measures of inequality are wrong both because of the undermeasurement of new wealth and also the extremely equitable pattern of the distribution of that new wealth.
Comments Off on Enriching the public in ways that do not show up in the GDP calculations
QotD: In government regulations, complexity is a subsidy to existing companies
One of the major themes of the book I’m working on should be familiar to longtime readers of this “news”letter. It boils down to a simple insight: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary to get around them. Big corporations tend not to object to more burdensome regulations because they can afford to comply with them. Dodd-Frank was great for the “too big to fail” crowd. But it has been murder on community banks that don’t have the resources to comply. As Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, put it:
It’s very hard for outside entrants to come in and disrupt our business simply because we’re so regulated. We hear people in our industry talk about the regulation, and they talk about it with a sigh about the burdensome of regulation. But in fact in some cases the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.
But you’ve been hearing this stuff from me for years. Let’s get back to the arrogance thing. It seems to me a big part of the problem with progressive elites these days is that they lack self-awareness. That elites arrange affairs for their own self-interest is an insight that was already ancient when Robert Michels penned his Iron Law of Oligarchy. But ever since the progressives concocted their theories of “disinterestedness,” they’ve convinced themselves that they are not in fact a self-serving elite. Give feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces their status and power.
Well, most of them are blind to it. Occasionally the mask slips. Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects and financial beneficiaries of the health-care “reform,” told audiences that Obamacare was designed “in a tortured way” to hide the fact that “healthy people pay in and sick people get money.” They had to do it this way to get around the inconvenient “stupidity of the American voter.” A feudal lord who talked this way about his serfs wouldn’t get any grief for it. But in America such honesty gets you rendered an un-person.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.
Comments Off on QotD: In government regulations, complexity is a subsidy to existing companies
June 29, 2018
Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing
Justin Raimondo on the plight of Honduras, and how it got to be the hellhole it is:
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.
As tens of thousands gather at our southern border, roiling US politics, the question arises: why are so many of the asylum-seekers and migrants crossing the border illegally from three Central American countries in particular: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala?
To begin with, it’s no coincidence that these are the three “most invaded” countries south of the Rio Grande – that is, invaded by the United States and its proxies.
[…]
So what are these “refugees” fleeing? Is it so bad that parents are justified in paying smugglers to guide their underage children – traveling alone! – across the US-Mexican border?
Unlike the rest of the media, which has routinely ignored most of what goes on in Latin America since the end of the cold war, I’ve been covering the region regularly. […] As I wrote last year:
“Honduras has always been an American plaything, to be toyed with for the benefit of United Fruit (rebranded Chiquita) and the native landowning aristocracy, and disciplined when necessary: Washington sent in the Marines a total of seven times between 1903 and 1925. The Honduran peasants didn’t like their lands being confiscated by the government and turned over to foreign-owned producers, who were granted monopolistic franchises by corrupt public officials. Periodic rural revolts started spreading to the cities, despite harsh repression, and the country – ruled directly by the military since 1955 – returned to a civilian regime in 1981.”
That column was about the Hillary Clinton-endorsed coup against the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya. The popular conservative-turned-reformer had pushed through a number of measures designed to alleviate the peasantry’s hopeless poverty and shift power from the military to the presidency, which angered the Honduran elite. They were triggered, however, when Zelaya joined the ALBA alliance of Latin American countries allied with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. While ALBA never really amounted to much, either economically or militarily, the symbolism of this move was too much for the Honduran military, which was trained in the US and generously subsidized by Washington. The generals soon had Zelaya on a plane out of the country – while still in his pajamas. Washington issued a perfunctory scolding, but Hillary’s State Department had approved the coup in advance. It’s always been done that way, and this time was no exception.
[…]
So is the Honduran hegira to the Rio Grande a direct result of US foreign policy: is it “blowback,” to utilize CIA parlance for the unpleasant consequences of US actions abroad? It would be easy to say this is yet another example of how our foreign policy of global intervention comes back to haunt us, because that is partially true. Yet the old familiar story of the Ugly Americans backing the even uglier Local Despot doesn’t quite fit the most current facts: there has been an amazing drop in US military aid to Honduras. In 2017 it was over $19 million. This year it’s a mere $750,000!
The history of Honduras before the rise of American hegemony has done more to shape the country than any other single factor: the vital question of land ownership is the central issue here and in the entire South. Feudalism was never really abolished, and the feudalist remnants that persist to this day in the region delayed economic and technological development and kept the vast majority in penury. US foreign policy helped to sustain the life of this systemic repression: it didn’t create it. Whatever the “root causes,” the blowback from all this history has created something very close to a failed state.
This is why tens of thousands are making the long trek to the US-Mexican border: the social and institutional basis of human civilization is breaking down, not only in Honduras but throughout Latin America. Yet this is neither new nor is it primarily attributable to the actions of the US. Yes, our “war on drugs” has created a criminal class that is rivaling the power of the local governments to keep order, but hard drugs are illegal everywhere, not just in North America.
Comments Off on Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing
June 27, 2018
Calico prohibition
In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:
Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons
On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.
Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.
It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.
Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.
“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”
They failed.
In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).
Comments Off on Calico prohibition
