Quotulatiousness

June 9, 2020

It was scientifically inevitable for the Communists to win the Cold War – as foretold in the prophecies

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the “script” that progressives operated under during the Cold War and almost unchanged in detail to the present day, too:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

… the Cold War had two sides: the USSR and our elites, who had been corrupted and taken over for a long time thanks to the communist agents who had long-marched through our media, our entertainment and our bureaucracy.

Heinlein claimed the Democrats had been taken over by communists, secretly, by the 40s. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m sure most of the bureaucracy and governments in Europe had been taken over that way also.

Even so called conservatives assumed communism would eventually win, because according to the numbers coming out of the USSR and the reporters visiting the USSR — anyone know where Duranty is buried? there should be a line to piss on his grave — they were just so much more efficient. Scientific governance, you know? And anyway, technology was going to be so advanced that most humans would be unemployable, and by the way, there were more and more humans every year, so it was impossible to have all these bourgeois luxuries. So communism, efficient, compassionate, communism was the future, the only way.

The realists who saw it was the only way were willing to do anything to bring it about. Because the people who weren’t as intelligent/well informed would otherwise destroy the world and bring about unimaginable catastrophe.

“Conservatives” were merely those who wanted communism to arrive slower and be a little less violent. Communism with a human face. Socialism on the way to communism. Easing us into our role as cogs in the machinery of the future — where there was no room for personal frills or really emotions — with gentle pneumatic shocks, instead of with the excesses of the Russian and Soviet revolution.

All of this btw is based on three glaring fallacies (phaluscies, since you have to be a dickhead to believe them particularly now.)

1- People are a drain not an asset. They are also a sort of robot incapable of changing behavior in response to changing circumstances.

2- Wealth can’t grow, nor can the carrying capacity of the Earth improve. So since humans can’t respond to reduced infant mortality by having fewer children, the only way to feed everyone is to reduce everyone’s rations. Forever.

3- It is possible for “the best”, properly educated people to be utterly selfless and to administer everyone’s wealth equally and for the common good. They will not revel in power, nor will they avail themselves of any excess. Because, they are absolutely moral and all seeing.

Note the left is still running this script. And some on the right too (Hello, Pierre Delecto!) not to mention all of Europe, left and right. Also note #1 conflicts with the left idea that they can bring about a future in which humans change to be all selfless, etc. But that’s actually complicated and tied in to their myths, which honestly are a Christian heresy, complete with paradise lost.

I know when they started out, the USSR thought it could “engineer” a new human. Homo Sovieticus. But I don’t know enough of Soviet myth to know what underlay that. Maybe it was a behaviorist thing and they thought humans could be trained into being completely selfless automatons. I know by the time I was reading communist theorists (no, I didn’t buy their arguments, but I was required to read them, given when and where I grew up) in the seventies, the philosophy had fallen prey to the agitprop notion that people in madhouses in the US were political prisoners just as in the USSR. (BTW this is part of what underlay the closing of the madhouses.) And that was part of a push in the seventies, as the malfeasance of USSR was starting to be glaring, amid escaped dissidents and escaping information. The push was to “prove” that both systems were equally bad. (The left is still flogging that dead equine, too. So Cubans and Venezuelans are starving? So how many people die of anomie and not being loved enough under capitalism? REEEEE.) So, since Soviets put dissidents in mad houses, so did we. But that necessitated that people who widdled on themselves and/or thought they were a lampshade with a set of dishes thrown in be completely sane “political dissidents”. The only way to do this was to attribute anything communists don’t like to “insanity brought about by capitalism.” This led to crazier byways of thought. For instance, it led to the idea of the pre-historic, pre-agriculture paradise, where everyone was equal, there was no poverty, need, greed, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. A sub-branch of the church believed women were in charge and everyone worshiped the mother goddess. And some of these “scientific, atheist socialists” also believe the goddess actually exists, though G-d doesn’t.

David Friedman had a different formulation for the utopian world many progressives wish for the rest of us:

In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.

June 7, 2020

Why determining the Impact of Lend-Lease is so complicated

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History Visualized
Published 14 Aug 2018

Determining the impact of the Western Aid that was provided to the Soviet Union in the Second World War is quite controversial. This aid was provided under the Lend-Lease act, as such it is usually just called Lend-Lease. The majority of the support was provided by the United States, yet other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada aided the Soviet Union as well.

Thank you to VonKickass for the Thumbnail Design!

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» SOURCES «

Boris V. Sokolov: “The role of lend‐lease in Soviet military efforts, 1941–1945”, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 7:3 (1994) p. 567-586

Hill, Alexander: The Red Army and the Second World War. Armies of the Second World War. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2017.

Glantz, David M.; House, Jonathan M.: When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army stopped Hitler. Revised and Expanded Edition. University Press of Kansas: USA, 2015

Harrison, Mark: THE SOVIET ECONOMY AND RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES AND BRITAIN, 1941-1945, Draft 25 August, 1993

Hill, Alexander: “British Lend Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941 June 1942”, in: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 773-808

Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 1: Fighting the War. Cambridge University Press: UK (2015)

Broadberry, Stephen; Howlett, Peter: “The United Kingdom: ‘Victory at all costs'”, in: Harrison, Mark (ed.): The Economics of World War II. Cambridge University Press: UK (1998), p. 43-80

Strydwolf: Lend-Lease to Soviet Union, significance, impact and myths

Protocol and Area Information Staff of the U.S.S.R. Branch and the Division of Research and Reports: REPORT ON WAR AID FURNISHED BY THE UNITED STATES TO THE U.S.S.R, November 28, 1945

Harrison, Mark: “The USSR and Total War: Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?” In: Chickering, Roger (ed.); Förster, Stig (ed.); Greiner, Bernd (ed.): A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1939-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), p. 137-156.

Tooze, Adam: The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin Books: United Kingdom (2006).

Overy, Richard: Why the Allies Won. Pimlico: London, UK (2006).

Higham, Robin (ed.); Kagan, Frederick W. (ed.): The Military History of the Soviet Union. Palgrave: New York, 2002

Havlat, Denis: Western aid for the Soviet Union during World War II, Wien, 2015 (Master Thesis)

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June 3, 2020

How to be a Pirate: Quartermaster Edition 📙📈

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

CGP Grey
Published 2 Jun 2020

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Fanatics gonna fanatic … they can’t help it

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s funny that no matter what the claimed crisis, the answers always go in the same direction, as Kristian Niemietz points out with the demands to turn our still unending lockdown toward “protecting the environment”:

The change, superficially, is to encourage “a safe return to work” allowing more social distancing between pedestrians, but more substantially in order to preserve the cleaner air that has resulted from the lockdown.

The health and safety excuse for the policy change can be largely dismissed. The simple truth of the pandemic and national policy is that if social distancing matters, the centre of London is not safe to return to work. It is too densely populated and almost entirely reliant on mass transit which cannot operate above 10-15% capacity with 2m exclusion rules. With average commutes over 9 miles each way, substitution effects to walking and cycling will be extremely limited and temporary.

It is then hard to see then how the policy’s architects imagine the streets will fill up to the extent urgent measures are needed. Conversely, if social distancing does not matter (and it will cease to matter eventually), then a policy to enable more social distancing outside by widening the pedestrian streetscape is redundant. If it is safe to sit on a crowded train, it is safe to walk on a crowded pavement. It is not hard then to cut through the pandemic packaging to note that the motive for this policy is opportunistic, to accelerate a pedestrianisation plan that is the dream of many an urban planner.

Many will see this as self-evidently a good thing. Removing vehicle traffic from densely populated narrow streets will reduce air pollution, congestion and road traffic accidents. As a policy it will have more supporters than opponents; very few people drive into the centre of London to commute and there is very little capacity for parking. London’s leaders are not wrong to think that this is the future, the question is really one of timing and how they go about it, which is far more difficult and does not have anything to do with managing a coronavirus.

What the pandemic allows is the ability to use emergency powers for something that is not an emergency. This matters, in normal times it took several years to close one dangerous junction at Bank to most traffic, and this under a hail of protests from local businesses and taxi drivers. The same result can now be achieved in a few weeks across many streets. The democratic checks and balances that differentiate the UK from authoritarian states can be ditched and London officialdom granted extraordinary powers to do as they please. If the protestors don’t like it this time, they should note the right to protest has also been suspended, at least for now.

June 2, 2020

QotD: Economic inequality

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Economic inequality […] is both highly moralized (right-thinking people agree it’s the root of all evil) and intellectually devilishly complex, far more than people acknowledge. For example, if “the bottom fifth” earns the same proportion of income in 1980 and 2010, it doesn’t mean anyone’s income stagnated: these “fifths” are different people, and they earn a fifth of different totals. Also, it’s not clear that inequality (as opposed to poverty) is a moral abomination, or that reducing it is progress. As Walter Scheidel argues in The Great Leveler (another superb book of 2017), the most effective ways of reducing inequality are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions and state collapse.

Steven Pinker, “Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker”, Times Literary Supplement, 2018-02-18.

May 24, 2020

QotD: The “balance of trade”

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Joseph Schumpeter [wrote in] History of Economic Analysis (1954):

    The first thing to observe about this concept [of the balance of trade] is that it is in fact an analytic tool. The balance of trade is not a concrete thing like a price or a load of merchandise.

Yes (although it is even more accurate to describe the balance of trade as an accounting convention). If, for example, it had been decided to record purchases and sales of real estate on the current account rather than on the capital account, the size of each country’s current-account deficit or surplus would be different even though absolutely nothing real in the national or global economy would be changed. And yet to hear any of the many protectionists bemoan their country’s trade- or current-account deficit is to hear people who typically mistake this accounting convention for a concrete thing. Such complaints almost always reflect utter misunderstanding of so-called “trade balances.”

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-01-21.

May 22, 2020

When raising tax rates reduces total tax revenue

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains that the US tax system is already drawing too much in tax and any hope of increasing the total revenue will hinge on reducing the tax rate:

It is often stated that the rate [the Laffer Curve peak rate] discovered here is 75 to 80%. This is not so – that could be the rate if only we entirely and wholly changed the taxation system in a mass of highly undesirable ways. If we remain with roughly what we’ve got in structure and intent then the peak of the Laffer Curve is 54%. That is not income tax, that is taxes upon income. That means we add together all Federal and State taxes upon income, including “employer paid” portions of Social Security, Medicaid, special amounts for this and that and so on and on. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the US taxation system will note that top earners are, already in many states, paying this or more.

There is something else though. The Laffer Curve is not about taxes upon high earners. It is about taxes upon income. It’s true that there will be slight differences in what the peak rate on lower incomes should be, or what the peak of the curve is there. The income effect will be higher than the substitution at lower incomes than it is at higher. We don’t know how much so let’s just stick with what we’ve got – 54%.

At which point:

    The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own work incentives and disincentives. This paper uses the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to assess how these policies, in unison, impact work incentives. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program that incorporates household borrowing constraints and all major federal and state fiscal policies. We use TFA in conjunction with the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances to calculate Americans’ remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates. Our findings are striking. One in four low-wage workers face marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty.

This includes the withdrawal of welfare benefits as income rises – as it should – and so is compatible with the Universal Credit idea that the peak tax and withdrawal rate should be 60%. Or is it 66%?

As we can see that rate is hugely above the Laffer Curve peak. It should, therefore, be lower.

It’s possible to extend the taper. Withdraw benefits at slower rates as income rises. This is, however, hugely, vastlylily, expensive. So it’s not going to happen to any significant degree and if it does then it will be financed by reducing the overall amount of benefit being paid. Which would mean taking money off the truly low income in order to soften the blow to the marginally low income – not the way we want to be doing things.

The only other way to do this is to reduce the taxation of the income of those low income folks. This has been done, a bit, by the Trump tax reforms and the much larger personal deduction. A further bite could be taken by FICA taxation only applying to the income above the personal deduction, not from dollar $1 of income as now. In fact that would be the simplest manner of at least beginning to get to grips with this problem. FICA only starts at $12,000 a year or so. Or even, if all are to be sensible, starting income tax and FICA only at the poverty line, currently $14,000 or so a year for a single adult.

May 20, 2020

QotD: Behavioural economics, aka the applied theory of bossing people around

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Once [Richard] Thaler has established that you are in myriad ways irrational it’s much easier to argue, as he has, vigorously — in his academic research, in popular books, and now in a column for The New York Times — that you are too stupid to be treated as a free adult. You need, in the coinage of Thaler’s book, co-authored with the law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, to be “nudged.” Thaler and Sunstein call it “paternalistic libertarianism.”

Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around — for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.

Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.

For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics. Since 1848, one expert after another has set up shop finding “imperfections” in the market economy that Smith and Mill and Bastiat had come to understand as a pretty good system for supporting human flourishing.

Dierdre McCloskey, “The Applied Theory of Bossing People Around”, Reason, 2018-02-11.

May 19, 2020

Some changes to the working world … when the world gets back to working

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sean Gabb has some thoughts on the post-lockdown return so … well, not normal, but as the economy reaches toward a new working equilibrium:

Kensington High Street at the intersection with Kensington Church Street. Kensington, London, England.
Photo by Ghouston via Wikimedia Commons.

The Coronavirus and its aftermath of lingering paranoia are the perfect excuse. Decentralisation and homeworking must be done. They must be done for the duration. They must be continued after that to maintain social distancing. No one will think ill of Barclays and WPP for taking the leap. No one will blame them for taking the leap in a way that involves a few deviations from course and a less than elegant landing. A year from now, these organisations will be making measurably larger profits than they would be otherwise. The mistakes will have been ignored.

And other organisations will follow. Whether the present crash will bring on a depression shaped like a V or an L, there is no doubt that, even if slowly at first, the wheels of commerce will continue turning. But they will be turning on different rails. As with any change of course, there will be winners and losers. I have already discussed how I can expect to be among the winners. I will leave that as said for the other winners — these being anyone who can find a market for doing from home what was previously required by custom and lack of imagination to be done somewhere else. I will instead mention the losers.

Most obvious among these will be anyone involved in commercial property. Landlords will find themselves with many more square feet to fill than prospective tenants want to fill. Rental and freehold values will crumble. Bearing in mind how much debt is carried by commercial landlords, there will be some interesting business failures in the next few years. Then there are the ancillary sectors — property management companies, commercial estate agents, maintenance companies. These employ swarms of architects and surveyors and lawyers and negotiators, of builders, plumbers, electricians, of drivers and cleaners. If the humbler workers will eventually find other markets, many with degrees and professional qualifications can look to a future of straitened circumstances.

The lush residential estates in and about Central London will follow. I think particularly of the aristocratic residential holdings in Kensington. Houses here go for tens of thousands a week to senior bank workers from abroad. If the City and Canary Wharf are emptied out, who needs to live in a place like Kensington? It has poor Underground connections. It is close by places like Grenfell Tower. Its residents keep predators at bay only by heavy investment of their own in security and by suspecting every knock on the door and every sound in the night. Many of the shops and eateries that make its High Street an enjoyable place to be will not reopen. Those that do reopen will be hobbled by continuing formal and informal rules on social distancing.

As a result, restaurants and pubs and coffee bars will begin to disappear. All but a few of these were barely making normal profit before they were closed last month. So few are in liquidation as yet only because so few petitions have been lodged in the courts. Most of them will now be surplus to requirement. The same can be said of hotels. Speaking for myself, I used to visit Cambridge twice a year on examinations business. I was always put up there for a couple of nights. I shall now do from home all that I did in Cambridge. I doubt I am alone. Zoom will destroy business travel. In the same way, bigger televisions plus continued social distancing will finish off the theatres and cinemas — also in decline before last month.

May 16, 2020

QotD: Division of labour in the modern world

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… digital devices slow us down in subtler ways, too. Microsoft Office may be as much a drag on productivity as Candy Crush Saga. To see why, consider Adam Smith’s argument that economic progress was built on a foundation of the division of labour. His most celebrated example was a simple pin factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points” and 10 men together made nearly 50,000 pins a day.

In another example — the making of a woollen coat — Smith emphasises that the division of labour allows us to use machines, even “that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool”.

The shepherd has the perfect tool for a focused task. That tool needs countless other focused specialists: the bricklayer who built the foundry; the collier who mined fuel; the smith who forged the blades. It is a reinforcing spiral: the division of labour lets us build new machines, while machines work best when jobs have been divided into one small task after another.

The rise of the computer complicates this story. Computers can certainly continue the process of specialisation, parcelling out jobs into repetitive chunks, but fundamentally they are general purpose devices, and by running software such as Microsoft Office they are turning many of us into generalists.

In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. On a bill-by-the-minute basis none of this makes sense.

Why do we behave like this? It is partly a matter of pride: since everyone has the tools to build a website or lay out a book, it feels a little feeble to hand the job over to a professional. And it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving.

Tim Harford, “Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga”, The Undercover Economist, 2018-02-02.

May 14, 2020

QotD: Anti-dumping laws

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The antidumping law is defended as a remedy for market distortions caused by foreign government policies. Yet in actual practice, the methods of determining dumping under the law fail, repeatedly and at multiple levels, to distinguish between normal commercial pricing practices and those that reflect market-distorting government policies.

As a result, antidumping law as it currently exists routinely punishes normal competitive business practices — practices commonly engaged in by American companies at home and abroad. It is therefore not the case that the law guarantees a level playing field for American companies and their foreign competitors. On the contrary, it actively discriminates against foreign goods by subjecting them to requirements not applicable to American products.

Brink Lindsey and Dan Ikenson, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Laws, 2003.

May 9, 2020

History Summarized: The Meiji Restoration

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Humour, Japan, Military, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 8 May 2020

Japan may well have the record for World’s Speediest Industrialization, but how did they accomplish so much so fast without falling victim to Europe’s favorite 19th century pastime of “Colonization”? And how did Japan build up a Pan-Asian empire so darn quickly? All that and more in this deep-dive into the Meiji Restoration!

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction by Goto-Jones.
The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War by Paine.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Nitobe.

THAT WACKY POLITICAL CARTOON: “Japan Makes Her Debut Under Columbia’s Auspicies” https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services…

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

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May 7, 2020

Interesting change in shipping patterns … to avoid the Suez canal

Filed under: Business, Economics, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh linked to this story at gcaptain.com which would have been an unbelievable one in the pre-epidemic world:

A column of ships along the Suez Canal on 3 December, 2011.
Photo by https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104657/http://www.panoramio.com/user/2433337?with_photo_id=64163879 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) is set to lose over $10m in revenue from container lines routing vessels via the Cape of Good Hope rather than its waterway.

According to new Alphaliner research, “the number of containerships that have opted to use the Cape route and bypass the Suez Canal has risen to a historic peace-time high,” including at least 20 sailings on the Asia-Europe, Europe-Asia and North America east coast-Asia trades.

“A unique combination of a container tonnage surplus and rock-bottom bunker prices has increasingly prompted ocean carriers to avoid the canal – and thus its fees,” the analyst noted today.

“Rather unusually, even three westbound Asia-Europe headhaul sailings have opted for the Cape route, all operated by CMA CGM.

“Carriers very rarely choose this longer route for the time-sensitive headhaul, but the low bunker price and lack of demand in European markets, hit by the Covid-19 lockdowns, have suddenly made such moves viable,” it added.

May 6, 2020

Essential private sector workers and non-essential government workers

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A couple of articles at the Foundation for Economic Education look at the arbitrary division of peoples’ jobs into two broad categories:

In a recent TV appearance with Dana Perino on The Daily Briefing, [Mike] Rowe made it clear he’s not a fan of the terms “essential” and “non-essential” worker. The problem with such a view, Rowe said, is that such terms have little actual meaning and the economy makes no such distinction.

“There’s something tricky with the language going on here, because with regard to an economy, I don’t think there is any such thing as a nonessential worker,” Rowe said. “This is basically a quilt … and if you start pulling on jobs and tugging on careers over here and over there, the whole thing will bunch up in a weird way.”

Rowe’s message is precisely what FEE president and economist Zilvinas Silenas was getting at in a recent article published at Townhall.

    Allowing politicians to decide which businesses and products are “essential” is an invitation for disaster. If we continue to deny these businesses the ability to do the one essential thing they are best at — providing goods and services to millions of everyday Americans — we risk more than unemployment or recession of stock price plunge. We deprive ourselves of the best resource — our people — during the time of need.

The truth is, all workers are essential.

Unfortunately, all too often what is deemed “essential” is simply what’s convenient to state leaders making the decisions. Few would suggest that liquor store owners are inherently more essential than pizza parlor owners — except perhaps state revenue collectors. No doubt this is the same reason Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer concluded that lottery tickets are essential, but gardening seeds are not.

Liquor stores and lottery tickets aren’t especially “essential” to Americans, just state budgets. But as one Washington State sheriff noted in April, this seems to be the criteria state leaders often use to determine what is “essential” and “non-essential”: whether it helps the government’s bottom line.

When the state picks winners and losers it’s not only unfair, however. It’s also destructive.

In the other piece, J. Kyle deVries points out that government cannot be immunized from the economic harm the shutdown has and continues to inflict on the private sector:

So far millions in the private sector have lost their jobs or have been furloughed — but not many in government have. Many government employees continue to get salaries and benefits despite not working. Their agencies most certainly will not have as much work to do since major portions of the economy are closing down. Many agencies won’t even be needed any longer, but you better believe they will continue to be funded and probably expanded over time. That is outrageous. As we suffer economically, government should not be exempted.

This phenomenon is truly confounding and unfair. After all, government does not exist without taxes and taxes can only come from people who produce and earn a living — in other words, the private sector. The private sector supports government employees who, on average, receive higher pay, better perquisites and much better retirement plans. That should change. As we restructure our economy in the wake of the coronavirus, government should be restructured as well.

Businesses have no guarantee they will remain in business — they must provide their customers with a quality product or service at a competitive price or they will go bust. But government agencies remain in place for life, even if they continue to provide lousy services at outrageous expense. Government needs to show us they are with us during this fight. Part of doing so is to take a hard look at various agencies and departments to see if they can be improved or if they need to be eliminated. Before you say that would be difficult, let’s look at some obvious choices.

May 5, 2020

The perverse incentives of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren has clearly taken his cynical pills today:

The daily count of deaths from the Red Chinese Batflu is among the prized, scare-mongering features of our mass media. I am among those who consider these numbers to be significantly overstated, for a reason that Nikolai Gogol would understand. Each corpse is worth cash to some public authority, usually from a higher authority; and as always, finally from the taxpayers. Each also saves money for government programmes, that can be reallocated to the purchase of new votes. As the corpse providers from this virus are very old, and suffering from other life-threatening conditions, in almost every case, this statistical inflation is easy to perform. Death certificates are issued for any who died with “Covid-19,” whether or not they died from it, and more are then added of those who were never tested. Anything respiratory will do. It’s all judgement calls — on which side of the bread is buttered.

Compare if you will the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 and 1969. I was just reading a memoir, from down that memory hole. The death toll was actually higher then, than ours is now, and from within a smaller population; the victims included children and the young. Yet there were no interruptions in economic life; no public emergency theatricals; and at the height of the second wave of that scourge, we had events like Woodstock. (Those were the days, my friend.)

A neat way to correct for all our “judgement calls” might be to look at overall death rates, and see if they have risen or fallen. It is too early to get a clear view, but soon it may be too late, for vested interests will have tampered with them. All my life I have been learning to trust statistics, less — especially from those who dress in labcoats and affect that earnest look. Sometimes an exception must be considered, however. An unpredictable minority may be honest; some others might get numbers right by mistake.

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