[Progressives] should also be delighted by public choice scholars’ development of the theory of privilege-seeking (or “rent-seeking“). It’s an old observation, really: when the state’s personnel have favors to dispense, people in the private sector will invest resources to obtain them. Such favors are by nature impositions on third parties. They may take the form of cash subsidies, taxes and regulations that hamper or quash competition and raise incomes in a non-market manner, and other devices. But the principle is the same: private- and government-sector individuals collude to use the state’s coercive power to obtain what they could not obtain through voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. It’s a theory of exploitation the good-faith left should embrace.
By the same token, the state’s personnel, seeing opportunities to sell favors, are just as likely to initiate the privilege-seeking process. In this sense, public choice scholars are right when they see the political arena as a series of exchanges. The big difference with the marketplace, however, is that in the political arena the largest group of people is forced to participate.
The bottom line on privilege-seeking, which should interest the left, is this: the people with the greatest access to power will not be those the left cares most about, but those who run Boeing and ExxonMobil and GE and Lockheed Martin. Wealth transfers will tend overwhelmingly to be upward.
Sheldon Richman, “TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice”, The Libertarian Institute, 2017-07-28.
September 17, 2019
QotD: Rent-seeking
September 14, 2019
Stalin’s 5 Year Plan for Economic Mass Murder | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1932 Part 1 of 4
TimeGhost History
Stalin has to deal with the consequences of forcibly changing the Soviet Union from an agrarian economy into a modern industrialized society as his first five-years plan reaches its final year.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Naman Habtom
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Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
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Research by: Naman Habtom
Edited by: Daniel Weiss en Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek KaminskiA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
1 hour ago (edited)
Debating the concepts, definition and framework of Marxism, Communism and Socialism is something that historians don’t seem to get enough of, much like applying these theories to historical and contemporary phenomena. The study of how these theories turned into ideology and what effect that had on nations, cultures, peoples and wars is a very interesting field of history, which can be debated to great lengths, which we ourselves also like to engage and participate in. However, we want to once again emphasise that we will only allow debate within the generally accepted rules of academic debate. Keep it civil, substantiated, name your sources whenever possible and stay away from pseudo-science and contemporary politics. We are fierce believers in the benefits of academic debate and don’t want to resort to turning off the comments, as other channels might do when talking about subjects like the 5-year plan or the Holodomor.Cheers, Joram
September 13, 2019
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh gets his tax plans vetted by the Parliamentary Budget Office
A recent innovation for political campaigns is that they can ask the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide an estimate for the impact of any taxation proposals, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first out of the gate to have his “super-wealth tax” evaluated. The PBO estimates that the levy would net out some $6 billion in the first full year of implementation. Sounds like a lot of money! Colby Cosh explains why it’s not quite what it might seem:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.
Alas, the bean-counters always swoop in to spoil things. Singh’s wealth-tax scheme is instructive not only because he availed himself of PBO costing, but because it usefully reveals the limits of what the PBO or any other economic modeller can do. Look, in other words, at the fine print.
The PBO’s job was to estimate what you can extract from “an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to one per cent of net wealth above $20 million.” In the PBO model this is a simple multiplication, but the roughly $6 billion take is arrived at only by reducing the revenue by 35 per cent to correct for “behavioural response” — that is, lawful (and unlawful) tricks employed to avoid the new tax by the rich targets. The net revenue is what’s left after you deduct another two per cent to cover administrative costs.
And, as the PBO immediately insists, “the estimate has high uncertainty” on both counts. This means they’re educated guesses. Jennifer Robson, a social policy prof at Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger College, pointed out on Twitter that right now we don’t tax economic families per se and we don’t report assets and debts routinely to Revenue Canada. Ideas for pure wealth taxation (which is rare in practice) are predicated on the creation of, essentially, a new tax system — one which would have to detect and perpetually update how much, for example, the furniture in your house costs. The 35 per cent loss from behavioural response is at the high end of historic estimates from real-world examples. Even within our current tax system, Robson observes, we only get two extra dollars for every one we spend on expanding collections and compliance against the existing tax base.
As a practical matter, a wealth tax would mostly be, or would act most efficiently as, a tax on bank balances and investment accounts. Of course, there is always real estate. The super-rich seem to have a lot of that, and it is relatively easy to tax, and the resentment of Torontonians and Vancouverites who don’t own some is, for better or worse, a major reason the NDP is trying to weaponize envy.
But this reminds us that property taxes and taxes on property transfers perform a similar function, although they are not used primarily for income redistribution as such here — and in Canada ours are relatively high. The OECD does a little league table of tax structures, and compared with other industrialized countries Canada’s take from property taxes is about double the average. In a 36-country list we are near the bottom (33rd) in our dependence on taxing goods and services, and about average (12th) in dependence on corporate taxation, but fifth highest in dependence on personal taxation — and third in dependence on property taxes.
September 6, 2019
Germany Commits Suicide by Cancelling War Reparations | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1931 Part 3 of 3
TimeGhost History
Published on 5 Sep 2019Contrary to popular belief it is not so much reparations themselves that puts the first stepping stone in place for the Nazi to rise to power. Instead it is the cancellation of war reparations, or more correctly put; the measures that “The Hunger Chancellor” Heinrich Brüning implements to get reparations cancelled that pushes Germany over the financial brink and into the hands of Hitler and Goebbels.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
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Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
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Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
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Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns and Daniel Weiss
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Colorization by Daniel WeissThumbnail: Goebbels colorized bu Olga Shirnina, aka Klimbim
Archive by Reuters/Screenocean http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
Sources:
Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Theo Balderston, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic
Kolbe, The Weimar Republic
Harold James, The Causes of the German Banking Crisis of 1931
Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to HitlerSources images: Bundesarchiv
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
49 minutes ago (edited)OK, so this video is about Naziism to some degree, it’s also a serious look at how Germany started transitioning into Naziism – this is not speculation, it’s not even very controversial, it just happens to not fit with many popular superficial misconceptions. Now, we love it when you guys debate under our videos, even when it’s in disagreement with something we or somebody else said, but before you do so please save us some time and read our rules and consider if your post is against our rules. If you think it might be, consider editing or just not posting it — otherwise you’re just wasting our time and your own — because no matter what, we will moderate this.
If your going to post that the Versailles Treaty was to blame you might want to read this instead: https://community.timeghost.tv/t/why-the-treaty-of-versailles-didnt-cause-naziism-answering-a-guy-on-youtube/1858 — that’s Indy’s extensive answer to that claim.
If you’re going to claim “Naziism was Left Wing” well you can do that, we don’t suppress opinions, not even silly ones, but we suggest that you read this instead: https://timeghost.tv/national-socialism-an-extreme-left-wing-ideology/ that’s Spartacus’s explanation why it is not considered so by historians (and why it’s not really that important).
If you’re going to praise Naziism or celebrate Communism, or propose that any other form of lethal extremism is a great idea — just don’t, we do remove any promotion for lethal anti-democratic ideologies, and will probably revoke your positing privileges.
If you’re going to start peddling conspiracy theories about Jews controlling [insert your crazy idea here] or “it was the Jews” — definitely don’t do that or it will be last thing you post here.
If you’re going to say that stopping German Communism is what caused Naziism — well you can do that … it’s pretty much wrong or at least a gross misrepresentation, and you’ll look like an idiot to anyone who knows their factual German history, but you can do that if publicly proclaiming ignorance is your thing — we would however suggest waiting for our next video on Germany’s elections in 1932 for a more correct take on that instead.
September 4, 2019
Viewing WW2 as “the Air-Sea Super Battlefield”
According to Phillips Payson O’Brien, it’s old-fashioned to view large land battles as being “decisive” in modern warfare:
Kombat (Russian: Комбат, lit. “battalion commander”) is a black-and-white photograph by the Soviet photographer Max Alpert. It depicts a Soviet military officer armed with a TT pistol who is raising his unit for an attack during World War II. This work is regarded as one of the most iconic Soviet World War II photographs, yet neither the date nor the subject is known with certainty. According to the most widely accepted version, the photograph depicts junior politruk (political officer) Aleksei Gordeyevich Yeryomenko, minutes before his death on 12 July 1942, in Voroshilovgrad Oblast, Ukraine.
Wikimedia Commons.
Allied victory in WWII is usually viewed through the lens of large land battles, from Stalingrad to Kursk to D-Day. However, battlefield losses of equipment in these “great” land battles were relatively small and easily replaceable. This column demonstrates that the real effort of the major powers was put into the construction of air and sea weapons. The Allies used their air and sea power to destroy the Axis’s in a multi-layered campaign. This was the true battlefield of WWII: a massive air-sea super battlefield that stretched for thousands of miles. Victory in this super-battlefield led to victory in the war.
Every aspect of WWII is discussed in a vast literature. Considering its diversity, explanations of why Germany lost the war are surprisingly predictable. It remains widely argued that the Nazis were beaten mostly by the Soviet Union’s powerful Red Army (Hastings 2005: 508, Kennedy 2013: 183).
From June 1941 to May 1945, German “power” was supposedly engaged and destroyed by the Russians. At some points, more than two-thirds of German infantry were engaged against the Red Army. The famous battles of the Eastern Front, such as Stalingrad and Kursk, supposedly caused the Germans’ crippling losses. The upshot of this lopsided deployment was that most German soldiers died in the East. Fighting against the Americans and British, conversely, is often portrayed as a secondary concern (Roberts 2010: 573).
What’s wrong with a focus on battles?
This battle-centric view, like much history of WWII, is old-fashioned. Historians of strategy have moved away from seeing battles as determinative. Nolan (2017) has argued that attrition losses are more important than battle losses in explaining outcomes.
The battle-centric analysis implies that infantry deployment is the best way to analyse effort. Yet, human-power was rarely the key factor in deciding combat in WWII. Equipment and specialised training mattered more. Possessing and operating the largest stores of modern weapons, not only tanks and artillery but also aircraft and naval vessels, determined the course of battles and the war.
If we reframe the discussion of the war to look not only at what equipment was made but also at how it was destroyed, it emerges that the war was decided far from the land battlefield (O’Brien 2015). The most striking sign of this is how little war production went to the land war and how much went to the combined air-sea war. This was the case for all the powers except the USSR.
September 2, 2019
The economics of climate change policies
Tim Worstall explains the economic implications for the various demands that we consume less in order to fight climate change:
A major contention from economists is that if we decide to fight global heating in the wrong manner then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. A major contention from the same economists is that if we don’t fight global heating at all then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. That being the economic point about all of this, we must fight global heating in the correct manner.
The correct manner not being vast plans by bureaucracies. Instead, change market prices with the one intervention – a crowbar into the system just the once with a carbon tax – and then let the economy itself chew through the implications of that.
Do note that the argument is not “poorer than we are now”, it’s poorer in the future than we need to be in that future.
And then we’ve got the varied Green, New Deal, unsoaped hippies and socialist idiots whose demand is rather different. They are insisting that we must be poorer, now, than we are, now. These people really do have to be told to bugger off:
A sustainable environment means consuming less, not differently.
The only useful measure of how rich you are is “What are you able to consume?” Insisting that you consume less is therefore insisting upon being poorer.
It’s also entirely wrong that consuming differently won’t make a difference. Because again those economists. The thing we consume is value. That’s also the thing that we produce. That Gross Domestic Product, GDP, that is so bewailed as a societal target is nothing but the value added in the economy. GNP is the value which accrues to the people in the economy. NNI is the net value that goes as income to those in the economy. And so on through the different possible combinations of net and gross, national and domestic, production and income.
They’re all measures of value added. Not of resources consumed at all. So, if we face resource constraints all we need to do is change the value we’re producing by using fewer of those scarce resources to do so. Then we can carry on consuming ever greater quantities of value that we’ve gone and created. This must obviously be so – we do quite obviously face resource constraints currently. All economic resources are scarce, that’s what makes them economic resources in the first place, their scarcity. We don’t actually have an economics of atmospheric nitrogen because it’s not scarce. We do have an economics of soil nitrogen because it is scarce. The conversion of one to the other comes at a price – many prices in fact. The conversion itself, the algal blooms from having done so and so on. But the doing also adds value – which is then what humans consume, the value added.
So, the idea that consuming differently won’t make a difference is dribble. Plus, the idea that we must all be poorer in order to sustain that environment is drivel. Simple observation tells us that places with poor people have worse environments than places with rich.
August 30, 2019
Academia and social media create a toxic, abusive environment
Phillip Magness recounts his experiences on Twitter when he pointed out that a major work that the New York Times used in their 1619 Project suffers from some significant statistical problems:
About a week ago I began scrutinizing how the New York Times‘ 1619 Project relied upon the work of the controversial “New History of Capitalism” genre of historical scholarship to advance a sweeping indictment of free markets over the historical evils of slavery. The problems with this literature are many, and prominent among them is its use of shoddy statistical work by Cornell University historian Ed Baptist to grossly exaggerate the historical effect of slave-produced cotton on American economic development. Baptist’s unusual rehabilitation of the old Confederacy-linked “King Cotton” thesis is unsupported by evidence and widely rejected by economic historians. His book The Half Has Never Been Told has nonetheless acquired a vocal following among historians and journalists, including providing the basis of a feature article in the Times series on slavery.
Curious about the following Baptist’s work had acquired despite its clear problems, I presented several questions on Twitter for its enthusiasts in the academy.
Were they aware that Baptist’s statistics, including his estimate of slavery’s share of the antebellum economy, arose from a documented mathematical error? Did they know his thesis had been scrutinized by leading economic historians, who found problems of misrepresented evidence and citations to documents that did not support what Baptist claimed? Had Baptist made any effort to respond to his critics? Or, more importantly, had he corrected his statistical mistakes, which continue to be cited in the press, in academic works, and even in congressional hearings on the legacy of slavery despite their inaccuracy?
Unless you’re new to the social media cesspit, you won’t be surprised to find out that his inquiries generated a lot of heated responses, including some academics indulging in “keyboard warrior” tactics to discredit him while avoiding engaging with the points he was attempting to raise.
Social media brings with it a mixed bag of everything from intellectual exchange to juvenile antics to a corrosive undermining of basic discourse, as my colleague Max Gulker recently catalogued. But there also seems to be something about Twitter that brings out the very worst in academics.
A quick foray onto the site and a few minutes of reading will provide ample evidence that Araujo’s outburst is not atypical among the regulars of History Twitter. Or Econ Twitter. Or English, Philosophy, and Sociology Twitter. Politics are often, though not always, the occasion, which in practice translates into distinguished professors at elite institutions striving their hardest to reduce themselves to intellectual parity with a certain presidential account’s own notorious stream of insults and derision.
The more disturbing examples come from the medium’s effects on scholarly discussion though.
In theory, a functional academic Twitter community would permit intellectuals to instantaneously present their ideas before peers all over the world and receive real-time feedback on research discoveries or scholarly challenges to controversial ideas. They could tap the expertise of others for suggestions on roadblocks in the processes of scholarly production. They could solicit constructive criticism from opponents. Or they could challenge problematic arguments in the existing literature, prompting scholars to examine the strengths and weaknesses of each. Imagine a global conference or seminar room where you can not only find academic peers working on common interests, but also solicit their advice — or push back against contested areas of their work.
August 29, 2019
“‘Neo-liberalism’ is actually little more than … ‘market socialism'”
Peter Boettke responds to a New York Times opinion piece by Binyamin Appelbaum, blaming economists for the state of the western world:
A Mises Institute graphic of some of the key economists in the Austrian tradition (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Mises Institute via Wikimedia Commons.
But the problem is deeper than economists, it is ANYBODY put in this position of power and prestige, and to do so is fundamentally anti-democratic as was argued by Frank Knight in various writings, and then by Vincent Ostrom in The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration, and more recently in David Levy and Sandra Peart’s Escape from Democracy. We cannot fix this problem by replacing one set of “experts” with another set. We have to stop thinking of the relationship between economics and public administration along these lines altogether.
I try to lay out the argument in my SEA address on “Economics and Public Administration“, which also served as an attempt to summarize two decades of research that several of us have undertaken in this spirit. The critical argument in that text for this issue is that I argue that economics is a derived demand, if we conceive of the task of public administration one way, that will shape not only shape the supply and demand of economists, but dictate what it means to produce an economist — and thus, what is means to be an economist.
The problem with narratives like Appelbaum’s isn’t that he is suspicious of the pretensions of economists, it is that he is blaming the wrong culprit for the mess we’re in. Here it is important that everyone of these critics read Gregory Mankiw’s very important piece, published BEFORE the financial crisis, on the macroeconomist as scientists (read Chicago New Classical and Monetarists) and the macroeconomists as engineers (read MIT/Harvard Keynesian and New Keynesians). The Chicago folks — and the Austrian, Virginia, UCLA, etc. folks — did not go to DC, did not write laws, didn’t attempt to orchestrate economic miracles abroad, or stimulate growth at home. They taught, they lectured, the researched and wrote papers in journals and published books, and a subset of them wrote opinion editorials and did interviews in various forms of popular media. In short, they were teachers and students of society. They did not get paid to be experts for the government in general. They were not advisors. But others were — from Keynes to Larry Summers — the line is long. Just look at the number of central bankers that were PhD students under Stan Fischer at MIT. Can you trace that same lineage to Milton Friedman? How about to F. A. Hayek? Mises? Right, I didn’t think so.
“Neo-liberalism” is actually little more than an effort to bring neoclassical models of efficiency into the operation of governmental agencies — that in another era was called “market socialism” — just look at Abba Lerner’s The Economics of Control. He actually thought he had found the right way to combine socialist aspirations with the teachings of economics so he could ensure microeconomic efficiency and macroeconomic stability and provide economists with the tools to successfully steer the economic ship. That basic idea from mid-20th century to today has never disappeared in those halls of power — what has appeared is a waffling between liberal (in the American sense) Keynesianism, and conservative Keynesianism, but Keynesianism exists throughout. The Samuelsonian Neo-classical synthesis achieved the status he hoped for it … and provides the meaning behind his statement in the teachers manual “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws … if I can write its economics textbooks.” Samuelson knew that if he could wrest control of the tacit presuppositions of public policy functionaries, then there thoughts and actions would be guided by what he taught about market failure, macroeconomic instability, and government as a corrective to our economic woes. It’s an amazing achievement what he did. For at least a generation, perhaps two, he controlled both the introduction to economics market, and the advanced training of PhD students in economics market.
Thinkers rose up in opposition to this hegemony from the older generation such as Knight, Mises and Hayek, but also among his contemporaries such as Alchian, Coase and Friedman, and of course a younger generation such as Becker and Lucas, but also Demsetz, Kirzner, etc. But, look at those names … they did not go to Washington DC to work for domestic policy agencies or the international agencies in economic policy. They were content in their jobs as economic scholars/teachers. They were humble students of society, and some among them rose to the status of social critics and intellectuals. But again none were master manipulators of the organs of power to try to shape the economy into the image of their ideal.
August 28, 2019
And then came Genghis Khan – Sorrow of the Song Dynasty l HISTORY OF CHINA
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 10 Aug 2015The Song dynasty is often described as an early modern economy. It marked a lot of economical changes from previous dynasties. Starting with the decentralisation of power and reduced economical involvement, it brought on industrial growth and agricultural expansion. Although being forced to advance in military technology due to wars with the Liao and the Jurchen, the Song would eventually fall to the Mongols. Crumbling under Genghis Khan’s attacks it would only take one generation until his successor Kublai Khan would declare a new Yuan Dynasty. Find out all about this Epoch on IT’S HISTORY!
» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
Pictures: mainly Picture Alliance
Content:
Benn, Charles (2002), China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang dynasty, Oxford University Press
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (1999), The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Gascoigne, Bamber; Gascoigne, Christina (2003), The Dynasties of China: A History, New York
Levathes, Louise (1994), When China Ruled the Seas, New York: Simon & Schuster
Whitfield, Susan (2004), The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith, Chicago: Serindia» ABOUT US
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Of course! Tell your teachers or professors about our channel and our videos. We’re happy if we can contribute with our videos.» CREDITS
Presented by: Guy Kiddey
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August 24, 2019
Remy: All My Loving (Beatles Parody)
ReasonTV
Published on 23 Aug 2019Remy discovers the hysterical, shrieking crowds are here for the entitlements.
Written and Performed by Remy
Produced and Edited by Austin Bragg
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
——————Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—————-
LYRICS:
Does adulthood dismay you?
Vote me and I’ll pay you
You won’t have to grow up it’s true
All your bills will be paid
Your adulthood delayed
And I’ll give all this money to youBob commuted to college
For discounted knowledge
So large debts he would not accrue
Lived at home, did some chores
Now he’ll also pay yours
Cuz I’ll give all his money to youAll this money
You will get from Bob
All this money
If I get this jobAll your work wages risen
Your debts all forgiven
Your childcare will be paid for too
Want free parental leave
Just takes one vote for me
And I’ll give all this money to youAll Bob’s money
I will give to you
All Bob’s money
If I win it’s true
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
I will give to you
August 19, 2019
UBI: threat or menace?
At Samizdata, Samizdata Illuminatus outlines the arguments for some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Negative Income Tax (NIT) and argues that it’s a terrible idea that should not be implemented anywhere:
Cartoon that appeared with Michael K. Spencer’s article “Is Universal Basic Income really a solution?” at https://medium.com/@Michael_Spencer/is-universal-basic-income-really-a-solution-c0d6d95f100e
For those that are not familiar with the term, UBI (Universal Basic Income) means, roughly, “the government should guarantee everyone some minimum level of income whether they work or not”.
The notion began simply enough. Some economists observed that there are a myriad of intersecting government programs for the poor (in many countries, dozens) which distort behaviour in horrible ways and which cost a fortune in overhead to administer. This is where the problem of UBI begins, in the hubris of the armchair philosopher. “What if”, these economists asked, “we can’t get rid of the dole entirely (even though that would be better) but we could at least make it efficient by replacing the entire morass with a single program, say a negative income tax?”
Trained to explore ideas (no matter how bad) for a living, said academic economists then vigorously explored this impossible hypothetical world in which they could not get rid of the dole but could somehow get politicians to perfectly implement their hypothetical improved alternative, and proceeded to write lots of papers about it.
Again, this academic musing was already a utopian impossibility, for in the real world, there are interests that would act to block the elimination of existing welfare schemes and insist that the new scheme be added to the current ones rather than replacing them. This sort of thing is routine, of course; originally, VAT schemes were thought of by academic economists as a less distorting replacement for income taxes but ended up added in addition.
The interest groups arrayed against replacement of existing welfare schemes range from the bureaucrats whose job it is to administer said schemes (and who for whom “efficiency” means unemployment), to the vast range of contractors employed in providing benefits of one sort or another, to the politicians who get votes and power in exchange for largesse paid for with other people’s money, to the current recipients of existing benefit schemes who will correctly reason that the notion behind “efficiency” is not to increase their benefits. There’s no advantage in replacement for any member of the existing system, and thus, it was a non-starter to begin with.
This did not, however, prevent many people from falling in love with the idea, as wouldn’t-it-be-ever-so-elegant-if-it-could-happen so often trumps this-is-reality in the minds of those saying “what if” over a pint or seven late in the evening at the pub next to the economics department offices.
Oh, and of course, a form of the negative income tax was created in the United States under the name of the “earned income tax credit”; as might have been predicted in advance, it was added to existing welfare programs rather than in any way replacing them.
From this simple yet benighted beginning as a completely unrealistic thought experiment, the idea of UBI gained traction and then, as most cancers do, developed a mutant and even more virulent cell line, one that allowed it to spread and grow in the minds not only of leftists (who are already inclined towards redistribution of all sorts) but those on the right who are inclined to view ordinary people as useless.
We are now informed that UBI is a solution to a different problem as well. We are informed, in not-so-hushed tones, that the rise of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence will soon automate away most jobs, resulting in a vast class of people who will be unemployable in any trade whatsoever, which will consequently lead to mass unemployment, and that said permanently unemployable people will starve to death if we don’t find ways to provide them with income.
We are told we thus must guarantee a minimum income for all, without regard to whether they are capable of earning a living on their own, or we’ll have riots on our hands once AI based systems become ubiquitous. They claim that we should, nay, must, promise everyone some minimal subsistence income, whether they work or not. This will provide the masses with the ability to survive, and thus society will be preserved.
August 18, 2019
The Austrian School on the causes and cures of economic recessions
Tim Worstall responds to a Guardian article on recessions (we’re apparently due for another one, according to the writer) and suggests that the Austrian theories may be helpful to understand what’s going on:
A Mises Institute graphic of some of the key economists in the Austrian tradition (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Mises Institute via Wikimedia Commons.
As a pencil sketch – all you can do in a single article – that’s rather good. So, fine, let’s run with that. We’ve not had a normal recession for ages, one will come along soon enough and we’ve forgotten how to deal with it.
However, we can take this idea a little further too. Off into the wild spaces of Austrian theory. There a recession happens because of the built up malinvestment across the economy. Essentially, when it’s too easy to finance stuff then too much bad stuff gets financed. We need the regular recession to flick off the froth and get back to a more sensible allocation of capital.
My own view is that there is no one correct macroeconomic theory but that all of them contain elements of the truth. The trick is to work out which theory to apply to which happenstance. Reorganising the Soviet economy wasn’t going to be done by a bit of Keynesian demand management, there was a century of misallocation to chew through. Getting out of 2008 was different because it was the financial system that had fallen over, we didn’t just have that cyclical decline in business investment. Etc. Austrians can – perish the thought, eh? – be a little too fervent in the insistence that all recessions are about misallocation that must be purged.
But note the underlying thing we can pick up from Davies here. We’ve been staving off that normal recession for decades through that management. Perhaps it’s not all that good an idea to continually do that? He really does say that the Crash stemmed from those attempts to stave off after all. Thus, in a sense, we could argue that we’re going to get the recessionary horrors come what may. Even Keynesian demand management might not be the correct solution if it just gives us once in a generation collapses rather than more regular downturns?
That is, perhaps the Austrians are at least in part right? We need the regular purges for fear of something worse?
QotD: “Hitting back” at protectionist policies
But soon a trade dispute erupts. Stump discovers – correctly, we can assume – that XYZ is charging you less for its lawn-care services than Stump agreed is acceptable for you to be charged and that XYZ agreed in the trade deal to charge. Stump, being a master negotiator, threatens to reimpose the $25 tariff on you unless and until XYZ raises the price it charges you to at least the level that Stump has divined is acceptable and that is enshrined in the terms of the trade agreement between him and XYZ. Alas, XYZ gives in and agrees to raise the price it charges you. Stump then boasts that, by not letting XYZ get away with breaking its word in the trade deal, he is not only protecting the neighborhood from dangerously low prices but is also upholding the sacred rule of law and the sanctity of contractual agreements.
Of course, in reality, Stump’s presumptuous exercise of the power to
rob youimpose a tariff on you whenever you engage in commerce that he finds objectionable is a wrong inflicted on you and on your trading partner, XYZ. The fact that the practicalities of the situation result in your and XYZ going along with the “deal” to entice Stump to stop robbing you each time you buy XYZ’s services does not ethically oblige you to stick to the terms of the deal if you can, in secret, get better terms from XYZ. When Stump threatens to reimpose on you the $25 tariff, he harms you. That is, when in response to Stump’s threat to reimpose the tariff XYZ agrees to abide by the terms of its trade agreement with Stump and raise the price that it charges you, you are made worse off, not better off.Stump’s enforcement of this agreement, in short, does not protect you from further victimization in the future; instead, that enforcement is itself an act of victimizing you. Successful enforcement of this agreement assures you a future less prosperous than it would be were Stump instead to ignore XYZ’s “violation” of the deal.
Note: we can all agree that, between the two options (1) $25 tariff and (2) no tariff but an enforced price-hike, under the trade agreement, of $15, that the second option is better for you than the first option. It is in this limited sense that trade agreements in reality are beneficial. But there’s a third option: (3) Stump does not interfere with your commerce and you pay whatever price you negotiate with XYZ without that price being artificially affected by Stump’s interference. This third option is, for you, the best of the three – and it’s the only fully ethical one of the bunch. (So when Dan Griswold, myself, and other free-traders defend trade agreements, we do so with the realistic recognition that option (3) is politically infeasible. Given this unfortunate infeasibility of option (3), we endorse option (2) over option (1).)
Don Boudreaux, “Strict Enforcement of an Impoverishing Deal Assures Continuing Impoverishment”, Café Hayek, 2017-07-07.
August 16, 2019
The CO2-reduced future the elites want for the rest of us
Arthur Chrenkoff outlines the self-imposed hardship of a new Swedish MEP as he struggles to make his 24-hour weekly commute between Stockholm and Strasbourg (because he’s pretending that there are no flights between those two locations) and explains that it’s emblematic of the kind of future “our” leaders want all of us peasants to be living in the future:
Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Listen, I’m all for it; if people want to go back in time as a result of their own free choice that’s wonderful. At least these martyrs for Gaia are putting their money where their mouth is – on train as opposed to plane tickets. They are not being hypocrites, unlike the two hundred celebrities who came on 114 private jets and numerous superyachts to Google’s climate change summit in Sicily the other week. Even St Greta herself, the teenage idiot savant of the green movement, will be eschewing plane travel and going to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York in September on a zero-emission yacht. Want to suffer 24-hour Strasbourg-Stockholm regular commutes or a few weeks at sea between Europe and America so as not to sin again the planet, knock yourself out. My problem starts as soon as the environmental flagellanti decide it’s not enough that simply they care and want to start imposing their totalitarian solutions on everyone else.
[…]
This indeed seems to be the vision of an ecommunist utopia now increasingly on offer from its vocal and influential supporters:
- As Thunberg herself declares in her musical collaboration with the Brit pop band The 1975 released last month (all proceeds to the pests of Extinction Rebellion who have a tendency to glue themselves to busy intersections): it’s “time to rebel” and for “civil disobedience” … “We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed, all political movements in their current form have failed, but Homo sapiens have not yet failed … Now is not the time for speaking politely. Now is the time to speak clearly.”
- David Runciman, politics professor at Cambridge University: “If electoral democracy is inadequate to the task of addressing climate change, and the task is the most urgent one humanity faces, then other kinds of politics are urgently needed … Channeling more energy into these other forms of democracy — into citizens’ assemblies and civil disobedience, rather than elections and party-building — will change our politics drastically. But it may be the only way to ensure our planet does not change beyond recognition.”
- Greenpeace: “We’re not advocating that everyone adopt a ‘meatless’ diet tomorrow. But we all must develop “meat consciousness” and reduce the level of meat in our diets. Shifting to more plant-based foods is essential to combatting climate change, soil, air and water pollution, ocean dead zones, and myriad other problems caused by industrial livestock production.” Sentiments echoed this week by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- And don’t even mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
This is the future according to eco-warriors: anti-democratic, anti-growth and prosperity, with your options on everything from how (and if) you travel to what you eat restricted by your moral betters.
As my more favourite Scandinavian, Bjorn Lomborg, wrote recently:
This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century …
Global warming is a real, man-made problem — but it is just one of many challenges facing humanity. We shouldn’t base our policy decisions on Hollywood movies or on scare scenarios but on the facts. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even if we did absolutely nothing to respond to global warming, the total impact by the 2070s will be the equivalent to a 0.2 per cent to 2 per cent loss in average income. That’s a challenge that requires our attention — but it’s far from the end of the world …
Despite costing a fortune, the Paris Agreement will have virtually no impact on global temperatures. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has estimated that even if every country makes every single carbon cut suggested in the Paris treaty to the fullest extent, CO2 emissions would be cut by only 1 per cent of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2C. Incurring an annual $US1 trillion cost while failing to rein in temperature rises is a very poor idea.
August 12, 2019
Australia’s government broadband fiasco might be a useful lesson for Senator Warren
In the race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a government-provided broadband rollout across the United States to compete with or supplant the existing private ISPs. Arthur Chrenkoff suggests that looking at Australia’s experience with a very similar plan might encourage her to abandon her proposal after a brief airing on the campaign trail:
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe Senator Warren should have a pow-wow first with IT experts from Australia, who could enlighten her about our country’s 12-years-and-counting saga of the National Broadband Network, a Labor government initiative that the -then leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, described as “a white elephant on a massive scale” but later adopted and continued while in government.
It started in 2007 as a policy for a government-rolled out broadband network, in most areas duplicating internet services already provided by private sector providers (mainly through the existing copper wire telephony network), which would be available as an option to all Australian households. In most cases it would be achieved through wired technology (fibre to the premises, later downgraded to a cheaper fibre to the node) with a satellite connection available to the most remote areas where cabling was impractical.
I remember thinking then that the project was an absurd waste of taxpayers’ money for a service of the type that telecommunication companies would be able and willing to provide in any case. At most, there was an argument that the government could step in and provide the infrastructure in some country areas where there was no commercial case for the private providers to proceed. Call me a clairvoyant but it was pretty clear to me that “broadband for all” would take a lot longer to roll out that planned, would cost significantly more than initially budgeted, and would very likely be technologically obsolete by the time it was finished.
