Quotulatiousness

January 1, 2015

The Laffer Curve at 40

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

In the Washington Post, Stephen Moore recounts the tale of the most famous napkin in US economic history:

It was 40 years ago this month that two of President Gerald Ford’s top White House advisers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, gathered for a steak dinner at the Two Continents restaurant in Washington with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget. The United States was in the grip of a gut-wrenching recession, and Laffer lectured to his dinner companions that the federal government’s 70 percent marginal tax rates were an economic toll booth slowing growth to a crawl.

To punctuate his point, he grabbed a pen and a cloth cocktail napkin and drew a chart showing that when tax rates get too high, they penalize work and investment and can actually lead to revenue losses for the government. Four years later, that napkin became immortalized as “the Laffer Curve” in an article Wanniski wrote for the Public Interest magazine. (Wanniski would later grouse only half-jokingly that he should have called it the Wanniski Curve.)

This was the first real post-World War II intellectual challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, which preached that when the economy is growing too slowly, the government should stimulate demand for products with surges in spending. The Laffer model countered that the primary problem is rarely demand — after all, poor nations have plenty of demand — but rather the impediments, in the form of heavy taxes and regulatory burdens, to producing goods and services.

[…]

Solid supporting evidence came during the Reagan years. President Ronald Reagan adopted the Laffer Curve message, telling Americans that when 70 to 80 cents of an extra dollar earned goes to the government, it’s understandable that people wonder: Why keep working? He recalled that as an actor in Hollywood, he would stop making movies in a given year once he hit Uncle Sam’s confiscatory tax rates.

When Reagan left the White House in 1989, the highest tax rate had been slashed from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent. (Even liberal senators such as Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum voted for those low rates.) And contrary to the claims of voodoo, the government’s budget numbers show that tax receipts expanded from $517 billion in 1980 to $909 billion in 1988 — close to a 75 percent change (25 percent after inflation). Economist Larry Lindsey has documented from IRS data that tax collections from the rich surged much faster than that.

Unintended consequences – charities suffer due to US anti-terror measures

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:31

It’s actually rather amazing how powerful the US government can be … and we’re not talking about military power here. US banking laws are being exported to other nations without their consent or consultation, and there’s nothing non-US governments can do about it:

Now here’s a real surprise. The various anti-terror laws, terrorist financing laws, know your customer, illicit money tracking laws which now festoon the financial system have costs. Really, who would have thought it that bureaucratic regulations have real costs out there in the real world? It’s something of an amusement that it’s a rather lefty think tank, Demos, that brings us this news. For, of course, it tends to be those who are rather lefty who tell us that regulation is the cure for all our ills and no, of course not, regulations never have any costs they only do good things. You know, the Elizabeth Warren approach, piles of regulations on finance will be just wonderful, no one will ever lose out.

It particularly interests me as I’ve a very vague connection with a charity, Interpal, that has been hit by these sorts of regulations. Not, I hasten to add, that I am actually connected with that charity, only that I was once on a TV program with the head of it discussing their difficulties in gaining access to a bank account. The basic problem was that the Americans thought that they were less than kosher (the charity themselves obviously disagree) and that thus they shouldn’t have access to the banking system. This shouldn’t be all that much of a problem as they’re a UK charity and they were looking for access to the UK banking system. But that isn’t how it all works. If the Americans decide that they don’t think someone should have access to the banking system then they tell the bank that, well, you wouldn’t want us to come looking at your American banking licence if you were to offer an account with your UK licence, would you? And thus there is the leverage required to extend US law to other countries.

[…]

It’s not particularly the British government that is causing these problems although they have a part in it, to be sure. It’s the general international rules over who a bank may deal with, what they’ve got to know about them and what they’re doing with the money. Everyone seems quite happy with this as it stops (or hinders at least) drug dealing, money laundering and tax abuse. But it does have costs. Absolutely any set of regulations will affect people who are not the target of said regulations. If you insist that banks make a large effort to understand what their customers are doing then the banks will simply reject some customers as not being worth the candle. If perhaps handling money for some Islamic terrorist means bankers go to jail then bankers won’t handle the money of anyone who might be an Islamic terrorist: nor anyone who wanders around in Huddersfield in Islamic robes and states that they’re raising money to help the poor of Gaza. The manager of, say, Lloyds Bank in Huddersfield doesn’t know what the heck is going on in Gaza, who is linked to Hamas, who is not, who is delivering food and who is doing other less reputable things. And there’s no reason why she should either. So, the laws to prevent the one will lead to the other not gaining access to a bank account. This is really simple, simple, stuff.

This is what happens when people regulate.

It’s. Just. Wrong. Period.

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jacob Sullum on the always-hot-button topic of state torture:

In an interview on Sunday, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked former Vice President Dick Cheney if he was “OK” with the fact that a quarter of the suspected terrorists held in secret CIA prisons during the Bush administration “turned out to be innocent.” Todd noted that one of those mistakenly detained men died of hypothermia after being doused with water and left chained to a concrete wall, naked from the waist down, in a cell as cold as a meat locker.

Cheney replied that the end — to “get the guys who did 9/11” and “avoid another attack against the United States” — justified the means. “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective,” he said.

Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general during the Reagan administration, and his son Gregory, a philosophy professor at Suffolk University, offer a bracing alternative to Cheney’s creepy consequentialism in their 2010 book Because It Is Wrong. They argue that torture is wrong not just when it is inflicted on innocents, and not just when it fails to produce lifesaving information, but always and everywhere.

That claim is bolder than it may seem. As the Frieds note, most commentators “make an exception for grave emergencies,” as in “the so-called ticking-bomb scenario,” where torturing a terrorist is the only way to prevent an imminent explosion that will kill many people. “These arguments try to have it both ways,” they write. “Torture is never justified, but then in some cases it might be justified after all.” The contradiction is reconciled “by supposing that the justifying circumstances will never come up.”

QotD: Henry Ford and the doubled wages – the real story

Filed under: Business, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In 1913, turnover reached an unbelievable 370 percent, and Ford hired more than 50,000 people to maintain an average labor force of about 13,600. When profits swelled, he paid well for labor, creating an uproar when he doubled the basic wage to $5.00 a day, which triggered a virtual stampede of job seekers. Paying higher wages for labor was not altruistic in Ford’s eyes. Moreover, it wasn’t simply that Ford was trying to pay his workers “enough to buy back the product,” although he did preach a high-wage doctrine after the stock market crash in 1929. Rather, paying relatively high wages was, for Ford, a matter of smart business. He regarded well-paid skilled workers as important as high-grade material. By paying workers well, he effectively lowered his costs because higher wages reduced turnover and the need for constant training of new hires. (At the time, the newspapers saw Ford’s wage increase as an extraordinary gesture of goodwill.)

Mark Spitznagel, The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World, 2013.

December 31, 2014

The (awful) people of Whole Foods

Filed under: Business, Health, Personal, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Many years ago, when we lived on “the Danforth”, we were occasional patrons of “The Big Carrot”, an early retail store for the self-consciously “alternative” set. If you wanted gluten-free, or dairy-free, or fair-trade, they were almost the only game in town in the late 80s and early 90s. The selection may not have been great at times, but they did try to provide a variety of foods that you couldn’t get at the mainstream supermarkets of the day. The employees seemed to be mostly good, helpful folks, but almost to a person the customers were incredibly self-centred, self-righteous, arrogant, and intolerant. I don’t know how the staff put up with the constant childish antics and unending whining from the customers. Whole Foods is a much bigger enterprise than Toronto’s Big Carrot … and they seem to have attracted exactly the same customer base:

The problem with Whole Foods is their regular customers. They are, across the board, across the country, useless, ignorant, and miserable. They’re worse than miserable, they’re angry. They are quite literally the opposite of every Whole Foods employee I’ve ever encountered. Walk through any store any time of day—but especially 530pm on a weekday or Saturday afternoon during football season — and invariably you will encounter a sneering, disdainful horde of hipster Zombies and entitled 1%ers.

They stand in the middle of the aisles, blocking passage of any other cart, staring intently at the selection asking themselves that critical question: which one of these olive oils makes me seem coolest and most socially conscious, while also making the raw vegetable salad I’m preparing for the monthly condo board meeting seem most rustic and artisanal?

If you are a normal human being, when you come upon a person like this in the aisle you clear your throat or say excuse me, hoping against hope that they catch your drift. They don’t. In fact, they are disgusted by your very existence. The idea that you would violate their personal shopping space — which seems to be the entire store — or deign to request anything of them is so far beyond the pale that most times all they can muster is an “Ugh!”

Over the years I have tried everything to remain civil to these people, but nothing has worked, so I’ve stopped trying. Instead, I walk over to their cart and physically move it to the side for them. Usually, the shock of such an egregious transgression is so great that the “Ugh!” doesn’t happen until I’m around the corner out of sight. Usually, all I get is an incredulous bug-eyed stare. Sometimes I get both though, and when that happens, I look them square in the eye and say “Move. Your. Cart.” I used the same firm tone as Jason Bourne, with the hushed urgency of Jack Bauer and the uncomfortable proximity of Judge Reinhold. From their reaction you’d think I just committed an armed robbery or a sexual assault. When words fail them, as they often do with passive aggressive Whole Foods zombies, the anger turns inward and they start to vibrate with righteous indignation. Eventually, that pent up energy has to go somewhere, and like solar flares it bursts forth into the universe as paroxysms of rage.

December 30, 2014

Tax-splaining a headline

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

The headline that grabs attention says that a vast number of US corporations pay absolutely no corporate taxes. Tim Worstall explains that this is quite true:

Timothy Taylor has a nice piece here on the subject:

    More than 90 percent of businesses, representing more than one-third of all business activity, in the United States are structured as flow-through entities — businesses that do not pay the corporate income tax, but rather pass profits through to owners who pay tax under the individual income tax.

    We have two (actually, more than two, but this is the distinction that matters to us here) forms of business ownership. The first is the C Corporation, what we all normally think of as a corporation. The second is an S corporation (in taxation, very like a partnership). And the important thing is that C corporations are the only ones that pay the corporate income tax. S corporations don’t: their owners pay individual income tax on the profits. So, if we saw a move from C to S corporations as the method of organisation then we’d see a reduction in corporate income tax paid. But not, possibly, a reduction in total tax paid on business profits.

And that is what seems to have happened at least in part:

    Back in 1980, nearly 80% of business income went to “C” corporations–so named after the applicable part of the tax code that governs them–which are what most of us think of when we think of a “corporation.” Back then, the remaining 20% was almost all sole proprietorships, which were just taxed as individual income. …..(…)…But C corporations now account for only about 30% of all business income. The share going to sole proprietorships hasn’t changed much. But much more corporate income is going to partnership and S corporations….(…)…Back in the 1960s, the corporate income tax often collected 4-5% of GDP. Since about 1990, it has more commonly collected 1-2% of GDP. Part of the reason is that a smaller share of business income is flowing through the conventional C corporation form.

That really is a large part of the explanation. It’s not that business profits are not being taxed, it’s that they’re being taxed in a different way. And that explains much of the fall in the corporate income tax revenues: and all too few people are over on the other side looking at the increase in individual income tax payments stemming from corporate profits.

So a legal change has drawn a lot of corporations to change how they are structured, so that profits are taxable in the hands of their individual owners, rather than in the imaginary hands of the corporate person. And another US tax quirk explains even more of the headline:

There is another point to be made here, about how we measure the share of corporate profits in the US economy. This has very definitely risen, this is absolutely true. And the tax bill hasn’t, that’s also true. A goodly part of the explanation is the above, about C and S corporations. But there’s this one more thing. Profits in the US economy includes all profits made in the US, by both Americans and foreigners. But it also includes foreign profits made by US corporations. Those tens of billions being made abroad by Google and Apple, Microsoft, they’re all included in the US profit share. And as we also know, those foreign profits aren’t paying the US corporate income tax because, entirely legally, they’re being used overseas to reinvest in those foreign businesses. My stick my finger in the air estimate of the difference those profits make is about 2% of US GDP. Meaning that if we measure US profits as 10% of GDP, then look at tax payments, we’re only seeing the tax payments from 8% of GDP (before we even look at the C and S corporation thing).

December 29, 2014

Western states and the female franchise

Filed under: History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

An interesting story from Maggie McNeill, discussing the career of Lou Graham, Seattle’s most famous madam:

As Thaddeus Russell explains in A Renegade History of the United States, the reason so many western states gave women the right to vote long before the eastern ones (or the country in general) had absolutely nothing to do with high-minded egalitarianism and everything to do with pragmatism and arse-kissing. You see, frontier populations are always disproportionately male because they tend to lack the sort of amenities “good” women tend to want. Accordingly, frontier towns fill up with lonely young men desperate for female company and usually possessed of money drawn from whatever industry the town is built on (whether that be mining, trapping, trade or whatever). Naturally, whores arrive to capitalize on this and so the minority of frontier populations which are female are usually made up largely of working girls. These ladies soon amass a disproportionate share of the wealth, and madams tend to become fabulously wealthy; in order to win their favor (the better to secure donations and investment in civic projects), city fathers all over the western US granted them suffrage. Seattle did this on November 23rd, 1883 and almost immediately regretted it; by the time the city had actually granted suffrage, the whores had been outnumbered by recently-arrived “good” women, who immediately repaid the “bad” sisters who had won the vote for them by electing “progressive” prohibitionists to enact new laws (and vigorously enforce old ones) restricting saloons, brothels, gambling and other “vices”. The result, naturally, was a dramatic loss of tax and license revenue, and by the time women’s suffrage was revoked by judicial fiat in 1887-88 the city’s finances were in shambles.

Talk about your unintended consequences!

Reason.tv Nanny of the Year for 2014

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Published on 29 Dec 2014

Our nation’s control freaks got even freakier in 2014 – from jetpacks to parking apps, eco-ATMs and powdered alcohol, they were determined to kill anything cutting edge.

They targeted everything from dogs in parks to births at home, and they’ll sic cops on you for hoarding or smelling bad. You might even get busted for doing things that are legal–like vaping while driving, warning motorists about speed traps, or putting up Christmas lights.

And whether it’s yanking chocolate milk, boogie boards, homemade libraries or sunscreen(?!), the control freaks are (all together now!): Doing it for the children.

It’s fitting, then, that 2014’s Nanny of the Year recipients justified their power grab on the same grounds (although the real reason may have more to do with protecting city officials from future caught-on-tape embarrassments).

Check out how one cop’s rant (“Obama has decimated the friggin’ Constitution”) embarrassed a city council into taking home this year’s top dishonors!

December 28, 2014

QotD: The art of politics

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing or the other, and most men have to be both. The whole process is one of false pretences and ignoble concealments.

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926.

December 27, 2014

The Railroad Signal – New York Central Railroad Educational Documentary 1948

Filed under: History, Railways, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Uploaded on 30 Nov 2011

New York Central Railroad Educational Documentary from 1948 that gives an overview of railroad signals and related safe working infrastructure used by trains, as well as the ongoing improvements to the signalling systems due to technological advances.

The film was released as part of the NYC’s “Running the Railroad” series, and features many examples of different signalling systems in use by the New York Central Railroad, as well as lots of scenes of passenger and freight trains. .

QotD: Political morality

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

There is in him, in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late Dr. [Woodrow] Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as multitudes of American politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough. That place is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses him and makes him happy. It is also one of power, and power is the commodity that he has for sale. I speak here, of course, of the democratic politician in his role of statesman – that is, in his best and noblest aspect.

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926.

December 26, 2014

Normalizing US relations with Cuba

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

The United States has been in a Cold War state of tension with one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere for half a century. The benefits of this strategy are hard to find (and harder to justify), but the drawbacks are pretty stark. The recent move by the Obama administration to move to more normal diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba may be driven by short-term petty political considerations, but the move is correct and rational on the larger scale. In The Federalist, Tom Nichols tries to talk the conservative base in off the window ledge by pointing out that there’s a strong conservative case as well:

Okay, everyone. Calm down.

There are a lot of reasons to be worried about the president’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba. Not least among them is that this is the least-adept foreign policy team in post-Cold War history (yes, I include the Carter and Bush 43 White Houses in that evaluation), and after six years of being taken to the cleaners by bad regimes, it feels like it’s happening again. It also looks too much like a quid pro quo for the release of an imprisoned American. And it’s being rationalized by the president himself in terms that show little understanding of the origins of the entire policy he’s about to overturn.

With all of that said, it’s still the right thing to do, and conservatives oppose it at their political peril.

Before we go any farther, however, what exactly are we actually talking about? To judge from the reaction of some conservatives, President Obama just proposed to send Fidel Castro a personal masseuse in a bikini stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know what will come from this, other than “normalization:” that is, the ability to establish an embassy, carry on diplomatic relations, and negotiate over trade. Congress — dominated by Republicans for the next two years — will have a large say in how all of that proceeds. So it’s important to maintain some perspective here, especially since there is only so much the president can do by fiat.

[…]

First and foremost, conservatives need to think carefully about the argument that Cuba is simply too evil a country to have a relationship with us. There is a moral “whataboutism” trap in that position, and liberals will gladly (and rightly) spring it. Many of the people thundering that we cannot even think of dealing with the Castros are the same conservatives who celebrate our massive, and utterly immoral, trade relations with China, a nominally Communist giant whose human rights abuses and mischief in the world dwarf Cuba’s.

Is our indulgence on China only because China is huge? Very well: I also note no similar outrage over our healthy relationship with much smaller Vietnam, a country in which American boys were killed and tortured, often with Chinese weapons and Chinese assistance. Other examples abound.

Yet we normalized relations with both nations. How many of us are wearing clothing with a “made in Vietnam” label right now? (I still can’t get used to that.) Think of it this way: all that cheap junk at your local department store eventually funds nuclear missiles aimed directly at the United States. Are we all ready for a China boycott and closing our Beijing embassy, or is moral outrage reserved only for small nations too broke to buy their way out of our condemnation, however justifiable?

December 25, 2014

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

QotD: Reactionary views on American Progressives

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In America, progressivism focuses on pointing out how terrible American culture is and how much other people’s cultures are better than ours. If we celebrate Columbus Day, we have to spend the whole time hearing about what a jerk Columbus was (disclaimer: to be fair, Columbus was a huge jerk). If we celebrate Washington’s birthday, we have to spend the whole time hearing about how awful it was that Washington owned slaves. Goodness help us if someone tries to celebrate Christmas – there are now areas where if a city puts up Christmas decorations, it has to give equal space to atheist groups to put up displays about how Christmas is stupid and people who celebrate it suck. That’s … probably not the way to maximize cultural unity, exactly?

We are a culture engaged in the continuing project of subverting itself. Our heroes have been toppled, our rituals mocked, and one gains status by figuring out new and better ways to show how the things that should unite us are actually stupid and oppressive. Even the conservatives who wear American flag lapel pins and stuff spend most of their time talking about how they hate America today and the American government and everything else associated with America except for those stupid flag pins of theirs.

Compare this to olden cultures. If someone in Victorian Britain says “God save the Queen!”, then everyone else repeated “God save the Queen!”, and more important, they mean it. “England expects every man to do their duty” is actually perceived as a compelling reason why one’s duty should be done.

It would seem that the Victorian British are more on the Mormon side and modern Americans more like the Unitarians. And in fact, the Victorians managed to colonize half the planet while America can’t even get the Afghans to stop shooting each other. While one may not agree with Victorian Britain’s aims, one has to wonder what would happen if that kind of will, energy, and unity of purpose were directed towards a worthier goal (I wonder this about the Mormon Church too).

Reactionaries would go further and explore this idea in a depth I don’t have time for, besides to say that they believe many historical cultures were carefully optimized and time-tested for unifying potential, and that they really sunk deep into the bones of the populace until failing to identify with them would have been unthinkable. The three cultures they most often cite as virtuous examples here are Imperial China, medieval Catholicism, and Victorian Britain; although it would be foolish to try to re-establish one of those exactly in a population not thoroughly steeped in them, we could at least try to make our own culture a little more like they were.

Once again, the Reactionary claim is not necessarily that we have to brainwash people or drag the Jews kicking and screaming to Christmas parties. It’s just that maybe we should stop deliberately optimizing society for as little unity and shared culture as humanly possible.

Scott Alexander, “Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell”, Slate Star Codex, 2013-03-03.

December 23, 2014

Turning the United States into something like Scandinavia

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:13

In his daily-or-so Forbes post, Tim Worstall explains the real reason why it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to turn the United States into a Scandinavian mixed economy like Denmark:

The essence of the argument is that sure, we’d like quite a lot of equity in how the economy works out. Wouldn’t mind that large (but efficient! of which more later) welfare state. We’d also like to have continuing economic growth of course, so that our children are better off than we are, theirs than they and so on. And we can have that welfare state and equity just by taxing the snot out of everyone but that does rather impact upon that growth. So, the solution is to have as classically liberal an economy as one can, with the least regulation of who does what and how, then tax the snot out of it to pay for that welfare state. Not that Sumner put it in quite those words of course.

The lesson so far being that if the American left want to turn the US into Scandinavia, well, OK, but they’re going to have to pull back on most of the economic regulation they’ve encumbered the country with over the past 50 years.

The other point is an observation of my own. Which is that those Scandinavian welfare states are very local. To give you my oft used example, the national income tax rate in Denmark starts out at 3.76% and peaks at 15%. There’s also very stiff, 25-30% of income, taxes at the commune level. A commune being possibly as small as a township in the US, 10,000 people. The point being that this welfare state is paid for out of taxes raised locally and spent locally. Entirely the opposite way around from the way that the American left tells us that the US should work: all that money goes off to Washington and then the bright technocrats disburse it.

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn’s Beer Effect. You’re in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy. I give you as an example Danish social housing or the vertical slums that HUD has built in the past. And if people think their money is being well spent then they’re likely to support more of it being spent.

[…]

So, the two things I would say need to be done as precursors to turning the united States into Scandinavia are the following. First we need to move back to a much less regulated, more classically liberal, economy. Secondly we need to push the whole tax system and welfare state provision down from the Federal government down to much smaller units. Possibly even right down to the counties. The first of these will generate the economic growth to pay for that expanded welfare state, the second make people more willing to pay for it.

If you find any American leftists out there willing to agree to these two preconditions do let me know. Because I’ve never met a single one who would think that those were things worth doing in order to get that social democracy they say they desire.

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