Quote of the Day
I can’t write a book commensurate with Shakespeare,but I can write a book by me.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
Don Boudreaux's Barrons Review of Piketty: Thumbs UP!
Flaws aplenty mar Piketty's telling of the capitalist saga, flaws that spring mainly from his disregard for basic economic principles. None looms larger than his mistaken notion of wealth...No principle of economics is more essential than the realization that, ultimately, wealth isn't money or financial assets but, rather, ready access to real goods and services...Yet, to the extent that inequalities are at all relevant, the only ones that really matter are inequalities in access to real goods and services for consumption...This shrinking gap between the real economic fortunes of the rich and the rest of us should calm concerns about the political dangers of the expanding inequality of monetary fortunes.
Flaws in the author's stratospheric viewpoint are also on display when we try to think in human terms about the inevitability of the return on capital, at 4% to 5%, exceeding the growth rate of economy, at 1% to 1.5%...Sooner or later, the entry of competitors and of changing consumer tastes curbs their growth, when not reducing their size absolutely or even bankrupting them. In 2013 alone, 33,000 businesses in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy, a typical figure for a year of economic expansion. Second, and more importantly, successful capitalists rarely spawn children and grandchildren who match their elders' success; there is regression toward the mean.
If Piketty really believes in a "perfect" capital market yielding capitalists reliable and steady income, he might wonder why the bankrupt book-selling giant Borders is no longer around to sell his books, while Amazon.com has grown up to challenge all manner of bricks-and-mortar retailers. In his world, capitalism is a system of profits; in the real world, it's a system of profit and loss.
Piketty's disregard for basic economic reasoning blinds him to the all-important market forces at work on the ground—market forces that, if left unencumbered by government, produce growing prosperity for all.I'm a mark for just about anything Boudreaux writes; my favorite daily email is a digest from Cafe Hayek. If I would make a criticism, I might have wanted a brief summary of some of the more technical objections to Piketty, e.g., the summarization and/or valuation of capital, whether Piketty's findings are unduly influenced by the analomous 2008 economic tsunami, the use of summary statistics vs. longitudinal designs which might obfuscate income mobility, etc. I know that he is aware of them via links published at Cafe Hayek. I might have wanted him to expand more on the opportunity costs of Piketty's "and then some magic happens" suggestions of public policy tools to correct inequalities. If, as I believe, that wealth taxes and/or high income tax brackets are inversely related to economic growth (did Piketty exhaustively review public policy? I haven't heard a reviewer mention it), wouldn't that adversely affect job opportunities and net worth for the lower-income households? What about the morally hazardous consequences of welfare net programs on lower-income savings accumulation? I don't believe for a second Piketty's view about wars or revolutions being wealth accumulation resets.
Boudreaux has a marvelously readable, pithy writing style I admire. I particularly like the second highlighted sentence--this is very similar to a point Cowen recently made: "Another pre-existing empirical problem is that 19th century data seem to indicate that a “Piketty world,” even if we take it on its own terms, far from being a disaster, would likely be accompanied by rising real wages and declining consumption inequality, albeit rising wealth inequality." Conveniences like televisions, music players, PC's, and cellphones, were barely conceivable less than a century ago, unavailable at any cost. Whereas the well-off may have been early adoptees of emerging technologies, it was production economies of scale which made the technology affordable for even lower-income Americans. So what if companies like Apple and WalMart made themselves wealthy in the process of providing low-cost, usable technologies for the masses? Competition is intense; for instance, a number of smartphone competitors (including Google and Microsoft) challenge Apple's dominance, and Amazon has transformed itself from its early roots as a dominant online bookseller to a serious competitor to WalMart.
Shinseki Resigns: Thumbs UP!
This was inevitable; the fact that the Obama Administration had been caught red-handed keeping vets off the official wait lists to manipulate performance statistics, it was necessary for Shinseki to fall on his sword. I knew just as soon as I heard him issue a public apology, he was done. Nervous Dem incumbents, up for reelection this fall, were increasingly on the record for throwing him under the bus. I think I was mostly intrigued that Speaker Boehner had held off calling for Shinseki's resignation.
The big issue remains, of course. As an aside, I myself, as a former Navy officer, had received a mailing from the VA, hyping eligibility for the program. No, thanks; the VA has been hyped by the Administration as the successful prototype for "superior" single-payer solutions. The real solution is to privitize VA hospital operations.
Guest Post Comment
Every once in a while I'll comment in another blog (e.g., occasionally I'll do it on Cafe Hayek). As I've explained in past posts, I don't do it often, because in the past I've found myself subjected to wolf pack attacks (e.g., Atkins diet fanatics); it's not that I don't enjoy the give and take of a debate (after all, I'm a former academic), but they are a sinkhole of my time, and typically the other party resorts to ad hominem attacks, which is never fun.
In this case, the House of Representatives passed an historic bipartisan amendment 219-189 to defund related DEA raids in nearly half the states decriminalizing medical marijuana/products (e.g., medicinal oils). Granted, this is a baby step forward; we also need federal sentencing reform, etc., and it's an open question whether the Senate might go along, although I would expect senators from the nearly half of states which have decriminalized pot for medical or recreational use would support it, and I think there are enough libertarian-leaning GOP senators (Paul, Cruz, Flake, Rubio, etc.) to push it through (although frankly I've not looked at individual senator policy positions on this issue).
I myself have never indulged and have never been tempted by either cigarettes or marijuana. One story from my undergraduate days: my best friend Ramon and I had taken a city bus down to watch the Spurs play. (At the time, the Spurs offered OLL student a cheap ticket bundle--I think it cost more for the bus rides than the games.) Some of our dorm friends spotted us and offered us a free ride back to campus. Ramon didn't want to go but didn't explain his reluctance; I didn't see the harm in saving bus fare. I then understood; soon as we got on the road, our dorm friends started smoking weed, and the smoke filled the car. They rolled down the windows and shouted, "Oink! Oink!" as we passed by a San Antonio cop directing traffic. All of a sudden, I could see my life pass in front of my eyes, worrying I might get busted with my fellow students, even though I had nothing to do with it. I then told the others that the smoke was making me queasy, and if they didn't stop, I might puke all over the car. It worked, although there was discussion of kicking me out of the car and stranding me in the middle of San Antonio...
It was difficult not to notice in the dorms where it seemed every other room was burning incense. It got to the point I even misinterpreted an act of kindness. One of my best coed friends had a younger, taller sister also attending the university; I didn't know the sister that well, but late one semester she had some issue with her typewriter (yes, I'm ancient...) with some end-of-semester term papers coming due; without really thinking about it, I offered to loan her mine. The next semester I started getting notes from a secret admirer, and one of the guys in the dorm was helping her out. I don't think at the time I had even gone out on a date (I graduated from high school at 16, I lived on an Air Force base miles from campus and had no car), never mind having a secret admirer (I have to admit that initially it was very flattering). Then one day the intermediary knocked on my door bearing a pan of brownies. At this point, I started getting paranoid: everyone knows what some people do with brownies: was this some sort of hoax to get me high? (I eventually did eat the brownies--which were ordinary brownies.) I thought the attention I was getting had crossed the line into stalker territory, and I told the intermediary in no uncertain terms this had to stop. I got one tearful response from the mystery coed writing it was never her intent to get me upset; she wanted me to be happy, and she would respect my wishes and leave me alone... It stopped and had mostly been forgotten until some time later when I was talking to my coed friend whom I think was graduating. She made a puzzling comment that her kid sister was dating someone else now. I didn't immediately understand why she was discussing her sister's dating life with me--when it finally dawned on me later that the little sister was my secret admirer and big sister thought I knew. Story of my dating life: once women get to know me... (It would have been awkward anyway; I was attracted to big sister, whom had a boyfriend; I would have asked her out in a heartbeat. Who knows? Maybe big sister encouraged her sister's interest; I don't know how she forgave me for hurting her sister's feelings--I would have never done that if I had known whom it was. I would have probably have asked out the little sister if her approach had been more direct, and my life might have changed for the better.)
In any event, the Libertarian Republican blog published a relevant post on the medical marijuana vote. (I have my differences with the blog, which is more interventionist, immigration-restrictionist, and partisan political than I am; they regard some of my widely cited sources like Reason as "left-libertarian". As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I see left-libertarianism as more anti-big, including business, not in terms of foreign meddling, which the Old Right, like Robert Taft, also opposed.) I have mostly steered my blog away from partisan bickering and have posted multiple times my differences with the GOP, even coined a term 'Free Federalist' for a new party name. (I use the term to reflect less of a nationalistic, mercantilistic brand which transitioned from Hamilton's party to the Whigs and eventually GOP, more reflective of the principle of Subsidiarity with a minarchist perspective.) That being said, I find the conservative wing of the GOP closer to my classical liberal (free market) views, while there no longer is such a thing as a conservative Democrat [the last real conservative of note was Grover Cleveland]. But still, the one talking point that irritates me to sniping back on Facebook and elsewhere is the LP talking point that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same. I think the George W. Bush Administration was anomalous; keep in mind Bush had been elected in part on rejecting Clinton-style nation-building, he had created the world's biggest bureaucracy in DHS, and his version of "compassionate conservatism" was a smokescreen for accelerated domestic spending and a radical expansion in federal education intervention--a generation after Reagan wanted to eliminate it. I think likewise the Congress had lost its way--the most prominent example being a late Alaskan senator whom threatened to resign his seat over any attempt to scratch funding for the Bridge to Nowhere. This was a different GOP than the one whom kept President Zipper in a fiscal straitjacket during his last 6 years in office.
Here's the Dem troll:
FTR, 91% of democrats supported this while 22% of republicans did. Party of freedom and liberty indeed.
As to the Democrat troll in this thread, tell me, where was the Democratic leadership on this issue when they controlled both chambers of Congress from 2007-2010, plus the Presidency in the second? And where has The One been, other than the Justice Department will look the other way for states that decriminalize, an abuse of discretion? The fact of the matter is that 100% of the Dems couldn't have carried the day without sizable GOP support. And let's not forget: "Progressives" were full in on the original Prohibition and to the present day have no problem telling other people what to do, to eat, etc.
Facebook Corner
(Drudge Report). D'Souza's 'AMERICA' warns Hillary will 'finish off' country.
I think 2016 will be a change election year, and an aging Hillary is part of the Bush-Clinton legacy that will have dominated national politics over the past 3 decades. We will be well into the first decade of the Baby Boomer tsunami, with probably $80T in unfunded liabilities, nearly $20T in national debt and probably 16 years of tepid economic/job growth, if not a global recession. If and when interest rates pick up, federal interest expenses on that $20T will explode. Even if Ms. President Zipper is elected, she will likely be fending off problems that have been kicked down the road for years, hardly expanding the Statist empire.
(Economic Freedom). See Thought of the Day.
Hairdressers should be licensed. I am a licensed barber, at the time I needed 15OO hrs of schooling (took out a loan) then had to pass state of fla. board. There is a lot to know especially when dealing with chemicals & sanitation. So I believe in licensing for certain jobs
Spoken like a self-serving crony hairdresser; why do you feel threatened by women whom have a talent for hairbraiding? If you can markup your services commensurate with your qualifications, do so.
Who would hire a unlicensed plumber? How about a unlicensed doctor?
Licensing need not be bear the imprimateur of Statist bureaucracy. Speaking as an IT consultant and former MIS professor, I've met many talented people in the profession without a relevant degree or certification. I know a lot of people whom pick a service professional based on favorable word of mouth and/or have selection criteria beyond any licensing criteria, e.g., bedside manner, responsiveness, availability, experience. (For example, when I had my Lasik procedure done, it was done by someone with 800 procedures under his belt.)
More Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via IPI |
BJ Thomas, "Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love?"
