Quote of the Day
O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law:Murphy was an optimist.
Image of the Day: Free Market vs. Minimum Wage
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| In Williston, ND (Bakken Shale Oil Hub): 0.9% unemployment via Carpe Diem |
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| NBER 2004 via Bob Murphy Piketty--evidence of top wealth accumulation? |
Over the past week, I've been stewing over an unconscionable seminar at the Catholic University of America, “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case Against Libertarianism", with a keynote address by a Pope Francis surrogate, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Think that this was a balanced presentation and/or a genuine dialogue/debate? Think again. One of the mostly prominent Catholic libertarian-leaning organizations/spokespersons, Rev. Robert A. Sirico, of the Michigan-based Acton Institute, was only welcomed as a member of the audience. Other prominent Catholic libertarians: Woods, Napolitano, Tucker, Rockwell, etc., weren't invited either.
As I mention in my FB Corner segment below, the one thing the Catholic catechism focuses on (and regular readers will recognize my frequent reference to it over the past several weeks), is the principle of subsidiarity, which is the polar opposite of government centralization. I think that American Catholic bishops are being played by "progressives" using high-sounding titles for legislative acts and pushing disingenuous talking points. I think they don't appreciate how conservatives/libertarians could oppose federal legislation on grounds of moral hazard and/or at least counter to the principle of Subsidiarity, how government can impede the functioning of voluntary institutions (take, for instance, the recent birth control mandate under ObamaCare, even for Church-affiliated institutions of hospitals and schools, or regulations on charitable donations), how excess tax revenues have opportunity costs in the private sector (impeding growth, which would add new jobs, goods and services to the economy), how easy money policies by central bankers come at the expense of the poor and those on fixed-income, how protectionist policies limit low-cost product and service alternatives, etc. The pope and Madariaga don't understand or trust the concept of spontaneous order or the invisible hand and confuse the concepts income or wealth inequality with consumer inequality. For example, during the Gilded Age, we saw a few had accumulated large fortunes, but we also saw rising wages and a higher standard of living--a win-win situation. Just because you live in a house vs. a mansion does not mean you live in poverty--and envy and/or theft of another person's possessions are a focus of the Judaic-Christian Ten Commandments.
Madariaga, who doesn't understand the convenient datasets and nuances of the likes of Krugman and Piketty, thinks that we libertarians have been devastated by the latest "progressive" flavored cotton candy fad, Piketty's Capitalism tome. Woods has had a couple of podcasts on the topic and dismisses it concisely: "Cardinal Maradiaga says we libertarians are trembling before Thomas Piketty’s fashionable book Capital in the 21st Century. You know what? Not really. Let’s see: Piketty invented a tax history of the U.S. that suits his narrative but has no connection to reality; he invented a history of the minimum wage in the U.S. that suits his narrative but has no connection to reality; how he deals with depreciation is at the very least unconvincing (see here and here) yet central to his argument; and his view of the relationship between capital and interest was exploded 100 years ago."
Some other interesting Woods' stats: "In 1820, 85 percent of the world’s population was living in “extreme poverty.That had fallen to 50 percent by 1950, 33 percent by the early 1980s, and 18 percent by the beginning of the twenty-first century...this is the natural outcome of the extension of the market economy and the division of labor...When we look at the figures from 2011, the American poor—not the American public in general, but the American poor—97.8 percent had refrigerators, 96.6 percent had gas or electric stoves, 96.1 percent had televisions, 93.2 percent had microwave ovens, 83 percent had DVR capability, 80.9 percent had cell phones in addition to land lines, and 58.2 percent had computers."
I wish that Woods had tied libertarianism more directly to the catechism's explicit focus on the principle of Subsidiarity, voluntary associations and institutions, the emphasis on free will, personal liberty and responsibility, and Rothbard's reference to Spanish scholastics as proto-Austrians. But Woods' review is up to the task of providing a compelling rebuttal to the disingenuous rhetoric of an intellectually vapid and insipid left-wing cardinal.
Interesting Tidbits
From certain financial investment emails (1,2):
- "According to a new study published in the Financial Analysts Journal, investors (that's both individual investors and institutional investors) currently have the lowest percentage of their portfolios invested in stocks since they began collecting data in 1959. Just 37.7% of portfolios are stock positions at last count." We're talking about a $90.6 trillion pool of investable assets worldwide. And $56.4 trillion of it is in (mostly) cash and bonds. There's not much of it in gold right now, that's for sure...Nor is that survey the only evidence out there: As of last month, the American Association of Individual Investors survey found cash allocations at an eight-month high and stock allocations at a six-month low.
- As for Friday's numbers, don't forget the good ol' birth-death model. That's a practice with which the wonks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics guess at the number of jobs "birthed" by owners of startups, who are too busy to respond to BLS surveys. Using the birth-death model, the statisticians imputed 205,000 new jobs last month. In other words, nearly 95% of the total was a statistical invention
- The bureaucrats running government agencies are not encouraged to produce profits. They are not rewarded for improving the long-term value of a business. Bureaucrats are motivated to spend their entire budgets and grow larger. This allows them to acquire more power… and bigger budgets for next year… which allows them to acquire more power and bigger budgets for the year after that.
- Tom Woods on the Gilded Age: "Andrew Carnegie, for instance, almost single-handedly reduced the price of steel rails from $160 per ton in 1875 to $17 per ton nearly a quarter century later. John D. Rockefeller pushed the price of refined petroleum down from more than 30¢ per gallon to 5.9¢ in 1897. Cornelius Vanderbilt, operating earlier in the century, reduced fares on steamboat transit by 90, 95, and even 100 percent. (On trips for which a fare was not charged, Vanderbilt earned his money by selling concessions on board.)...Economist Thomas DiLorenzo, in an important article in the International Review of Law and Economics, actually bothered to look [at behavior evident in the industries where monopoly was most frequently alleged to have existed]. During the 1880s, when real GDP rose 24 percent, output in the industries alleged to have been monopolized for which data were available rose 175 percent in real terms. Prices in those industries, meanwhile, were generally falling, and much faster than the 7 percent decline for the economy as a whole. We’ve already discussed steel rails, which fell from $68 to $32 per ton during the 1880s; we might also note the price of zinc, which fell from $5.51 to $4.40 per pound (a 20 percent decline) and refined sugar, which fell from 9¢ to 7¢ per pound (22 percent). In fact, this pattern held true for all 17 supposedly monopolized industries, with the trivial exceptions of castor oil and matches."
(Cato Institute). "The leaders of the world’s most hierarchical, centralized faith don’t much care for the philosophy most closely aligned with individual liberty. Huh."
As a Catholic libertarian who has been critical of the pope and Madariaga, I found this essay disappointing. One would think from the author's characterization that the Church is a prototype of central planning. If an author writing on Catholicism did due diligence, he would know that the catechism explicitly espouses the principle of subsidiarity, promotes voluntary associations and institutions, and insists on personal freedom and initiative. There are several prominent Catholic libertarians (Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, Andrew Napolitano, and Jeffrey Tucker immediately come to mind); do not confuse the structure of an organization with a political perspective.
It is astonishing that the commentary on the Post piece doesn't take issue with the opening statement: "For years, American Catholics have been under pressure to vote Republican." In fact, this is the kind of rubbish JFK had to address in the 1960 campaign. Nancy Pelosi, Mario Cuomo, John Kerry, Joe Biden and the late Ted Kennedy are Catholics, whom have taken political positions (e.g., elective abortion), which have been against Catholic moral teachings (not to mention opposed to the principle of subsidiarity in federal policy). The Post article neglects to mention Catholic prelates all but endorse nearly all "progressive" social policies, sending a nuanced message to voters.
The Catholic Church is opposed to all forms of collectivism. That's right out of the catechism. The current Pope is from Argentina where there is crony capitalism. That's not free enterprise either. He also has pretty bad translators.
If you think that the pope was simply attacking crony capitalism, you're delusional and knowingly quoting him out of context. His exhortation explicitly attacked the invisible hand, raised the bogeyman of social darwinism, and praised the political vocation. He explicitly realized that his discussion would spark controversy--certainly not from the "progressives" whose talking points that he had copied and pasted.
You are somewhat misstating what catechism says. "The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." "The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies. It tends toward the establishment of true international order." " In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, neither the state nor any larger society should substitute itself for the initiative and responsibility of individuals and intermediary bodies."
(Mercatus Center at George Mason University). See Chart of the Day
Let's point out that until the 1980's or so, two-income households were less common, i.e., a lower labor force participation rate. I thought that the more salient point is that the rate is much lower than the overall rate at about 63%--and worse--the proportion is leveling off or even declining--perhaps involuntary retirement?
(a "progressive" troll in an IPI thread).
Government, by its very nature, is self-serving and ineffective; the market alone anticipates and fulfills consumer wants and needs. Government is monopoly and has no competition or managerial incentives to radically reduce costs and prices.
Proposal Encore
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie via IPI |
Neil Diamond, "America"
