Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1512

Seizing control

When people tell me how mad they are at Wal-Mart for driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business, I ask them how Wal-Mart managed to do that. Did they go around torching their stores in the middle of the night, threatening the moms and the pops with baseball bats if they didn't close their stores?

The consumers drove the mom and pops out of business. The consumers preferred Wal-Mart (and Target and K-Mart) to the mom-and-pops. To the extent Wal-Mart did the driving, it was by offering better products at better prices.

I was thinking of that yesterday when I saw the headline in the Washington Post:

GOP Seizes Control of House

I know, it's just an expression. But they didn't seize control. The voters essentially gave the Republicans control. (I say "essentially" because voters don't vote for who gets control–they vote for an individual politician.) And if the Republicans don't do a good job, the voters will let the Dems run the House again.

And for those of you reading this via email and uncertain of who's writing this post, I'll let you know that I voted on Tuesday. That should help you figure out who the author is.

Joe's Income Doesn't Belong to Sam

Here's a letter to the New York Times:

Gail Collins criticizes the Bush tax cuts because "there was no money to pay for them" ("The Day After the Day After," Nov. 4).

Ms. Collins's perspective is distorted.

Taxes are payments people are obliged to make in return for services provided by government.  Because it's misleading, at best, to talk of 'paying for' reduced payments, it's misleading to talk of 'paying for' tax cuts.  So, in fact, what "there was no money to pay for" was not the tax cuts but, rather, the goods and services that government continues to supply despite having insufficient tax revenues to pay for them.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

It's true that future taxpayers and (because of inflation) consumers will be stuck with the bill for today's debt-funded expenditures – in the same way that spendthrift Joe will be stuck with the bill, in his future, for his debt-funded expenditures today.  In both cases, the thing appropriately identified as being unaffordable today – the thing that is today too costly for the spender, given his income, to purchase – is not his reduced income but, instead, the goods and services he buys that he cannot afford.

The evil Apple empire

In Hazlett on Apple vs. Google, I expressed surprise that people view Apple as immoral for not being open enough–for putting limitations on how their products are used or sold. I argued that it was weird to be angry or outraged that Steve Jobs has a controlling personality, perhaps, or a dislike of Flash for some reason and as a result  makes his product less attractive. I could see why that would discourage you from buying the product–it doesn't work well enough to suit your needs. But moral indignation strikes me as a peculiar response.

Jerry Brito responds:

Russ then likens a personal conviction to avoid closed products to some of his readers' feelings of entitlement that they have a right to post a comment on his blog, and to a stranger thinking he has the right to take hot dogs from Russ's backyard grill. I don't think I have to explain why these analogies don't hold up. What I would like to point out is that abstaining from certain products on moral grounds (and even hectoring friends to do the same) is not at all bizarre behavior. We see it all the time by animal lovers who won't buy leather or products tested on animals, or people who avoid buying diamonds from conflict areas. I'm sure there are products Russ wouldn't buy on moral grounds.

So if you honestly believe (and I don't) that patronizing Apple will help contribute to the closing of the Internet, and you value that openness, especially for political reasons, you would be acting perfectly rationally by boycotting Apple.

Maybe Jerry misunderstood my point. I agree with him that there's nothing wrong with having morality play a role in your purchases. What I find strange is viewing the openness of a product as a moral issue. If Apple limits the number of devices I can sync my iTunes purchases to, I'm less interested in buying songs on iTunes. Yes, I understand why you'd like a world of free music and total freedom to do what you want with your music. But how is Jobs's decision immoral? Or if he makes all of the developers for the iPad use his Apps store, how is that immoral? It might be a bad business decision. But immoral? I don't see it.

I do understand that the state enforcing property rights makes this more complicated. It's not straightforward. Maybe, we'd be better off as consumers with a more open property rights regime and allow other mechanisms than the state to emerge as a way to encourage incentives for creativity and innovation. But the desire of many to end intellectual property is not open and shut. I view it as an empirical question, not a moral one.

Camp Politics

This video by the Institute for Justice is great!  (HT J.A. Leach)

By George

George Will is especially insightful today.  [image error]

Although When I Disagree with George Selgin, I Worry….

Here's a letter to the Washington Post:

At his post-election post-mortem yesterday, President Obama said "Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were standing at this podium two years into their presidency getting very similar questions, because, you know, the economy wasn't working the way it needed to be" (Dana Milbank, "Obama is sad but not sorry about the election results," Nov. 4).  That's true in the case of Reagan, but false in the case of Clinton.

In November 1994 – when the GOP took control, for the first time in four decades, of both houses of Congress – the unemployment rate was a quite decent 5.6 percent and had fallen for each of the past three months.  It was a full percentage point lower than the 6.6 percent rate for January and February of that year.  And in November 2000, voters gave Bill Clinton's heir-apparent, Al Gore, only a razor-thin majority even though the unemployment rate was then an awesomely low 3.9 percent.

Voters are complicated.  While undoubtedly influenced by the state of the economy and job market, voters are also subject to fits of irrational exuberance, foolish fears, excessive moralizing, and perhaps even rare spasms of wisdom.  It's too simple and convenient for the Democrats to blame their shellacking exclusively on the current foul state of the economy and on Mr. Obama's recently diagnosed inability to communicate.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

A Nation of Slack-Jawed Yokels?

Writing in today's USA Today, Ross Baker blames yesterday's trouncing of the Democrats to "an enduring Democratic blunder: talking over the heads of the American people."

Ummm.  No.

The "enduring Democratic blunder" (often repeated by the GOP) is to enact indecipherably complex and intricate statutes aimed at achieving impossible outcomes.  It's the ludicrous convolution of such legislation that is "over the heads of the American people."  And it's over their heads not because the American people are dumb but because no one – not even the geniuses on the Hill – can possibly absorb the full meaning of the words in the statutes, much less anticipate the millions of unforeseen consequences, large and tiny, that are unleashed by the social engineering for which too many politicians have a fetish.

Like Father, Like Son (I Report Proudly)

Here's a letter that my 13-year-old son, Thomas, wrote to the New York Times:

Charles Blow says that "Private schools by their very nature discriminate. Their students are literally the chosen ones – special, better. This sort of thinking has a way of weaving itself into the fibers of a family and into the thinking of the children, particularly young boys in a male culture where even the slightest deviations from the narrowest concepts of normality are heretical" ("Private School Civility Gap," Oct. 30).

I disagree.

I've gone to private school my whole life.  My parents send me there because it provides a superior education.  They don't send me to private school because they think I am "special" or "better."  They also don't raise me to think like that.  Nor does my school teach me to think like that.  My classmates and I are taught tolerance and civility in addition to formal subjects like math and Latin, so none of us are bothered by people and ideas just because these might be different from ones that are more familiar.  And I myself especially enjoy how I am different from my classmates.

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Boudreaux

Eighth Grade

Westminster School

Annandale, VA 22003

Government failure

Michael Rizzo over at Unbroken Windows hits a home run with this post on health care (HT: Arnold Kling at EconLog). Rizzo writes:

For a federal government to spend $3.5 trillion per year and still find itself with this health care crisis is so much more inexcusable than arguing that "society is so rich that we should trade off some efficiency for some equity." What the heck are we doing with $3.5 trillion (or $6 trillion if you add all levels of government)? The US government (all levels) has 20% more resources itself than the largest economy in the world does yet it cannot take care of health care for the poor and chronically infirm? Where on the list of priorities must this really be? Is it ahead of mohair subsidies, sugar subsidies, windmill subsidies, funding for education schools, and so on? What kind of bizarre world am I living in? And I am being asked to sacrifice a little more just to see that we'll get it right this time?

A few months back, I wrote something similar:

The crisis of government in America is that it does too many things badly instead of doing a few things well.

But Rizzo says it better than I did. Read the whole thing.

No Party of Know

Here's a letter to the Telegraph (in the U.K.):

Toby Hamden reports that "Jon Stewart's smug 'Rally for Sanity' in Washington at the weekend, endorsed by Obama, gave the hipster crowd their chance to chortle at Middle America" ("Midterms 2010: Americans aren't stupid – but they are angry with Barack Obama," Nov. 2).

While every part of the political spectrum has an abundance of dolts and dimwits, intellectual vanity is more common on the left than on the right.  My guess is that this phenomenon springs from the notion that persons who have ideas – especially 'Big Ideas' – for how to run other people's lives are mistaken for being thoughtful and caring.  In contrast, persons who offer no ideas, big or small, for how other people should live their lives – persons who have no itch to meddle in the affairs of others and want only to be left alone to mind their own business as they each judge best – are mistaken for being feeble-minded and uncaring.

In short, to the 'Progressive' brain, I'm smart and kind if I am enchanted by half-baked schemes to herd and prod and tax my fellow Americans, but dumb and mean if I question the wisdom of all such collectivist plots.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux