Russell Roberts's Blog, page 462

Some Hopes for 2020 and Beyond

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I express some hopes for 2020 and beyond. A slice:

I hope also that people generally come to have a more realistic view of government. While most people aren’t as intoxicated by the prospect of discretionary state power as are socialists, even political moderates are immoderate in their expectations of what democratically elected politicians can accomplish.

For example, many moderates naively suppose that government officials empowered to impose tariffs on fellow citizens’ purchases of imports will use that power only to promote the country’s general welfare and never to bestow special privileges on politically prominent producers. Many other moderates credulously suppose that when politicians set minimum wages, the artificially raised cost of employing low-skilled workers won’t dampen firms’ eagerness to employ such workers.

And yet other moderates assume unthinkingly that when politicians promise to “fight” climate change by raising taxes on carbon, that these taxes will be imposed with such scientific rigor that the resulting benefits will necessarily exceed the costs.

Here’s another hope: that we Americans stop obsessing over how much money people such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have in their financial portfolios. I hope that we instead come to understand — and to celebrate — just how incredibly wealthy we all are.

Sure, to fly across the continent at jet speed, you and I must share an aluminum tube with a few hundred other people, while Bezos has his own personal flying machine. That’s nice for Bezos. But not only did Bezos’ wealth not come at your or my expense — quite the contrary, by increasing the convenience of shopping, he made us richer — the fact remains that you and I can fly across the continent, in safety and comfort, at jet speed!

And we ordinary Americans also have homes and automobiles that are air-conditioned, access to antibiotics, an abundance of foods available only to monarchs a few hundred years ago, and a variety of foods available to no one a mere 100 years ago.

My hope for 2020 and beyond is that we all come to better appreciate the cornucopia of wonders made readily available by market-driven commerce.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Art Carden praises Steve Davies’s new book, The Wealth Explosion.

Historian KC Johnson is rightly critical of the combination of cowardice and ideological bias that prevents many historians from publicly criticizing the New York Times‘s “1619 Project.” Here’s his conclusion:

Gordon Wood has argued that the Times’s handling of the historians’ letter means that “in the long run the Project will lose its credibility, standing, and persuasiveness with the nation as a whole.” Perhaps. School administrators should certainly be reluctant to use the Project’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century curricular material for their students. But the affair has also exposed shortcomings within the historical community. The Project’s slipperiness with the factual record provided a golden opportunity for professional historians to stand up for scholarship in an era where so many seem indifferent to objective facts. The Bynum letter’s signatories passed this test, but the broader historical community appears to have failed.

I love Candace Smith’s The Etiquette Blog.

Myron Magnet is spot-on correct about the tyranny incipient in so-called “hate-crime” statutes. A slice:

Designating an offense as a hate crime criminalizes not the action but the idea that supposedly impelled it. Here we are but a step away from the “thoughtcrime” George Orwell described in “1984.”

Properly, the law should ask only two questions about your state of mind. First, do you have the faculty of reason that allows you to distinguish right from wrong? Second, did you intend to do the crime you committed? Beyond that, as James Madison repeatedly insisted, you have freedom of conscience. You can believe whatever you want, however politically incorrect—especially since today’s political correctness may be deemed tyranny in retrospect. In a far-flung republic composed of various subgroups, multiple viewpoints and interests are bound to proliferate. Under such circumstances, toleration is required.

Arnold Kling writes about his dissertation advisor at M.I.T., Robert Solow (who this August will turn 96).

Kevin Williamson accuses Jonathan Chait of being dishonest.

Jonah Goldberg predicts that the “2020 presidential campaign will be even uglier than the 2016 contest.” (Expecting politics to be not-ugly is as realistic as expecting people slathered in crude oil and wrestling in mud to be not-ugly.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 274 of the original 1972 edition of the late Peter Bauer’s invaluable collection, Dissent on Development; specifically, it’s from Bauer’s 1967 paper “Economics as a Form of Technical Assistance“:

With few and normally irrelevant exceptions, incomes represent payments to owners of productive resources for services supplied, and not money extracted from others without return. The contrary view that incomes, especially those of certain groups, are somehow extracted from other people, is politically influential, popular and appealing.

DBx: Ordinary people are not sociopathic. But all are self-interested and nearly all are ignorant of economics and of history. These traits combine to make many ordinary people open to the rants of those who, greedily seeking power, tell ordinary people that some others – for example, Jews, immigrants, high-income capitalists, or low-income foreigners – enrich themselves unjustly at the expense of ordinary persons. Easily convinced that this fallacy is factual, too many ordinary people willingly grant power to those seeking it in the hopes that this power will be selflessly used by those invested with it to seize wealth from the predatory others and return it to its rightful and righteous owners.

Of course, such demonization of others, and promises-to-seize-and-‘redistribute,’ figured prominently among the reasons for the rise to power of beasts such as Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Chavez. But this political move is not practiced only by totalitarians. Ordinary politicians in functioning democracies routinely practice it, if (usually) in more moderate tones and constrained by cultural attitudes and legal traditions that prevent the kinds of full-blown horrors visited upon places such as Soviet Russia and communist Cuba.

Listen to Bernie Sanders. Listen to Elizabeth Warren. Listen, indeed, to any Democratic aspirant to the U.S. presidency. “Elect me and I’ll give you free stuff paid for by others who don’t deserve what they have and who do deserve to be fleeced” – such is their message. (That this message is interpreted by many as being both “Progressive” and reflecting selflessness remains, to me, astonishing.)

Donald Trump is no better. “With me in office, I’ll restore to patriotic Americans the riches unjustly denied to them by foreigners who export to America and by foreigners who immigrate to America.”

At work here is the criminal mind appealing to the childish mind. And this reality isn’t altered by calling such appeals “Progressive” or because the likes of the New York Times and Ivy-League professors compose rococo justifications for such predatory behavior – or by calling such appeals “conservative nationalism” and wrapping them in economically ignorant, and historically uninformed, tales of how America, once great, is being undermined by “globalists” and “free-market purists.”

Sad, and scary.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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…  is from page 139 of George Will’s excellent 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility:

Furthermore, some of what government does it has no constitutional warrant to do, and much of what government tries to do it does not know how to do. So the cause of good government, or at least of minimizing bad government, involves stopping things.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy hopes that Congress and the Trump administration make these three resolutions for 2020. A slice:

Last year’s trade policy was chaotic. This was largely a result of the president’s random announcements, often on Twitter, that he’d apply tariffs on goods coming into the country. In some cases, the tariffs were meant to negotiate radically different trade deals than the ones we already had, a goal never achieved so far. In other cases, tariff threats were a way to get foreign governments to do things that have nothing to do with trade, such as reducing the number of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border or forcing Brazil and Argentina to somehow keep economic turmoil from causing the value of their currencies to fall. In yet other instances, the president’s announcements seemed to be triggered by some weird need to show that he’s still in control and untamed.

No matter the reasons, this behavior needs to stop in 2020.

David Brooks remembers the late Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Robert Wright sings the praises of the largely unsung market forces that keep our food safe.

California’s new legislation ostensibly designed to help freelance workers – help them by requiring that (most) such workers be formally classified as employees of the firms with which they contract – is (shocking!) hurting many of these workers.

Simon Lester makes the case against UK-EU tariffs.

Mark Perry shares UCLA law-professor Stephen Bainbridge’s statement on how he, Bainbridge, contributes to his university’s goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

George Will hopes for a return to normalcy in U.S. politics.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 98 of the original edition of James M. Buchanan’s and Richard E. Wagner’s insightful 1977 book, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (links added):

To remain in office, the politician need not meet the demands of all constituents. Instead, he need satisfy only a required subset, usually a majority. Because majority coalitions shift as among different policy issues, the behavior of the politician who seeks to maintain majority support need not reflect properties of rationality normally attributable to an individual who chooses among private alternatives. This feature of democratic politics has been exhaustively discussed by social scientists since Kenneth Arrow formally proved what he called the “impossibility theorem.”

Why Take the ‘Climate Change’ Crowd’s Case for More Government Power Seriously?

(Don Boudreaux)

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I believe that such a track record – as uncovered here by Maxim Lott – conveys scientifically valid and useful information.

I’m tired of hearing that anyone who refuses to embrace every proposal to tax carbon and to otherwise hamper markets in the name of ‘addressing’ climate change is an unscientific ideologue. Of course, some such people are, but it follows neither that every such person is, nor that the embrace of proposals to tax carbon and to otherwise hamper markets in the name of ‘addressing’ climate change is thereby the only scientifically supportable position.

Those of us who are skeptics of giving the state more power to ‘address’ climate change are not the ones who now have as a prominent spokesperson a 16-year-old child. We are not the ones who cling to a completely unscientific notion of how governments actually operate. We are not the ones who ignore the vast upsides of economic growth, or the full history of that growth. And we are not the ones whose ranks are heavily populated by people making doomsday predictions that are consistently proven wrong – and, in many cases, spectacularly wrong.

Why should anyone with a serious commitment to thinking rationally, realistically, and scientifically pay attention to a political movement whose adherents made such predictions as those reported by Maxim Lott about the year 2020?

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Tyler Cowen understandably accuses Thomas Piketty of being “out to lunch” in the latter’s bizarre and, frankly, ignorant attempt to justify the Soviet Union’s hostility to the private ownership of even minor means of production. A slice from Tyler’s post:

The sections [in Piketty’s forthcoming tome] on Soviet and socialist experience can only be called “delusional.”  In his account, if only a few political decisions had gone the other way, the USSR might have ended up on a path similar to that of Norway….

Joakim Book – here and, additionally, here – identifies several weaknesses in the case for raising carbon taxes. A slice from the first essay:

Provided that what scientists tell us about the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet is accurate — economists are usually not equipped to assess that conclusion — the task of balancing economic needs with environmental harm is an economic (or at worst a political) question rather than a scientific one. While the science of what happens might be “settled” (and no, that does not include the most extremist and alarmist wings of the environmentalist movement), the actions necessary to address that are most certainly not.

Carbon emissions are not, contrary to what many economists and non-economists seem to believe, approaching the idea of a pure externality; their costs are only partially external to the main transaction.

Bruce Yandle looks forward with optimism.

Here’s a list of books that Steve Horwitz regards as being most foundational to Austrian economics.

Pedro Schwartz writes of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin.

Deirdre McCloskey warns against hubris. A slice:

The policy notion on the left, including Sanders, is that running the economy is easy, and easily achieved in legislation. “What lawyers design,” the lawyer-politicians declare, “will be how it actually turns out. After all, we say so, right here in the whereas-preamble to the legislation—that poor people will be better off if we enforce schemes for rent control, a minimum wage, usury restrictions on consumer loans, tariffs on goods supplied to Walmart, ordinances preventing Walmart from opening downtown, trade-union restrictions on entry to professions, and industrial policy to pick winners to be subsidized out of free public money.”

It’s childish. Since when has adding weight to a racehorse improved its speed? Adding weights on Peter to pay Paul can’t make both better off, with rare exceptions such as taxes to finance elementary education for Paul’s kids. Most such laws cause deadweight loss to the society taken as a whole and regularly damage poor Paul.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Dirty job”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the October 24th, 2007, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I was inspired by Mike Rowe to write about an especially dirty job. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more…)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from this November 30th Facebook post by my Nobel-laureate emeritus colleague Vernon Smith:

The author asks: “How would I ameliorate the tragic dilemmas that come with our complicated Mexican border?”

You might start by considering de-criminalizing the possession and drug use in the US, which originally fueled drug production in south of the border countries, that led directly to the corruption and instability of their governments, and to the refugee problem.

DBx: Today is Vernon’s 93rd birthday. Happy Birthday, O wise and brilliant one! May you have many more.