Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets international affairs property rights

Idaho Foils Foul Harvest

China, organ harvesting, insurance

One can be for free trade yet still demand, while sticking to principle, certain restrictions on international trade.

The State of Idaho has demonstrated one sort of restriction compatible with a free society’s free-trade rules. “As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-transplant care performed in China or any country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting,” explains Frank Fang in The Epoch Times (No. 508, A5). The legislation had been passed unanimously in both legislative houses earlier in the month and was signed by the governor on April 10.

Idaho wasn’t the first state to do this, following Texas last year and Utah this year, with its law going into effect on May 1.

The problem to be addressed? The suspiciously short waiting time for organ transplants in China, especially after the Chinese government cracked down on the Falun Gong decades ago. 

“In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years ‘on a substantial scale,’ with Falun Gong practitioners being the ‘principal source’ of human organs,” according to Mr. Fang.

This is not protectionism. And it really isn’t any unwarranted regulation on trade. For even in the freest of societies, with 100 percent free trade and freedom of contract, the sale and purchase of stolen goods is unlawful.

Rightly prohibited.

If anything has been taken away unjustly, it’s the internal organs of political prisoners by the Chinazis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Supermarket Slavery

grocery store, police

How to sue supermarkets for shutting down:

One. Move to San Francisco.

Two. Support a proposed ordinance “amending the Police Code to require large supermarkets to provide six months notice to their customers and the City before permanently closing, and to explore ways to allow for the continued sale of groceries at the location.”

Three. If the ordinance passes, wait for a large supermarket to go out of business without having known six months in advance that it would need to do so.

Four. Sue.

That the proposed law would amend the police code is perversely apt. The idea is use the state’s police power to penalize ending an activity that as a free man, not a slave, you have no obligation to continue.

Ending any project may inconvenience people who benefit from what you’re doing. But unless you are bound by contract, these other people have no right to your further efforts. 

Not for six months, not for six seconds.

The San Francisco ordinance would exempt supermarkets that must close because of a natural disaster or other circumstance not “reasonable foreseeable.” These exemptions don’t solve the problems that the ordinance could cause for innocent businessmen. As Reason magazine notes, any stores that closes “without providing the proper notice” could still be sued for damages, supposedly exempted or not.

In the 1980s, when this notion was originally proposed (unsuccessfully), supermarket executives argued that making it harder for them to shut down would also discourage them from opening a store to begin with.

True. But that’s just common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment free trade & free markets tax policy

What Pfizer Pfolks Got

Pfizer, drugs, taxes, corruption, Covid

Yesterday, a whole lot of people paid a whole lot of taxes. It was Tax Day — filing day — for most Americans.

Truth is, American workers pay income tax with every paycheck. And they pay other taxes too.

Somehow, though, Pfizer — one of the world’s most profitable companies — did much better than we did. “Drugmakers make big profits in the U.S.,” explains Sydney Lupkin at NPR. “But many pay taxes far below the 21% corporate tax rate. Pfizer’s effective tax rate is so low it’s getting a big refund despite booking $59 billion in revenue.”

Did you get a big refund on top of a huge wage hike? No?

Well, you should lobby Congress more.

Now, Pfizer’s long had a cushy/pushy relationship with the U.S. Government. The company’s had to pay loads of legal penalties for malfeasance, but it’s also received subsidies, immunities, and government-forced clientele — in the rollout of its most famous product. But through thick and thin it faces our byzantine tax code with ease, for it’s that tax complexity that really gives Big Pharma the advantage, compared to smaller companies.

I have never argued for more taxes. I wonder if corporations should even be taxed based on income, which gets complicated to figure since it’s based on profits and losses and investments etc., thus opening the door to corrupt insider politics. Plus, those taxes simply get passed on to us. 

But if corporations are taxed, how indecent that small companies tend not to get huge refunds on years in which they make stellar returns.

Though I suppose if Congress keeps on awarding more to the bigger, that’s a problem that sort of solves itself. 

With the smaller companies just dying out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation

Dining Out on Cause and Effect

California, minimum wage, hamburgers, economics, wages, jobs

Could a barren, charred, devastated landscape be the actual intended goal?

In California as in Washington, lawmakers and chief executives apparently have a long list of nice things to destroy and are crossing them off one by one, as if on the payroll of aliens from outer space wanting to conquer earth without doing very much conquest-work themselves.

Part 99-C of the plan is to price entry-level labor and entry-level restaurant dining out of the market by hiking the minimum wage of fast-food workers even further beyond the market rate for the labor and its actual productive value to employers: now to $20 an hour.

Already, prices for restaurant meals are going up, and restaurant workers are being laid off.

The $20 minimum is a compromise that restaurant owners accepted in lieu of probably paying a $22 per hour minimum. Like letting burglars take only most of the silverware and letting them return at will.

Even more looting of employers is to come, if employee and activist Angelica Hernandez has her way. “We’re going to have to keep speaking up and striking to make sure we are heard.” She wants her dough and doesn’t care about the consequences for others. Policymakers rush to appease her and those like her.

So is omni-destruction the actual intended goal?

Or is it that the mental powers of the crusaders and politicians and too many voters don’t extend so far as the relationship between cause and effect?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets international affairs repeal

The Milei Option

Argentina, socialism, communism, Milei, president, economy

Argentina’s new president promised to take a chainsaw to the high taxes and controls that have been killing the country’s freedom and prosperity.

He has had successes. One of his decrees removed rent controls, and as a result the supply of rentals has jumped and rents have dropped.

But Milei cannot simply issue decrees to free up markets. He’s got to go through the legislature. And Argentina’s Senate recently rejected a mammoth Milei-issued emergency decree to deregulate the economy apparently in one fell swoop—revising or killing some 300 regulations.

The Financial Times reports that Milei’s coalition, La Libertad Avanza, “controls less than 10 per cent of Senate seats.” Many of the “centrist” senators could have helped pass Milei’s reforms over the objections of the adamantly leftist members. But these centrists profess to have constitutional reservations about the decree.

The real problem is probably that there is still a very large constituency for the subsidies and grift that have impoverished so many Argentinians.

The decree remains in effect until the House votes on it too. Milei’s administration is negotiating with the lawmakers of that chamber and with others who may have an impact on their vote.

If President Milei loses this fight in the near term, he must keep reminding voters why he can’t do more to lift them out of poverty and serfdom. His election to the presidency was a huge political change. But it’s not the only one Argentina needs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets political economy subsidy

When the CHIPS Are Weighed Down

Taiwan, computer chips, regulations, DEI, race, racism

Has DEI “killed the CHIPS Act”?

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created a giant package of subsidies that shouldn’t exist to begin with and is made even worse by all the strings attached.

The Act authorizes giving $52 billion of taxpayer money to microchip manufacturers to make chips in the U.S. The boost to domestic production will supposedly help us if China invades Taiwan and disrupts Taiwan’s globe-leading microchip industry.

But chipmakers eligible for the largesse are recoiling from all the embedded DEI mandates. “DEI” means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It’s a collectivist mantra and ideology designed to make employers fret about racial and gender quotas and DEI indoctrination at the expense of hiring qualified people and making high-quality microchips.

According to Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson, writing for The Hill, nineteen sections of the Act are devoted to DEI. One gives the Department of Commerce a mission that Commerce describes as “strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem” by ensuring “significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The authors believe that CHIPS is “so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.” Worse, it’s making it hard for chipmakers to move, forced to focus away from making microchips and, instead, onto the wasteful exercise of appeasing regulators.

Now that they are finally about to get CHIPS funding, Intel and others are delaying announced factories and foundries on U.S. sites and instead going ahead with more overseas plants.

I guess they want to get stuff done.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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