Category: free trade & free markets

Failure and the Five-Day Weekend

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 6, 2016
3 Comments on Failure and the Five-Day Weekend

Venezuela, socialism, failure, work day, illustration

Socialists often brag how their activism — through unions — gave the modern world its five-day workweek. One could spend a book picking at this boast, but no need: it’s overshadowed by the latest.

A socialist country has just reduced the workweek to two days! Hooray for socialism!

Or, no cheers at all. For this epochal move occurred in Venezuela, the “world’s worst performing economy,” with an inflation rate soaring to 720 percent and an absence of food, toilet paper, and . . . electricity: “President Nicolás Maduro will furlough the country’s public employees,” Nick Miroff writes in the Washington Post, “who account for a third of the labor force — for the bulk of the week, so they can sit through rolling blackouts at home rather than in the office.”

It’s only government employees who get the five-day weekend. And this is not a sign of socialist efficiency (heh heh), ushering in a Marxist utopia.

Another nation ruined by socialism and technocracy!

But not just any nation. Venezuela can boast one of the largest oil reserves in the world. If Norway and Alaska and desert sheiks can milk their underground deposits and distribute goodies to their people, why cannot Venezuelans manage it?

Because they extended socialist planning beyond a kleptocratic sharing scheme. Experts had advised them decades ago to build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, live off low- or no-priced electricity as well as oil sales. Today, oil goes cheap . . . and there’s a drought, too little water behind the dam.

Now Venezuelans are trying to burn oil to generate electricity — mostly without success. Socialism has it all — rampant corruption and catastrophic inefficiency.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags government failure, socialism, unions, Venezuela, Venezuelans

Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

You’re Fired! Hillary-style

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 4, 2016
2 Comments on You’re Fired! Hillary-style

“I’m the only candidate,” Hillary Clinton boasted at a town hall back in March, with “a policy about how to bring economic opportunity — using clean renewable energy as the key — into coal country. Because we’re going put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right Tim?”

First, who is this “Tim” fellow? Aren’t you curious? The news media, typically unhelpful, provides no context.

Clearly, Mrs. Clinton supports the Obama Administration polices that have been disastrous for the coal industry. “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels,” she explained.

Monday, in West Virginia, Clinton met unemployed coal worker Bo Copley, who teared-up talking about his family and being out of work. He asked Hillary, “I just want to know how you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?”

Mrs. Clinton told Copley that it was “a misstatement.” And that what she said was “totally out of context” from what she meant . . . whatever that means.

“[T]he way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs,” she explained. “I didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said was, that is going to happen unless we take action to try to and help and prevent it.”

Yes, Hillary has a plan — not to “prevent” losing coal jobs, but, instead, to spend $30 billion in tax dollars to help those her policies hurt.

As one West Virginian passionately put it: “We don’t want your handouts; we want work.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, coal, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, renewable energy

free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies responsibility

Too Much of a Good Thing

Warren Buffett, Coca-Cola, consumer, regulations, consumer protection

Once upon a time, over-indulgence was considered a sin, a vice.

Not so much, nowadays.

Somewhere along the line, the idea that a little of a good thing was good, that general abundance is good, but that there can be too much of a good thing for any particular person . . . this latter common sense idea got lost.

I was reminded of this while reading the latest from the nation’s most famous investor: “Warren Buffett set himself on a potential collision course with public health campaigners when he said it was ‘quite spurious’ to lay the blame for obesity and diabetes at the door of fizzy drinks companies, such as his part-owned Coca-Cola.”

The octogenarian multi-billionaire Buffet, described as a “renowned Cherry Coke drinker,” defended not only his habit but the company that produced it. He emphasized choice, consumer choice. And he said, “I make a choice to get 700 calories from Coke, I like fudge a lot, too, and peanut brittle and I am a very happy guy.”

It came up because a university study had “linked fizzy drinks to 184,000 deaths annually worldwide.”

Well, name your poison. Some folks over-indulge in alcohol; others, food; others, fizzy drinks. But Buffet limits his Cherry Coke intake, as common sense would indicate.

Gluttony used to be a vice. It was preached against. The morality of common sense held sway in our culture.

At some point hedonism in the unrestrained sense took hold of many consumers, who can pay a heavy price — if not at the grocery, at the doctor’s office.

No new laws or regulations are needed. Let everyone, billionaire or not, add up their costs and choose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Coca-Cola, consumer, consumer protection, regulations, Warren Buffett

folly free trade & free markets meme moral hazard national politics & policies

Trump’s Dangerous Idea

Donald Trump, trade, protectionism, Donald Trump, war, borders, Bastiat

A lot of people were impressed by the reasonableness of Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech yesterday . . . despite the usual hyperbolic promises of “best” and “great” and “beautifully.”

Its general tenor? Refreshing. Rejecting post-Cold War foreign policy for a return to “national interest” and “America first”? Long overdue. Like Trump, I think we should eschew nation building.

But still there is that one big problem: Trump is a mercantilist. He believes in protectionism. He thinks that trade has to be “fair” in order to benefit both participants. He thinks NAFTA and similar trade agreements (which generally promoted trade while still reserving a lot of room for government futzing about) are what hurt American industry. Trump is always blaming the “bad deals” made with Mexico and China, rather than placing the blame where it squarely belongs, on

America’s world-high corporate income tax, and
chaos of regulatory excess, and
impenetrable tax code.

But protectionism makes sense to a lot of people. They are incredulous when they hear the (well-established) idea that free trade — even unilateral free trade — is a benefit to the people who live under it.

Surely, they snort, when you target aid or protection to some industries, you are doing good, right?

Wrong. Oh, yeah, of course protectionism protects the chosen few, the advantaged. That’s what it obviously does. But it doesn’t protect the general interest – consumers pay more and producers allocate resources to less valued uses.

You have to look beyond the obvious (“the seen”) to get the full picture (“the unseen”).

Trump’s at his most dangerous right here — forget his loose talk — by continuing to pretend that protectionism helps America.

We cannot afford another Smoot-Hawley.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bastiat, borders, Donald Trump, Presidential campaign 2016, protectionism, trade, war

Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Bailed — Before Bailout

health insurance, experts, obamacare, insurance, costs, illustration, meme

Last Wednesday, UnitedHealthcare Group Incorporated (UNH) announced that it will drop coverage of plans under Obamacare in all but a few states by 2017.

The market signaled a thumb’s up: UNH stock prices shot up over 2 percent.

The company, described in the news, somewhat vaguely, as the country’s largest insurer, is sending us a signal: the Affordable Health Care Act and its “Obamacare”?

Not affordable.

An insurance policy must make sense to both parties, the insured and the insurer. The insured gets peace of mind . . . and coverage when the rare events insured-for take place. The insurer has written enough insurance contracts out there, prices based on actuarial risk, to allow it to make a profit even with payouts.

The problem with the ACA is that it raised costs (in part by forcing insurers to take on patients with pre-existing conditions) while regulating terms of policies offered . . . and prices, too.

Plus, face it: the idea that one should insure for regular checkups is just one of the many absurdities built into the system.

It’s just too much meddling to work, in the long run. Bailouts and subsidies of those insurance companies that stick with the plan will then make the program unaffordable . . . for America’s taxpayers.

Over-regulated and over-subsidized, Obamacare suffers from the preposterous idea that a bird’s eye view of the economy from the politicians’ perch gives enough information to run complex systems servicing millions of people with diverse needs.

Expect more big stories with tags lines ballyhooing a “serious blow to Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Affordable Healthcare Act, experts, health insurance, ObamaCare

folly free trade & free markets ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies

Cranks for President

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, cranks, nuts, populists, illustration

Some of us who think of ourselves as populists — or just ordinary people, hence “outsiders” — are having a hard time this political season. The two most talked-about outsider candidates, billionaire Donald Trump and socialist Bernie Sanders, make for strange populists.

A billionaire as a “man of the people”? Not very plausible. It is his lack of a self-censor, his free-wheeling, stream-of-conscious grade-school-level discourse, that impresses many folks. Definitely not scripted.

A socialist as populist? Socialism, long associated with elitists, would put the State into every area of everyday life. Most folks with horse sense resist that.

But Trump and Sanders do have something in common. They rely upon common misconceptions about everyday market life. They both fan the flames of conspiracy theories about prices.

When the price of fuel was spiking a few years ago, Bernie Sanders warned us: “Forget what you may have read about the laws of supply and demand. Oil and gas prices have almost nothing to do with economic fundamentals.” It’s all greed, you see: arbitrary power.

But, as Daniel Bier reminds us at The Freeman, believing that businesses are superpowers out to screw us with ever-rising prices, unhampered by supply and demand, is not just socialist silliness, it’s Billionaire Trump silliness, too — four years ago, the developer not only trumpeted the idea that we simply threaten OPEC for lower prices, but suggested we actually seize foreign oil fields.

This is not common sense. It’s crankism.

It’s the kind of thing folks say when they’re drunk.

Maybe on power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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