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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard property rights responsibility too much government

Poison Is Poisonous

Venezuela’s socialist economy has been collapsing.

No big mystery. If, out of hostility to capitalism, a society keeps destroying everything that production, trade, and prosperity depend upon, the economy suffers. The benefits of markets don’t flow no matter what.

One assault has taken the form of hyperinflation — runaway printing of currency, done in part to dissolve government debt. Many Venezuelans are resorting to barter. It’s easy to understand why.

Or is it? A Reuters reporter says that economists say that “the central bank [of Venezuela] has not printed bills fast enough to keep up with inflation, which . . . reached an annual rate of almost 25,000 percent in May.”

So go faster!?

Dude. Dude. The massive expansion of Venezuela’s money supply is what’s causing massive jumps in prices. Just like any other economic good, the medium of exchange is subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Other things being equal, enormously increasing a supply of a good will enormously lower its market value or price. Money, too, has a price — in terms of the non-monetary goods being bought. If the pre-hyperinflation price of a dollar in terms of bread is one loaf and the post-hyperinflation price is one bread crumb, you won’t reverse the decline by printing even more dollars or bolívars even faster.

If you’re ingesting poison, you can’t fight the effects by being poisoned more and harder. The very first thing to do is stop ingesting the poison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 


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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom local leaders nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Kick the Addiction, Save Money

The political case for the War on Drugs has always been intuitive. “Drugs are bad” has trumped practical concerns. But the actual, responsible case for the political crusade has depended upon some concept of “social cost.”

Now that marijuana is being legalized state by state, the case against the greater War on Drugs is being taken seriously — enough to rethink all varieties of costs. Indeed, many now see the opioid epidemic as being driven, in part, by the War on Drugs, and not just as an excuse for a stronger crackdown.

Nevertheless, coming to some accounting — especially “social cost” accounting — remains difficult. This is especially true so long as its effects on freedom and the rule of law do not get figured in.

Somewhat surprisingly, even the budgetary effects of legalization have proven a bit tricky.

So it is welcome to read Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron’s study of marijuana legalization as it has occurred in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. He compares results of legalization with the predictions he had made eight years ago, in a previous Cato Institute study. It turns out that while tax revenues are far greater than expected, law enforcement costs have not gone down.

“Early experience suggests that governments will reallocate rather than reduce those expenditures,” Miron writes. “That reallocation may be beneficial, but it does not have a direct effect on the budget deficit.”

On a federal level, though, we might expect greater savings. How? We could shut down whole bureaus.

Yet, achieving such savings would require progress on Washington’s biggest addiction:  spending.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


Studies cited:

Jeffrey Miron, “The Budgetary Effects of Ending Drug Prohibition,” Cato Tax & Budget Bulletin, Number 83, July 23, 2018.

Jeffrey A. Miron and Katherine Waldock, “The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition,” Cato Institute white paper, September 27, 2010.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Taking a (Lemonade) Stand

When life hands you lemons. . . .

Once upon a time, putting up a summertime lemonade stand was the American way for kids to learn about hard work, good will, and entrepreneurship. Almost every kid had one, making some spendable profit selling the nectar.*

Some of the youngsters grew up to become Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and, well, lemonade’s one heck of a gateway drink.

But then, along came “progress” — that is, mandates and regulations slapped upon businesses. And the hordes of regulators required to enforce the morass of rules — “swarms of Officers.”

Soon lemonade stands were vanquished from our neighborhoods.

And America was made safe (at long last!) for . . . inane bureaucracy.

“Reports of kids’ lemonade stands being shut down for breaking local health or permitting laws have long left grown-ups feeling sour,” today’s Wall Street Journal informs. But the story also details how “a growing movement of adults is fighting back.”

So, when government policies hand you lemons, what do you do?

Make a map of all the lemonade stand clampdowns.

“I think the Constitution covers [lemonade stands] as written,” Dave Roland told the Journal, explaining the map he and his wife Jenifer have produced. “But if there’s any doubt about that, let’s get it fixed.” The Rolands run the Freedom Center in Missouri, but theirs is a regrettably national map.

Last month, the popular lemonade maker Country Time started “Legal-Ade,”  pledging to come to the defense of any kid “busted” for trafficking in lemonade.

Seriously.

“When life gives you arcane laws,” the company’s video says, “make lemonade.”

Taste the Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


* The profit was made possible largely by pushing their costs off onto their parents. But isn’t that sorta what parents are for? And good lessons were still learned.

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Accountability crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard responsibility

Blame the App?

Who spreads “fake news”?

Gossips, politicians, publicity agents, Twitter eggs, partisan bloggers, lying news journalists?

Or . . . the medium of communication they use?

Do envelopes, stationery, telephones, email, and messaging apps have moral agency?

And who commits the crimes that news (true or false) is used to rationalize?

A New York Times story discusses “How WhatsApp Leads Mobs to Murder in India,” which is like saying that civilization, flying lessons and boarding passes “led” terrorists to 9/11.

The Times reports that fake news about children being kidnapped — dramatized by doctored video clips and forwarded via WhatsApp, a messaging app — provoked anger and fear in many Indians. Some were then willing to attack anyone who “seemed” about to kidnap children.

In recent months, dozens of people have been murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Without social media and the mega-popular WhatsApp, the murders probably would not have happened, at least not the way they happened. That seems certain. But this doesn’t mean that without WhatsApp, nobody in India would spread false stories or assault innocent people.

Mob violence in the country antedates the Internet.

Perhaps a thousand material circumstances directly or indirectly enable any particular act of wrongdoing. But no such prerequisites “lead to” anything without individual choices.

If someone pretends it’s okay to kill innocent persons — or persons whose guilt or innocence he doesn’t care to know — he, the killer, is the guilty party. The telecommunications network or messenger app used to provide grist for excuse-making is innocent.

Apps don’t murder people. People murder people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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Accountability general freedom government transparency incumbents insider corruption local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

“Dorky” Doesn’t Define It

“Term limits,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of The Modern Age, in a recent podcast conversation with historian Tom Woods, “was one of the dorkiest ideas of the 1994 so-called Newt Gingrich revolution.”

He characterized it as not having really gone anywhere.

Huh?

Granted, Congress is still not term-limited. But Americans in 15 states — including California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, and representing 37 percent of the nation’s population — do enjoy term-limited state legislatures.*

And it sure wasn’t Newt Gingrich’s idea. Gingrich opposed it.

McCarthy repeats the old chestnut that what term limitation “winds up doing is actually weakening Congress and congresspeople in particular — relative to their own staff, who stay in Congress and become sort of experts and learn how to manipulate their congressman, and also relative to the executive branch who have people rotate in from time to time.”

Nifty theory — one very popular with politicians, who know that voters fear unelected influences on legislation.

The reality, however, is that Congress, designed by the Constitution’s framers to be both most powerful and closest to the people‚ is, today, the weakest branch.

And legislators are not term limited.

Ditch the “manipulation theory”; adopt a “collaboration theory”: legislators with Methuselah-long careers learn, sans “rotation in office,” to feather their own nests and those of the interest groups that fund their re-elections (and insider trading schemes).

Term limits remain popular with normal Americans because voters intuitively grasp the reality of such everyday corruption, which is directly tied to Congress having sloughed off so much constitutional responsibility.

We need term limits to restore a Congress sold out by professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


* Nine of the ten largest cities in America likewise have termed-limited their elected officeholders. For more information, see the links to the column from which this episode of Common Sense is condensed.

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Categories
general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Plantation Revolt

The #Walkaway movement started with Brendan Straka, who proclaimed that his tribe — the liberal Left — had become “intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded, and, at times, blatantly fascistic.”

Mr. Straka’s beef — and the general tenor of the pile-on Twitterstorm — was not about Democratic Party policy, as Scott Adams noted. It was about the left-of-center movement’s rhetorical/propagandistic rut. Since the election of Donald Trump, Democrats had come to rely almost exclusively on the feeding of frenzy by psychological manipulation, by ginning up fear.

Straka’s appeal to “walk away” became a hit, especially amongst those “racial, sexual, and religious minorities in America” that he says the Democrats have treated as if they owned.

Yet the Washington Post pooh-poohs the trend as just a social media blip — over-hyped by the very nature of the medium itself.

Plausible?

David Catron says no. Before the #WalkAway movement, he writes in The American Spectator, African-American voters had already walked away from Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in enough numbers to allow Trump his victory. And this bodes badly for the Democratic Party, for, as Catron quotes YouTube sensation Candace Owens, “I’ve seen black liberals go conservative, but never seen a black conservative go liberal.”

It doesn’t take many defections, says Carton: “All that is needed is about 5 percent more African-Americans to vote Republican and another 5 to 10 percent to simply stay home.”

But be warned: wishful thinking and Straka’s litany of political vices — “groupthink, hypocrisy, division, stereotyping, resentment” — can overtake any movement pretty quickly.

Anti-leftists in general and Republicans in particular are not immune to mass mania and suicide-by-panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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