Sunday, December 11, 2016

Unintended Consequences


Watch this for a good laugh.  It's funny because it’s true.


Yikes.  It could certainly be much worse.


The media is so damn hypocritical it disgusts me.  Trump messes up almost everything, but slipping away to enjoy one steak when his life has been scrutinized constantly for over a year is the least of his offenses.


Now this is a fun article.  In brief, Ethos = character, Logos = policies, and Pathos = personality.  Pathos wins in a contest against either Ethos or Logos every time. Why? People are easily fooled on character and policy when emotions from within are too strong.

We must say it till we are blue in the face.  The minimum wage is hurting the people it purports to help the most.

"Unfortunately, Larson’s comments strike at the heart of the matter. It would be great if the state had to foot the bill for the increased wages, but the state has no source of revenue that does not come directly at the expense of its citizens. Whether through direct taxes or from revenue generated by traffic citations or other minor infractions, the state does not have the means to pay for a wage increase. However, neither do many Washington businesses.

When wages are inflated artificially (not as a natural response to increased market demand and higher profits), financial hardships are inevitable. As children, we were taught that money doesn’t grow on trees. However, this lesson seems to have been lost on proponents of minimum wage increases."


95% of all policies fail the standard cost benefit analysis. The worst of the bunch?  Policies outlawing drugs. This is not an opinion.  This one is not up for discussion. Best option is to legalize all drugs now.

Walter William from 2001.  I often point out to my fellow graduates and current students at U of C that higher education, and really all education for that matter, is a liberal sounding board.  They usually return with some kind of question (and I think this is the correct question) along the lines of "well have you ever considered that maybe the reason for that is the most educated people are all liberal?"  To that I usually answer in one word - incentives.  And this is exactly what I mean.  

By the way, if we are going down this route, have you liberals ever wondered why the large majority of economics professors are conservative?  

Ball’s in your court.

A quote from Professor Williams:

"In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician’s major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success. The education establishment and politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, work hand-in-glove to further both of their goals. The education establishment makes large payments into the political campaign coffers of politicians, and politicians return the favor with large government education expenditures."


The nanny state can't govern as well as each individual can. Not only does a politician need to be the smartest person in the world, in order to beat the free market, a politician has to be smarter than every person in the world COMBINED in order to govern with more efficiency.  à Too many unintended consequences


Campaign finance has always been an interesting subject for me.  Why are people so focused on reducing the amount of money that can be contributed to a certain candidate?  They claim that this benefits the rich and special interests at the expense of the poor and underrepresented.  If we take this approach we are violating people’s Constitutional right to express themselves.  If we truly wanted to stop special interests (which politicians most certainly do not) wouldn't we simply eliminate the ability of politicians to yield to the special interest requests they get.  Then people can still contribute as much as they like to a campaign because they believe this politician will create good policy rather than specifically enacting a policy on their behalf.  This is a classic example of politicians solving an issue rather than getting at the actual problem that we have.  More unintended consequences …

"Among other things, the bill seeks to ban unrestricted ‘soft money’ contributions to political parties and restrict advertising by advocacy groups during federal elections. Soft money contributions to political parties emerged as a means around 26-year-old legal limits on direct contributions to political candidates. During the Republican primaries, Sen. McCain campaigned on this issue, saying that the billions of dollars going into the campaign coffers of political parties created undue influence and special favors.

While it’s true that McCain-Feingold poses a significant threat to our First Amendment guarantees, our rights to express ourselves in the political process, there’s another issue totally lost in the debate. Let’s look at it.

Which issue should we be more concerned about? Should we be concerned by the fact that people are willing to pour money into political campaign coffers with an eye toward gaining access, influence and special favors? Or should we be more concerned that our elected officials are in the business of granting special favors in exchange for campaign contributions? The McCain-Feingold bill suggests that we should be concerned with the former while ignoring the latter. The only solution to political corruption must involve measures to reduce or eliminate Congress’ ability to create a privilege for one American that’s denied to another American."
"… We’ve become a nation of thieves.  Nineteenth century philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat was right on the money with his observation, ‘The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.’"


We need to stop forcing (nudging) encouraging everyone to go to college.  If a kid got a real high school education they would get most of what the left like to claim are "positive externalities" from education (ie. less gang involvement, less crime, better decision-making).  After all, it doesn't take a degree in economics to know that joining a gang is probably a net negative decision as long as other possibilities are available.  But that is the key - as long as other possibilities are available!  So instead of forcing kids to go to college and devaluing higher education while simultaneously increasing the price, we need to offer things along the lines of trade schools and apprenticeships.  This article shows the success of apprenticeships in Germany but also claims it would be difficult if not impossible to implement in the US, but at least the thought is in the correct direction.  The current left has put us down a path of ever more education and ever less production.


For all the people who don't think we should be always focused on our individual freedom ... It can be taken away quicker and easier than you know.  Blurb below is the lesson, but please read the full article for background on how the author got here.

"That is to say, whatever the CIA, the Pentagon, … do as part of a national security state operation, no one will ever be prosecuted for it. The national-security state branch of the government has simply become much too powerful. There is no possibility that the Justice Department is ever going to target anyone for crimes committed in the course of a national-security state operation.
But let’s just assume, hypothetically, what would happen if President Obama and the national security state decided that Trump’s supposed unfitness for office posed as big a threat to national security as Allende’s. What if they decided to prevent Trump from assuming power, just as Nixon, the Pentagon, and the CIA decided to prevent Allende from taking power and then later instigated the events that brought his removal him from power?
If that were to happen, there is absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. That’s the nature of a national-security state. If that were to happen, Congress would buckle, the federal courts would buckle, and so would the mainstream newspapers, just as they did in Chile. After all, given that these institutions have buckled in the so-called war on terrorism in the face of totalitarian-like powers now being wielded by the president and his national-security forces, there is no doubt that their buckling would be much pronounced in a military coup.
Impossible? The Chilean people certainly wouldn’t think so. And neither would the Los Angeles Times, which, prior to the election, published an op-ed entitled “If Trump Wins, a Coup Isn’t Impossible Here in the U.S.”
If Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA were to end up doing to Trump what Nixon, the Pentagon, and the CIA did to Allende, undoubtedly there would be many Americans who would cheer, just as there were many Chileans and Americans who cheered when they did it to Allende and, for that matter, just as many Egyptians cheered not so long ago when the U.S. supported military dictatorship ousted that country’s democratically elected president in a coup. But as we learned from Pinochet’s reign of terror, the consequences of violating the will of the electorate oftentimes brings adverse consequences, including tyranny, round-ups, torture, rape, and murder of tens of thousands of innocent people, along with impunity for the malefactors."


I have a few comments on this:

1.  I think this is the first FEE article I have outright disagreed with.

2.  I love Musk's ambition.  He is definitely part genius and he seems (and I have read a lot on the topic and about him) to be a good person trying to do what is right for society.  

3.  I COMPLETELY agree it is ridiculous that his two companies, as well as Solar City, are so heavily subsidized by taxpayers. He should do what he does, but be funded by shareholders who are the people able and willing (and with skin in the game) to make the decisions that ultimately make it a smooth engine.  

4.  I don't fault Musk for approaching and coming to deals with various government entities and I think it is hypocritical of the author to be upset with him.  After all, FEE is a big free market think tank and should understand that incentives are always at play.  The blame in this scenario does not go to Musk who is obtaining funding from the politicians but to the politicians themselves for allowing this to happen.

5.  Musk is probably correct that we need to be looking into better forms of energy and trying to colonize Mars.  I just disagree with how he is funding this venture.

6.  If you haven't read Tim Urban from Waitbutwhy.com articles on this topic, you need to do that ASAP.  Link is http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html.

An excellent piece.  Is progress really progress if it is forced on the people? Kind of like the forced apologies I had to give my brother as a kid.  What were they worth?

I have pasted the whole article below.

"’So what happens now? Now we fight. Now we organize. So they may take every piece of social progress we've made in the last 50 years, from gay marriage back to the civil rights act. So what? We'll take them back.’

The words sat there, dark on my back-lit computer screen. They were meant to be the apex of a long, impassioned plea, posted online by a man I respect, a brother of sorts, reacting to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. It was a plea driven by anger and fear – mostly fear. He warned of suffering, disease, death, decline, suppression, persecution, harassment, assault, poverty, hunger, and total destabilization.

We have never talked politics, although the paths our lives have traveled intersect in the world of applied philosophy. We have never talked economics, or history. The nature of our occasional intersections, with its peculiar focus on unity and brotherly love and acceptance, preclude such talk, as politics, economics, and history tend to be divisive. I find this sad because they need not be. Perhaps we should find another intersection, one where such talk is proper, I would like to try to see the virtue in his approach.

His is a perspective espoused and defended by nearly all Americans; a vision of a nation where every man, woman, and child is free not just from political oppression, racial bigotry, or religious intolerance, but also free from disease, intimidation, shame, poverty, and catastrophe. It is a noble vision. And frankly, it is a universal vision. The progressives hold no monopoly on that goal, despite their rhetoric. It is a vision made real only by the means of social progress.

Social progress. The true sense of the phrase is ennobling. Make no mistake, if there is to be a leap in human evolution, social progress is the requisite precursor. I long to see an era of broad, lasting social progress.

The means by which progress is made possible is the cipher by which we can decode whether the progress (as laudable as it may be) be social or antisocial.

A black man can walk into any restaurant in Georgia and be seated and served. He can expect the same menu items, treatment, and service as any other patron. Compared to 1940, that seems to be real social progress.

A gay man can rent an apartment from anyone, provided there is consent on both sides, even foot-washing, born-again evangelicals, regardless of his sexuality. He can expect the same treatment from the landlord as a heterosexual, newlywed couple. Compared to 1990, that seems to be real social progress.

A poor mother can walk into a clinic with a child stricken with illness, unashamed of her indigence, and expect her child to be seen and cared for exactly the same as the millionaire's kid next door. Compared to 2000, that seems to be real social progress.
But is it? Are these really social progress?
Might Does Not Make Progress

There is an idea that has plagued mankind, possibly forever, but most radically since the dawn of progressivism a century ago. That idea is that society is an institution organized by common conformity to a regulatory framework that delimits acceptable action. The idea is that, as the regulatory framework progresses toward that universal vision of the brotherhood of man, so too does society progress.

But society is not an institution. It is not organized by regulatory frameworks. And a degree of conformity certainly is not a measure of consent. Society is an aggregate of individuals, each with a personal regulatory framework governing his or her ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and vice. Society only progresses to the degree that its members progress, and the only means a man has to measure his progress is to consider the nature of his internal governance, his conscience. He must consider that which causes him to feel pleasure and that which causes him to feel pain, that which causes him to feel pride and that which causes him to feel guilt, that which causes him joy and that which causes him sadness.

External regulation cannot induce progress.

My friend, lamenting an expected withdrawal of social progress, fails to realize that there was little real social progress to begin with. The ethical construct that leads a progressive to leverage the violence of the state to force progressive-like behavior is the same ethical construct that compels the racist restaurateur, the homophobic landlord, and the heartless clinician. It is an ethic that Montague called kraterocracy. It means "might makes right." It is the idea that those who rule have the right to determine right and wrong, that those in power have the right to establish normative values for all those weaker than they are. My friend, fearing a withdrawal of ‘pieces of social progress,’ proclaims, ‘We'll take them back.’

But they aren't pieces of social progress. They are expressions of brutalism.

The universal vision that progressivism strives for is rooted in virtue. But the laws passed to achieve that vision are selected precisely to create cautionary tales, warnings, and examples; they are constructed raw and violent to push a point.  It is how the brutalists proclaim that racism is bad, bigotry is bad, intolerance is bad, poverty is bad, disease is bad, intimidation is bad, shame is bad, poverty is bad, and catastrophe is bad. They leverage the threat of violence to make an example out of those who act out of line. It is a line of reasoning absent of virtue, regardless of the ends it seeks to achieve.

It is not virtue that advocates such laws, but compulsion, control, and dominion – the very same vices the laws seek to address are what drive the supporters of such laws. They have abandoned true social progress in favor of a counterfeit. Not only are those laws, as much as the behaviors they seek to inhibit, examples of anti-social progress, but they are indicative of regression, not progression. Their existence is evidence not only of the brutal culture and normative mores of society but of their supporters as well.

What progress is there if the black man can only get a meal because the restaurant owner will have his food and beverage license revoked if he doesn't?  In a socially progressive society, the restaurant would have gone out of business long before there was a need for such a law.

What progress is there if the gay man can only rent a room because the landlord will be fined if he doesn't? In a socially progressive society, the landlord would have no tenants.

What progress is there if the sick child is treated only because his mother's insurance company was forced to put her in their book? In a socially progressive society, the clinician's professionality would be figuratively executed in the public eye, a public that would have had the generosity to cover the child's expenses.

We live in a society of regressive values. Even the means by which good-intentioned men and women seek to achieve that universal vision are evidence of their own social regression. There is not and cannot be any virtue in regulation. The initiation of force, or the threat thereof, is always evil. As George Washington said, ‘Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force!’ Real social progress isn't found in laws and cannot be inculcated by compulsion. Only individual enlightenment begets lasting social progress, and that is the kind of social progress for which my friend is longing – the kind that isn't threatened because the head of the state is a bozo, or a psychopath, or a misogynist, or racist.

And that should be the focus of our work – individual enlightenment, of ourselves and of others. Let us work toward that end. Let us strive to free individuals from the shackles of culture and history. Let us help men evolve into enlightened souls. Let us give them permission to question dogma. Let us call out as such the elements of every culture, tradition, or belief system that is regressive. Let us live and act and talk in a way that breathes the spirit of confidence into the souls of men and women who have been brutalized and made to be afraid. Let us enliven them with truth, and be examples of hope and charity.

This isn't a battle, it isn't zero-sum; it is an adoption, a welcoming of brotherhood, and an invitation to bathe in cool waters. Only virtue can beget virtue, and only in virtue is real social progress possible."


Here we go already with the Trump cronies.  Ivanka is married to Jared, Jared's brother, Josh has a company that makes money selling Obamacare insurance policies. Way to go people - you elected this guy to rid Washington of the “ruling elites” and “crony establishment”, yet here we are.  Congrats! :/


Something to be thankful for:

"Bottom Line: The fact that a family in America can celebrate Thanksgiving with a classic turkey feast for less $50 and at a ‘time cost’ of only 2.29 hours of work at the average hourly wage for one person means that we really have a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving: an abundance of cheap, affordable food. The average worker would earn enough money before their lunch break on just one day to be able to afford the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Compared to 1986, the inflation-adjusted cost of a turkey dinner today is more than 20% cheaper, and nearly 29% cheaper measured in the ‘time cost’ for the average worker. Relative to our income and relative to the cost of food in the past, food in America is more affordable today than almost any time in history."


Why is it that democrats think the liberal agenda is the path to enlightenment and prosperity.  A simple glance at the data shows that areas under liberal and progressive control have consistently been highlighted as areas where life is not thriving.  I don't mean to be too simple about it because I understand there could be and are conflicting variables, but the correlation alone at least warrants a true investigation instead of blind loyalty to the democratic party.  


GS makes the point that its going to be difficult to really cut taxes because the debt is historically extremely high relative to GDP when compared to the last 2 times a republican took office following a democrat.  Thanks Obama.


If you are an econ junkie, give this a read.  I wonder if Friedman thought about the possibility of the Fed as a bureaucracy created to give economic rents to the banking sector and still would have considered it to be the best option.  I truly don't know but would love to hear more.


An important concept of libertarianism is identified by Tho Bishop.  Truth right here!  He says:

"One of the most common fallacies those on both the left and the right regularly make about libertarianism is suggesting that opposing government funding of a specific product, service, or organization is the same as opposing their very existence."



Libertarians don’t necessarily think various government organizations are out to do harm or are negative beings.  Libertarians simply oppose the governments involvement and the nature of forcing anyone to do anything they wouldn’t voluntarily do.
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