Friday, December 9, 2016

Tolerance, Intolerance and Why We Need to Exit the Echo Chamber


This is a must read, an absolutely excellent piece.  For you NY Times lovers, pay attention.  For you NY Times haters, it says what you have been preaching for years.


If you think we need the government to make industries competitive, you have the wrong view of what true competition is.  Watch the video.


This article was written in 1998 and pertained to Bill Clinton.  But the effects predicted in this article came true.  Bush and Obama (and almost assuredly Trump) have and will continue to extend the power of the executive branch and we have failed to reign in this power.  We must work towards this goal now.

"ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING aspects of the whole presidential impeachment crisis is the number of people who seem to think that this is about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. What they did in the past and how they will deal with it in the future are things that can be left to them ---- and to the tabloids.

What matters is not their past but this country's future. All the talk about whether Clinton has been genuinely contrite, or contrite enough, is completely beside the point. No one needs to see someone grovel. We certainly do not need to see the President of the United States grovelling to keep his job, especially since he must continue to represent us to other countries and to the world, so long as he is in office.
Repeated perjuries and an orchestrated campaign of obstruction of justice have happened. Nothing can change that. You cannot unring the bell. 

All that can be done now is to choose whether perjury and obstruction of justice will be condoned or punished. There is no third way, however much some politicians and journalists might like to have one.  When all is said and done, either the president gets away with perjury and obstruction of justice or he doesn't.  Either way, it won't change the past. But it can make a huge difference to the future of this country. And that is the real issue, not Clinton or Lewinsky or Starr or anybody else.

We in the twentieth century have no excuse for forgetting the enormous dangers that go with letting leaders be lawless because they are popular. Many of the horrors of this century resulted from leaders whose popularity allowed them to ignore laws.

Lenin, Hitler and Mao were all popular -- and millions paid with their lives for the power that popularity gave them. This is not to compare Clinton with them. On the contrary, Clinton's past and future deeds are as nothing compared to what others who hold the power of the presidency can do in the future if he gets away with his violations of laws and his corruption of our institutions.

At this point, Clinton doesn't matter and his contrition doesn't matter, whether real or fake. In the context of history -- and what is happening in Congress now is historic, regardless of how it turns out -- Clinton just happens to be the man who confronted us with this challenge to the rule of law."

Is income derived from 1) getting there first, 2) winning the lottery from some grand dealer in life, or 3) our own capacity to please our fellow man?   What do you believe?

“We just might ask ourselves: Where is a society headed that holds its most productive members up to ridicule and makes mascots out of its least productive and parasitic members?”

Williams articulates what I believe to be the most basic argument against government intervention: we don’t even know what we don’t know!

"… mankind’s total knowledge of all that can be known is trivial. Another is some people act as if they know it all and, in their roles as politicians and bureaucrats, they forcibly impose what they see as their “superior wisdom” on others. These barbarians have forgotten Richard Whatley’s warning, “He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.” Not only will these people mislead themselves, if they have power they’ll mislead a nation."

The author presents the libertarian case for open immigration borders.  

"In the early stages of interventionism, the emphasis is on keeping immigrants out. When state interventionism gets more intense, the emphasis switches to preventing citizens from leaving — as was the case in the USSR and all the Eastern European socialist countries.

It is true that socialist policies cannot survive free migration. Welfare states are inherently unsustainable — the problem is not the immigration; the problem is the socialist economic policies of the state. Do you advocate dismantling socialist controls? Or do you advocate propping up an unsustainable welfare state with the protectionism of immigration controls?
If you are against welfare, make the argument against the welfare system, not against immigrants on the basis that they might someday take welfare. If you are worried that immigrants might vote for politicians you dislike, be consistent and argue against the legitimacy of anyone’s voting to take your money, not just someone who recently moved.

We have a common enemy — the interventionist state. People moving from one home to another across an artificial line are not initiating aggression. They are not the enemy. Nineteenth-century classical liberals knew that. It’s a shame that so many modern libertarians have forgotten it."


Are we as Americans really as racist as we are made out to be?  The author contends the term “racism” doesn’t mean racism as such anymore.  Instead, he suggests the term is levied by progressives when others don’t agree with them.

"I wonder if the average American thinks about his country in that way anymore. I wonder if the average American understands how rare bias-motivated crimes are in his country. Since 9/11 we’ve been warned about an impending violent backlash against Muslims. Yet even with a number of horrific terrorist acts perpetrated by home-grown Islamists, it still hasn’t happened. Of all hate crimes, 19.7 percent were reported as religious bias. Among that group, 51.3 percent were reported as anti-Semitic and 22.2 percent were anti-Muslim. (Also, 17.7 percent were committed against one of the Christian faiths, which the FBI divides into multiple categories.)"

"In truth, the reason racism is treated as a grievous social sin is because it is so rare and intolerable in everyday discourse. The Left compensates for this by constantly expanding the description of bigotry to include anyone opposing their policy preferences. When everyone is a racist, no one is."


The forgotten side of terrible public schools are the kids who are bored in class going over the remedial material.


While I am not necessarily endorsing these suggestions, one point is challenging to refute: There is a difference between health insurance and health care.  When we force coverage on everyone we take resources away from figuring out how to best provide health care in the most efficient manner instead of just health insurance.


READ THIS ONE.  I 100% agree.

1. Diversity of thought is the most important form of diversity.  Yet, this is the kind of diversity the supposedly “pro-diversity left” tries to squash.

 Exit the echo chamber      ß

2.  The empirical benefits of other kinds of diversity are lacking at very best.

3. The diversity of Trump voters is greater than the diversity of Clinton voters by far - and this is not necessarily a good thing, but certainly ironic.  

4. The left has a less diverse view of what diversity itself is.  

A meta irony.


Stop the madness while there is still time!

"Otherwise put, bureaucracy must not be allowed to swell, it must be nipped in the bud, as reducing it will only become increasingly difficult. In fact, the costs of reducing bureaucracy will often act—though they should not—as a disincentive to demand such a process."


No need to click the link.  The quote is pasted below.

"But the same lack of knowledge on the part of any single person or organization which makes it impossible for comprehensive planning to replace the market also makes it irrational for a non-comprehensive planning agency to try merely to ‘guide’ the market.  If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide – and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system – then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others."



"If the rising generation of young progressives allow themselves to believe Donald Trump is just a bump in the road to inevitable Democratic success, that nothing needs to change in their message or their agenda, it could be that they are in for even more rude awakenings in the future. The sooner they wake up to this political reality – that the Obama coalition is harder to reassemble than just checking the right boxes and rolling out the right celebrity endorsements, and that the moment requires introspection and reevaluation of their prior assumptions – the sooner they will grow to understand the nation as it is, not as they imagined it to be."
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Monday, December 5, 2016

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

Links are provided, I include either my own commentary on the articles or some insightful quotes from the article.  Emphasis is mine.



"It’s also worth remembering that the dynamics of this election would be completely different if the popular vote actually mattered. The election is geared to winning states, not people. There is no guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have won. There are tons of conservatives in blue states, for instance, who do not vote because they understand that the majority around them have a different political outlook. A direct national election would mean focusing on blue-state Republicans and red-state liberals. I’m not sure that setup works out for Democrats exactly as they imagine."

"There are two ways to look at Trump’s election. We could see his win as an endorsement of dark qualities. Or, we could see it as a repudiation of a ruling elite which people see as even more anachronistic, arrogant, entitled, smug, and conceited than Trump himself. Neither are completely correct."

We’ve seen lots of haranguing of late about the popular vote vs. the Electoral College.  This article offers a good lesson on political economy and why the diversification of powers across time, geography, population, and money, through the structure of the electoral process is so important.  Gives good discussion of interaction of levels of government, re-election vs. life-time appointments, appointments vs. confirmations and most obviously the branches of government.

The author’s conclusion:

"More significantly, institutions matter more than specific electoral outcomes. The institutions that determine how the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and President are decided accidentally restrain the federal government within a two-party system by dispersing political power between both parties. The electoral college contributes by deterring any one party from systemically controlling the presidency through its tampering with the voting system."

"Despite the media’s focus since 9/11 on Islamophobic incidents and fear of them, the biggest target by a mile for hate crimes in the United States in 2014 was Jews—long before Trump and the alt-right came into the picture. The FBI report on hate crimes confirms: ‘A significant number of the anti-Jewish hate crimes – 451 – consisted of vandalism or some other type of property damage.’ That’s not to say that anti-Semitic defacement isn’t worrisome now, but it’s important to note it existed before Trump and should have been taken seriously prior to his nomination and election."

Said another way, if you don’t fit the media’s definition of minority, hate crimes and bias against you don't matter.  Think about it!

My guess is you don't know as much about the Electoral College system as you think.

Things that make you say “Hmmm.”

"Race did play a role in Trump's win, but not in the way that the liberal media thought. Through their control of what Richard Weaver called the ‘great stereopticon’—the media construct by which we are all propagandized—we are told that we should think about race and gender everywhere all the time. The problem is that when Whites are forced to think about race, they are also forced to act like a minority—as Cohn points out, a very large one. The problem here is that the result is almost exactly the opposite of what the purveyors of racial politics intended."

Entitled “The Healthcare ‘Crisis’.”  Written in 1998.  Will we ever learn?

I am fascinated by the implications block chain will have on our future.  Hopefully the government doesn't figure out some way to regulate and ruin it.

OTHER THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

AV --à Most people don’t realize that impeaching a President says nothing about whether he is guilty or not.  It simply means there is enough evidence that the House deems it prudent to send the case to the Senate for a trial.  Both Presidents who were impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton (Nixon resigned before a successful impeachment), were later acquitted by the Senate.

I present three articles today from Walter E. Williams, a professor of Economics, who happens to be black, from George Mason University:


"Are the millions of Europeans, Asian and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 20th century responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations money? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they cough up reparations money for black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites, who are a majority of Southern whites – should they be made to pay reparations?

On black people’s side of the ledger, thorny issues also arise. Some blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves – to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these blacks eligible and deserving of reparations?
There is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. Should Conyers haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Muslim states before Congress and demand they pay reparations? By the way, is there anyone prepared to make the argument that blacks in America today would be better off if they were in Africa? If blacks wouldn’t be better off, then why the reparations?

Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s utter nonsense. Slavery doesn’t have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations nonsense, the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts." 


"At one time, black Americans didn’t enjoy constitutional protections. Today, we do. As such, the civil-rights struggle is over and won. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other problems, but they are not civil-rights problems. If we diagnose them incorrectly as civil-rights problems, however, their solutions will remain illusive."

Might I remind you that these are words coming from a black man who is smarter than you and me?

Let’s be fair about this.  Trump pleaded with his supporters to not antagonize or hurt HRC supporters.  While he could have done more, so too could have both Obama and Clinton done to urge protestors to end the destruction of private property and the attacks on people. I am not being unfair.  Protest if you like but both sides need to quit with the hate crimes and destruction of property.


I learned a lot in this article about the Articles of Confederation.  More importantly, I was exposed to the Anti-Federalist insights into how the Constitution does not provide enough protection against the abuses of government.  This may be the first article you and I have read supporting the Articles.

"The Anti-Federalists accurately predicted that Congress would interpret the General Welfare Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause in ways that allow it to legislate on subjects beyond its constitutional purview. They foresaw the Supreme Court becoming an unaccountable body that acts as a super-legislature rather than a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes. These prophets also recognized that the states would be rendered impotent and dependent on the national government for revenue and direction."


http://cafehayek.com/2016/11/quotation-of-the-day-1897.html

"Profits are a measure of the sustainability of patterns of specialization.  When a business that participates in a pattern of specialization earns a profit, the value of its output is greater than the cost of its inputs.  That outcome indicates that the business is making a positive contribution to consumer well-being.
DBx: The truth of this observation reveals as meaningless and silly that popular trope of the political left, ‘People before profits!’  
Not only are profits earned only by people – and not only is nearly all of the value of profitable innovations captured by the general public in their role as consumers – but in market economies the only people who profit are those who serve other people well.  And the better other people are served, the higher are the profits of those entrepreneurs and business owners who perform these great services."


Don't bother going to the link since I have pasted the large majority of the article below.  The highlighted sections that capture the essence of the article, namely that our two-party politics have degenerated into divergent paths toward the same goal of increasing state power, neither of which is conservative nor focused on returning power to the people.

"Here’s a reality about the United States that is commonly masked by misleading labels: The thrust of both major U.S. political parties is decidedly illiberal.  Of course, members and sympathizers of one of those parties call themselves “liberal.” But the likes of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Harry Reid, and Paul Krugman are no more liberal than was Chancellor Bismarck.  They mistakenly conclude from the fact that they are not ignorant racists or bigots, and that some of their policies differ from the policies advocated by people who are called ‘conservative,’ that they are therefore liberal.  But they are not liberal.
Ms. Clinton & Co. look to the state as the source of all order and of most goodness. The individual, in their view, has and is entitled to no more rights other than those rights that state officials choose to bestow on the individual – ‘rights’ that can be amended or even altogether removed at the will of those same officials.  As these mistakenly called ‘liberals’ see matters, the state, if it is not simply another name for society, is the most essential and defining feature of society.  Anyone who proposes that society get along without the active attention and detailed guidance of the state is regarded by these ‘liberals’ as being either hopelessly unintelligent or a paid pawn of nefarious capitalists.  Modern, misnamed ‘liberals’ – on the most generous interpretation – seem constitutionally unable to understand spontaneous order.

Of course, many modern American conservatives aren’t much different from these misnamed ‘liberals.’  Many modern conservatives see the state as the great source of national life and identity that must be protected by good people (that is, conservatives) from being kidnapped and polluted by bad people (that is, so-called ‘liberals’).  But with the exception of some conservatives in America who, I believe, really are true liberals (or who are very close to being true liberals) – people such as George Will – most conservatives in America differ very little from most so-called ‘liberals.’  The differences that are manifest and that seem fundamental are superficial; these differences are over the details of just how the transcendent and wonderful state should use its power and majesty rather than over how much power the state should have and how much majesty it really, when you examine its grotesque and fetid fine points, does possess.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump is not very different from what are in America miscalled ‘liberals.’  Trump is an economic nationalist.  Most ‘liberals’ are economic nationalists.  Trump is utterly ignorant of economics; he believes that riches spring from state destruction of wealth and restriction of opportunity.  Most ‘liberals’ are utterly ignorant of economics; they believe that riches spring from state destruction of wealth and restriction of opportunity.  Trump and ‘liberals’ share a conviction that it’s their job – their duty – as “leaders” to butt aggressively into the affairs of private people."


How was the wealth produced?  Property rights led to savings, savings led to investment, investment led to innovation, innovation to less intensive manual labor and more job mobility and the rest is history.

If credit is backed by savings, it adds value to the economy by connecting suppliers and demanders of capital.  If it isn't backed by savings, it artificially manipulated interest rates leading to under and mal investment and thus the business cycle.


I don't know what to make of the table except that we are seeing partisanship at its finest.  Maybe the two party system really is broken?


More hypocrisy.

"Or what about Obama’s Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal? All but ignored by the liberal press and mostly forgotten amid the drama of election season, the IRS targeted more than 400 conservative groups in what will someday, one hopes, be remembered as one of the worst federal scandals in modern times—which is still ongoing, by the way.

Then there’s Obama’s national security fabulist Ben Rhodes, who crafted a false narrative about political moderation in Iran to sell a gullible press on the administration’s unpopular and unworkable Iran nuclear deal.  In that March column of mine Sullivan quoted, I referenced Cuba, where libel is ‘whatever the regime says it is.’ But she failed to quote the full sentence, which notes that Obama held a press junket during his visit to Cuba that week—a visit the mainstream media largely celebrated. Few publications noted that, for the sake of a photo op with Cuban strongman Raúl Castro, Obama was willing to stage, without irony, a press event in a country that routinely imprisons journalists.


The list goes on and on. Yet here’s Politico’s Jack Shafer, clutching his pearls and worrying that, heaven forbid, Trump’s White House might coordinate with Breitbart, ‘functioning as his ministry of information as it did during the campaign, and going on the attack to keep renegade legislators in line.’ This, in a publication whose chief political correspondent, Glenn Thrush, sent stories to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for approval, imploring him, ‘Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this.’
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Friday, December 2, 2016

On Identity Politics, Post Election Views and Random Topics

When I launched this blog I aggregated the articles discussed by broad subject. In order to become more timely with my posts, I am instead posting articles daily as I read them.  Understandably, the themes will now jump around some.  Check the article title and read if it interests, and skip if not.  Happy reading and thinking!

As always, anything in quotations is from the article or specifically noted, my words are not in quotations.  Highlights and emphasis is mine.


Written from the perspective of a Chicago suburban woman.  Excerpt from the article:

"Aside from the policy differences and mixed enthusiasm, one factor brought us together: Hillary Clinton. It all boiled down to a common refrain I heard from women and men, which was, ‘I can’t vote for her.’ The disdain, even disgust, for her was palpable. Corrupt, dishonest, phony were the most common descriptors. Her complicity in the Benghazi terrorist attack and subsequent cover-up were high on the list of reasons my friends wouldn’t vote for her, along with her private email server and questions about the Clinton Foundation.

They were afraid her policies would mean higher taxes on their families and more regulations on their small businesses. Frankly, no one really talked about her as a role model for women. In fact, some shared the opposite view, believing she had largely risen in politics because of her husband. Given what a poor candidate she was, it’s not hard to make that case."

I know some females in my life who can relate to these statements!

And another excerpt:

"The weeks leading up to Election Day made our vote easier. The media pile-on and growing viciousness toward Trump supporters only emboldened us. The real possibility of upending the political establishment—both Democrat and Republican—in Washington DC was compelling. And now that we’re being called racist, traitorous homophobes—even Nazis—by the bitter, vanquished elite, we feel even better about our choice. Our vote for Trump didn’t come without serious consideration, moments of doubt, even anxiety about what we were getting ourselves into. But our vote wasn’t borne of ignorance, bigotry, or blind loyalty to our sex. Now we all have our fingers crossed for a successful Trump presidency for our country and, yes, for the daughters we are raising."


Why is it so difficult to understand the difference between the option to use contraception and the mandate that insurance pay for it?

Three quotes:

"It’s beyond me why the Left fears that a man who very obviously loves lots of sex with lots of women wants to ban the birth control that makes such profligate seed-sowing possible by neutering it."

"Repealing federal mandates for insurance companies to make everyone pay for the birth control that only some women avail themselves of would simply tell women that their reproductive choices are their responsibility, not mine."

"Let’s be clear here. The law Pence signed required medical facilities, not women at home, to dispense of human remains they are aware of in a dignified way, rather than just chucking them out with the trash or tipping them into the sewer. Yes, both of these have happened, as have instances where hospitals refused to release to parents their miscarried child’s remains for a funeral."


If my purpose in writing “IdeaEquilibrium” is to marry differences, then I need to work on understanding the perspectives from which the other side comes from.  This is something I am working on, and I submit it is something we ALL need to work on.  I see myself in the author’s statement: “It is easy to laugh at the hypocritical nature of the left.  It is harder to empathize with them and realize they have their beliefs for good reason.”  For this reason I am trying to become more understanding.

Excerpts:

"Instead, I remember that anyone would be upset at such a historic loss, and this loss is magnified by their fears of a man who would ban entire religions, build walls, deport undesirables, enact torture, and promote country-wide violence. Those are the conditions they believe will become reality.

Just as conservatives are sick to their stomachs at the thought that unborn children do not have rights, liberals likewise are sick to their stomachs at the loss of reproductive freedom. I posit one reason Trump won this election is that conservatives swallowed their distaste of the man and decided abortion was that important. Why can we not understand that this issue is just as important to the other side? ‘Don’t tell me to smile,’ said one my friends recently. ‘Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay.

I see the anger and disbelief by liberals who believe that almost 50 percent of the country is more racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic than they feared. I am tempted to be furious at their suggestion. In fact, I was initially angry when I began seeing those statements on election night.  You know what else happened? I got called out on the irony of my anger at Republicans being treated as a monolithic group, while addressing my writings to all liberals as a monolith. They are not a monolith. Not everyone upset at this election is a spoiled elitist millennial. Not everyone having a cry-in session or giving out free hugs is weak. Not everyone furious at this election is a hypocrite who does not understand how democracy works. In fact, most are not ... We always scoff at liberals for not expanding their bubbles. We say they control mainstream media, education, and live in ivory towers. We laugh at the story of the New York woman in shock over Reagan’s landslide election, who said she knew not one person who had voted for him. But we can be just as guilty."


This was well done.  The last line is the best.  "I am going to give him a chance and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand he give us one too."


My psychology and sociology courses at UChicago tell me this rings true.  I have often thought the more we characterize ourselves by differences, the more divided we believe we are. 

"Throughout the entire 2016 election campaign, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Donald Trump almost every day. But every one of these articles was a personal attack—portraying Trump as a poor businessman, a tax cheat, a womanizer, a cad. Never once, if memory serves, did the Times run an intelligent piece on the issues Trump was campaigning on. 

Identity politics is almost by definition the politics of hate. It is based on convincing people that they have been victims, that they have grievances and that people outside their group are responsible for their suffering. This type of politics necessarily creates its own backlash.

When voters hear speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Convention list all the groups they are for—blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc.—they have to be really, really stupid not to notice that if they are a white, straight and male, they are not on the list. No wonder they flock to the other party.  Donald Trump throughout his campaign never said one word that could be characterized as anti-black or anti-gay or anti-Semitic. Even though he was insensitive about Hispanics and Muslims, he made clear over and over that he was not anti-Hispanic or anti-Muslim. Yet he is being accused of arousing hatred in every corner of the country."

Another excerpt:

"Think about that while you consider some relevant facts. It was Donald Trump who took on the establishment in Palm Beach, a city with a notorious reputation for ugly prejudice that goes back for decades—opening his hotel to blacks, Jews and everyone else. And, in all of American politics you will find nothing more hateful and incendiary than the efforts of the NAACP, the Democratic Party and even Barack Obama to inflame racial passions in order to drive black voters to the polls. They are much worse, for example, than the rhetoric of David Duke. (See “Which is the Party of Hate?”)"



Just to play devil's advocate - today's heavy lifting looks at a scenario when a minimum wage law actually would make sense.  Give it a read.

My takeaways:

1. Monopsony rarely if ever occurs in the free market.

2. If it did, technological advances could eradicate monopsony at any time.

3. And even if it did occur, and existed for a long period, monopsony would still require government to set a minimum wage law for every employer at that employers individual level of power given the preferences and elasticities of demand for labor in each individual firm market. (BTW these preferences can and do change at a moment’s notice but even if they remained static it is not possible to maximize benefit because maximization is inherently probabilistic.)  
4. So suppose points 1,2 and 3 above somehow don't pose a problem - we still have to have a government that is extremely political and partisan in nature.  Additionally, it is run by a bunch of people trying to get reelected or pushing their own agenda.

5.  And finally, there is yet another wrinkle:  

"But matters get yet more complicated once the dynamism of the global economy is taken into account.  With consumer demands frequently shifting, with new market opportunities always opening, and with new production techniques regularly becoming available, the optimal minimum wage for each employer with monopsony power changes over time – perhaps monthly or weekly (or even daily).  If, for example, the demand for firm A’s output falls tomorrow, the optimal minimum wage for firm A also likely falls.  If under these circumstances the state fails to lower firm A’s minimum wage, this failure will cause some workers to be unemployed."

This means that the firm level of monopsony minimum wage pricing would need to be updated at all moments to reflect changing market dynamics. 

If all that works under your view of government, then maybe, just maybe, there is a role for a minimum wage.  But it sure took a lot to get to a scenario in which the benefits of a minimum wage law are even remotely plausible.

Are the American people really too dumb and the politicians too corrupt to not realize that guaranteed issue and community rating are simply incompatible no matter which way you twist turn and fudge it?  If someone has cancer it costs money to provide health care.  Either 1) they shouldn't be covered and the costs can remain low in an insurance plan or 2) they are provided insurance and the whole group pays a higher cost to cover the risk of a few having cancer.  If you force everyone to get insurance, you have chosen option number 2.  Prices for insurance will surge.  This is what we are seeing right now on the exchanges with premiums going up more than 30% in many states.  It really is not rocket science folks. 

Is Trump a moron or a genius? I truly cannot tell.


Returning power to the states and localities has two big benefits:
      
1.    Less divisiveness

"A weak federal government would produce little divisiveness because there is little to be divided over. A strong Federal government would produce significant divisiveness since there is much to be divided over. It also goes to say that an absolute government would create absolute division while the absence of government would not produce a division because there isn’t any risk of having your life dictated by distant populations."

2.    Reduced cost by eliminating the middle-man known as the Federal government:

"On average, the Federal government consumes 50 percent of all the taxes paid in this country. This means that, if the average holds for Colorado, and the State is likely further disadvantaged because of the higher income bracket, residents are sending $1 in taxes to the federal government for every $1 in taxes that are collected from them that go to the State or Local governments. In other words, Colorado residents have no say in how half their tax resources are used. Worse, Colorado residents would likely do a better job administering the exact same programs and do so for less because most Federal programs do little more than return the money back to equivalent State agencies. This means your State is having to cover the overhead of 2.7 million Federal employees whose sole purpose is to take money from your State then give it back again with orders on how to spend it."


“’Our nation’s Framers got a lot right,’ wrote Dana Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt chair of English and American studies at Vanderbilt University. ‘But they got something major wrong: they assumed that the three branches of our government would remain co-equal, maintaining the Constitution’s delicate balance. Over time, the executive has become the dominant branch. Presidential government replaced congressional government over the course of the 20th century.”

"For example, we know President Obama has unilaterally authorized the assassination of American citizens abroad. We do know that he lied about doing it. We do not know how many or why. President Obama has unilaterally denied the writ of habeas corpus to detainees not accused of a crime. He has unilaterally commenced war."

We are on a slippery slope folks.  You may have been happy with Obama doing what you agreed with but now that same power is in the hands of Trump.  Scared?


"All the tears shed and anger felt by those who wanted a different outcome prove one thing: statists have little understanding of reality or human nature. These people can be accurately described as utopians.  They object to Trump building a wall, but not to the fact that the president has the power to build a wall.  The record of history is abundantly clear that this is not the case. The greater the power that is granted to a state, the more that power will attract those who ought not to have it."

Has this ever been truer then now, when we, ahem, elect Donald Trump as our next president?


"People say those who place their trust in the market are wide-eyed utopians. That our systems would require angels to function well.   In fact, it is the statists who are the utopians. They are the ones who believe that, once created, an all-encompassing state can be controlled and used only for good; that the humans who wield that power will use it for the good of society and not to enrich and protect themselves and their friends.  Libertarians and market anarchists understand that power only attracts the corrupted and will only serve to corrupt them further. This is why we reject the legitimacy of force in the normal conduct of human affairs. That is why we reject an expansive state as an effective and ethical form of governance.  So if you are feeling the sting and the fear, please understand that the problem is not Trump. The problem is a government that is capable of causing this fear."
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