04.21.10
The double-thank-you phenomenon
John Stossel says that it is the basis of free-market economics. In an exchange between a buyer and a seller of a good or service that is unfettered by outside interference, both parties win.
04.15.10
Number trends don’t happen in a vacuum
I know lots of MSM stories have appeared lately cheerily reporting signs of recovery. Free-market champion Larry Kudlow has even gotten into the act. He even predicts an out-and-out boom.
Yes, commodity prices are rising, but it’s the same old grind in areas like jobless figures, foreclosure rates, and industrial output.
I’ve been thinking about this since I came across the Kudlow piece the other day. His outlook is both admirable and annoying. I think it’s endemic to his profession. Economists tend to be a bit nerdy, to view the world through the very circumscribed lens of monetary laws and results that past trends of various kinds have produced. Kudlow is so convinced, as are lay folks such as myself, that the principles of free-market economics are key to human well-being and societal advancement and that they work wherever and whenever the yare applied that he can’t see how anyone wouldn’t be a true believer. It’s like his view is that, gosh darn it, as soon as the TCM administration sees the efficacy of the capitalist approach, it will reverse course and provide an environment for the precarious green shoots to thrive.
The only problem with that view is that it fails to account for the other levels of consideration: the totalitarian socialist ideology of the FHer regime, cultural factors such as a widespread paucity of economic literacy as well as denial about the implications of the debt we’ve amassed, and America’s palpable decline on the world stage.
No one wants a turnaround more than me. Counting on our present overlords to come to their senses, though, is an exercise in unfounded hope.
03.28.10
God digs profit and private property
Dr. Paul Kengor, the head of Grove City College’s Center for Vision and Values, interviews Grove City economics professor Shawn Ritenour, author of a new book entitled Foundations of Economics: A Christian View. Ritenour’s point is that free-market economics is biblically supported, and that the “social-justice” redistributive orientation is not.
03.15.10
We could be doing this instead of handing our country over to tyrants
Rep. Paul Ryan R-WI in the Washington Post on what actual health care reform would look like, with a link to his Road Map website.
03.05.10
Not only is it morally wrong, it doesn’t deliver
Time to revisit Free Market Cure’s Ten Myths about Single-Payer Health Care.
02.20.10
When you think you’re indispensible, you’ll assume the ultimate sugar daddy is going to pull your fat out of the fire
Tom Blumer at Pajamas Media on how big business is prone to act in ways antithetical to free-market capitalism, such as appeasement of the regulatory leviathan and an attitude of entitlement to public largesse.
01.09.10
Scott Brown knows that the way out of this morass is simple, elegant and that it would have swift results
His latest web ad is only 31 seconds long, but that’s plenty of time to let you know how we could solve our economic mess pronto. He didn’t write the message he speaks, as you’ll see. It comes from the last Democrat president who wasn’t a Freedom-Hater.
01.08.10
Brian T. Schwartz needs to be in charge of health-care reform. Like right now.
His Pajamas Media column today makes, with searing clarity, the points we’ve made here at BN in various ways over the last couple of years.
His main point: a truly free market would lower health-insurance premiums and motivate insurance companies to offer even more compelling products covering a wider range of people.
Some points within that main point:
Non-profit organizations, and especially government, don’t have nearly the motivation to control costs that profit-making organizations do.
The ideal scenario would have most people paying for most of their health care directly to the doctor out of pocket.
Bringing young, healthy uninsured people onto the FHer “reform” program is only going to further distort the real cost of older people’s health care, since those youngsters will be subsidizing it.
Insurance companies’ profit margins are paltry compared to most other industries.
Insurance companies’ desires to protect their reputations for quality and integrity see to it that policies are by and large honored.
Profits are the measure of how well a business understands what the customer wants.
The whole piece is thunderous in the simplicty of its logic. I hope it gets wide dissemination today.
01.06.10
Here’s how it’s done
Power Line has observations on, and links about, how Chile and Peru went from being third-world backwaters to real economic players. Bottom line: they embraced the free market.
09.16.09
When a FHer tells you he wants to make things more fair for you, tell him “no thanks”
When TCM gave his finger-wagging to Wall Street yesterday, my thoughts returned to something that becomes a frequent subject in BN comment threads: what, if anything, economic bubbles and business cycles generally have to tell us about free-market capitalism. The Aquarian Totalitarian told the financial district’s traders and investment bankers that new regulations were on the way, although, true to form, he was short on specifics (which is how he gives himself wide berth to impose what he thinks he can get away with). Like many of the comments along these lines in BN comment threads, his remarks were crafted to make greed-driven speculative recklessness look like the principle factor in the recession of the past year and a half. In his pose as a bold guardian of “the people’s” welfare, he was sending a signal, much like his “I’m-all-that-stands-between-you-and-the-pitchforks” message to auto-industry executives in the spring, that, in push coming to shove, he had the greater power behind him.
TCM, and the zeal for a heavy-handed regulatory environment generally, represents that point at which leftism’s much-vaunted caring, the nanny state’s encouragement of “let’s-play-fair” egalitarianism, turns ugly and becomes the drawn gun of raw state power. He’s no longer making suggestions. This is for keeps.
Socialists like TCM have to start showing such ugliness before too long into their reigns because it’s crucial to their designs that people forget that they are free. Leftism is predicated on the notion that the individual is too dense to hit his own ass with a yardstick. The difference between the do-gooder sprout-munching Untiarian Sierra Club type and the hard-core thugs such as TCM is that the thugs see that finger-wagging is an inadequate measure. We saw this during the 1917 revolution in Russia. The Mensheviks said, “Oh, great, now we can overwhelm the democrats in the first post-Tsar-era elections,” to which Lenin responded, “You fools! That’s not why we brought about a revolution. We seize power!”
It does start with an appeal to the nice little liberal down the block’s notion that, by golly, something ought to be done about life’s rough edges. Even tyrants like it if they can keep a big portion of the populace on their side by appealing to this. As I say, the point is to get people to forget about freedom.
Any good mutual-fund advisor will tell you that the key to realizing a return on your investment is to ride out economic cycles for the long term. On average, balanced stock portfolios have risen over the past century even through a depression and several recessions.
It’s called looking out for yourself. It’s called staying away from exotic financial products that smell more like schemes than solid wealth-builders.
The same principle is at work in this area as in the health-care debate. You don’t – assuming you value your freedom and conduct yourself so as to maximize your self-respect – want government defining security, success, appropriate level of risk – or health (or fuel economy or a great number of other things). Those concepts come under the headin’ of your business, to paraphrase Hopalong Cassidy.
To reiterate point one of the Bent Notes Manifesto, freedom is more important than fairness. For one thing, life isn’t going to be fair anyway. If people are free to do as they wish with their money and property, the arrangement on the macro level will be the most fair one we could ask for.
It really boils down to that age-old question: Who can exercise better stewardship of your destiny, you or some loud-mouth in Washington whose foremost interest, it is obvious from a look into his or her eyes, is his own power?
09.14.09
Abandoning free-market principles wreaks havok on basic order in the world
So says former EU official Mario Monti.
09.09.09
Large organizations dependent on cronyism tell us nothing about the free market
A post at the Economic Policy Journal that bolsters the National Affairs piece from yesterday.
Hat tip: BN reader Bob.
09.08.09
Just free people up to make things and sell them at a profit
In the inaugural quarterly issue of National Affairs, which has its roots in The Public Interest, there is an important, timely and well-articulated article by University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Luigi Zingales entitled “Capitalism After the Crisis.”
Among the noteworthy points he makes are -
- the fact that holding lobbyists up as some kind of whipping-boys for free-market economics is a red herring. Lobbyists are motivated to push for advantage for their particular industries or interest groups, rather than see that an absolutely unobstructed arena of free choice exists for all
- the fact that part of America’s exceptionalism is rooted in the aspect of its character we call inventiveness. We make things and our fellows see how those things better their lives. This is how our great enterprises have grown.
- the fact that those great enterprises fall prey to bureaucratic heavy-handedness, which diminishes the inventiveness which was at the very root of their greatness
- the fact that the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, which repealed some of the most restrictive aspects of the 1931 Glass-Steagall Act was in fact not responsible for the financial crash last year
A great read. It ends with a strong note of caution about our current juncture.
09.03.09
I hope he’s correct
Larry Kudlow says that if we can keep the FHer’s mitts off the economy, it will recover nicely.
09.01.09
“The producers . . . have the moral right to sell it to willing consumers on any mutually acceptable terms”
Paul Hsia, a Denver-area physician, explains that free-market health care is most definitely not rationing, and why we must not let FHers get away with saying that it is.
08.26.09
We’ve said this many times here at BN
The free market can’t work properly unless its participants are moral actors.
Great essay at City Journal by Steven Malanga on the set of virtues that made America the world’s premier economic giant – and a look at their steady erosion since the 1960s.
Two of the money lines come from others whom he quotes. Sociologist Max Weber: “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit.” Daniel Bell says that what went wrong was that we began “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification for life.”
