I just returned from one of the greatest experiences of my life: a Paul McCartney concert at FedEx field.
The 67-year-old McCartney took the stage at 9pm and played, non-stop, until nearly midnight. Three hours of rocking in the humid Washington weather.
I confess to being now, as I have been since I was a five-year-old in February 1964 when the Beatles first came to America and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, utterly obsessed with their music. Not a day passes that I don’t listen to the Beatles. I never tire of hearing their music. (Some exceptions: I loathe “Michelle” – which McCartney sang tonight [yuck], and I’m left cold by “The Long and Winding Road” – which he also performed tonight. But that’s pretty much the extent of what I don’t care for in Beatles music.)
McCartney’s encore performance of “I Saw Her Standing There” was — well, words fail me. It was spectacular, amazing, remarkable, brilliant.
The evening made me indescribably happy.
McCartney was soaked in sweat for most of the concert, but his energy never waned and his rapport with the audience never faltered. And yet he’s worth, what?, a billion dollars – a pittance compared to what he’s contributed to humankind. Why does he do it? Who cares? He performs, he records, he writes, and he thrilled me and tens of thousand of others tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah!!
Here’s a blog post that I did three years ago on McCartney’s 64th birthday.
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite (and Mr. Smith, and Ms. Jones, and Mr. Williams, and…..)
by Don Boudreaux on June 18, 2006Lots of media are noting that today Paul McCartney turns 64 – notable chiefly because McCartney wrote and sang, as a Beatle, the song “When I’m 64.” Of course, many of these reports also mention Paul’s recent separation from his second wife, Heather Mills, and the fact that she’ll get a sizeable share of his fortune of $1.5 billion.
I don’t care about McCartney’s personal life, but I do love Beatles’ music. I’ve loved it since, as a five-year-old boy on February 9, 1964, I sat in my grandmother’s lap and watched the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
When I read of McCartney’s fortune, I’m struck by how puny it is compared to the amount of pleasure he’s contributed to humankind. Consider:
If each viewer of only the Beatles’ first two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show deposited $1 into an account in return for watching the Beatles on these telecasts, this account would have had in it, on February 16, 1964, $143.7 million. (The number of people who tuned in to the Beatles’ February 9, 1964, appearance was 73 million; the number who tuned in one week later for their second appearance was 70.7 million. These data are here.)
If this money were invested at the historical rate of return earned by U.S. stocks, it would have earned an annual return, on average, of eight percent. Today, this account would be worth about $3.5 billion.
Divided equally among John, Paul, George, and Ringo, Paul’s share today would be $875 million – more than half of his current net worth. And this from only a small payment made 42 years ago by each viewer of a mere two episodes of an American television show. Add the value of the pleasures McCartney helped to bring to us from the Beatles’ other appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show – the value of the Beatles’ many live performances around the globe – the value of their many albums that continue (now mostly in CD form) to be played – the value of the Beatles’ movies such as “A Hard Day’s Night” – the value that McCartney’s music post-Beatles brought to countless people.
And the man is worth only $1.5 billion! Because no one forced him to write and perform and record music, I’ll certainly not argue that McCartney is undercompensated. But I do insist that his net worth of $1.5 billion is paltry, puny, insignificant compared to his contributions to humankind.
Quite a bargain.
Update: I wish only that, last night, McCartney had performed “Please Please Me” – one of my favorite songs of all time.
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I love the Beatles. Not too crazy about that one song from Abbey Road (I think it was brown shoe or something — I hate it so much, I can’t remember the title) and there was a song on Rubber Soul about how John was going to kill some girl for talking to other dudes. Not a fan of that one either.
I would love to see McCartney, but (I think because I am a guitarist) George was my favorite Beatle.
Old Brown Shoe was the B-side of The Ballad of John and Yoko. I agree with Steven about Run For Your Life. Funny that that song was included on the American release of ‘Rubber Soul’, but Drive My Car (a really fun song) was left off.
“brown shoe or something”
Are you saying you hate the Harrison timeless classic “Something”? Or something that rhymes with “brown shoe”, like “I want you”?
Doesn’t matter. There’s not a bad second on the whole Abby Road album. And it should be listened to as an album. It is not just a collection of songs.
viking….I just want to point out the awesomeness that is your misspelling of ‘Abbey,’ following your obvious Beatlemania.
Funny. I just received a dinner invitation from someone named Abby. Must’ve crossed some neurons.
McCartney would be better if he’d put Ringo in there on drums.
McCartney’s drummer just ain’t as good, and people seem not to understand the magic Ringo’s unique drumming added to the sound.
Amen! The Beatles have contributed mightily to mankind’s daily happiness through the music. I think McCartney has been very well compensated, does anyone listen to Wings?
“Maybe I Amazed” from the Wings Over America concert album–ausgezeichnet, though I think the song predates his forming Wings. “Band on the Run”, “Venus and Mars”, “Jets”. Lot of good stuff there.
You’d enjoy Beatle Bumper Fridays on the Jason Lewis Show.
http://www.ktlkfm.com/pages/jlewispersonality.html
I take back everything.
Maybe Daniel Kuehn was right after all.
I hope you took your son last night. Paul could completely turn over his concert set and do all different songs with no real drop in quality.
The only Beatles song I really dislike is “What Goes On”
Vikingvista – what time on Friday?
Jason Lewis is syndicated nationally, so you’ll have to look it up for your area. But all of his radio shows are available as podcasts, which is how I listen to him (when I’m caught up with EconTalk, of course):
http://www.ktlkfm.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=jasonlewis.xml
If you like Cafe Hayek, and you like the Beatles, you’ll love the Jason Lewis show.
The earliest Beatles guitar rock and roll was amazing, especially considering the state of recording equipment circa 1964.
Still holds up.
And then they changed music forever. Not bad for some shaggy haired kids.
“Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman”
Taxman made you rich Paul!
I wonder how much money Mr. McCartney would have made if men with guns didn’t steal my money to enforce copyright and patent protection laws for the Beetles.
I too was a big Beetles and Wings fan who is very glad McCartney received the government support helping him along with such success.
Imbecile muirgeo, if you had stated this in way that decent people would, you would have found a lot of people agreeing with you. But you are incapable of decency.
Funny. I specifically framed the argument using the same method and wording that others here use to rebut me.
you don’t frame arguments. you just string a lot of virulent and silly words together and crap all over this blog. You have not said a new thing on this blog for 3 years( that is a absolute fact ), and when you could have, like in this instant, you just are incapable of putting together an arguments that has some basic decency.
Men with guns don’t steal your money to enforce copyright and patent laws.
It is the responsibility of the copyright or patent owner to enforce them, in civil court. When filing for a patent, the submitter of the patent pays for the filing.
Men with guns tax you to enact copyright and patent laws, and the title holders have no authority in any court without these enactments, so their filing and court costs do not exhaust the costs imposed.
To be clear, I don’t necessarily oppose intellectual property or any other property right, but I don’t simply ignore the forcible imposition involved either. I want statutory authority, including proprietary authority, limited by a system of checks and balances, so I favor a progressive consumption tax for example. This sort of tax limits both the less centralized authority of proprietors and the more centralized authority of Congressmen.
I only wish that people like muirgeo were more open to this sort of check, rather than always defending the ever expanding authority of a few hundred statesmen chosen in biannual plebiscites to rule over hundreds of millions of people.
The rule of law is not anti-libertarian. Neither is government for that matter, with the qualifier ‘limited’.
What tires me of muirgeo’s posts is his apparent refusal to accept that fact. That libertarianism is not anarchy.
really? he’s still here, and you guys are still responding to him? seriously?
I wonder how much money Mr. McCartney would have made if men with guns didn’t steal my money to enforce copyright and patent protection laws for the Beetles.
Yeah, somebody might have gotten his DNA and cloned him so Don didn’t have to pay the original Paul to see him in concert. George, we get that you hate great things that people do, but this wasn’t even a good troll. George Fail.
muirgeo, judging from the replies of others, it seems you are not to be taken seriously… but I’m less familiar than others with your M.O., so I’ll take the bait.
I’m pretty sure I can help you understand the point of the song Taxman, which you appear to have missed.
Very few people would argue that the government can be entirely abolished in any practical sense – the most likely outcome is that a new government would emerge, as that’s what happened last time there was no government, and that’s how we got into this situation. We’re territorial animals, it’s how we do things. So yes, some tax must be payed, at a minimum, just to run the legal system. The question is, how much? And what (if any) other uses are appropriate?
To put this in perspective, George Harrison’s satirical lyrics contain accurate figures. 5% is what was left over after tax! Twenty shillings in a pound, nineteen shillings income tax. “There’s one for you, nineteen for me, ‘cos I’m the taxman.”
Do you really think it was necessary for the government to take 95% of private incomes just to fund the legal system, to pay the police to show up to work? Or to later increase the effective rate to around 98%? That’s your option A.
Or is it option B: Were they blowing the money on ill-advised attempts to prop up industries that had already been slowly falling apart for decades, and which just got worse and worse the more subsidies they got?
I’ll give you a clue. It’s option B.
Incidentally, although socialism in the UK is naively associated with the Labour Party, led in the 1960s by Harold Wilson (as in “Ha ha, Mr Wilson”), the most socialist government in British history was run by the Conservative Edward Heath (as in “Ha ha, Mr Heath”). This cross-party consensus was recognised very early by Hayek himself, who dedicated ‘The Road to Serfdom’ to “socialists of all parties”.
Heath actually tried to micromanage the entire economy, even shortening the working week to three days in an attempt to reduce demand for coal! The idiocy of it is scarcely believable today. The government sent inspectors out to business to perform random checks to ensure that they weren’t being productive on days of the week when it was banned. Of course, there was also a government committee responsible for deciding the correct price of a box of teabags – just like their colleagues in Russia did for the price of Vodka.
This is the thing about government – we all (apart from a few anarchists) recognise the good it can do, but we must also all be aware that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
George Harrison wrote “Taxman”.
McCartney wrote “Back in the USSR”.
I have to ask- Beatles or Stones? Its a fundamental question.
I love the Beatles, but for me its Stones all the way. I guess the Beatles aren’t quite gritty and bluesy enough for a country boy like me.
Jagger was a prophet:
Obama: “Under My Thumb, nation, that…once had me down…”
Oh, a storm is threatning
My very life today
If I dont get some shelter
Oh yeah, Im gonna fade away
Don’t question why she needs to be so free
She’ll tell you its the only way to be
She just cant be chained
To a life where nothings gained
And nothings lost
I could not foresee this thing happening to you…
Now you always say, that you want to be free…
You better stop, look around; Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes…
Wild Horses couldn’t drag me away…
——————
BTW, Mick Jagger studied economics in college.
I’m also a long-time Beatles fan, but we’ll never know who might have entertained Don without various forcible proprieties like copyright and monopolization of electromagnetic spectrum, and we’ll never know what McCartney’s personal entitlement to govern resources would be without these forcible impositions either. It’s very possible that McCartney might have entertained Don just as rapturously regardless, without the accumulation of personal authority over resources, just as Don entertains me now.
If Ed Sullivan owns this account, it doesn’t account for McCartney’s wealth at all, so the counterfactual demonstrates only your proprietarian assumptions.
“…who might have entertained Don without various forcible proprieties like copyright and monopolization of electromagnetic spectrum…”
You say this as if throngs of deserving and entertaining would-be rocks stars are somehow being deprived of the opportunity to share their greatness with us. If you want to be a rock star, you can go get your gear and start playing shows, make cds, sell t-shirts, etc. If you learn to draw the crowd, then you will earn the payment. If you aren’t willing to go and compete with others in your career for the good jobs, that isn’t the fault of our “proprietary” tradition.
No, I say nothing like it. You bicker only with yourself here. I’m not interested in your moralizing about whose “fault” anything is.
I say that various forcible proprieties play critical roles in the accumulation of entitlements by rock stars, because they do as a matter of fact. Ignoring reality doesn’t change it.
I’ve a question for Martin and some other commentors: When have Russ or I ever argued against the protection of property rights?
Reasonable people can and do debate the best methods for defining and enforcing such rights. And, of course, there’s a huge debate over the proper extent of intellectual property rights. (I favor such rights, by the way.) But in the bedrock of my economics and politics is the vital necessity of secure private property rights.
Oh, by the way, even if we all agree that the state is the only, or the best, agency to protect private property rights, that fact no more give the state any special claim on the rest of us than does, say, the fact that farmers are a necessary, or best, source of vital foodstuffs. Perhaps society would crumble without government protection of property rights. So, too, would society crumble without anyone working to produce food. To assert that one component part of society is more important than another component part is very bad logic — and very bad history.
When have I argued that you argue against the protection of property rights?
I also favor property rights, including some intellectual property rights.
For me, the question is not whether the state is the only, or the best, agency to establish standards of propriety. I take this answer for granted. It’s practically tautological, because a standard of propriety practically implies a central authority; otherwise, I have no idea which “standard” I’m supposed to respect.
For me, the question is: Which standards are most useful? The answer is debatable.
Well, it does, because the state decides what “property” means precisely, and the devil is always in the details.
Statesmen can’t decide that no farmers are necessary to produce food, but they do decide which farmers are entitled to produce it, because farmers need fertile land to produce food, and statesmen decide the propriety of a farmer’s use of land.
I don’t know what “society would crumble” means exactly. I only know that societies with different governments establishing different property rights take different forms, some materially wealthier than others.
I don’t know, for example, that a society governed by current U.S. law, slightly reformed, would be wealthier or poorer or otherwise different in utilitarian terms.
I don’t know that a progressive consumption tax, far less Congressional expenditure and less personal consumption by the wealthiest proprietors would generate more or less wealth, and I don’t know whether the reformed distribution of consumption would make more people happier or less happy.
But I’d like to find out.
Well, I don’t assert that McCartney is more or less “important” than some other component part of society we could discuss. I observe that he accumulates more entitlement to consume. I’m not sure that McCartney is more “important” in some sense than men who accumulate far less of this entitlement, men like Einstein or Milton Friedman or Julian Simon.
Martin misunderstands me. My point is the much simpler one that McCartney is worth his personal wealth — that the amount of human happiness he has produced is greater than even his vast monetary fortune.
The Beatles, in fact, were paid $8,500 for their February 1964 appearances on the Sullivan show. And I assume that whoever now owns the rights to Sullivan’s programs owns those clips of the Beatles. But so what? That has nothing to do with my point.
My point is that we don’t know how much happiness to attribute to McCartney personally. We only know what established propriety channels to him. I know some very talented musicians, and they’re very entertaining, but they have no mass audience. So who produces McCartney’s mass audience? McCartney or Ed Sullivan or Thomas Edison, who invented the phonograph? And did Edison really invent it alone? And is his invention of the device most “important” or did entrepreneurs who learned to mass produce phonograph records contribute more?
These questions don’t concern the value of Paul McCartney per se. They involve the value of various forcible proprieties.
“….. that the amount of human happiness he has produced is greater than even his vast monetary fortune.” BD
So markets don’t always appropriate reward with value. My point exactly. Goldman Sachs executives rob the economy and are wealthy beyond comprehension while productive workers struggle more and more to get by. And how we set policy has a lot to do with how efficient our markets are and how the wealth is shared.
The idea that “unregulated markets” are most efficient may be true. I just don’t see any evidence to support the claim. I know that it is blasphemy here but there is a chance I may be the one who is right.
“So markets don’t always appropriate reward with value.”
Nor should they, since a voluntary exchange should be beneficial to both the producer and the consumer. That suggests a price somewhere between the least the producer was willing to sell for and the most the consumer was willing to buy for. If producers captured all of the value the consumer placed on a good, then the exchange would be at best neutral for the consumer; therefore, the consumer would probably not (voluntarily) participate.
As an aside to our hosts, one feature I really *hate* about the new site design is the bit where it tells me the name I was trying to post under is “already taken”.
-rpl
Beatlemania indeed.
Martinmania.
Once and for all. Property is theft, so, let’s abolish it, and starve to death.
You apparently don’t understand what “property is theft” meant in the historical context or that the author of the phrase also wrote “property is freedom”. As someone in the forum noted a few days ago, the phrase uses the same irony that Socrates uses in Plato’s Republic when he says, “The just man is a thief.” And by that, he means what you might mean if you said that statemen are thieves or their taxation theft.
If you want to abolish property and starve to death, that’s up to you, but attributing your straw man’s assertions to me only highlights an absence of your reply to my assertions. The technique is effective when preaching to a choir but not otherwise.
I was talking with the wife about two weeks ago about the sickening rhetoric involving MJ and his vast talent, etc. etc. and labeling him the King of Pop.
I posed the rhetorical question to my wife, “How many covers of MJs music does the average person ever hear, how many orchestra’s have rearranged MJs music and made them part of their standard fare?”
I then used the Beatles as the alternate example. Their music has been covered by so many artists across the broad spectrum of music from classical, blues, bluegrass, to Reggae and more.
MJ, outside of a MJ recorded performance, I don’t know if I have ever heard his stuff.
Perhaps I am just ignorant of if, but for the life of me I can’t put MJ in the same category of great that I put the Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and so many more whose music is covered and recovered across that broad spectrum.
Hey, a good argument for an excess profits tax on feeling good…!!
The creativity in that band, particularly its two leaders, is one of the great marvels of Western culture.
I sometimes think that a having a film that chronicled the creation of one of those songs–say “Please Please Me”–from beginning to end would be worth all the tea in China. From the outside, at least, such creativity seems like pure magic: How did they do it over and over, for years? How did they go from a tune or a phrase to something so good? Who added what, and how? How did it get improved?
Haunting questions. We’re lucky to have this music.
Martin: I mean the following not in any snide way, but sincerely. You really ought to learn some law — you (admittedly, like most persons) seem unable to distinguish common-law processes for discovering and enforcing law from legislation. I recommend — even more highly than a night at a McCartney concert — Vol. 1 of Hayek’s 1973 book Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
My dad’s a lawyer, and I know quite a bit of law, including the difference between statutory and common law. Judges establish common law by following precedents set by other judges. Common law develops within constraints established by statutory law.
Hayek may argue that some systems of law are not stable and cannot persist in practice, while others emerge more or less spontaneously. That’s fine. I’ve never disputed the idea.
Is monopolization of the electro-magnetic spectrum part of the emergent order, or is it a statutory constraint within which an established order emerges? If Hayek’s 1973 book contains the answer to this question, you can cite it here. Simply dropping the name doesn’t advance the discussion. That’s only an argument from authority, and you don’t even provide evidence that your authority asserts anything specifically.
Give up Don, Martin is right, he is always right.
You’ve been Brocked.
Obviously, I think my assertions are right; otherwise, I’d be asserting something else.
This fact is not so incredible, but you incredibly don’t seem to realize that you’re no different; otherwise, you wouldn’t address this remark to me particularly.
No martin it is addressed explicitly to you. You have told me that you don’t think you’re right, you know you are. No questions, no doubts, no opinions, just statements of facts.
Your father was/is a lawyer and that tells us what about your legal knowledge? You know of course that Stradivarus had a son who didn’t even know what a violin was? Shakespeare had a son who couldn’t even read, much less write? Colt had a son who grew tulips and couldn’t bear the sight of a gun? Casanova had a son who was queer?
What your dad was/is does not in anyway establish credentials for you, other than say you were around him.
But, since your legal knowledge is so sharp I guess I can finally get an answer to my question, “What is the legal mechanism that gives the Constitution jurisdiction over anyone?” Naturally, martin, both you and your father should know that one, right?
Now I wait with bated breath, and after you have successfully answered that one, we can proceed to having you point out the actual law that requires you, makes mandatory on you, to pay an income tax on the fruits of your labor.
Instead of messing around with silly ass irrelevant crap like copy right law, why not go right to the heart of the matter, the ultimate understanding about law and jurisdiction.
But then since you are so vastly knowledgeable in law you can tell us how your Dad’s knowledge got you a degree in law and got you through the BAR exam, eh?
How does law compel your allegiance? How does law compel your obedience? How does law compel your performance?
Simple questions for someone like yourself “thinks his assertions are correct”.
martin, you frequently have interesting thoughts on subjects, some of which resonate with me as a free man who is determined to stay that way. If only, if…..only…..you’d ever come to understand that your thoughts are not facts, nor is your opinion documented research, and every utterance from your fingers the God’s truth. If you’d just learn to qualify your expressions or assertions so that we would all know that you are offering opinion and not pronouncements from God in the form of inscribed tablets of stone.
God bless you martin, you’re priceless.
Just to show that the market doesn’t always reward excellence, there are so many musicians that produce truly excellent music in the “alternative” genre but don’t get 1/10 sales of a Brittney Spears. I guess one might say the same applies to food. Most people buy Kraft Mac & Cheese instead of that local French bistro that makes a baked 4-cheese pasta casserole to die for. The masses always prefer the least quality as long as it’s “just good enough”.
The masses? You being the exception?
People balance quality along with price. I would imagine that 4-cheese pasta casserole to die for costs a bit more than Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
As for music, there is far more variables being considered in the market than simply a weighting of the quality of the musicians.
Uh yes I do consider my taste in music to be superior to the masses who’ve spent the last several weeks buying up Michael Jackson’s back catalog.
Paul McCartney may be the most excellent musician who ever lived. His excellence is beside any point I’ve made. I don’t much oppose his copyrights, although I favor reforms of copyright, and I don’t want to transfer his authority over resources to central planners either.
I only want to constrain McCartney’s personal consumption by encouraging him instead to invest in the further production of goods valued by the market. I see no terrible immorality in this limitation of his prerogatives, because he accumulates entitlement to govern resources within the constraints of countless other forcible proprieties.
I don’t see how the limitation somehow deprives McCartney of his inherent “worth”. Even if everyone on Earth, including me, wishes to listen to Paul McCartney and prefers his music to every possible alternative, it’s not obvious to me why he should be entitled to exclusive use of a castle or burial in a pyramid or a week on Mir or anything similar. If he were not entitled to demand exclusive use of these resources, markets would organize their use differently.
Maybe McCartney himself needs no encouragement in this direction. A concert at 67 suggests as much. If so, reforms I advocate affect him less than others.
Have to disagree with you there. I’ve had plenty of gourmet cheese pastas. Kraft beats them all.
I’ve been to Spain. The best tapas I’ve ever had were in Minnesota.
I’ve been to Italy. Pizza and pasta dishes from Domino’s beats them all.
My city is full of critically-acclaimed gourmet restaurants that you can’t walk out of without dropping hundreds of dollars for a dinner for two. I’ve been to many of them. Few can pass the Whopper with Cheese test.
And I suspect that any of those gourmet chefs would be quite happy if any of their dishes could go mass market. And if any of them did, then those once hailed fabulous dishes would be ridiculed as junk food for the hoi polloi.
There are a lot of factors that go into creating a recipe with widespread appeal and availablility. But taste is not one of the least of them.
Arrowsmith,
In the circles I move in, that last sentence of yours translates into “a settle for life”.
As long as they don’t have to make great effort or expense, they’ll settle for it.
And, that makes them the most untrustworthy and dangerous block of people in America, IMHO.
If, as once charged, the Beatles were a Communist conspiracy to deaden the minds of the young, seeing Don Boudreaux go round and round with Martin makes me think that it is finally having a delayed effect.
Heaven help us!
Let’s be civil here. Why insinuate that Don’s adoration of Paul McCartney has deadened his mind?
Does anyone want to imagine what it would be like to be parented by a lawyer?
My father is a very careful, positive thinker, because his job description requires it. ["Positive" is not synonymous with "optimistic" here.] At the same time, he is very skeptical of the utility of legal positivism, because he knows the game too well. Yes, I learned the habits from him and also from training as a mathematician, and I share his skepticism.
Some economists speak of so-called positive externalities as if they are bad. I don’t understand why.
Overplayed. They think positive externalities are a problem because it reduces the incentive to produce. In reality producers look at how much they can get, independent of the positive externalities. It would only be an issue if the producers could not get enough to encourage them to do their thing–but again, whether that is because of positive externalities or not is irrelevant.
If they can find a way to capture some of those externalities, then that is great, and they will try to do so, but then you can hardly call them externalities. If there is not a way to capture them, that is, if they truly are positive externalities, then it isn’t even an issue.
So the so-called problem of positive externalities is hardly a problem at all.
RE: “It would only be an issue if producers could not get enough to encourage them to do their thing”.
Most economists think on the margin, not in this sort of dichotomous “will they or won’t they produce it” sort of way – and on the margin an externality will always reduce production. Is there a situation where it wouldn’t? I don’t think there’s a threshhold where it doesn’t kick in.
But this point on the Beatles that Don makes is great and encouraging – many artists simply enjoy making art so they make up for some of the underinvestment. But just because the Beatles have done that, doesn’t mean we as a society culturally underinvest because of the positive externalities that exist.
I think it all depends on what the externality is. But the reason why you point to a positive externality and usually say it’s bad is that the fact that it’s an externality means that a good thing is underinvested in. Education is often refered to as something that involves positive externalities – that in itself is great – but it makes economists worry precisely because that positive externality means that it will be underinvested in.
Then what would account for it?
Interesting thoughts! That’s what I like about your posts – even when I disagree with some of them, you highlight a facet of a problem that you don’t hear much elsewhere.
I still love the Beatles music, but am really another Stones man. That having been said, I think the compensation parable ($1/viewer) is more distracting than illuminating, relying as it does on “the miracle of compound interest.” It’s like dismissing all the discussions about Native Americans getting taken by Europeans by pointing out that, had they only invested the $24 my ancestors paid them for Manhattan at 8% interest, they’d have about $100 Trillion today.
Terrific, Don! As a Beatle fan and lover of freedom, this made my day. I will share it with my students at the appropriate moment.
I prefer John.
I’m well aware that my thoughts are not facts, Vid. My posts are full of this qualification. You simply ignore it.
For example, above I write, “For me, the question is not whether the state is the only, or the best, agency to establish standards of propriety. I take this answer for granted. It’s practically tautological, …”
If you know what these words mean, you know that I’m not discussing facts here at all. I’m discussing assumptions. I could quote dozens of other examples from my own posts, but the exercise is pointless, because you’ll simply ignore the words again.
Unlike these other sons, I learned much from my father and give credit where credit is due.
As Washington eloquently said, “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force.” A “state” is the monopoly of coercive force in a region by definition. Precisely how states become states is an interesting question, but it doesn’t necessarily happen through “legal mechanism”. Rather, positive, legal machinery is what states typically impose, superficially at least.
I understand that Don reserves “law” for more specific patterns of human behavior, but I’ll stick with the more coventional usage here.
The U.S. Constitution hardly matters in the U.S. anymore anyway. It’s a quaint relic that statesmen largely ignore.
It’s in the U.S. code, and I pay it because I earn more income as a software developer in the corporate sector than I can earn outside of this sector, so far. Working for the corporatists is easier, at least. The corporation withholds the tax from my income before I receive it. I don’t object much, because I don’t want the IRS garnishing my wages, obtaining liens on my property and so on.
I never claimed to have a degree in the law or to have passed the Bar exam. Look in the mirror. That’s you.
My grandfather did pass the Bar exam, but he never had a degree in the law. He only read the law, passed the exam and started practicing, while continuing to run his farm. Times have changed.
I’ll yield a bit to Don here. Law doesn’t compel obedience. States compel obedience. In my neck of the woods, the state often uses a carrot as well as a stick, as in the encouragement of corporatism described above, but the stick is always there, and the statesmen don’t let us forget it, so the carrot never operates in isolation.
Disingenuous as usual, and as typically off point. For instance:
” … the actual law that requires you, makes mandatory on you, to pay an income tax on the fruits of your labor.
“It’s in the U.S. code,”
That is hardly an example of the exact law. The U.S.Code is extensive as I have the joy of learning. My question was the “EXACT” law.
“What is the legal mechanism that gives the Constitution jurisdiction over anyone?”
There is an exact legal mechanism, and it is a legal mechanism; but not one the average person ever learns, hell even most attorneys do not know it. Oh they know the mechanism, they just don’t know that it applies to their citizenship as well.
But, gosh I thought you would.
As for the positive assertions that your expressions are statements of fact, that was documented in one of your previous posts about two or three months ago and we had a row about it at that time as well.
I have much better things to do, for instance going into town in a few minutes and practicing capitalism, so I am not going to waste time going back and looking for it.
I am not the only one here that remembers, martin, others do as well.
Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 1 imposes the income tax on individuals.
Cornell’s copy of the code.
That’s enough. I’m not interested in hours of back and forth about what the Constitution really says and which amendments were really ratified and what statutes really mean, with someone who knows the law better than most attorneys.
If you want to avoid income taxes by working in an underground economy, that’s fine with me. I think it’s great. More power to you. If you want to teach law to the judges, you can go to court for that. I’m not a judge.
My dad could teach you some lessons about trying to teach the law to judges. Be careful. That’s just friendly advice.
I know as well as your dad about judges, and probably far better than you.
Here is your problem with the above answer about,
“Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 1 imposes the income tax on individuals.”
Had you gone farther into the quoted section you would find this phrase:
“There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of—”
You automatically assume that you have taxable income, and I know I do not.
You’ve never really read Title 26 to find out exactly how to determine taxable income for a man who earns all his fruits of labor here within the 50 states.
Do you have taxable income?
I have seen some of the most exhaustive research on that subject that you can imagine and no one has yet to find it applies to me earning everything here in the 50 states.
This is the precise reason federal judges work in cahoots with the government lawyers and the IRS to keep any mention of the law out of any tax charge.
It has been shown repeatedly that if a jury actually hears the truth or realizes that the truth is being shielded from them in order to direct them to a conviction, they acquit far more often than they convict, and god of gods does the IRS and government dread losing.
So, the upshot, martin, is that you haven’t shown the exact law yet.
Nor have you told us the exact mechanism that gives the Constitution and all the laws that use it as their justification, jurisdiction over you.
You are priceless, martin.
Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter B, Part I, Section 63 defines taxable income. Section 61 defines gross income, and the definition does not exclude income earned in the United States.
If a jury acquits you of income tax evasion for any reason, I think that’s great. A trophy for reading Lawrence and Lee’s The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail in a high school forensics tournament, back in ’78, is still one of my proudest accomplishments.
Thoreau spent the night in jail for tax evasion, protesting the Mexican-American War. I was already a libertarian back when you were earning your state pension, financed largely by income taxes imposed on others.
Juries also acquit people of pot smoking and other crimes. These acquittals don’t persuade statesmen that their enactments are not “the law”, and you roll the dice every time you confront a jury. That’s your choice. Again, more power to you.
I jump out of airplanes myself, but I don’t live in denial of the risks I take, and I don’t go around telling other people that the risks don’t exist. I can recommend that you try skydiving, once informed of the risks and with the appropriate waiver of liability, only because I believe the experience is worth the risk.
These are all just more disingenuous replies to dodge the issue, is it law that applies to the individual who earns his fruits of labor within the 50 states.
Yes a jury is a skeet shoot, but it is far better than trial by judge in any tax case. That still has nothing to do with the question, what is the exact law, which has not yet been proven by the IRS or government in a court.
Courts play their disingenuous games as well, and they use public ignorance and the power of enculturation to drag the people along in the game.
The power of the courts and government to continue to fool the people and access something they aren’t entitled to will last as long as the ignorance and enculturation does.
Oh and martin,
this: “If a jury acquits you of income tax evasion for any reason, I think that’s great.”
is another of those things that people whose entire knowledge is based on conventional wisdom just shrug and accept.
However, it relates directly back to the question of “exactly what law makes me liable.”
You see, before being able to charge or convict one with income tax evasion, it has to be proven that 1. a lawful tax is owed, and 2. that the defendant actually had “taxable income”.
All of which begins with establishing jurisdiction of the court in which one is being charged.
Jurisdiction relates directly back to the question of “how does the Constitution establish jurisdiction over you, what is the legal mechanism.”
These are all valid questions that enculturated people have no understanding to even ask.
A friend of mine, who served in the Army Airborne before switching to the Military Police, once told me that only two things fall out of the sky. 1. birdsh.t, and 2. fools.
I am compelled to agree with him.
“Thoreau spent the night in jail for tax evasion, protesting the Mexican-American War.”
Actually Thoreau spent his time in jail protesting taxes, primarily a tax that was being imposed upon him to pay the local church minister not the Mexican War. His argument was that as no public tax paid him as a school teacher, why should he pay a tax to support a minister.
He is also credited with asking the potent question of his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who came to visit him in jail and said, “Thoreau, why are you in there?”; to which Thoreau replied, “The question is not why I am in here, but why are you out there?”
Why did many slaves in the old USA never make any attempt to escape or revolt, ever? It is a question I ask myself daily. Why did many of them run in fright from those slaves who did talk escape or revolt?
Why do Americans escape into their TV sets, “their” football-baseball-basketball-team, why do they run when someone talks of escape or revolting?
You are born, a gift of God or Nature, to natural human parents, government had absolutely zero contribution to birth. You are alien to government and government is alien to you. How then can it claim you, your allegiance, your obedience, and convince you that you have an obligation to support it with 50%(any %) of the fruits of your labor?
What gives it that power? The answer is found in Black’s Law Dictionary in the definition of specific terms.
When replying more than once to the same post, don’t reply to yourself. To avoid the increased indentation, add a second reply to the same post.
It was a poll tax and presumably funded many things, particularly since Thoreau was six years delinquent, but according to Lawrence and Lee, Thoreau was protesting the war. Wikipedia agrees with them, citing lectures to the Concord Lyceum.
“On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal.”
He might have felt this way too, but I’d like to see your evidence that he expressed this reason primarily at the time.
Reply protocol noted.
Regarding Thoreau, I got it from a book loaned to me by my son.
“On the duty of Civil Disobedience” H.D.Thoreau (1917-1862)
I agree that in the essay above he did talk vividly about the Mexican American War being morally and philosophically objectional, but I remember him emphasizing the ridiculousness of his paying a tax to support the preacher and the preacher paying no tax to support him.
I found an audio reading of the essay on librivox.com, a site where they are trying to create free audio books of every book in the public domain. I now have the essay on CD.
I see the account of the Church tax in Civil Disobedience, but Thoreau wasn’t jailed in this case. He discusses his refusal to pay the poll tax, for which he was jailed, in the following section of the essay.
Of course, several states including Massachussets had state Churches in the nineteenth century, since the Constitution doesn’t prevent one. It only prevents Congress from establishing a Church.
I will take the privilege of going back and reading the thing again. It has been awhile, it is possible I remember emphasis that is unwarranted in the actual essay.
Egad this is tiny.
Martin, I see the emphasis I remembered was wrong. Thoreau’s jailing was specifically for nonpayment of the poll tax.
Note however, that in the charge regarding the church tax he used the same basic debate or argument that I present to this state the USA, in that he declared that he would not support any organization in which he had no interest or commitment.