The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Young (a GMU Econ grad) offers ten reasons to abolish the U.S. Export-Import Bank. A slice:
For most of its history, the Export-Import Bank has directed most of its benefits to a handful of large, politically connected firms. In other words, its main function is to dispense corporate welfare. With more $37 billion in business in 2013 and a total portfolio near its statutory limit of $140 billion, Ex-Im is one of the federal government’s largest corporate welfare programs. President Obama wants to raise the cap to $160 billion with this year’s reauthorization.
In his most-recent New York Times column, Tyler Cowen explains that economic inequality is falling.
Want cleaner air? Promote economic freedom.
Doug Bandow reflects on politics, politicians, and cronyism. A slice:
The problem is not just the money—roughly $100 billion a year for corporate welfare, for instance. Also disturbing is the message government is sending to all Americans. The way to rise and prosper, to expand one’s business and increase one’s income, is to seize control of the State to loot your neighbors. Gaining wealth by working hard is, well, hard work. It is so much better to hire a lobbyist and whisper sweet nothings in legislators’ ears. No heavy lifting there.
Moreover, the illusion of consent cannot hide the dubious moral principles these players rely upon. If government has as purpose, it is to advance particularly important and genuinely collective interests which cannot be achieved privately. Taking people’s earnings for anything less differs little from theft. Sadly, most of today’s vast transfer state looks like a complex of stolen goods.
People respond predictably to incentives – even unemployed people receiving unemployment-insurance benefits.
Here’s Richard Rahn on government spending.
… is from page 136 of philosopher Jan Narveson’s 2008 book, You and the State:
A perception very widely held about government is that it is a creative agency that provides all sorts of things for us, the people. We no doubt believe this for two reasons. One is that the state appears to do so. Certainly it busies itself with all sorts of projects. The other is that it keeps telling us so. But the perception is misleading. Perhaps we should instead compare it with the member of the Mafia who brings home a nice new car for his wife. The fact that he bought it with money recently robbed from a bank is not mentioned. Similarly, the fact that all these things the State does are done with money taken, without asking, from the people who created the services now curtailed peremptorily by the government should, surely, matter. Normal people do things by working or selling things or at least investing in enterprises. Not, however, the state. It spends its days fleecing its subjects.
(Apologies, of course, are due to those many mafiosi who earn their livings honestly: by supplying morally unobjectionable goods and services to willing buyers. As Narveson suggests, politicians are never so ethically upright: most of the ‘services’ they supply are morally objectionable – for example, restricting immigration, subsidizing corporations, and pricing many low-skilled workers out of the job market. And nearly all of the state’s activities are funded, not by voluntary payments as in markets, but by forced extractions as in robberies.)
… speaks volumes. (Click on the photo for better resolution.)
… is from page 135 of my GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke’s excellent 2012 book, Living Economics:
Adam Smith detailed the power of invisible hand processes to channel self-interest into public benefits. But he also recognized that the hidden hand of the sophistry of the merchants can, in concert with government officials, result in special privileges for a few that undermine the prosperity of the general population.
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
You rightly criticize the U.S. government’s imposition of punitive taxes on Americans who buy steel made outside of America (“Protectionists Steel Washington,” July 17). Economic arguments of the sort that you make against protectionism are powerful and necessary. I myself make these arguments repeatedly. I’ll continue to do so and hope that you will too.
Yet occasionally it’s important to step away from these economic arguments in order to expose protectionism’s immorality.
Protectionism is government intimidation unleashed against consumers to oblige them to buy products that they prefer not to buy. Protectionism is force that enriches the politically powerful at the expense of the politically impotent. Protectionism is business people capturing rents from receiving special favors from the state rather than earning profits from giving good service to the public. Protectionism is the myth that money belongs not to consumers who earned it peacefully but to suppliers who steal it coercively. Protectionism is the corrupting lie that absurdly and insultingly insists that mass flourishing results from monopoly and dearth rather than from competition and abundance.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Naomi Brockwell is Bitcoin Girl:
… is from page 5 of the 1987 Liberty Fund edition of Helmut Schoeck’s excellent 1966 volume, Envy:
Most of the achievements which distinguish members of modern, highly developed and diversified societies from members of primitive societies – the development of civilization, in short – are the result of innumerable defeats inflicted on envy, i.e., on man as an envious being.
Yes. It is, therefore, especially ironic that people who today call themselves “progressives” are especially active in stoking feelings of envy – in elevating this primitive, dangerous, excessively individualistic, and intensely greedy emotion into a basis for public policy.
A reader writes to me:
You appear to be sanguine about the loss of life engendered by the effort to immigrate to the US. South Texas has become a dying field, as a direct result of the actions or inactions of our federal government (along with the Mexican government, the Honduran government, the Guatemalan govt., etc,. etc.). In my view, the atrocity created by our political leaders is of a piece with the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, though the numbers might not be quite as great. You also seem sanguine about the political process necessary to achieve a different result at the border, and appear to verge on a desire for autocracy in place of Constitutional Republican efforts to address the issue. You seem to avoid assigning responsibility for both (I for one would place most blame on Barack Obama for both his incitement of illegal immigration, and his poisoning of the well politically to ensure that Congress will not be able to work with him to ameliorate the immigration problems and revise the system, although both parties have colluded to produce the current disaster and we the people have elected them–we have no one to blame but ourselves; I tend to agree with your position, but am rather appalled at the seeming political naivety and human indifference you evince).
I emphatically am neither indifferent to, nor sanguine about, the horrors taking place today along the southern U.S. border. They disgust and sadden me. These horrors, though, are an artifact of the very political process that anti-immgrationists turn to as the means through which immigration into America is kept restricted. I assumed that this much is obvious.
The solution to this horrible problem is easy: open the U.S. borders, or at least return to the immigration regime we used until 90 years ago (the one symbolized by Ellis Island). No quotas; no numerical restrictions of any kind on immigration.
Tourists to America aren’t sneaking north in their quests to spend a few days at Disneyland or to visit cousins in Missouri or Maryland. Therefore, tourists are not dying in the desert southwest. Tourists arrive here openly and safely and in relative comfort. (I say “relative” because the annoyance at passport control adds discomfort to any trip into the U.S. these days.) The reason is that there are no numerical restrictions or quotas on tourists coming to the U.S. And so it should be for immigrants. Get rid of immigration quotas and immigrants would not be suffering and dying as they are today when immigrating to America. That problem is easy to solve.
Here’s a letter to U.S. senator Tim Kaine:
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
Senator Kaine:
In your interview this morning on WTOP Radio you made two claims that must be challenged.
First, the Hobby Lobby decision does not “allow employers to deny women access to certain kinds of contraception.” Instead, that decision prevents government from forcing employers to pay for employees’ access to certain kinds of contraception. Hobby Lobby no more gives employers power to deny women access to certain kinds of contraception than would a court decision that prevents government from forcing you to buy me beer give you power to deny me access to certain kinds of libations.
Second, you justify government forcing employers to pay for all manner of contraception by asserting that contraception “is expensive.” Let’s overlook your neglect of the fact that when employers are forced to pay for fringe benefits they reduce their employees’ non-fringe wages and salaries - and the more expensive the fringes, the greater this reduction in these wages and salaries. Focus instead on the evidence that you cite for the importance of contraception - namely, the “substantial” (your word) reduction in unwanted pregnancies over the past two decades. You plausibly attribute this reduction to contraception. But if contraception for at least two decades now has substantially reduced unwanted pregnancies, how can you say with a straight face that contraception is so expensive that government must force employers to subsidize employees’ access to it?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
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