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By far, the profession that attracts into its ranks the highest proportion of two-faced shameless unprincipled and cowardly and often buffoonish egomaniacs is politics.  This reality is explained, in part, by the fact that politics – compared to other professions, legal and illegal – disproportionately rewards with success and garish ‘honors’ two-faced shameless unprincipled and cowardly and often buffoonish egomaniacs.  I reflect on politicians in my most recent column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  Here’s my closing paragraph:

Far from acting heroically by resisting interest groups’ pleas for special privileges – and by being mindful of the welfare of countless people, such as future taxpayers, who aren’t organized into clamorous political lobbies – the typical politician spinelessly promotes his or her own career by picking the pockets of others.

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Here’s a letter to Washington, D.C., news radio station WTOP:

Last night and this morning your news anchors introduced your report on D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s ambivalence toward the pending “living-wage” bill with this question: “Will the District force large retailers to pay their workers more?”

A more illuminating introduction would be “Will the District force low-skilled workers to demand wages that make many of these workers unprofitable to employ?”

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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Bob Higgs reflects creatively on creative destruction.

The patterns and degrees of specialization are themselves changed – indeed, improved – by immigration.

Anthony Gregory reflects upon the inescapable reality of blowback.

Cato’s Christopher Preble is realistic about America’s ability to engineer outcomes in Syria.

The wise John Cochrane explains the dangers of an all-powerful Federal Reserve.

Who’d a-thunk that government in California would make life difficult for business owners there?  (HT George White)

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… is from page 24 of Liberty Press’s 1979 edition of Forrest McDonald’s 1965 volume, E Pluribus Unum; it’s the final sentence of the author’s Preface to the First Edition:

If I have stated the obvious I do not apologize, for it is the obvious that is often most difficult to see.

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I’ve forgotten where I read the speculation that if Julius Caesar had been resurrected in 1795 and found himself walking with George Washington on the grounds of Mount Vernon and then with Lafayette in France, he would have regarded the late 18th century as reasonably fathomable.  Obviously, he would have noticed changes from his own time – including, of course, the widespread use of gun powder.  But the dominance of agriculture in the late 18th century would have made that era not terribly or radically unfamiliar to Caesar.

But then transport Caesar, Washington, and Lafayette to modern-day America and imagine their reactions: our world would be nearly unfathomable to all three of them.  Automobiles, jet planes, personal computers, television, space travel, electric lighting, air conditioning, telephony, refrigeration, indoor plumbing even for the poorest, anesthesia, antibiotics.  All new.  All marvelous.

In short, the differences created in the world over the span of 1,800 years from Caesar to Washington were much smaller than were the difference created over the span of the 200 years from Washington to today.

One way – there are many ways, of course – to highlight the marvelousness of our age is to note that, unlike for the multitudes of all of our pre-industrial ancestors, nearly everything that an ordinary denizen of our age consumes is something that

(1) that person did not personally make;

and, most spectacularly,

(2) no single person knows how to make – that it, it is something the construction and supply of which require the knowledge, skills, and efforts of literally millions of individuals.

Millie and Johan living, say, in 1000 A.D. likely grew their own food, produced their own clothing, and built their own hovel.  And if they didn’t personally – with their own hands – produce something that they consumed, they personally knew the person, or small group of people, who produced these things for them.  Relatively rare were the consumption items produced through a complex system of economic cooperation by large numbers of people most of whom were strangers to the peasants who consumed the items.

Not so today.  Nearly everything (and I’m tempted to drop the qualifier “nearly”) that an ordinary American or Spaniard or Australian consumes today is an item that is the result, and could only be the result, of the productive actions of millions of people, almost none of whom is known to the persons doing the consumption.

Look around you.  What do you consume that you make from scratch?  Nothing (or nearly nothing – perhaps you grew the tomato that you’ll chop up for your salad this evening [But from where did you get the tomato plant?]).  The clothes on your back, the chair that you’re sitting in, the bed that you’ll sleep in, the plumbing that helps make your home habitable, the food that you enjoy and the beer or wine that you wash it down with, the aspirin that you’ll swallow tomorrow morning because you drank one too many glasses…..  Nearly everything that you consume requires, for its production and its availability to you, the efforts of literally millions of people – almost none of whom you know or will ever know.

And perhaps even more marvelously, all of these things that you consume are affordable.  Even the quotidian pencil required for its production and supply millions of people, almost all of whom are strangers to you – and, don’t forget, also strangers to each other.  And yet you can buy a pencil for just a few cents!  (See also here.)

Ponder this astonishing fact: Each and every thing that we consume today in market societies is something that requires the coordinated efforts of millions of people, yet each of us is able to command possession and use of these things in exchange for only a small fraction of our work time.

Why aren’t more people blown away with the pure splendor and marvelousness of it all?!

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… is from page 185 of Joel Mokyr’s 1990 book, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (citation omitted):

Of the most bellicose nations of the century before the Industrial Revolution – Charles XII’s Sweden, Louis XIV’s France, Frederick the Great’s Prussia – none saw many technological benefits of the expensive wars conducted by their sovereigns.  The Industrial Revolution itself was hindered rather than aided by the wars of the time….  Moreover, the net effect of war on technological change has to take into account the costs as well; there can be little doubt that the balance is negative.  I see no reason to revise the conclusion reached by [John U.] Nef in his classic work, which argued that it was peace, not war, that was the innovating force in manufacturing, and that war and military preparation did not add conspicuously to the material prosperity of Europe.

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If you’re a sports fan, you’ll know that Johnny Manziel (last year’s Heisman Trophy winner) has been under investigation for selling autographs. He has evidently been cleared of that offense but has received a .5 game suspension for a milder violation that can’t really be explained. ESPN tries to:

The NCAA and A&M agreed on the one-half suspension because Manziel violated NCAA bylaw 12.5.2.1, an NCAA spokesperson confirmed. The rule says student-athletes cannot permit their names or likenesses to be used for commercial purposes, including to advertise, recommend or promote sales of commercial products, or accept payment for the use of their names or likenesses.

“If additional information comes to light, the NCAA will review and consider if further action is appropriate. NCAA rules are clear that student-athletes may not accept money for items they sign and based on information provided by Manziel, that did not happen in this case,” the NCAA said in the joint statement.

In addition to the suspension, Manziel will speak to his teammates about lessons learned from the situation, and A&M will educate its athletes about signing multiple items for individuals.

The NCAA has to be a Kafkaesque organization. Why can’t a college football player sign autographs for money? Because that would allow a fan of say, Alabama, to pay him $100,000 for an autograph. Why would that happen? Because there is a price ceiling of ZERO on the compensation allowed for college football players. (OK, they do get room and board and a chance at an education if they can find the time.) But they are not allowed to collect the wage that would result from their value and from competition for their services. So to keep that from happening surreptitiously, the NCAA forbids autograph sales or any kind of work. So the coaches and the universities get a disproportionate share of the value of top athletes relative to what would result from open competition.

But it’s hard to stop the market forces that are still pushing schools to reward the best athletes. So they compete in other ways (fancy dorms, weight rooms and so on) and fans compete under the table which is why there are constant recruiting scandals. Those scandals make people think that college sports is a cesspool. But the stink comes from the attempt to pretend that these are student-athletes like any other, attending school and playing a little football on the side.

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Here is Joseph Stiglitz reflecting (HT: John Papola) on Martin Luther King and discrimination, indicts Gary Becker:

Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School, Gary S. Becker, would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn’t exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Here is a better summary of Becker’s views from his bio at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Becker’s unusually wide applications of economics started early. In 1955 he wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on the economics of discrimination. Among other things, Becker successfully challenged the Marxist view that discrimination helps the person who discriminates. Becker pointed out that if an employer refuses to hire a productive worker simply because of skin color, that employer loses out on a valuable opportunity. In short, discrimination is costly to the person who discriminates.

Becker showed that discrimination will be less pervasive in more competitive industries because companies that discriminate will lose market share to companies that do not. He also presented evidence that discrimination is more pervasive in more-regulated, and therefore less-competitive, industries. The idea that discrimination is costly to the discriminator is common sense among economists today, and that is due to Becker.

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In this four-plus-minute-long video (from sometime in the 1970s), the great and wise and (truly) liberal Milton Friedman discusses the perverse incentives created by confiscatory inheritance taxation.  Watch it at least twice; it’s message runs much deeper than you might think upon a first viewing.

(HT Addie Bendory)

Over at Facebook I saw someone comment on my “I, Too, Have a Dream” post – a post that Steve Horwitz kindly posted on his Facebook page – that “If you want to eliminate affirmative action programs, it would make sense to have a 100% inheritance tax in order to make the playing field more level.”  (It was, I think, in response to this comment that Addie posted the above video of Friedman.)

There are too many errors with this comment for me to get into now.  (I’m currently preparing to meet this evening, for the first time, my Fall 2013 ECON 385 class – “International Economic Policy.”)  But I can’t resist pointing out that one unstated but real premise of the comment is clearly mistaken, namely, that society in general, and the economy in particular, has a fixed number of ‘good’ positions to go around and, therefore, each of us competes to occupy these fixed-in-number ‘good’ positions.