Our One-Off Economy

Essays In Fragility

by Charles Hugh-Smith

If you set out to create an increasingly fragile economy, you'd do precisely what the Federal Reserve and our political "leaders" have done.

All the extraordinary measures deployed since 2008 to jumpstart the U.S. economy are one-offs: either they cannot be repeated or they have lost their effectiveness.

As a result, we now have an extraordinarily fragile one-off economy that is dependent on "emergency" measures that cannot be withdrawn even as their utility in the real economy dwindles by the day.

These two dynamics--declining effectiveness and unrepeatability--have created a uniquely fragile economy. Once you become dependent on extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus, withdrawing the stimulus will trigger a recessionary cascade. But continuing the stimulus cannot duplicate its initial effectiveness, as malinvestment and unintended consequences degrade the initial boost.

We cannot add another $1 trillion in borrowed money to the $1.3 trillion we're already borrowing every year. The Federal Reserve could expand its balance sheet by another $2 trillion, but in sharp contrast to its earlier injections, the "high" from its latest QE stimulus was next to non-existent.

An Inconvenient History

Nazi Greens

Walther Darré National Ecosocialist

by Martin Durkin

Two disturbing stories recently on the greens.  First Spiegel magazine runs an article on the rise of extremist right-wing environmentalism in Germany.  Then The Observer newspaper reveals that, in the name of preventing ‘climate change’, British aid money to India is paying for the forced sterilisation of poor people. These are shocking stories. But not so shocking to those familiar with story of Nazi environmentalism.  Time for a history lesson …

Picture the scene.  At the edge of a forest, German soldiers point their guns at rows of naked people who follow the Jewish religion.  Among them are young mothers clutching their babies.  The shots echo through the woods and the dead bodies fall into the ground.  Down the road, while this is happening, their German army comrades are busy establishing nature walks and bird sanctuaries and planting trees.  The Nazis conducted horrific experiments on children (I have seen footage so upsetting it can’t be shown on TV) but at the same time they banned medical experiments on animals.  The same Nazi monsters who committed crimes of unimaginable barbarity also advocated vegetarianism, organic agriculture, forest preservation and homeopathic healthcare.  How can we possibly explain this?  What was the connection between the inhuman brutality of the Nazis and their gushing idealization of ‘Nature’?

The purpose of exploring Nazi environmentalism is not just to upset the greens.  If environmentalism were a curious but peripheral aspect of National Socialism, it would be of no real historical interest.  Environmentalists could be forgiven for saying, Ah well, it just goes to show, there’s a little bit of good in the worst of us.  But environmentalist ideology was not an accidental, optional-extra to National Socialism.  As we shall see, green ideas were at the core of Nazi thinking.  The German Volk and Nazi movements marched beneath the banners of ‘Nature’ and the ‘organic’.  However, what follows here is not simply a potted history of Nazienvironmentalism.  It is, at the same time, a brief history of early environmentalism writ large.  As will become clear, it is not so easy to draw a line between two types of green thinking.

To understand why green ideology emerged at all, and why it happened in Germany, we need to go back in time, a few centuries, to set the scene.  We have described elsewhere on this blog (The Greens: A Warning from History), the transition from feudal society to capitalism.  To the greens this great historical change it is more or less the source of all evil.  In Germany, it was a process which began, falteringly, in the 13th Century.

Historically, a rise in commercial activity is reflected in the growth of towns (towns are in essence markets). During this century the number of them in Germany increased by about ten-fold.  But the towns in Germany were less of a liberating force than they had been in England.  German feudal society was especially rigid.  Professor of German history Mary Fulbrook describes how ‘Germany had a much more immobile social hierarchy and was more ‘caste-ridden’ than either England or France.’   The liberty of the towns was more bitterly opposed by the German nobles, the increasing wealth of the new commercial classes more keenly resented and the desperate attempts by the serfs to obtain their freedom more fiercely resisted.

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

Sheep demanding the wolf

by Yuri Maltsev

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What’s not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today’s Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one-third of the average bus driver’s salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

Being a People’s Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a 14-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save “precious” X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Profits From Poverty

Poverty Professionals And The Crony Capitalists Who Love Them

By Bill Frezza

Yes, it looks like a wedding announcement out of The Onion, but when it comes to making a killing off the never-ending “War on Poverty,” the marriage of convenience between the financial services industry and federal bureaucrats is no laughing matter.

The idea that government welfare programs could eliminate poverty, rather than temporarily alleviate its worst impacts during hard times, took root during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative. From modest beginnings, a panoply of federal welfare programs expanded and multiplied to the point where they now consume one-sixth of the federal budget—some $588 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This is a lot of spending—even by contemporary standards—and this figure doesn’t even include the current explosion in unemployment benefits, as these are considered social “insurance” payouts rather than welfare. Nor does it include Social Security or Medicare, our largest and most rapidly growing federal expenditures. To make matters worse, these programs, which were designed to keep the elderly out of poverty, are entitlements not yet subject to means testing, so payments go to rich, middle class, and poor alike.

With anti-poverty programs enjoying meteoric growth thanks to the economic policies of the current and previous administrations, we may someday look back fondly on the days when we “only” had to fork over half a trillion a year to support the longest and least successful “war” in American history, with no sign of stopping.

How many civil servants with good pay and benefits does it take to do all this poverty fighting?  Try as I might to discover the answer I finally gave up, surprised that I couldn’t locate a definitive study enumerating the number of federal, state, and government-funded private employees whose livelihood depends on administering the ever expanding stream of tax dollars flowing to the poor. Is it any wonder that these entrenched bureaucrats have managed to slowly expand the definition of poverty to include a standard of living that would have been considered middle class back when the war on poverty started?

Social Darwinism and the Free Market

The Free Market is the means by which human beings cooperate

by David Gordon

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress "thinly veiled social Darwinism."

What did the president mean by this comment? The budget proposal in question, he claimed, would require drastic cuts in government programs designed to aid the poor. "And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline." Further, his opponents reject proposals to increase taxes on the rich.

How can anyone favor refusing government aid to the poor and oppose requiring the rich to pay more in taxes? Obama answered that those who think in this way must believe that the welfare of the rich is of primary significance. The poor, and everyone else, must take whatever "trickles down" to them from the rich.

It is this view that Obama had in mind when he spoke of social Darwinism, but the doctrine is usually characterized in a different way. Darwin, it is alleged, has taught us that evolution is a struggle in which the strong overcome the weak. To aid the poor would, on this view, act counter to progress. It would be an attempt to promote the survival of the unfit, rather than the fit. Instead, we should stand out of the way and allow the poor and improvident to suffer the natural consequences of their feckless ways.

Responses to Obama's speech from defenders of the free market have not been slow in coming. The libertarian philosopher and historian George Smith, among others, has noted that Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, usually classed as the main social-Darwinist defenders of the market, believed nothing like the doctrine just described. Spencer approved of private charity and includes in his Ethics a discussion of the duties of "positive beneficence."

Spencer opposed coercive, state enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed.… In one essay he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as "the latest and most hopeful fact in human history." Moreover, the final chapters in Spencer's The Principles of Ethics are devoted to the subject of "positive beneficence," the highest form of society in which people voluntarily help those in need.

Further, as the political philosopher Larry Arnhart has pointed out, Darwin did not teach that human evolution depends on ruthless struggle. To the contrary, he emphasized the importance of social unity and cooperation. 

"'Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,' Darwin declared, and without coherence nothing can be effected. If Social Darwinism is all about selfish competition … then Darwin was not as Social Darwinist."

Ludwig von Mises already called attention in Human Action to this misunderstanding of Darwin:

The notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus is to be understood in a metaphorical sense.… It need not always be a war of extermination such as the relation between man and morbific microbes. Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor.

On the Socialization of Wealth

Real wealth constantly passing from the domain of private property into the communal domain

by Sheldon Richman

That … veil which is spread before the eyes of the ordinary man, which even the attentive observer does not always succeed in casting aside, prevents us from seeing the most marvelous of all social phenomena: real wealth constantly passing from the domain of private property into the communal domain.

Wealth marvelously passing from the private to the communal domain? It sounds like a socialist’s redistributionist fantasy!

But wait — Frédéric Bastiat, the great laissez-faire radical, wrote those words in his book Economic Harmonies, chapter 8, provocatively titled “Private Property and Common Wealth.”

He repeats the point throughout his fascinating chapter:

And so, as I have already said many times and shall doubtless say many times more (for it is the greatest, the most admirable, and perhaps the most misunderstood of all the social harmonies, since it encompasses all the others), it is characteristic of progress (and, indeed, this is what we mean by progress) to transform onerous utility into gratuitous utility; to decrease value without decreasing utility; and to enable all men, for fewer pains or at smaller cost, to obtain the same satisfactions. Thus, the total number of things owned in common is constantly increased; and their enjoyment, distributed more uniformly to all, gradually eliminates inequalities resulting from differences in the amount of property owned.

Here’s what Bastiat has in mind. In a competitive marketplace with advancing technology, as the effort required to produce and, hence, acquire things diminishes, the price of gaining utility falls. For example, if the average worker had to work two hours, 40 minutes, to buy a chicken in 1900, but only 14 minutes as the 21st century approached (actual statistics), Bastiat would say the chicken “is obtained for less expenditure of human effort; less service is performed as it passes from hand to hand; it has less value; in a word, it has become gratis, [though] not completely.” In other words, most of the utility that had to be paid for with painful effort in 1900 was free by 2000. (By “less value,” Bastiat meant that the market price has fallen, not that the chicken is less useful.)

Thus progress through the market order consists in ever more people satisfying more of their wants at less and less effort. Bastiat calls this a move from private property to common wealth because he roots property in effort, and greater wealth is available to all with less effort. What makes this possible? Technological innovation. As Bastiat puts it, “Production has in large measure been turned over to Nature.”

The Singularity of Fools

A special report from the utopian future

BY DAVID RIEFF 

Good books transcend their times; bad books reflect them. One reads Madame Bovary for its sublime writing and exploration of the human condition in all its tortuous complexity. But if you really want to understand 19th-century bourgeois France, you would be far better served by plowing through the literarily mediocre but historically informative novels of Gustave Flaubert's journeyman contemporary, Eugène Sue. What has always been true of literature is even more so with regard to nonfiction, especially by authors who claim to know what the future holds in store for us. The history of financial predictions made at the height of stock market booms is a well-known illustration, whether it was the great economist Irving Fisher insisting shortly before the crash of 1929 that stock prices had reached "a permanently high plateau" or the not-so-great economist Kevin A. Hassett heralding Dow 36,000 -- the 1999 book he wrote with James K. Glassman -- a little more than a year before the dot-com bubble burst.

But financial manias pale (at least for those who have not bet their 401(k)s on such fanatically rosy assumptions) when compared with the techno-utopias that, at least since the middle of the 19th century, have periodically captured the collective imagination of the general public in the West -- and today litter bookstores with their rah-rah optimism. Too bad few remember Cicero's tart observation that he did not understand why, when two soothsayers met in the street, both did not burst out laughing. But if the history of utopian fantasies has taught us anything, it is that people find it hard to accept the fact of their unreality, preferring instead to hew to their hopes, whether profound, as with Marxism, or preposterous (and commercially self-interested), as with the vision of the carefully ordered futuristic cities famously laid out for a receptive public at the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair -- just as Adolf Hitler was about to blitzkrieg Poland.

If utopia has always been a kind of escape clause from the human condition, contemporary techno-utopianism represents a radical upping of the ante. For entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, creator of the X Prize to spur the development of passenger-carrying private spaceships and other innovations, not only will technology make it so that "during our lifetime … we're moving off this planet," but it will solve even the gravest problems that confront humanity -- climate change, species extinction, water and energy shortages. For futurist Ray Kurzweil, "nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence" by 2030, making it possible to "go beyond the limits of biology, and replace [an individual's] current 'human body version 1.0' with a dramatically upgraded version 2.0, providing radical life extension."

The Extraordinary Business of Life

Business is the most dynamic social institution known to mankind

by SANDY IKEDA

I heard it again from this year’s commencement speaker: the common mistake of thinking economics is just about business and making money. I know I’m not the only economics teacher who every year has to disabuse his students (and many of his own colleagues from other disciplines) of that same error. 

Economics is not business administration or accounting. Economics is a science that studies how people interact when the means at their disposal are scarce in relation to their ends. That includes business, of course, but a whole lot more as well.

Where Does That Notion Come From?

Well, for starters, perhaps from one of the greatest economists in history, Alfred Marshall. He opens his highly influential textbook, first published in 1890, with this statement:

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of well being. (Emphasis added)

The Friedmanite Corruption of Capitalism

Friedman shifted the foundation of the nation’s money supply from gold to T-bills

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

All throughout his new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, David A. Stockman is critical of the Chicago School, especially its intellectual leader during the last half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman. He captures the irony of the so-called free-market Chicago School on the very first page of his introduction, where he writes of the “capture of the state, especially its central bank, the Federal Reserve, by crony capitalist forces deeply inimical to free markets and democracy.”

This is a deep irony because it was Chicago School economists such as George Stigler who wrote of the “capture theory of regulation” when it came to the trucking industry, the airline industry, and many others. That is, they produced dozens of scholarly articles demonstrating how government regulatory agencies ostensibly created to regulate industry “in the public interest” are most often “captured” by the industry itself and then used not to protect the public but to enforce cartel pricing arrangements.

This was all good, solid, applied free-market economics, but at the same time the Chicago Schoolers ignored the biggest and most important regulatory capture of all — the creation of the Fed. The Chicago School simply ignored the obvious fact that the Fed was created as a governmental cartel enforcement mechanism for the banking industry — during an era when many other kinds of regulatory institutions were being created for the same purpose (i.e., “natural monopoly” regulation).

Not only did the Chicago School ignore this glaring omission from its “capture theory” tradition of research on regulation; it also ignored the realistic, economic analysis of political decision making that was an important part of the research of the two most famous Chicago School Nobel laureates next to Friedman — George Stigler and Gary Becker. Stigler and Becker published some important articles in the field that is better known as public choice, or the economics of political decision making. Friedman himself had long been an advisor to Republican politicians, so no one could credibly argue that Chicago School economists were naïve about the realities of politics.

The High Cost of “Free”

Paying people to be disabled, sick, reproduce, unemployed, unmarried, retired, poor, homeless, hapless, or drugged

by Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance

Why does a large portion of the population choose not to work when there are many jobs available? The answer is simple. If you can receive 2-3 times as much money from unemployment, disability, and/or welfare benefits (subsidized housing, food stamps, free cellphones, etc.) as you can from a temporary or part-time job, and live a life of leisure, why work? In 2011, the U.S. government spent over $800 billion[1] on this “welfare,” exceeding expenditures on Social Security or Medicare.

In the Denver arena where Mr. Obama gave his DNC 2008 acceptance speech, a woman in the audience became overwhelmed by the speech and said that she no longer needed to worry if she could make her car or mortgage payments because he would take care of it for her. In Cleveland, a woman claimed that she was going to vote for President Obama again because he gave her a free cellphone (along with a litany of other entitlement giveaways). Before you growl, you should know that the free cellphone program was instated by President Bush in 2008 through the FCC’s Universal Service Fund. Fees for these “free” cellphones are paid by all telecommunications service providers out of the revenue received from their paying customers. Despite the political rhetoric over the past half century, entitlements were actually highest during Republican administrations. The political allure of free is bi-partisan.

The political allure of free is so strong that an alarming number of people choose to become wards of the entitlement/welfare state rather than captain their own destiny. Economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute believes that Americans have become a nation of takers, threatening the self-reliance that has long characterized our national psyche. Eberstadt (2012, p. 4) presents data showing that entitlement payments to Americans, since 1960, have risen annually by 9.5 percent. He argues that over the past 50 years the ever-increasing array of transfer payments to Americans have risen 727 percent. In 2010 such payments alone totalled $2.3 trillion with Social Security (for old age and disability) accounting for 31 percent, Medicare 24 percent, Medicaid 18 percent, Income Maintenance 12 percent, other giveaways (free cell-phones, support for a broken education system, housing, the arts, etc.) 8 percent, and Unemployment Insurance 6 percent (Eberstadt 2012, C1-2). This has resulted in 49 percent of American households receiving one or more government transfer benefits (Eberstadt 2013); this amounts to 18 percent of all personal income and a burden of $7,400 for every American.

The Balance Sheet on Government Giveaways

Our economic analysis shows that retirees who worked for 40 years and then live 20 years past retirement will receive more than twice what they, and their employers, contributed over their lifetime of working. Only retirees who survive a decade or less after their retirement do not take more out of Social Security than they contributed. Most people will agree that the retirees should receive his/her Social Security benefits at retirement. But with people living longer, who will pay for all the additional benefits now promised? Most people who have not done their homework (including Congress) fail to realize that the numbers for Medicare benefits exceed those for Social Security. Since 1965, Medicare required less than a 3 percent contribution from a worker’s gross wages, yet most people receive over $250,000 in medical benefits before reaching the age of 74, assuming no catastrophic illness. You can do the math on your own wages, assuming a lifetime salary of $100,000 per year for all 40 working years, a worker will have paid in only $120,000 into the Medicare system. Congress, after agreeing to take care of everyone after retirement for the rest of their lives, has broken a sacred trust and used incoming contributions to fund other government expenditures, instead of letting the contributions build over the past 50 years.

The Paradox of Imperialism

State, War, and Imperialism

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The State

Conventionally, the state is defined as an agency with two unique characteristics. First, it is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction). That is, it is the ultimate arbiter in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Second, the state is a territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, it is an agency that unilaterally fixes the price citizens must pay for its provision of law and order.

Predictably, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in favor of the state. Instead of resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. Worse, while the quality of justice will fall under monopolistic auspices, its price will rise. Motivated like everyone else by self-interest but equipped with the power to tax, the state agents' goal is always the same: to maximize income and minimize productive effort.

Instead of concentrating on the internal consequences of the institution of a state, however, I will focus on its external consequences, i.e., foreign rather than domestic policy.

The Eurozone's Conspiracy Theories

The ultimate audacity of conspiracy mongers is to advertise themselves as victims of conventional wisdom

By Fabio Rafael Fiallo

Putting the blame of Europe's economic woes on sinister forces operating behind the scenes has always had its charm and its advocates. Suffice it to recall General de Gaulle's invectives against what he used to name the "gnomes of Zürich," i.e. the financial markets, guilty in his view of the travails of the French franc in the 1960s.

The crisis that the Eurozone is currently going through has provided a unique terrain for conspiracy theories to blossom one more time. A race is on among politicians and economists who try to identify which sly interests have created or prolonged the current economic turmoil in the southern countries of the Eurozone.

Unintended Consequences

The law of unintended consequences is at work always and everywhere

by Rob Norton

The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it.

The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” that end being the public interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” Smith wrote, “but from regard to their own self interest.”

Most often, however, the law of unintended consequences illuminates the perverse unanticipated effects of legislation and regulation. In 1692 the English philosopher John Locke, a forerunner of modern economists, urged the defeat of a parliamentary bill designed to cut the maximum permissible rate of interest from 6 percent to 4 percent. Locke argued that instead of benefiting borrowers, as intended, it would hurt them. People would find ways to circumvent the law, with the costs of circumvention borne by borrowers. To the extent the law was obeyed, Locke concluded, the chief results would be less available credit and a redistribution of income away from “widows, orphans and all those who have their estates in money.”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the famous French economic journalist Frédéric Bastiat often distinguished in his writing between the “seen” and the “unseen.” The seen were the obvious visible consequences of an action or policy. The unseen were the less obvious, and often unintended, consequences. In his famous essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” Bastiat wrote:

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.(1)

Bastiat applied his analysis to a wide range of issues, including trade barriers, taxes, and government spending.

The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton. In an influential article titled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” Merton identified five sources of unanticipated consequences. The first two—and the most pervasive—were “ignorance” and “error.”

Is Germany Really a ‘Weight on the World’?

Martin Wolf Complains About Germany

By Pater Tenebrarum

Few writers produce erudite-sounding nonsense with such unwavering regularity as Martin Wolf, an establishment-approved scribbler for the Financial Times. When he is not screeching for more money printing, he is belly-aching about 'trade imbalances', which allegedly condemn the world to economic hell. The latest example is his article 'Germany is a Weight on the World'.

This was written after the misguided Mercantilists apparently still populating the US treasury department (after decades of US trade deficits that have somehow completely failed to matter all this time) decided to complain about Germany's allegedly unconscionable trade surplus.

So here we are, more than a century after the fallacies of Mercantilism have been disproved by a plethora of economists, and people still allege that there is something evil in trade that requires even more government intervention than there already is.

Wolf writes: 

“The criticisms that hurt are those one suspects might be fair. This might explain the outrage from Berlin last week over the criticism by the US Treasury of Germany’s huge and vaunted trade surplus. But the Treasury is to be commended for stating what Germany’s partners dare not: “Germany has maintained a large current account surplus throughout the euro area financial crisis.” This “hampered rebalancing” for other eurozone countries and created “a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy”. The International Monetary Fund has expressed similar worries.” 

(emphasis added)

It took him just one paragraph to mention the tiresome deflation bogey again, but allow us to point out that all these 'worries' about 'Germany's surplus' implicitly and quite wrongly assume that countries are somehow equivalent to acting human beings. This is not the case.

If, say, an American spends $50,000 to buy a car from BMW, then what this trade tells tells us that an individual residing in the US valued a German-built BMW more than $50,000, while the managers of the company BMW valued the $50,000 more than the car they offered in exchange. Both parties to the exchange have gained, otherwise no trade would have taken place. Win-win!

But no, says Martin Wolf, wagging his finger, accompanied by a chorus of bureaucrats from the US treasury to the IMF, something evil has occurred! See, due to this misguided American individual buying a car that the misguided Germans have built so well that he prefers it not only over his $50,000 but also to cars built by others elsewhere, the US now has a $50,000 deficit with Germany! This is terrible! Someone must do something!

A cosmic Stockholm syndrome

What the State Fears Most - Revelations of the Truth about the State

By Robert Higgs   

Why does the U.S. government go to such extraordinary lengths to discredit, punish, and ruin persons such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, and—next in line, no doubt—Edward Snowden? The government alleges that these persons give aid and comfort to the nation’s enemies and endanger national security. In truth, however, these persons only “crime” is to tell the truth to the public about what the U.S. government is doing. By telling the truth about especially important matters, they endanger only the state, by exposing its lies and its hidden crimes for the world to see.

The rulers can continue to plunder and bully the great mass of people only as long as the people believe the Biggest of All Big Lies, which is that the government seeks to be, and is, their essential protector and general benefactor. The Ellsbergs, Assanges, and Snowdens, rare as they are, demonstrate that the government’s pose as protector and benefactor is nothing but a ruse to hide its essential nature and functioning. The only protection the rulers aim to provide us is the kind that a shepherd provides his sheep—protection from anything that interferes with his exclusive ability to determine how and when the sheep will be sheared and slaughtered.

The ultimate scholar

Free people are net producers

By Donald J. Boudreaux

Last Friday, marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the great economist Julian Simon. Although he never received the professional or popular acclaim of economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson or F.A. Hayek, Simon's insights and work rank with those of history's greatest social scientists.

Simon's most important contribution was to crystallize and explain an insight that even the best economists before him only glimpsed -- namely, that human beings in free societies are "the ultimate resource." Nothing -- not oil, not land, not gold, not microchips, nothing -- is as valuable to the material well-being of people as is human creativity and effort.

Indeed, there are no resources without human creativity to figure out how to use them and human effort actually to do so. Recognizing the truth of this insight renders silly the familiar term "natural resources."

No resources are "natural."

Take petroleum. What makes it a "resource". It's certainly not a resource naturally. If it were, American Indians would long ago have put it to good use. But they didn't. I suspect that for Pennsylvania's native population in, say, the year 1300, the dark, thick, smelly stuff that bubbled up in watering holes was regarded as a nuisance.

Petroleum didn't become a resource until human beings creatively figured out how to use it to satisfy some human desires and other human beings figured out how to extract it cost-effectively from the ground.

Or take land. For at least 80 percent of Homo sapiens' time on earth, land was merely something to trod and hunt upon. Land had no special value as a resource until about 10,000 years ago when someone figured out how to cultivate soil and to plant, tend and harvest crops. Only then did land achieve the kind of status and value that we associate with a resource.

The same, of course, is true for magnesium, iron ore, bauxite, feldspar, trees, New York harbor -- you name the "natural resource" and you'll realize that it is a resource only because human beings creatively determined how to use it productively.

An important implication of this realization that humans are "the ultimate resource" is that high and growing population -- in societies with sufficient freedom to allow individuals to experiment and create -- is desirable. If human creativity and effort are not only resources, but also the ultimate resource, surely it's foolish to lament large and growing supplies of it.

Helicopter Money and Stone-Age Banking

Half baked truths and fully baked lies

by Anthony de Jasay

Teaching aids can be treacherous instruments. Images, metaphors and little tales, addressed to all and by no means only to children, are designed to convey some truth in an easy to grasp and hard to forget. Some of these aids however, also contain half-truths and falsehoods. Worse still, some of them do this by design, deliberately implanting lies in people's minds. They are easier to plant than to eradicate once they have taken root.

A classic example is the representation of the national product as society's "cake". Some good fairy flies in overnight, deposits the cake on the communal table, ready for "society" to slice it and hand out the slices to its members. The next step is unsaid, but suggested almost irresistibly: everyone is entitled to the same size of slice as everyone else. Unequal shares would be "socially unjust"—which it presumably would be if the cake really fell from heaven, unaided by human hand. Once it waits on the table, ready to be sliced, it is all too easy too ignore that human hands had first to bake it.

Helicopter money is a less insidious, but no less misleading example of the wrong sort of teaching aid. When the economy is producing at less than a comfortable rate, with capacity utilisation at less than 90 and unemployment at more than 5 or 6 per cent, it stands to reason that easy remedies must be available to put this right and only a government of retarded half-wits will fail to reach for one. It needs nothing more clever and complicated than using helicopter money. It can print a few hundred tons of banknotes, load them into helicopters and have then fly up and down the country, letting the money pour down like blissful rain in a drought. People will pick up the money, quickly spend most of it, and add the rest to their savings. Consumption, investment and the production to match them will rise to the desired capacity level and, like the pump once it has been primed, will carry on at that level. Should it fall short, the government can always dispatch a few more helicopters with cargoes of fresh money. Admittedly, some of the money would be spent on extra imports and may also absorb goods that would otherwise been exported, but these leakages will only siphon off a small part of the beneficial irrigation of the economy.

However, for much of the non-economist public, all this is a little too good to be true. The graphic image of the "velocity of circulation" of money, drawn by Irving Fisher as a teaching aid to his quantity theory, is still lurking in the sub-conscious.(1) Money, of course, has no "velocity" in the physical sense; it may stay with the same owner for a long time, or it can pass from one owner to the next at the speed of light, as the history of great depressions and great inflations has shown. Nevertheless, the idea of money moving around with a velocity of its own lives on in the mind of the lay public. It mistrusts helicopter money as blissful rain. Instead, it sees it as a fuse that will trigger off inflation before we know where we are. Fear of it might well nullify the good the spraying of the parched land with banknotes could be hoped to do. Teaching aid would be working against teaching aid.

He who sees that "helicopter money" has the symbolic form of "quantitative easing" uses it to explain how it works. In fact, it works quite differently. Instead of spraying with banknotes, the traders of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York are buying securities, primarily U.S. Treasury bonds, at an annual rate of one trillion dollars or about 6 or 7 per cent of U.S. national income. The sellers are paid by credits added to their balances at the Federal Reserve System. In plain language, this is the Fed "printing money". What the lay public overlooks and the commentators fail to mention, however, is that while the Fed is issuing a trillion dollars of new money, it also takes out of the economy a trillion dollar's worth of securities that are the closest thing to money in the spectrum of assets. Both the assets and the liabilities of the Fed increase by a trillion, but those of the economy do not change. Only their composition is altered a little, holders of securities that yield them interest of between near-zero and 2 per cent willingly sell them to the Fed in exchange for money yielding zero. Manifestly, they are not rushing to spend this money, nor even a significant part of it, on consumer goods. Judging by how the stock markets are rising, some of it is invested in shares in industry and commerce, and the indirect effect is a potential stimulus to both consumption and investment. How the stimulus works out depends on many things. One of them, alas, is the instinctive mistrust and fear that the poorly understood "quantitative easing" is the same as helicopter money and must come to some dire end. London and Tokyo are copying the Fed and Frankfurt differs more in form than in substance, so that if a dire end must come, it will come to us all. It need not come, unless by our mistrust and lack of clear thought we bring about its coming.

By quantitative easing, the authorities gently press the accelerator. By partially dismantling the banking system to punish it for its post-2007 misbehaviour, they are standing on the brake pedal. They seem surprised and disappointed that the banks are shrinking their balance sheets, pulling in their horns, and starving small business of credit. Except for household names, non-bank sources of credit in Europe are embryonic and the withdrawal of bank credit from medium and small firms is one of the chief reasons for Europe's present stagnation.

The Fantasy World of the Statist

Fantasies explode on contact with reality

by james holmes

Democrats are now requesting, nay expecting, nay demanding that Republicans cooperate with them to save ObamaCare by reforming it. For example, President Obama's former economic advisor Larry Summers blames the failure of ObamaCare on "the systematic effort of the president’s opponents to delegitimize and undermine the project."

"It is disingenuous for those who stood ready to turn any regulatory detail into an attack ad to profess outrage when guidance was not provided during an election campaign. It is hypocritical for those who held up confirmations of key officials with responsibility for managing federal health-care programs and whose behavior deterred many people from coming into government to lash out at the incompetence of government management. And it is indefensible to refuse to appropriate money to carry out a program and then attack it for being under-resourced.

"There is a line that must be respected between political opposition and conscious subversion. Everyone understands that when the country is at war, even a war a person may oppose, vigorous oversight is essential, but, in the end, there is an obligation to support American troops. In the same way, history will not judge kindly those who, having lost political debates over policy, go beyond vigorous oversight and seek to subvert enacted programs."

Let's leave aside the dishonesty of blaming a "refusal to appropriate money" for the fact that the administration couldn't build a website after spending between $175 and $300 million. Consider the overall message: that political opposition to ObamaCare as the equivalent of wartime subversion.

This is the consequence of supporting a major piece of legislation with a lie. When things go wrong, you have to keep on maintaining that lie through attempts to suppress the truth by suppressing the political opposition.

This is a vile argument, but it's also a bluff. It comes, not from a position of power, but from a position of desperation.

Did Summers mention funding and cooperation from the states? Consider what has happened in Oregon.

"With a reputation as a pacesetter in health care, Oregon laid out bold plans for complying with the federal overhaul.

"The state wouldn’t just create a health insurance exchange, a complicated undertaking in its own right. Oregon officials set out to build one of the biggest and best in the nation—a model that other states would want to copy.

"But more than a month after Cover Oregon’s online enrollment was supposed to launch, reality is lagging far behind Gov. John Kitzhaber’s grand ideas. The online system still doesn’t work, and the exchange has yet to enroll a single person in health insurance."

Oregon has spent more then $300 million so far to accomplish, basically, nothing.