Krugman vs. McCarthy

Posted on May 22, 2016 by Loquitur Veritatem

Arnold Kling characterizes Paul Krugman as “Joe McCarthy with a Nobel Prize.” I appreciate and share the disgust with Krugman that spurs Kling’s statement. But I must note that McCarthy was an enemy of America’s enemies; Krugman is one of America’s enemies.

We Owe It to Ourselves

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek is having a good time with Paul Krugman’s assertion that “U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.” This bold claim comes in the midst of yet another of Krugman’s seemingly infinite number of columns touting deficit spending as a panacea for what ails the American economy.

Boudreaux’s posts (to date) are here, here, here, here, here, and here. I will not try to match Boudreaux’s deep and weighty commentary on Krugman’s outrageous assertion. Instead, I offer the following non-academic observations for Mr. Krugman’s consideration:

1. Who are “we”? If government borrows money and spends it on goodies for Congressman X, Y, and Z’s districts, how do I get my cut? Or does the happiness generated in Congressman X, Y, and Z’s districts simply radiate in waves across the country, eventually reaching me and making me feel better?

2. I know of no magical power that enables government to ensure that deficit spending absorbs unemployed resources without diverting already-employed resources from productive uses. So this leads me to ask why it wouldn’t be better to take the borrowed money and flush it down a toilet, rather than sending it to Congressman X, Y, and Z’s districts.

3. Anyway, if the borrowed money makes (some) people in Congressman X, Y, and Z’s districts better off, why is it that “we” (i.e. the rest of us and/or our descendants) end up repaying the debt that made those others better off? I don’t understand how I “owe it to myself” when (a) I didn’t ask to borrow the money and (b) I gained nothing as a result of the borrowing.

You might claim that my personal wishes are of no account because Congress and the president are duly elected by majorities of voters. But that is tantamount to saying that Congress and the president possess a kind of omniscient super-consciousness that somehow overrides the harm, hate, and discontent that flow from their acts. I don’t think you’d agree with that, given your views about the many and various “sins” committed by the Bush administration, usually with the connivance of Congress. Or, perhaps only Democrats possess omniscient super-consciousness. Yes, that must be it.

With regard to my not having gained as a result of borrowing, perhaps you think that I ought to be happy simply because (some) people in Congressman X, Y, and Z’s districts are happier as a result of deficit spending. Perhaps I should be, but I am just a curmudgeon who has 12 grandchildren who will be less well off because of the extra taxes that I, their parents, and/or they will pay for the privilege of making some strangers happier. Are you telling me that you — or anyone — has a way of making everyone happier by making a lot of people less happy? Or are you telling me that you don’t care who is made less happy as long as government does what you think it should do? My money is on the latter proposition.

If I do, indeed, owe some portion of the U.S. debt to myself, I hereby forgive my share of the debt and absolve myself of any obligation to pay it.

The Arrogance of (Some) Economists

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

Paul Krugman, former economist, writes:

Think of the government budget as involving tradeoffs similar to those an individual household makes. On one side, there are all kinds of things the government could be doing, from dropping freedom bombs to providing children with dental care; think of each of these things as involving a certain marginal benefit per additional dollar spent, with the marginal benefit declining in the total amount spent on each concern. On the other side, raising revenue has a cost, both the direct cost of the money taken from taxpayers and the possible reduction in incentives from higher tax rates.

What the government should do, in this case, is set all the marginals equal: the marginal benefit of an additional dollar spent on bombs, dental work, national parks, soup kitchens, etc, should all be equal, and this common marginal benefit should equal the marginal cost of raising an additional dollar of revenue.

Krugman must know that the benefits of government programs are unlikely to flow to the persons who bear the costs of those programs. Even if the benefits were to be allocated in such a manner, it would be pure arrogance to assume that income-allocation decisions should be taken from individuals and placed in the hands of government official and bureaucrats. That, of course, is precisely the assumption that underlies government spending. And those who share that assumption, are guilty of the same arrogance. Krugman is so guilty that he should be serving time in a special hell of his own — being forced to listen to the recorded lectures of Milton Friedman, for example.

What is the problem with the kind of cost-benefit analysis prescribed by Krugman? It is this: If you take a dollar from me to make X happier, you have made me less happy, and X’s greater happiness doesn’t compensate for my greater unhappiness. I don’t even have to be a selfish curmudgeon to object to the transfer of my dollar to X. It could be that I wanted to give the dollar to one of my grandchildren, which would have made both me and my grandchild happy. As for X, I couldn’t care less. And it is presumptuous of Krugman (or anyone else) to suggest (even by implication) that it is okay to take a dollar from me just to make X (or a government bureaucrat) happier.

Government, in short, is a tool used by arrogant, self-serving individuals to impose their preferences on others. That is why government should be restricted to a night-watchman role — protecting citizens from predators, foreign and domestic. Anything more than that is social engineering.

The Keynesian Fallacy and Regime Uncertainty

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

In “A Keynesian Fantasy Land,” I gave six reasons for the failure of “stimulus” spending to stimulate the economy, despite the insistence of leftists and left-wing economists that economic salvation is to be found in bigger government. The reasons, which I elaborate in the earlier post, are these:

1. “leakage” to imports

2. disincentivizing effects of government borrowing and spending (regime uncertainty)

3. timing and targeting problems (spending that is too late and misdirected)

4. reversed causality (lower aggregate demand as symptom, not cause)

5. the negative consequences of bail-outs

6. the unaccounted for complexity of human behavior

An article by Casey B. Mulligan, “Simple Analytics and Empirics of the Government Spending Multiplier and Other ‘Keynesian’ Paradoxes,” underscores the futility of “stimulus” spending. These are among Mulligan’s conclusions:

From a partial equilibrium perspective, it would be surprising if government purchases did not crowd out at least some private consumption, and that a reduction in factor supply did not result in less output. Yet some “New Keynesian” models, not to mention much public policy commentary, claim that today’s economy has turned this partial equilibrium reasoning on its head, even while it might have been historically valid. Among other things, individual firms and the aggregate private sector are alleged to leave their production invariant to changes in factor supply conditions during this recession. This paper shows how the government spending multiplier and the “paradox of toil” are related in theory, and examines evidence from this recession on the output effects of factor supply…

This paper does not contain a numerical estimate of the government purchases multiplier. However, its examination of data exclusively from the 2008-9 recession suggests that sectoral and aggregate employment and output vary with supply conditions in much the same way they did before the recession. The results contradict Keynesian claims that the government purchases multiplier would be significantly greater during the recession than it was before 2008, suggesting instead that historical estimates of the effects of fiscal policies are informative about fiscal policy effects in more recent years. Moreover, the supply incentives created by government spending cannot be ignored merely because 2008 and 2009 were recession years; rather incentives mattered as much as ever. Government purchases likely moved factors away from activities that would have supported private purchases. Unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other expanding means-tested government programs likely reduced employment and output during this recession, in much the same way they did in years past.

Compounding the futility of “stimulus” spending is the general climate of economic fear that Obama’s policies have engendered; for example:

Thanks to Regulatory Burdens, We’ve Got Both A Creditless Recovery and A Jobless Recovery (at Carpe Diem)

Why aren’t we seeing a jobs recovery? Maybe it’s ObamaCare’s fault (at Questions and Observations)

Home Depot Founder: Obama’s Regulations Are Killing Businesses (at Commentary)

As John Steele Gordon points out,

[t]he greatest periods of American economic growth came when taxes were very low—such as in the 19th century—or being lowered and simplified, as in the 1920s, 60s, and 80s. Inescapably, to tax wealth creation is to discourage it. But there is a large and politically potent segment of the population that, because its interests are now aligned with those of the government, seek to promote dependency through entitlements. This segment favors ever higher taxes (although they disguise the fact by demanding that only “the rich” pay their “fair share.”) But, as with regulation, high taxes inevitably produce low growth—and low growth threatens entitlements in the long term. If the United States remains in the doldrums for several more years without hope of a real turnaround, Medicare as it is currently constituted will go bankrupt in 2019. Raising taxes to prevent that will only slow overall growth, and that will actually defeat the purpose of saving Medicare.

So there is really no alternative to pursuing policies that encourage economic growth through private action by liberating the forces of the free market. A presidential candidate who finds a way to ground his economic policies in this core truth—and harnesses the idea to a larger and more optimistic understanding of the United States, both past and future, and resists the take-your-medicine tone that dominates the conservative policy discussion of the present moment—will be able to draw a sharp and effective contrast with the failures of the Obama years. (“Growth: The Only Way out of This Mess,” Commentary, July 2011)

But there is no point in cutting taxes unless government spending is cut — and cut drastically — for government spending, along with regulation, is the real drag on the economy. Only in the left’s magical thinking is government spending a good thing. In reality, it is a destructive force — even during recessions and depressions.

A Keynesian Fantasy Land

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

This post examines practical reasons for the failure of “stimulus” to stimulate and the “multiplier” to multiply. The deeper truth is that the Keynesian multiplier is a mathematical fiction, as explained here, and government spending is in fact destructive of economic growth, as discussed here and in some of the posts listed at the end.

“Liberal” economists and pundits complain incessantly that the recovery from the Great Recession is weak, and in jeopardy, because the federal government hasn’t spent “enough” money. (See this for some examples of the “liberal” view.) How much is “enough” for Paul Krugman et al.? It is always more than the government spends, of course.

Why should that be? The blindingly obvious answer — but not obvious to Krugman and company — is that demand-side fiscal policy (i.e., government “stimulus” spending) is ineffective. If the economy depends on government spending, how does one explain the decades after the Civil War, when government spent less than 10 percent of GDP (vs. today’s 40 percent), while America’s economy grew faster than at any time in its history? It took World War II and regime change (the disruption of the New Deal by the war) to end the Great Depression. Mr. Roosevelt’s adoption of Mr. Keynes’s hole-digging prescription (the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar make-work projects) had nothing to do with it. Mr. Roosevelt may have been an excellent marketeer, but he was a dismal economic engineer.

This is not to reject supply-side fiscal policy: tax-rate reductions. When tax-rate reductions are prospectively permanent — as opposed to one-time tax rebates and “holidays” — they can and do spur economic growth. Christina Romer, former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, once proved it — though she developed a convenient case of amnesia when she became a proponent of “stimulus.”

As any reputable economist will tell you, however, the best that one can expect of a temporary increase in government spending is a temporary increase in economic activity; it is a stop-gap until the economy recovers on its own. (And a reputable economist, unlike Krugman, will also tell you that a permanent increase in government spending diverts resources from productive uses — uses that yield economic growth and satisfy actual economic wants — toward less-productive and counter-productive ones, including the creation of paper-shuffling, regulatory bureaucracies.)

Despite the promises of Obama, Romer, and company, the “stimulus” has evidently failed to do much — if anything — to alleviate the Great Recession and its lingering aftermath. (See this, this, and this, for example.) Thus the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Krugman and company — who want to replicate the failure on a grander scale.

WHY THE “STIMULUS” FAILED TO STIMULATE: GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

What went wrong? Anthony de Jasay offers a piece of the explanation:

…In Keynesian parlance there is the multiplier effect and it is greater than 1. As long as there is spare capacity (unemployment) in the economy, the government ought to go on spending more, working through the multiplier, because the extra private saving takes care of the government dissaving and the extra consumption is, so to speak, a welcome windfall gain. Timidly refusing to generate it is criminal waste.

Despite truculent voices to the contrary, the Keynesian logic is faultless in that the conclusions do follow from the assumptions. Why it does not really work and why it singularly failed to work in 2009-2010 and maybe beyond, is that other things do not remain equal. Part of the extra spending stimulus fails to stimulate domestic income because as much as 0.3 of the multiplier might leak out through extra imports. Much of the rest may be offset by industry taking fright of the rising budget deficit and reducing investment, and consumers striving to reduce their indebtedness producing some saving to balance the government’s dissaving. The total effect of higher imports and lower investment might be a multiplier barely higher, or maybe even lower, than 1 and the stimulus stimulating nothing except the national debt. This is not the fault of Keynes but of those whose macro-economics exist in a fantasy land. (Library of Economics and Liberty, “Micro, Macro, and Fantasy Economics,” December 6, 2010)

Generally,

[t]he available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. (Robert J. Barro and Charles J. Redlick, “Stimulus Spending Doesn’t Work,” WSJ Online, October 1, 2009)

(For more on the subject see Barro’s “Government Spending Is No Free Lunch,” WSJ Online, January 22, 2009.)

WHY “STIMULUS” FAILS: SPECIFIC REASONS

Altogether, there are six reasons for the ineffectiveness of Keynsesian “stimulus.”

1. The “leakage” to imports, as indicated by de Jasay.

2. The disincentivizing effects of government borrowing and spending, to which de Jasay alludes.

As de Jasay suggests, industry (and the high-income earners who finance it) are being cautious about the implications of additional government debt. As I say here,

the sophisticat[ed] … institutions and persons who have the greatest interest in government’s actions [are] large corporations and persons in high-income brackets. They will react to government borrowing as if it would affect them and their heirs (corporate and individual).

That is to say, even if additional debt does not crowd out private-sector borrowing to finance business expansion, it will nevertheless inhibit investments in business expansion. This inhibiting effect is compounded by the reasonable expectation that many items in a “stimulus” package will become permanent fixtures in the government’s budget.

3. The timing-targeting problem.

The lag between the initial agitation for “stimulus” and its realization. In the extreme, the lag can be so great as to have no effect other than to divert employed resources from private to government uses. But even where there is a relatively brief lag, “stimulus” spending is essentially wasted if the result is simply to divert already employed resources from private to government uses.

The timing-targeting problem is one that strident Keynesians and their unsophisticated disciples in the media seem not to understand or care about. (They are happy as long as government “does something,” regardless of the cost.) The problem arises from the fundamental flaw in the Keynesian analysis: Economic output is portrayed as a homogeneous commodity, one that can be characterized in terms of aggregate demand (AD) and aggregate supply (AS). Accordingly, in the Keynesian orthodoxy, all it takes to stimulate AD is to pump in some additional government spending (dG), and the rest takes care of itself.

Arnold Kling calls it “hydraulic” macroeconomics:

Once upon a time, Joe lived in Keynesiana, where he was a representative agent.

Joe worked in a GDP factory, making GDP. Every Monday morning, he went to work, and he worked five days a week. He was paid $1 for every 24-minute segment he worked, and he worked 100 segments (40 hours), so he earned $100 a week. Every Friday afternoon, Joe cashed his paycheck and went to the GDP factory outlet, where he spent it all on GDP.

One day, Joe decided that he needed to accumulate some savings. He made up a rule for himself. Knowing that he needed to consume at least $40 of GDP each week, he decided that his rule would be to save 20 percent of everything he earned over and above that $40. So the first week, that meant saving 20 percent of $60, or $12. So he cashed his $100 paycheck, but that Friday afternoon he only spent $88.

Next Monday, morning, Joe’s boss had some news. “A funny thing happened last week. We sold 12 percent less GDP than usual. So this week, we’re gonna put you on a short week. You work 88 segments, instead of 100.”

Joe was disappointed, because this meant he would only be paid $88 this week. Sticking to his new rule, he resolved to save 20 percent of $48, or $9.60. So that Friday afternoon, he cashed his $88 paycheck and spent $78.40.

Next Monday morning, Joe’s boss said. “Well, golly, it looks like we sold even less GDP last week. I’m afraid we’ll have to cut you back to 78.40 segments this week.” Still following his rule, Joe resolved to save 20 percent of $38.40, or $7.68. So he spent only $70.72 at the GDP factory outlet that Friday.

Seeing where this was going, the country asked Krug Paulman, the famous economist, what to do. He said, “The stupid people are saving too much. We need government to spend what the idiots are not spending.” So the government borrowed $29.28 from Joe and spent it at the GDP factory outlet.

Now, when Joe came to work on Monday morning, his boss said, “Good news, we sold 100 percent of what we used to sell, so you can work 100 segments this week.” Sticking to his rule, Joe saved $12 on Friday afternoon. But the government borrowed the $12 and spent it at the GDP factory outlet. They all lived happily ever after. (Library of Economics and Liberty, “Hydraulic Macro: A Fable,” August 30, 2009)

But in reality, economic activity is far more complex than that. One very important part of that reality the vast variety of goods and services changing hands, in response to constantly shifting tastes, preferences, technologies, and costs. The real economy bears no resemblance to the “hydraulic” one in which the homogeneous “fluid” is units of GDP. For “stimulus” — an increase in government spending (dG) — to generate an real increase GDP significantly greater than dG, several stringent conditions must be met:

a. dG must lead directly to the employment of resources that had been idled by a downturn in economic activity (or newly available resources that otherwise would lay idle), therefore eliciting the production of additional goods for delivery to consumers and businesses.

b. Accordingly, government functionaries must be able to distinguish between unemployment that occurs as a result of normal (and continuous) structural changes in the economy and unemployment that occurs because of a general slowdown in economic activity.

c. To the extent that the preceding conditions are satisfied, dG may be used to restore employment if government functionaries do the following things:

Ensure that dG is used to purchase goods and services that would have been produced in the absence of a general slowdown in economic activity.

Ensure that dG is used by those persons, businesses, and governmental units that have become unable to buy those goods and services because of a general slowdown in economic activity.

Allowing for shifts in tastes, preferences, technologies, etc., adjust the issuance, allocation, and use of dG so that goods and services are produced in accordance with those shifts in taste, etc.

Reduce dG as the demand for unemployed resources rises, in order to avoid the distorting and disincentivizing effects of inflation.

To the extent that dG is less than on-time and on-target, there is “leakage,” which causes the multiplier to recede toward a value of 1. It can easily slide below 1 — as Barro has found — because of the “leakage” to imports and the disincentivizing effects of government borrowing and spending.

4. Causality: Inadequate AD as symptom, not cause.

The fourth reason for the failure of the “stimulus” to stimulate is that it is does not address the cause of the drop in AD. A drop in AD usually is caused by an exogenous event, and that exogenous event usually is a credit crisis. Pumping money into the economy — especially when it results in the bidding up the prices of already employed resources — does not reinflate the punctured credit bubble that caused the slowdown.

If a credit crunch arises from a sharp rise in the rate of home-mortgage defaults — as in the case of the Great Recession — the obvious way to “solve” the problem is to prop up the defaulting borrowers and their lenders, and to do so quickly.

But, in practice, the propping up is hit-and-miss, and the misses have drastic consequences. Consider, for example, the decision not to bail out Lehman Brothers and the effects of that decision on financial markets.

Which leads into the fifth reason…

5. Inequity, moral hazard, and their consequences.

Any kind of “stimulus” that targets particular individuals and firms, in an effort to rectify their failures of judgment, has adverse political and economic effects.

Favorable treatment of defaulters and failing companies generates considerable popular resentment, which — in the present instance — has found a vocal and politically potent outlet in the Tea Party movement. Favorable treatment of defaulters and failing companies also creates moral hazard; that is, it encourage unwise risk-taking that can (and probably will) spark future crises, leading the government to assume more obligations and impose more regulations, in a futile effort to change human nature.

All of this adds up to a climate of political contention and financial pessimism — conditions that militate against consumer confidence and business expansion.

6. The human factor.

The preceding five reasons for the ineffectiveness of Keynesian “stimulus” point to a sixth, fundamental reason: the human factor.

Models are supposed to mirror reality, not the other way around. Those who cling to the Keynesian multiplier would like the world to comply with it. But the world does not because it is filled with people, whose behavior is not determined (or described) by a simplistic model but by their responses to incentives, their political predispositions, their informed and reasonable skepticism about the consequences of government intervention in economic matters, and — above all else — their fallibility. And, believe or not, government officials and bureaucrats are no less fallible than the “ordinary” citizens whose lives they would like to organize.

The human factor is an inconvenient truth. But “liberals,” in their usual arrogance and ignorance prefer magical thinking to reality. Belief in the Keynesian multiplier is a prime example of magical thinking.

Competition Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

Paul Krugman, a defunct Keynesian, certainly isn’t the first person to decry competition. Krugman’s motive is somewhat different than the motives of others who think of competition as a dirty word, so let’s get Krugman out of the way.

Krugman’s ideal world is one in which the great socialist collective operates under the guidance and tutelage of his omniscience, which extends beyond his former discipline of economics into all aspects of human endeavor and the psychological underpinnings thereof. How else could he know, for example, that Republicans are unremittingly evil and the cause of all evil, not excluding the acts of mad men. Krugman’s problem, of course, is his heavy emotional investment in statism, which leads him to respond like Pavlov’s dog (slobbering and all) whenever anyone says an unkind or even doubtful word about the state’s wisdom or beneficence.

Enough of Krugman, as I once said, prematurely. Onward to competition, that dirty word.

Why is it dirty? First, thanks to “thinkers” of Krugman’s ilk, the word has acquired an adjective, which one hears in one’s mind even when it isn’t attached to the word by the person who uses it. The adjective is cut-throat. Cut-throat competition

refers to situations when competition results in prices that do not chronically or for extended periods of time cover costs of production, particularly fixed costs. This may arise in secularly declining or “sick” industries with high levels of excess capacity or where frequent cyclical or random demand downturns are experienced.

In other words, the term cut-throat competition has nothing to do with rapacious behavior. It is simply a picturesque description of a situation in which some firms are bound to fail, leaving survivors whose behavior should be characterized as persevering, not cut-throat. “Cut-throat” has nevertheless become ineradicably associated with “competition,” which has thereby acquired a strongly negative connotation among “average” persons, defunct Keynesians, the mainstream media, and “liberals” in general.

The other negative connotation of competition is its association with zero-sum games. In the extreme, there is gladiatorial, death-to-the-loser combat. In the somewhat less violent entertainments of the present epoch there are season-ending, winner-takes-trophy events: the Stanley Cup playoffs of ice hockey, the World Series of baseball, the Super Bowl of football, and so on, unto the Little League World Series and who knows what else.

The “average” person (Average Joe) enjoys winner-takes-trophy events and movies that employ death-to-the-loser plot devices, even as he deplores economic competition. That is so because competition as entertainment reinforces the view that competition inevitably generates losers. And yet, the competition of the arena — in its modern, non-lethal incarnations — isn’t really about the winner taking all. The winner takes a trophy and some extra moolah, but the losers — even the members of the teams that finish last and never get to post-season play — don’t lose. In fact, they earn rather nice salaries (often stupendous ones), usually for many years before their declining skills cause them to yield (gracefully or otherwise) to younger players.

Average Joe — unlike the athlete, aspiring performer, or trial lawyer — doesn’t like to think that he is in some kind of competition when he goes to work every day. But he is, even if his work doesn’t involve an explicit contest with, say, a co-worker to see who can throw a football more accurately in the face of charging defensive players, write the best computer program, serve the most customers, turn out the most readable technical manuals, and so on.

The element of competition in the workaday world is unavoidable, not only for the workers on the front lines but also for those in the back room. It is also inevitable for bosses all the way up the chain of command, and for financial backers (whose ownership shares and and loans are on the line).

The element of competition arises because of consumer sovereignty. In the final analysis, it is up to producers (workers, bosses, and business owners) to satisfy consumers — who are also producers. Every instant of every day there are changes in tastes, preferences, technologies, production methods, and other factors that determine the characteristics, quantities, and prices of goods and services that are bought and sold, and thus the rewards to those who are engaged in the production and financing of those goods and services. All of that constant change takes place in an economy that is generally growing, and some sectors of which grow even as others sink into recession or depression. Growth does not eliminate or soften competition because, when the veil of money is stripped away, growth depends heavily on the addition of resources (labor and capital of various kinds), which must be rewarded in accordance with the value of their contributions to economic output. Whether or not the economy is growing, the earnings of producers (and, therefore, their opportunities to consume) depend on their ability to satisfy consumers, who have myriad choices about how to allocate their incomes. In turn, the incomes of every economic actor, from janitor to chairman of the board to multi-billionaire shareholder, are determined by their respective contributions to consumer satisfaction.

The outcome of competition, contrary to the connotations of the word, isn’t a tally of winners and losers. Every “player” is a winner because he is rewarded, to some degree, for his efforts. The notion that there are winners and losers arises, wrongly, from the assumption that everyone is entitled to the same reward, regardless of how valuable his contribution is to others. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” is a long-discredited economic philosophy that leads to less for everyone (politicians, bureaucrats, and their favorites excepted). A low-income wage-earner may envy a Warren Buffet or Bill Gates (though that envy seems not to extend to the wage-earner’s favorite, highly paid athletes), but envy is in such ample supply that it is worthless, except when politicians decide to reward it, in the name of (cheap) compassion.

Which brings me to the political side of the story. It is the inevitability of competition — and the unwonted fear of it — that leads individuals and groups to seek shelter from it. Moreover, the general perception of competition as “bad” makes it easier for government to usurp private functions and set up in their place nearly impregnable bureaucracies. As a result of these impulses and perceptions, almost every product and service is made more costly by regulatory restrictions, licensing laws, import restrictions, tariffs, pro-union legislation, affirmative-action laws (which raise production costs by forcing employers to hire and promote second-best employees), and so on. At the same, the ability of consumers (as voters) to remove the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for such depredations is inhibited by civil-service regulations (which protect incompetent bureaucrats from more than mere changes of administration) and campaign-finance laws (which were designed by incumbents to protect their incumbencies).

All of this comes at a high cost to those Americans who must actually compete in the real economy. Average Joe doesn’t lose because of competition, he loses because so many of his fellow Americans have succeeded in insulating themselves from it. Therein lies true greed.

In summary, competition is a great thing. By rewarding invention, innovation, risk-taking, education and training, hard work, and all of the other things that contribute to economic growth. competition enables us — all of us — to enjoy a higher standard of living. And we would be much better off they we are if there were fewer individuals sitting on the sidelines, watching the competitors and taking an unearned cut of their earnings.

There’s nothing wrong with competition but the connotations it has acquired. It shouldn’t be a dirty word.

Government vs. Community

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

Tibor Machan reminds us that, contra Paul Krugman, government is not community:

Finally Paul Krugman, Princeton University Nobel Laureate in economic science and columnist for The New York Times, has come clean about his “moral” position (TNYT, January 14, 2011). He has admitted that he doesn’t believe that when you earn something, you own it….

If my life doesn’t belong to me–if the norm the Declaration of Independence identifies as universal, namely, that every human being has a right to his or her life, is false–then what is true? Does my life belong to the government? If we recall that government is a group of individuals to whom a certain social role has been delegated–namely, the role of securing the rights of the citizenry–the claim that government owns our lives and resources means nothing else but that these individuals in government own our lives and resources.

But that is very odd–why would those people be in the privileged position of owning us and what to all appearances belongs to us while we, also human beings and with equal rights, do not own our lives and resources? This makes no sense….

The idea that we belong to government is obscene and harks back to an age when Caesars, monarchs, tsars, Pharaohs and such were believed to have been given their realm by God and everything within that realm, including all the human beings, therefore belonged to them. Later these slaves and serfs began to be called subjects, implying that they were all subject to the will of the government. This is were serfdom and even taxation have their origin….

An essential aspect of any bona fide moral position is that it must be practiced voluntarily, not because someone–e. g., government–holds a gun to one’s head and coerces one to do what is right. That doesn’t count as doing the right thing, so any such policy is literally demoralizing. It robs people of the opportunity to be morally good (or bad, of course).

A society that’s fit for human habitation must not have policies that prevent citizens from exercising moral judgment. So, OK, assume for a moment that we should devote ourselves entirely to serving other people, to serving the public good. If, however, all of this is accomplished through governmental coercion like taxation, regulation, regimentation, and so forth, there can’t be anything moral about it. So Dr. Krugman’s so called moral stance isn’t one at all. It leaves no room for morality because it makes all purportedly moral conduct involuntary, imposed by rulers and not a matter of one’s own free will.

Sharing at the point of a gun is not sharing, it is theft. When government forces “sharing,” it removes opportunities for true acts of kindness and charity. It is such acts that help to foster a sense of community. And a sense of community is essential to civility.

Government interventions in economic affairs are therefore destructive of the social bonds that inhibit anti-social and criminal conduct. It follows that government interventions in economic affairs lead to increasingly expensive and oppressive efforts by government to regulate social conduct.

Enough of Krugman

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Loquitur Veritatem

Paul Krugman, who has descended to the use of survey statistics, declares that small businesses aren’t hiring because their sales are down (“It’s Demand, Stupid“). Krugman has two points to make:

Small businesses aren’t cowed by regime uncertainty, taxes, and red tape, and all of those other “wonderful” things about which Krugman knows nothing.

The way to get out of the recession is to double down on “stimulus.”

Krugman’s first point aligns with his stubborn insistence — against mountains of evidence to the contrary– that government is benign and free-markets are malign.

Krugman’s second point aligns with his simplistic Keynsian view of the world, in which GDP is a homogeneous substance, like water, the level of which can be raised or lowered in a trice by government spending or the lack thereof. There’s no room in the Krugmanesque view of the world for real firms, run by real people, staffed by real people, producing myriad goods and services in myriad ways, and subject to the whims of Washington and thousands of State and local governments.

To say that small-businesspersons are reluctant to hire because there is inadequate demand for their products is like saying that a sick person is lying down because he doesn’t feel well. It’s a banal and incomplete interpretation of the situation. In any event, the fact that small businesses — and businesses in general — haven’t resumed hiring at the pre-recession rate is not an argument for mindless pump-priming. If it is an argument for anything, it is an argument for government to get out of the way.

Were the government a business, with a strong incentive to perform services of value to willing buyers, it would get out of the business of managing the economy and stick to what it does best: dispense justice and defend the nation. That it often fails to do those things well should be a clue to the Krugmans of the world about their risible faith in the wise, omniscient, and efficient government of their imagining.

There’s plenty more out there to indict and convict Krugman and his insistently wrong-headed view of the world. Here’s a minute sample:

Krugman and DeLong, a Prevaricating Pair
Professor Krugman Flunks Economics
The Negative Consequences of Government Expenditure
Regime Uncertainty: Behind the Reports of Economic Doom
Finally, Some Evidence from Krugman
Reviewing Krugman
In Pursuit of Empirical Macroeconomics
Krugman: Republicans Are Fiscally Irresponsible for Pushing Smaller Tax Cut, Threatening Much Larger One

To write about Krugman is to grant him the favor of being taken seriously. Basta!

Rawls Meets Bentham

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Loquitur Veritatem

Steven Landsburg writes:

Paul Krugman is at it again, casting aspersions on everyone who opposes extended unemployment benefits while offering absolutely no positive argument for those benefits. Let me explain what would count, to an economist, as a positive argument.

There’s no question that extending benefits would be good for the currently unemployed, and no question that it would be bad for those who are called on to foot the bill. Economists usually deal with that kind of conflict is by asking what policy you’d prefer if you had amnesia, and and didn’t know your own employment status…. The amnesiac is an impartial judge who is forced to care about everyone, because he/she might be anyone.

I have no wish to defend the indefensible Paul Krugman, but Landsburg’s attack is equally indefensible, combining — as it does — John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his philosophical progeny. The “veil of ignorance,” according to Wikipedia, requires you to

imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue.

This is just another way of pretending to omniscience. Try as you might to imagine your “self” away, you cannot do it. Your position about a moral issue will be your position, not that of someone else. Moreover, it will not truly be your position unless you put it into practice. Talk — like happiness research — is cheap.

Pretended omniscience is the essence of utilitarianism, which is captured in the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number” or, more precisely “the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” From this facile philosophy grew the patently ludicrous idea that it might be possible to quantify each person’s happiness, sum those values, and arrive at an aggregate measure of total happiness for everyone.

But there is no realistic worldview in which A’s greater happiness cancels B’s greater unhappiness; never the twain shall meet. The only way to “know” that A’s happiness cancels B’s unhappiness is to put oneself in the place of an omniscient deity — to become, in other words, an accountant of the soul.

Landsburg, in the space of a single post, has put himself in company with “liberals” like Krugman, who arrogate to themselves the ability to judge the worthiness of others. A pox on both their houses.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Tag Archives: Paul Krugman

Krugman vs. McCarthy

We Owe It to Ourselves

The Keynesian Fallacy and Regime Uncertainty

A Keynesian Fantasy Land

Competition Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Government vs. Community

Enough of Krugman

Rawls Meets Bentham

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: