Markets Strengthen Moral Values

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[Cross-posted at the Progress Report]

Pure markets enhance people’s moral values. In a pure market economy, all activity is voluntary for everyone, and involuntary acts, those which coercively harm others, are outside the market as an invasion of rights. A pure market includes the governance that enforces natural moral law, thereby promoting acts that are good or neutral, while minimizing evil acts.

Critics of markets have claimed that when people search for the cheapest goods, this reduces moral concerns. But in a pure market, the products offered are produced by moral means, i.e. by a process that does not involve coercive harm. Therefore searching for the lowest-cost goods is not evil. Only when goods are produced by immoral means, such as with slave labor, is the product morally bad, but that could not occur within a pure market.

Unfortunately, some economists who conduct research on human behavior leap to incorrect conclusions because while they have been trained in experimental techniques and mathematics, their graduate-school training did not include market ethics. For example, Prof. Dr. Armin Falk at the University of Bonn and Prof. Dr. Nora Szech at the University of Bamberg conducted experiments in which persons were offered a choice between receiving ten euros versus letting a laboratory mouse get killed. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal (“Morals and Markets”), allowing it to live a decent life. Continue reading →

What is the “Chinese Dream”?

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The short answer is that it is the new slogan that new Premier Xi Jinping (who hung out in Iowa as a youth) has come up with. The longer answer is that it is basically a knock-off of the “American Dream” used here in the States, but minus the folksiness and with the added predictability of being engineered from the top down to harness a buoyant nationalism in the post-socialist state.

From Lily Kuo, writing in Quartz:

 Xi used the word “dream” at least 23 times in his speech to accept the post of president. Xi spoke of the need to “build a strong, democratic, civilized, and harmonious modern socialist country and to attain the Chinese Dream of the great renaissance of the Chinese nation” [...]

In Xi’s estimation, the Chinese Dream isn’t meant to be a collection of individuals’ hopes and aspirations. Instead, the dreams of Chinese citizens are to be shaped to fit the government’s vision, rather than the other way around. To that end, the Chinese government has tasked “educators” with uniting “the Chinese dream [with] the dreams of youth and students, to grow up and become useful members of society,” according to the People’s Daily [...]

Elusive expressions like Jiang Zemin’s “three represents” (which refers to the three pillars of the party—military, culture and public interest) and Mao Zedong’s “destruction of the four olds” (which connotes the destruction of pre-communist Chinese values) catalogue important transitions in China and form part of each leader’s legacy [...]

There is more, and it is very interesting indeed, including the “Seven Don’t Mentions”:

constitutionalism, democracy, civil society, neoliberalism and Western media bias.

Don’t ask me why there are only five! When you read it, do try to remember my short essay on the future of Chinese nationalism. I also think it is pertinent to note that even our scandal-wracked President has not, and does not, procure paternalistic slogans the way the Communist Party in China does. In fact, the American people haven’t dealt with these kinds of slogans since the fascistic Roosevelt administration and his “new deal.” This is not to say that I think Obama is anything more than a thug in a nice suit, but only that our liberal democratic foundations are stronger than we sometimes realize (thanks largely to the same free press that Obama has been trying to intimidate lately).

As an added bonus, here is a collection of our short notes about the fact that fascism and communism are just two strands of the same vile idea: paternalism.

See the Cat: The Heart of Economics in One Story

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A man was walking down a shopping street and came to a store window where there was a big drawing full of lines and squiggles. A sign by the drawing asked, “Can you see the picture?”

All the man could see was a chaos of lines going every which way. He stared at it and tried to make out some kind of design, but it was all a jumble. Then he saw that some of the lines formed ears, and whiskers, and a tail. Suddenly he realized that there was a cat in the picture. Once he saw the cat, it was unmistakable. When he looked away and then looked back at the drawing, the cat was quite evident now.

The man then realized that the economy is like the cat. It seems to be a jumble of workers, consumers, enterprises, taxes, regulations, imports and exports, profits and losses – a chaos of all kinds of activities. Here are fine houses and shops full of goods, but yonder is poverty and slums. It doesn’t make any sense unless we understand the basic principles of economics. Once we have this understanding, the economy becomes clear – we see the cat instead of a jumble. We then know the cause of poverty and its remedy. But since most folks don’t see the cat, social policy just treats the symptoms without applying the remedies that would eliminate the problem.

What is this economics cat? It starts with the three factors or resource inputs of production: land, labor, and capital goods. Land includes all natural resources and opportunities. Labor is all human exertion in the production of wealth. Capital goods are tools (such as machines and buildings) used to produce wealth. The owners of land get rent, workers get wages, and the owners of capital goods get a capital return.

Picture an unpopulated island where we’re going to produce one good, corn, and there are eleven grades of land. Continue reading →

The IRS Crimes: a Gift from Providence to Libertarians

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[Cross-posted at Facts Matter]

Anyone who has libertarian sentiments, in the Libertarian Party or outside of it, in the Republican Party, or elsewhere; anyone who sees himself as supporting the non-existent, imaginary “Tea Party,” is familiar with the difficulty of explaining even basic libertarian principles. There are three problems:

First, most people are lazy, especially when it comes to re-examining the creeds they absorbed in childhood or youth.

Second, libertarianism is paradoxically too familiar to draw interest. It’s more or less what you learned in high school about the work of the Founding Fathers. (Digression: It’s more interesting for immigrants like me than for the US-born precisely, because we had no superficial exposure to it at the time we had acute testosterone poisoning.)

Third, libertarianism is not sexy. It does not enjoy the emotional ease of access that big words procure: “Revolution,” “Justice,” “Fairness,” “the Future.” In other words, it’s not a cartoon; it ‘s not a reality show; it’s not a vampire movie. It’s an intellectual stance for adults only. Tough call!

Sometimes, though Providence throws us a lifeline. Now is such a time. A libertarian Hollywood scriptwriter, if there were one, could hardly come up with a better script than the current controversy regarding the IRS role in singling out conservative organizations, in persecuting them, in forcing them illegally and immorally to disgorge private information about opponents to the Obama administration. Or about imagined opponents. Continue reading →

Prêtez attention aux scandales (pluriel) de l’administration Obama

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Richard Nixon était parti en disgrâce pour bien moins que l’utilisation de la puissante administration fédérale des impôts (“IRS”) à des fins politiques. Je veux dire l’IRS d’Obama qui a délibérement persécuté ses adversaires politiques à grandeéchelle.

Ce que personne (sauf moi) n’a encore dit à haute voix: La noirceur de peau du président le protège actuellement des conséquences légales et politiques de la noirceur de ses actions autant que de ses omissions.

L’emprise du politiquement correct est tellement grande aux EU qu’on n’y considère même pas (encore) la possibilité de jeter le premier président noir pour les grotesques abus de pouvoir de son administration.

Suivez mon analyse en Anglais sur le meme blog.

Around the Web

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  1. A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting.
  2. Listen to the fascists sing.
  3. Philosopher Kevin Vallier’s response to a hatchet job on FA Hayek in a stale (and apparently desperate) Left-wing publishing outlet.
  4. Political scientist Samuel Goldman’s response to the same hatchet job.
  5. The aforementioned hatchet job (in The Nation).
  6. Monkey Gone to Heaven.