Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Julian Assange deserves a Medal of Freedom James Bovard, USA Today
  2. Assange, Ecuador had a testy relationship Solano & Armario, Associated Press
  3. Assange was a window into America’s polarized soul David French, National Review
  4. What lessons do conservatives need to learn? Scott Sumner, MoneyIllusion

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Japan’s robust challenge to China’s BRI Tobias Harris, War on the Rocks
  2. NATO needs to re-purpose itself…or die David Goldman, Law & Liberty
  3. Macron has learned how to fight Julia Amalia Heyer, Der Spiegel
  4. Ottawa calls on NATO for help in the Arctic Regina Leader-Post

Watson my mind today: labor markets

Derrill Watson Economics, Links , , , , , , ,

And how ‘bout them Dodgers, hunh? Actually, how about each division’s top team? That’s a lot of winning!

— A partial response to Marx’ claim that managers are expropriating the value produced by the workers while providing nothing themselves: “The study showed that managers didn’t just influence the results their teams achieved, they explained a full 70% of the variance. In other words, if it’s a superior team you’re after, hiring the right manager is nearly three-fourths of the battle.”

— Boudreaux wonders what supposedly-enormous transaction cost prevents firms from offering workers a choice of pay packages – buying more parental time for a lower wage, for instance. One commenter notes their firm does just that, letting workers buy back vacation time. This is also, of course, standard practice in much of academia, where faculty are allowed to reduce their teaching load in exchange for a salary cut – usually funded by a research grant.

— Sumner on how labor market reforms (including cutting unemployment benefits) helped Germany and Israel to lower average unemployment rates and increase economic growth.

— But there appears to be a great deal that only deregulation will not be able to change. A new paper by Berger and Engzell finds correlation between the European-country-of-origin of people in modern US and the level of inequality and intergenerational mobility. Institutions persist for a very, very long time … again. (Homework: How does this apply to the reparations debate?)

— Another new paper by Fone, Sabia, and Cesur finds that higher minimum wages increase property crime arrests – contra expectations – so that “a $15 Federal minimum wage could generate criminal externality costs of nearly $2.4 billion.”

— A history of civil asset forfeiture tells how the British Crown’s attempt to encourage the Royal Navy to enforce trade restrictions and tariffs became so widely used in modern America.

— Summers and Sarin show that wealth taxes will take in much less than their proponents hope.

Poverty Under Democratic Socialism — Part II: Escaping the Padded Cage

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, History , , , , , , , , ,

There aren’t many signs that the French will soon free themselves from the trap they have sprung on themselves. The Macron administration had been elected to do something precisely about the strangling effect of taxation on French economic life and, on individual freedom. (The latter message may have been garbled during his campaign.) Are there any solutions in sight for the French crisis of psychic poverty, framed by both good social services and high taxes?

I see two kinds of obstacles to reform. The first is comprised of collective cognitive and of attitudinal deficiencies. The second, paradoxically, is a feature of French society that American progressives would envy if they knew about it.

Cognition and attitudes

After four months of weekly demonstrations, the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protesters had not found the language to articulate clearly their frustration. I mean, at least those who were left protesting. They seem to be falling back increasingly on crude views of “social justice” (“les inégalités”) as if, again, the issue was never to produce more, or to retain more of what they produce, but only to confiscate even more from the (fleeing) rich. Over the many years of democratic socialism, French culture has lost the conceptual vocabulary that would be necessary to plan an exit out of the impasse. Here is an example of this loss: In the past twenty years of reading and watching television in French almost every day, I have almost never come across the single word “libéral.” (That would be in the old English meaning of “market oriented.”) The common, nearly universal term is “ultra-libéral.” It’s as if favoring an analysis inclined toward market forces could not possibly exist without being “ultra,” which denotes extremism.

What started as a fairly subtle insult against those who discreetly appreciate capitalism has become fixed usage: You want more free market? You are a sort of fanatic. This usage was started by professional intellectuals, of course (of which France has not shortage). Then, it became a tool tacitly to shut off certain ideas from the masses, all the while retaining the words derogatory muscle. So, in France today, one can easily think of oneself as a moderate socialist – on the center left – but there is no balancing position on the center right. (3) It makes it difficult to think clearly, and especially to begin to think clearly about politics. After all, what young person wants to be an extremist, except those who are really extremists?

I saw recently online a French petition asking that French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s work be studied in French schools. Bastiat is one of the clearest exponents of fundamental economics. His contribution is not as large or as broad as Adam Smith’s but it’s more insightful, in my judgment. (He is the inventor of the “broken window” metaphor, for instance.) He also wrote unusually limpid French. Bastiat has not been part of secondary studies in France in my lifetime. His name is barely known at the university level. Marx and second, and third-rate Marxists, on the other hand, are omnipresent. (Some cynics would claim that whatever their conversation, the educated French do not read Bastiat, or A. Smith, but neither do they really read Marx!)

Few, in France, are able to diagnose the malaise that grips the country because it has ceased to have a name. The handful who understand capitalism are usually allergic to it because it does not guarantee equal outcomes. A minority, mostly business people, grasp well enough how it works and how it has pulled most of humanity out of poverty but they are socially shamed from expressing this perception. There is little curiosity among the French about such questions as why the American GDP/capita is 35% higher than the French. They treat this information as a sort of deed of Nature. Or, for the more ideological, among them, it’s the sad result of America’s unfairness to itself. A debate that ought to take place is born dead. How did this happen? Socialists of my generation, most good democrats, born during and right after WWII largely, early on took over the media and the universities. They have shaped and constrained public opinion since at least the sixties. They have managed to stop discussions of alternative economic paths without really conspiring to do so, possibly without even meaning to.

A really deep state

In 1945, after the long night of the 1940 defeat and of the Nazi occupation, many French people where in a mood to engender a new society. They created a number of novel government organizations designed to implement their vision of clean government but also, of justice. (They took prosperity for granted, it seems.) One of the new organizations was a post-graduate school especially designed to ensure that access to the highest levels of the government bureaucracy would be democratic and meritocratic. It’s called, “École Nationale d’Administration” (ENA). It accepts only graduates of prestigious schools. The ENA students’ per capita training costs are about seven times the average cost for all other higher education students. ENA students are considered public servants and they receive a salary. France thus possesses a predictably renewed cadre of trained administrators to run its government. And, repeating myself here, its members are chosen according to a strictly meritocratic process (unlike the most prestigious American universities, for example), a process that is also extremely selective.

In 2019, ENA is flourishing. The school has contributed four presidents and eight Prime Ministers to-date. Its graduates are numerous among professional politicians, as you might expect. In addition, they are teeming in the highest ranks of the civil service, and also of business. That’s because they go back and forth between the two worlds, with some benefit to their careers and to their wallets. This iteration does not imply corruption. Mostly, ENA graduates do not have a reputation for dishonesty at all. They help one another but it’s mostly above board. (4) This being said, it’s difficult to become really poor if you are an ENA graduate.

Graduates of ENA are often disparagingly described as a “caste,” which is sociologically inaccurate because caste is inherited. The word is meant to render a certain collective attitude of being smugly sealed from others. The intended meaning is really that of “upper caste,” of Brahman caste, to signify: those who think they possess all the wisdom.

All ENA graduates have made it to the top by taking the same sort of exam. The style of exams and the way they are corrected become known over time. Naturally, ENA candidates study to the exam. The ENA formula for success is not a mystery although it’s not just a formula; ENA also requires a sharp intelligence and character. ENA graduates have important traits in common, including a willingness to spend their adolescence cramming for increasingly difficult competitive exams. There are few charming dilettantes in their ranks. They all emerge from a process that does not reward imagination.

ENA graduates – dubbed “énarques” – seem overwhelmingly to share a certain view of the desirable interface between government and the economy. It’s not hard to guess at, based on thousands of their speeches reproduced in the media, and with the help of a little familiarity with French classical education. Its origin is neither in capitalism nor in socialism. (Sorry for the only slightly misleading title of this essay.) It predates both by 100-150 years. It’s rooted in the well known story of the Minister Colbert’s 17th century economic reforms. (It’s well known in the sense that every French school kid knows his name and a thing or two about the reforms themselves.) Colbert (1619-1683) raised tariffs, regulated production in minute detail and, above all, he created with public funds whole industries where none existed, in glass, in porcelain, but also in textiles, and others. I believe his main aim was only to increase government (royal) revenue but others think differently. At any rate, there is a widespread belief that general French prosperity rose under his administration.

To make matters worse, Colbert is a historical figure easy to like: hard working, honest, an effective patron of the arts. With such a luminary to look up to, it’s fairly effortless to ignore both the actual disorderly origins of capitalism, and also the initially compassionate roots of its socialist counter-reaction. (On capitalism’s origins, and originality, you might consult my entry: “Capitalism.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Blackwell Publishing. Vol. 2, Malden, Mass. 2006. Make sure of that particular edition – 2006 – my predecessors and successors were mostly opaque Marxist academic lowlifes.)

For seventy years, French economic policy has thus been made largely by deeply persuaded statists, people who think rule from above natural (especially as it takes place within a broadly democratic framework), who judge government intervention in economic matters to be necessary, fruitful, and virtuous, people who believe that government investment is investment, people who have given little thought to private enterprise, (although they occasionally pay lip service to it, largely as if it were a kind of charity). Almost none of them, these de facto rulers, is a bad person. Their pure hearts make them all the more dangerous, I believe. The result is there in France for all to see: a sclerotic economy that has failed to provide enough jobs for fifty years, a modest standard of living by the criteria of societies that industrialized in the nineteenth century, a worsening unease about the future, a shortage of the freedom of small pleasures for the many.

I do not use the conventional words of “tyranny” or “despotism” here because both are normally more less deliberately imposed on the populace. Nothing of the sort happened in France. On the contrary, lack of individual freedom in France is the accumulated consequence of measures and programs democratically adopted within the framework described above. Together, these well-meaning social programs are squeezing the liveliness out of all but the upper layers of French society.

There exists in the country a growing resentment of the énarques’ basically anti-capitalist rule. One recent president, Sarkozy, even declared he partly owed his election to bragging about not being a graduate from ENA. Yet, the thousands of énarques permanently at the levers of command for seventy years are not about to relinquish them, irrespective of the political party or parties in power. Few groups controlling as much as they ever does so voluntarily. The deep sentiment of their collective virtuousness will make them even more intransigent. Most French critics believe that the énarquesare incapable of changing as a cadre, precisely because they are really an intellectual elite of sorts, precisely because they are not corrupt. And, as I remarked above, ENA’s statist (“socialist”) reign has lasted so long that the French people in general have lost track of the very conceptual vocabulary an anti-bureaucrat rebellion would require. (We know what we don’t want, but what do we want?)

(3) It’s true also that historical accidents have deprived France of a normal Tory party. Its place is currently occupied by reactionary nationalists (currently the “Rassemblement national,” direct descendant of the “Front National,” of Marine Le Pen) who don’t favor market forces much more than does the left.

(4) I take the ENA graduates’ reputation for probity seriously because, right now, as I write, there are clamors for abolishing the school but its generating corruption in any way is not one of the reasons advanced.

[Editor’s note: Here is Part I, and here is the entire longform essay.]

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Modernity and the loss of human dignity Lee Trepanier, Law & Liberty
  2. Gorbachev Joshua Dill, Modern Age
  3. The old problem of old age Carol Tavris, Times Literary Supplement
  4. Silas Dinsmoor, Indian Agent yours truly at RealClearHistory

School choice at the Supreme Court

Ethan Blevins History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , ,

Another school funding case is knocking at the U.S. Supreme Court’s door. This case, Espinoza v. Walborn, hales from Montana, where the state’s fledgling school-choice program was killed moments after it left the crib. The Court now has a chance to revive it and land a major victory for educational choice across the country.

Montana’s first school-choice law, passed in 2015, took the form of a tax-credit scholarship program. If a taxpayer donated to an approved scholarship organization, she could claim up to $150 of the donation as a tax credit. The scholarship organizations then dished out scholarships to help parents afford to put their kids through private school.

Then the Montana Department of Revenue gutted it. The Department promulgated a rule that none of that scholarship money could go to religious private schools. This basically killed the program, since the vast majority of private schools in Montana–and in most states–are religious schools.

The Department claimed that the state constitution prohibited the scholarship dollars from going to religious schools because of the state ban on indirect public aid to religious schools. This is an absurd argument. The scholarship funds are privately donated dollars–they never touch a public coffer. The fact that someone can claim a tax credit hardly means that the donation becomes “public funds” because of diverted revenue. Such an argument, extended to its logical conclusion, would mean that all money is the government’s, and when it graciously declines to tax us, that extra money of ours is in fact part of the public fisc.

Nonetheless, the government prevailed at the Montana Supreme Court. In fact, the Court did the state one better–they just invalidated the whole tax-credit program, even for the few parents who might use a scholarship to send their kids to a secular school.

It’s a terrible blow to parents in Montana trying to find some genuine variety in education. But it also gives the Supreme Court a chance to right a wrong that has been festering in education policy for well over a century. The Supreme Court should hold that barring religious schools from accessing a neutral and generally available funding program violates the Free Exercise Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The portion of Montana’s state constitution that laid the tax-credit program in an early grave is known as a Blaine Amendment, named after 19th-century Congressman James Blaine. In 1875, Blaine proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would, among other things, prohibit states from funding “sectarian” schools with public money. Blaine’s federal amendment failed, but many states passed state-level amendments to the same effect, and Congress managed to make inclusion of such amendments a condition of statehood for new states entering the union.

The history is clear that these amendments are rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry. As the United States transitioned to a public school system, public schools had a distinctly Protestant flavor (often state-endorsed or even state-forced). Catholic migrants therefore began forming and attending private religious schools of their own. The backlash was fierce, and anti-Catholic sentiment often expressed itself in hostility to Catholic schools. James Blaine’s proposed amendment was a key manifestation of this bigotry.

And the bigotry lives on today. Ironically, however, now opponents of genuine choice in education have retrofitted Blaine Amendments as a partisan weapon to combat vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Montana’s law is only the most recent victim. If the Supreme Court doesn’t grant this case and strike down these state laws rooted in religious bigotry, it won’t be the last.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Teach your children well Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
  2. A quiet NATO success story Azita Raji, War on the Rocks
  3. Whack-a-mole and Westphalian sovereignty Nick Nielsen, Grand Strategy Annex
  4. Why moving sucks Firoozeh Dumas, New York Times

Let’s Find Out – or: the Power of Reference

Joakim Book Culture, Philosophy , , , , , ,

The core message of a number of books I’ve recently had the great pleasure to read has been fairly simple. Have a look. Check it out. Put your numbers in perspective. In a world awash with statistics and cognitive biases imploring us to cheer mindlessly for our own team, having the skill and wherewithal to step back and carefully ask: “can this really be so?” is golden.

One of recently passed celebrity professor and YouTube phenomenon Hans Rosling’s most profound advice for countering misinformation about the state of the world is precisely this: put all numbers in perspective. Never accept unaccompanied numbers – never believe the numerator without checking the denominator. What matters, as Bryan Caplan never ceases to emphasize as the GMU Economics creed, “are statistics, not emotions – and arguments, not stories.”

But, a statistic may never be left alone, Rosling maintains, but always compared to other relevant numbers. What share of its total category does this statistic represent? What was it last year, 5 or 10 or 20 years ago? Is there some self-evident change in associated behavior that is relevant or ought to explain it? A century ago street cars used to kill and injure hundreds of people every year, but since very few American cities make use of street cars today, the casualty is fortunately much lower. If we keep in mind that miles travelled by cars far outnumber miles travelled by street cars, reporting the number of street car deaths – while probably correct – entirely miss the point when discussing traffic safety. In How Not To Be Wrong, Mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg quipped

Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.

Here’s another example. If I told you about 23 000 individual deaths and spent a brief 10 second on each of them, going through the list would take me almost three days. On a personal level like that, 23 000 deaths is an absurd, insane, catastrophe-style event that few people are emotionally equipped to handle – essentially the size of my hometown, wiped out in a single year. If I told you those 23 000 deaths were due to antibiotic resistant diseases in the U.S. last year, the pandemic scenarios working through your mind quickly escalate. That many! Let’s find the nearest bunker!

If I then told you that cancer and heart diseases (each!) claim the lives of about 20x that, the fear of lethal apocalyptic germs consuming the world ought to quickly recede. Oh.

Here’s another example. It is entirely correct to point out that the number of people killed in worldwide airplane accidents in 2018 (556 people) was much higher than the year before (44 people) and the year before that (325 people). Would one be excused for believing that air travel is getting more risky and dangerous? Forbes, for instance, ran a roughly accurate story claiming that airline fatalities increased by 900%.

Not in the slightest. The number of fatalities from air travel has been falling for decades, all while the number of flights and miles travelled have increased exponentially, meaning that the per-flight, per-mile or per-passenger risk of death has kept dropping. Not to mention that alternative modes of travelling like driving is magnitudes more dangerous.

While Rosling teaches us to figure out what the base rate is, i.e. putting our statistic into appropriate perspective, one of Philip Tetlock’s tricks for becoming a ‘Superforecaster’ is to use Bayesian updating of one’s beliefs. This picks up precisely where Rosling’s idea left off. Once we know where to start, we have to amass more information, numbers and observations from other points of view – Bayesian updating is a popular method to incorporate and synthesize new information with the old.

In short “Calculation, like logic, is your friend” (Landsburg 2018: 44). Statistics matter and numbers can deceive. In order to better understand our realities and see through mistakes that others make – either intentionally to deceive or persuade, or unintentionally through ignorance – we must embrace the core message of people like Ellenberg, Tetlock, Duffy, Rosling or Pinker.

Always Be Comparing Thy Numbers. Never accept an unaccompanied statistic. Never trust numerators without denominators.

Poverty Under Democratic Socialism — Part I: the French Case

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, History , , , , , , , , ,

I saw a televised investigation by the pretty good French TV show, “Envoyé spécial” about current French poverty. It brought the viewer into the lives of six people. They included a retired married couple. The four others were of various ages. They lived in different parts of mainland France. All sounded French born to me. (I have a good ear for accents; trust me.) All were well spoken. The participants had been chosen to illustrate a sort of middle-class poverty, maybe. Or, perhaps to illustrate the commonness of poverty in one of the first countries to industrialize.

All the interviewees looked good. They seemed healthy. None was emaciated; none was grossly obese, as the ill-fed everywhere often are. All were well dressed, by my admittedly low standards. (I live in the People’s Democratic Republic of Santa Cruz, CA where looking dapper is counter-revolutionary.) None of those featured was in rags or wearing clothes inappropriate for the season.

The reporter took the viewer into these people’s homes. There was no indoor tour but you could see that the outside of the houses was in good repair. Most of the interviewing took place in kitchens. Every kitchen seemed equipped like mine, more than adequately. There was a range and a refrigerator in each. Every house had at least one television set.(I couldn’t determine of what quality.) No one said he or she was cold in the winter though two complained about their heating bills.

The show was geared to sob stories and it got them. Each participant expressed his or her frustration about lacking “money,” precisely, specifically. It seems to me that all but two talked about money for “extras.” I am guessing, that “extras” mean all that is not absolutely necessary to live in fairly dignified comfort. One single woman in her forties mentioned that she had not had a cup of coffee in a café for a year or more. (Keep her in mind.)

Another woman talked about the difficulty of keeping her tank filled. She remarked that a car was indispensable where she lived, to go to her occasional work and to doctors’ appointments. Her small car looked fine in the video. The woman drove it easily, seemingly without anxiety or effort.

A woman of about forty, divorced, took care of her two teenage daughters at home two weeks out of each month. She explained how she went without meat for all of the two weeks that her daughters were away. She did this so she could afford to serve them meat every day that they were with her. I could not repress the spontaneous and cynical reaction that most doctors would probably approve of her diet.

Yet, another woman, single and in her thirties, displayed her monthly budget on her kitchen table. She demonstrated easily that once she had paid all her bills, she had a pathetically small amount of money left. (I think it was about $120 for one month.) She had a boyfriend, a sort of good-looking live-in help whose earnings, if any, were not mentioned.

The retired couple sticks to my mind. The man was a retired blue-collar worker. They were both alert and in good shape. Their living room was comfy. They also talked about their bills – including for heating – absorbing all of their income. The wife remarked that they had not taken a vacation in several years. She meant that she and her husband had not been able to get away on vacation, somewhere else, away from their house and from their town. They lived close to a part of France where some rich Americans dream of retiring some day, and where many Brits actually live.

I ended up a little perplexed. On the one hand, I could empathize with those people’s obvious distress. On the other hand, I got yanked back to reality toward the end when the retired lady blamed the government for the tightness of her household budget. Then I realized that others had tacitly done the same. The consensus – which the reporter did not try expressly to produce – would have been something like this: The government should do something for me (no matter who is responsible for the dire straights I am in now).

Notably, not one of the people in the report had a health care complaint, not even the senior retired couple.

So, of course, I have to ask: Why are all those people who live far from abject poverty, by conventional standards, why do all those people convey unhappiness?

The first answer is obvious to me only because I was reared in France, where I retain substantial ties: Many small French towns are dreadfully boring, always have been. That’s true, at least, if you don’t fish and hunt, or have a passion for gardening, and if you don’t attend church. (But the French are not going to church anymore; nothing has taken the social place of church.)

And then, there is the issue of what the French collectively can really afford. This question in turn is related to productivity and, separately, to taxation. I consider each in turn.

French productivity

According to the most conventional measure – value produced per hour worked – French productivity is very high, close to the German, and not far from American productivity: Something like 93% of American productivity for the French vs 95% for the Germans. (Switzerland’s is only 86%.) However, to discuss how much money is available for all French people together, we need another measure: the value of French production divided by the number of French people. Annual Gross Domestic Product per capita is close enough for my purpose. (The version I use is corrected to incorporate the fact that the buying power of a dollar is not the same in all countries: “GDP/capita, Purchasing Power Parity”).

For 2017, the French GDP/capita was $43,600, while the German was $50,200. (The American was $59,500.) Keep in mind the $6,600 difference between the French and the German GDP/capita (data).

If French workers are almost as productive as the Germans when they work, what can account for the low French GDP/capita? The answer is that the French don’t work much. Begin with the 35/hr legal work week. (1) (A study published recently in the daily Le Figaro asserts that 1/3 of the 1.1 million public servants work even less than 35 hours per week.) Consider also the universal maximum retirement age of 62 (vs 67 in Germany), a spring quarter pleasantly spiked with three-day weekends for all, a legal annual vacation of at least thirty days applied universally, a common additional (short) winter (snow) vacation. I have read (I can’t confirm the source) that the fully employed members of the French labor force work an average of 600 hours per year, one of the lowest counts in the world. Also log legal paid maternity leave. Finish with an official unemployment rate hovering around 9 to 10% for more than thirty years. All this, might account for the $6,600 per year that the Germans have and the French don’t.

There is more that is seldom mentioned. The fastest way for a country to raise the official, numerical productivity of its workers is to put out of work many of its low-productive workers. (That’s because the official figure is an arithmetic mean, an average.) This can be achieved entirely through regulations forbidding, for example, food trucks, informal seamstress services, and old-fashioned hair salons in private living rooms, and, in general, by making life less than easy for small businesses based on traditional techniques. This can be achieved entirely – and even inadvertently – from a well-meaning wish to regulate for the collective good. The more of this you do, the higher your productivity per capita appears to be and also, the higher your unemployment, and the less income is available to go around. I think the official high French productivity oddly distorts the image of real French income. I suspect it fools many French people, including public officials: They think they are wealthier than they are.

La vie est belle!

The French have nearly free health care – which works approximately as well as Medicare in the USA, well enough, anyway. (French life expectancy is higher than American expectancy.) Education is tuition-free at all levels. There are free school lunches for practically anyone who asks. University cafeterias are subsidized by the government (and pretty good by, say, English restaurant standards!) Many college students receive a stipend. Free drop-off daycare centers are common in big and in medium-size cities. Unemployment benefits can easily last for two years, three for older workers. They amount to something like 55% of the last wages earned, up to 75% for some.

That’s not all. The fact that France won the World Cup in soccer in 2018 suggests that the practice of that sport is widespread and well supported. It’s mostly government subsidized. Other sports are also well subsidized. French freeways are second to none. They are mostly turnpikes but the next network of roads down is excellent, and even the next below that. This is all kind of munificent, by American standards. The French are taken care of, almost no matter what. The central government handles nearly all of this distribution of services directly and some, indirectly through grants that local entities have to beg for.

Someone has to pay for all this generosity. After sixty or seventy years, many, perhaps most French people, still believe that the rich, the very rich, have enough money that can be pried from their clutching hands to pay for the good things they have, plus the better things they wish for. (No hard numbers here, but I would bet that ¾ of French adults believe this.) In fact, multi-fingered, ubiquitous, invasive taxation of the many who are not very rich pays for all of it.

French taxation

The French value added tax (VAT) is 20% on nearly all transactions. When a grower sells $100 of apples to a jelly producer, the bill comes to $120. When the jelly-maker in turn sells his product to a grocery wholesaler, his $200 bill goes up to $240, etc. Retail prices are correspondingly high. The French are not able to cheat all the time on the VAT although many try. (Penalties are costly on the one hand, but there exists a complicated, frustrating official scheme to get back part of the VAT you do pay, on the other hand.) I speculate that the VAT is so high because the French state does not have the political will nor the capacity to collect an effective, normal income tax, a progressive income tax. Overall, the French fiscal system is not progressive; it may be unintentionally regressive. To compensate, until the Macron administration, there was a significant tax on wealth. (That’s double taxation, of course.) It’s widely believed that rich French people are escaping to Belgium, Switzerland, and even to Russia (like the actor Gérard Dupardieu).

The excise taxes are especially high, including the tax on gasoline. In 2018, the mean price of gasoline in France was about 60% higher than the mean price in California, where gas is the most taxed in the Union. An increase to gasoline taxes, supposedly in the name of saving the environment, is what triggered the “yellow vests” rebellion in the fall of 2018. Gasoline taxes are particularly regressive in a country like France where many next-to-poor people need a car because they are relegated to small towns, far from both essential services and work. (2)

All in all, the French central government takes in about 55% of the GDP. This may be the highest percentage in the world; it’s very high by any standard. It dries up much money that would otherwise be available to free enterprise. Less obviously but perhaps more significantly, it curtails severely what people individually, especially, low income citizens, may spend freely, of their own initiative.

What’s wrong?

So, with their abundant and competent social services, with their free schooling, with their prodigal unemployment benefits, with their superb roads, with their government-supported prowess in soccer, what do the French people in the documentary really complain about? Two things, I think.

Remember the woman who couldn’t afford to take her coffee in a café? Well, the French have never been very good at clubs, associations, etc. They are also somewhat reserved about inviting others to their homes. The café is where you avail yourself of the small luxury of avoiding cooking chores with an inexpensive but tasty sandwich. It’s pretty much the only place where you can go on the spur of the moment. It’s where you may bump into friends and, into almost-friends who may eventually become friends. It’s the place where you may actually make new friends. It’s the best perch from which to glare at enemies. It’s where that woman may have a chance to overhear slightly ribald comments that will make her smile. (Not yet forbidden in France!) The café is also just about the only locale where different age groups bump into one another. The café is where you will absorb passively some of that human warmth that television has tried for fifty years but failed to dispense.

This is not a frivolous nor a trivial concern. In smaller French towns, a person who does not spend time in cafés is deprived of an implicit but yet significant part of her humanity. The cup of coffee the woman cannot afford in a café may well be the concrete, humble, quotidian expression of liberty for many in other developed countries as well. (After all, Starbucks did not succeed merely by selling overpriced beverages.) The woman in the video cannot go to cafés because the social services she enjoys and supports – on a mandatory basis – leave no financial room for free choice, even about tiny luxuries. She suffers from the consequences of a broad societal pick that no one forced on her. In general, not much was imposed on her from above that she might have readily resisted. It was all done by fairly small, cumulative democratic decisions. In the end, there is just not enough looseness in the socio-economic space she inhabits to induce happiness.

She is an existential victim of what can loosely be called “democratic socialism.” It’s “democratic” because France has all the attributes of a representative republic where the rule of law prevails. It’s “socialistic” in the vague sense in which the term is used in America today. Unfortunately, there is no French Bureau of Missing and Lost Little Joys to assess and remedy her discontent. Democratic socialism is taking care of the woman but it leaves her no elbow room, space for recreation, in the original meaning of the word: “re-creation.”

The second thing participants in the documentary complain about is a sense of abandonment by government. Few of them are old enough to remember the bad old days before the French welfare state was fully established. They have expected to be taken care of all their adult lives. If anything is not satisfactory in their lives, they wait for the government to deal with it, even it takes some street protests. Seldom are other solutions, solutions based on private initiative, even considered. But the fault for their helplessness lies with more than their own passive attitudes. An overwhelming sense of fairness and an exaggerated demand for safety combine with the government’s unceasing quest for revenue to make starting a small business, for example, difficult and expensive. France is a country where you first fill forms for permission to operate, and then pay business taxes before you have even earned any business income.

The French have democratically built for themselves a soft cradle that’s feeling more and more like a lead coffin. It’s not obvious enough of them understand this to reverse the trend, or that they could if they wished to. There is also some vague worry about their ability to maintain the cradle for their children and for their children’s children.

(1) I am aware of the fact that there exists a strong inverse correlation between length of week worked and GDP/capita: In general, the richer the country, the shorter the work week. Again, this is based on a kind of average. It allows for exceptions. It seems to me the French awarded themselves a short work week before they were rich enough to afford it.

(2) You may wonder why I don’t mention the French debt ratio (amount of public debt/GDP). All the amenities I describe must cost a lot of money and the temptation to finance them partly through debt must be great. In fact, the French debt ratio is lower than the American: 96% to 109% in 2018 according to the International Monetary Fund. This is a little surprising but all debtors are not equal. A country with near full employment and plenty of talent is better able to pay off its debts than one with high long term unemployment and a labor force decreasingly accustomed to laboring. The latter is, of course, a predictable result of inter-generational unemployment and underemployment. Nowadays, it’s common to cross paths in France with people over thirty who have never experienced paid work. International investors think like me about the inequality of debtors. Investors flock to the US but they are reserved about France.

[Editor’s note: You can find the entire, longform essay here if you don’t want to wait for Parts II and III.]

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Is the Turk a White Man? Murat Ergin, Aeon
  2. The centenary of the Amritsar Massacre William Dalrymple, Spectator
  3. The struggle continues Rafe Champion, Quadrant
  4. Why moral progress is not inevitable Ilya Somin, Volokh Conspiracy

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Israeli election season has been dominated by Bibi Michael Koplow, Ottomans & Zionists
  2. The Trump Era should make libertarians of us all David French, National Review
  3. Start planning NATOs 100th birthday Josef Joffe, American Interest
  4. Were European cities responsible for liberalism? Johnson & Koyama, Cato Unbound

Catholic Emancipation as a Constitutional Revolution 

Mark Koyama History, Law , , , , , , , , , ,
Antonia Frazer’s new book The King and the Catholics brings to light a neglected topic in British history, the removal of legal restrictions on Catholics. Catholic emancipation was a critical moment along the path to religious freedom — the theme of my book with Noel Johnson, Persecution and Toleration (see our new website for the book here).

Religious toleration is important to Britain’s historical self-image as a bastion of liberty against continental tyrants like Hitler, Napoleon, and Louis XIV.

But for much of the 18th century, Catholics in Britain were barred from government service, the army and navy, the law, and the universities. Formally, they were not allowed to inherit land or even marry with Catholic rites (though in practice there were well-recognized workarounds). Catholic priests faced life imprisonment and Catholic schools were illegal. When these laws were liberalized in 1778, this provoked the worst riot in early modern British history, the Gordon Riots.

Frazer details the travails involved in passing Catholic Emancipation. The King and the Anglican establishment were strenuously opposed to liberalizing laws against Catholics. Despite the fact that he had Catholic friends, George III opposed emancipation because it violated his coronation oath to champion the Protestant religion.

Prime Minister William Pitt proposed emancipation in 1801 and offered to resign if the King disapproved. This prompted George III’s descent into paranoia or “madness”. Frazer notes that

“There had already been a bout of this madness in 1788 and 1789, with the younger George as temporary Regent. Whatever the actual illness from which he periodically suffered, it included among the symptoms an obessional quality which certain topics unquestionably aroused. Catholic Emancipation, that appalling prospect which would cause him to be damned for breaking his sacred vow, was prominent among them:

None of this is mentioned in the 1996 film, featuring Nigel Hawthrone, of course!

Why did Catholic emancipation provoke this reaction? The British state faced a crisis in the early 19th century. Most accounts focus on the French and Industrial Revolutions, which disrupted the existing social order and alarmed ruling elites. Religion is scarcely mentioned. Thus from a Marxian perspective, the Chartists and the passing of the Great Reform Act — which extended the franchise to property holders — represent the bourgeoisie, demanding political rights to match their economic power. Acemoglu and Robinson model the transition from oligarchy to democracy as a game theoretic problem, in which the threat of revolution from below obliged elites to grant democratic rights, in order to make the promise of economic redistribution credible. Neither spends much time on religion.

But an older historical tradition saw the Catholic Emancipation as among the key causes of the constitutional crisis that the British state underwent in the 1820s and 1830s. According to John Derry (1963, 95):

‘The Protestant ascendancy was part of the Constitution: one might say without it the Constitution would never have existed. The Coronation Oath pledged the monarch to maintain the Protestant religion as by law established, while the Act of Settlement ensured a Protestant succession. Both the landed gentry and the commercial classes — as well as the urban mob — believed that if the Protestant ascendancy went the gates were open to unimaginable horrors.”

To understand why this was so, and why Catholic Emancipation paved the way for further liberalization and the rise of liberal democracy, let us revisit the argument of Persecution & Toleration.

The significance of the Protestant Ascendency reflected Reformation England’s Church-State equilibrium. The treatment of Catholics is a canonical instance of what we call condition toleration. Catholicism per se was not illegal, but it was constrained, and these constraints were justified in political terms. Throughout the 17th century, Protestants feared a return of Catholicism which they associated with unrestrained autocratic rule. For Henry Capel MP in 1679:

“From popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power. Formerly the Crown of Spain, and now France, supports the root of this popery amongst us; but lay popery flat and there’s an end of arbitrary government and power. It is a mere chimera without popery”.

It was on these grounds that the Whigs sought to disbar James II from the throne. After the Glorious Revolution, the Toleration Act of 1689 excluded both Catholics and atheists. And famously, the great advocate of religious toleration, John Locke rejected toleration for Catholics, as they were loyal to a foreign prince.

The religious aspect of the Glorious Revolution is neglected in the seminal accounts of it in the political economy and economic history literatures (i.e. here). But the Glorious Revolution settlement did not only guarantee the independence of Parliament from the Crown, it also safeguarded the political position of the Anglican Church by excluding Catholics from positions of power. In return, the Church of England remained the mainstay of state. As J.C.D. Clark (1985, 438) observed:

“The Church justified its established status on a principle of toleration — the toleration of other forms of Trinitarian Christian worship. It drew a sharp distinction between this and the admission of Nonconformists to political power.”

This was particularly significant in Ireland, where the Protestant Ascendency ensured the political and economic dominance of the Anglo-Scottish Protestant elite over the Catholic majority.

Now 18th century Britain was much less reliant on religion to legitimate political authority than prior regimes. As Jared Rubin argues, one consequence of the Reformation was a decline in the legitimizing power of religion; it was superseded by institutions such as parliaments, which represented economic rather than religious elites.

Other things had changed too. The ascendancy of the Church of England was seen as crucial to state security in post-Reformation England. But this was no longer the case by 1800. Following the initial break with Rome in the 16th century, these fears had not been groundless: Protestant Englishmen felt threatened by revanchist Catholic powers such as Spain and France and, in the Gunpowder plot, Catholic conspirators threatened the death of the king and the destruction of Parliament. The fact that the vast majority of Catholics were loyal to crown and country was not enough to alleviate Protestant fears, which occasionally erupted into persecutions, such as those that accompanied the Popish plot.

Following the French Revolution, however, Catholicism was no longer associated with an aggressively expansionist continental power. The old enemy was now secular. Catholic priests fleeing Revolutionary persecution found sanctuary in Britain. And by the 1820s there was a growing pragmatic and liberal opinion in favor of Catholic Emancipation. Lord Palmerston’s argument, as summarized by Frazer (p 157), was that

“. . . times had inevitably changed, and the argument to history could not be sustained: what if Nelson, Fox and Burke had all happened to be Catholics by birth. Would it have been right to deprive the nation of their services?”

Liberal Protestant clergy further argued that

“a Catholic layman who finds all the honor of the state open to him, will not, I think, run into treason and rebellion” (quoted from Frazer, 2018, 158).

Translated into the framework of Persecution & Toleration: the equilibrium had changed. Catholics no longer posed a political threat. The legitimatizing power of the Church of England was waning. Population growth, urbanization — particularly the rise of new urban centers — as well as immigration from Ireland, undermined the ideological hold of the Church of England.

Nevertheless, when the issue finally came to head in 1827–1829, it brought down the government. Catholic Emancipation was the Brexit of its day. When the pro-emancipation George Canning became Prime Minister, its leading opponents, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel resigned and the Tory party split into two. Canning then died. But the move towards liberalization now had momentum. Agitation in Ireland raised fears of revolution. In 1828 the Test Act was Repealed. Wellington and Peel reluctantly switched sides. 1829 Catholic Emancipation passed, despite the fact that King George IV disapproved of it.

Thus according to J.C.D. Clark’s insightful (though contested) account:

“As significant were the consequences of Emancipation: the belief that the sovereign would not resist massive constitutional change; and the profound schism which now rent the party of Wellington and Peel” (Clark, 1985, 536).

Catholic Emancipation thus set in motion a more general constitutional revolution. Both Whigs and Tory ultras who opposed Catholic Emancipation lost faith in the existing Parliamentary system. A fundamental pillar of society, the Church-State alliance, had been undermined. It was followed by the Great Reform Act and the rise of liberal democracy. In Clark’s word’s

“. . . the effect of the measures of 1828–1832 was to open the floodgates to a deluge of Whig or radical reform aimed against the characteristics institutions of the former social order . . . English society can point to few events which changed the pattern on the ground with the totality and the dynamism of 1776, 1789 or 1917: 1832 was not such an event. It was, however, decisive in many other ways, for it dealt a death blow to England’s old order. In the process, it produced what in other disciplines is called a ‘paradigm shift’”(Clark 1985, 555–556).

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. United States of Africa? Hakim Adi, History Today
  2. Eric Hobsbawm’s awkward embrace of the Establishment Geoffrey Wheatcroft, New Republic
  3. The philosopher who usurped Aristotle’s place in the Islamic world Peter Adamson, Times Literary Supplement
  4. Who are the real Kazakhs? Michael Griffin, Literary Review

Watson my mind today

Derrill Watson Links , , , , , ,

Apart from grading, reviewing, and my soon-to-be 5-yr-old’s birthday, that is…

–  A good question from Don Boudreaux. “Assuming (contrary to fact) that American trade deficits do necessarily cause Americans’ indebtedness to foreigners to rise, why do you bemoan these deficits? Why not instead cheer them? … Being indebted to foreigners means that we Americans must repay these debts, which in turn means that we Americans must in the future work to produce more goods and services for export. Isn’t this situation precisely what you and other protectionists want? Isn’t a rise in the demand for American exports – especially a rise not derived from, or offset by, a simultaneous rise in American imports – your very ideal?”

–  Speaking of protectionism, Tyler Cowen on Elizabeth Warren’s agriculture proposal: “a disappointment on two fronts: too wonky to be considered a purely political document, but not nearly wonky enough to be defensible in terms of substance.” It fails to understand inflation and food price data, calls for more protectionism, and doesn’t remove subsidies. He says he might be persuadable on a “right to repair” law, but worries about copyright infringement.

–  One of the issues Ludwig von Mises himself, I am told, never fully settled in his mind was over patents and copyright. It seems a necessary evil to encourage innovation, but granting someone a government-sanctioned monopoly just grates the wrong way. Now we’ve got “patent trolls” to add to the mix, who do not innovate themselves but buy up patents to collect licenses and sue or threaten to sue others. A paper finds that patent trolls encourage more upstream innovation while discouraging downstream innovation.

–  Why does Scott Sumner simultaneously support the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hike last year and expect a cut this year? As a market monetarist, he would like the market to dictate Fed policy and “the fed funds futures market forecasts a rate cut. … Because markets continue to forecast slightly below 2% inflation, even as the economy slows, the market forecast of an interest rate cut should be taken as evidence that a rate cut is probably needed at some point this year.” I also enjoyed the picture that goes with the article – he is an owl, neither a hawk nor a dove.

–  There’s a dictionary, detailing how Africans speak about politics, including some fascinating idioms. “Three-piece suit voting” refers to supporting the same party for all elected positions. On the contrary, “skirt-and-blouse voting” means to vote for different parties for presidential and legislative elections.” Other enjoyable examples at the link.

–  538 has an interesting piece on the perceived fairness of kidney donation systems, and the real struggle that still exists trying to get people to accept slightly less-regulated systems (let alone actually compensating donors’ families).

–  David Henderson: Occupational Licensing is a Bad Idea. Still. Really.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. NATO at 70: ten of history’s most important alliances Brandon Christensen, RealClearHistory
  2. Rethinking American efforts to boost partner militaries Jason Fritz, War on the Rocks
  3. Brexit is getting worse Tom Harris, CapX
  4. On the eve of the Great Psychedelic Debate Matthew Blackwell, Quillette