political economy

Slavery and the footnotes

Brandon Christensen History, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

I came across this old essay on slavery by economist Gordon Tullock (h/t Tyler Cowen) and what struck me (aside from an excellent presentation of the economics of slavery) was this footnote on the inevitable dissolution of Marxism (this paper was written in 1967):

It may be that the dissolution is not the first step toward the total elimination of this powerful religion, but merely a breaking away of the talmudic encrustation of the true scribes and pharisees of the Second and Third Internationals. Such a development is not uncommon in the history of other religions. My personal opinion is that the disintegration which we now see is more fundamental, however, and I doubt that Marxism will survive the century as a living faith.

In my own experience in the classrooms of powerful and plebeian universities alike, Marxism has indeed disintegrated into virtually nothing. Marxism has, rather, become a sort of an embarrassing older uncle that professors chuckle about in a manner that is more reminiscing than bitter. They all realize that Marxism led to very bad things, but they are unable to acknowledge that capitalism – Marxism’s Other – has brought about peace and prosperity for untold billions.

It would be wise for us, therefore, to continue to focus on this dead religion. Deep-seated beliefs are hard to let go of, even after these beliefs have been shown – theoretically and empirically – to lead to horrors of the worst kind. “Yes,” the embarrassed former adherents grudgingly admit, “communism has failed miserably, but socialism has not. It has not even been tried, and besides, it is capitalism that is responsible for the world’s ills today.”

This is not obstinance. This is deceit, plain and simple.

So how do we go about combating obvious deceit (rather than the sophisticated theories of 20th century Marxists)?

I think the answer is to just debunk their examples on a case by case basis, in as public as a forum as you can muster. Famines in east and central Africa, for example, have often been attributed to capitalism because of the policies of the World Bank and IMF. Libertarians ought to agree with most of this, and then simply point out that the World Bank and the IMF are central planning agencies designed, created, and supported by governments in the West. Once this fact -which is not quite as simple as it appears – is acknowledged, you can go from there and take a public choice route, an Austrian route, or even a populist libertarian route to explain why capitalism is not responsible for famines.

Wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing campaigns, etc., can all be explained (and eliminated) if libertarians focus on the role of the State in all of these ills rather than on the theoretical or empirical weaknesses of socialist explanations and proposals.

Some quick thoughts about political entrepreneurship

Brandon Christensen Law , , , , , ,

The Wall Street Journal has a weekend interview feature with an entrepreneur who founded Airbnb, a company that has been getting rich by exploiting the so-called “sharing economy.” Overall it’s an interesting read (I think the term “sharing economy” is misleading, but it is a stroke of marketing genius; “I’m not making money: I’m helping people share stuff!”).

However, after reading Rick’s recent thoughts on entrepreneurship and re-reading my own musings on how democracy works, this passage stood out to me like a sore thumb:

By year’s end, Airbnb says it will have booked more overnight stays than the Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains.

As might be expected, hoteliers and hospitality-industry regulators are suspicious of the Airbnb model. In October, New York state sued the company for violating a law passed in 2010—just when Airbnb was picking up steam—barring private citizens from renting an entire apartment for less than 30 days.

Why on earth would New York state undertake such a ridiculous ban? Ostensibly for safety reasons, right? Or maybe to better ensure that labor regulations remain up to par?

The law that hotel chains used to sue its competition strikes me as the perfect example of how cronyism works. The hotel chains are losing some of their market share to innovative competitors, but instead of improving upon their own models they turn to the political process, which (at least in the US) provides guaranteed access to any faction who would like to use it.

Just like in the marketplace, though, guaranteed access does not mean guaranteed results. Enter the entrepreneurial spirit. Except instead of finding ways to make money, the political entrepreneur is finding ways to prevent competition. This second type of entrepreneurship is also driven by self-interest. Libertarians, I think, recognize the dual nature of self-interest (in markets: good; in government: bad), but I cannot think of any literature off the top of my head that deals with this topic.

What I can note is that many people get the nature of self-interest completely wrong. In the minds of many, if not most, people, self-interest is something that only occurs in the marketplace. From this mindset springs many of the fallacies about government regulations and taxes that we often read about in the press. Whether this mindset is a product of genuine or willful ignorance is a topic that I think deserves further scrutiny.

Why is it, for example, that many people do not see that self-interest drives the political process itself? I know that the discipline of ‘political economy’ deals with self-interest in the political process, but even here I see a tendency to treat political entrepreneurs as more noble than the entrepreneur of the marketplace (with a few exceptions, of course). Support for higher taxes on corporations, or support for more stringent government regulations, is often very prominent among the general public and among elites. The general public thinks it is supporting itself against “big corporations” when it supports these policies, as do elites, but in reality these regulations and taxes are driven by an entrepreneurial process that desires to favor one faction over all others.

Am I missing anything? I know I’m missing a bunch of stuff.

Keynes on Free Trade

Brandon Christensen Economics, History, Politics , , , , , , , ,

I found this great quote from John Maynard Keynes earlier today:

In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labor, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another; and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness.

I found this in a journal article (pdf) on political decentralization and economic integration. The quote is from 1920 (the article is a couple of years old).

John Maynard Keynes’s system is collapsing in front of our eyes. It is doing so slowly, but it is collapsing nonetheless. What is interesting to note is that Keynesians share much of their ideology with libertarians. We are all liberals of one stripe or another, but the Keynesians won the public policy battles of the post-war period.

I’m not entirely certain I know what these policy battles were all about. Again, it seems like there is very little that we disagree with the technocratic Left about ideologically. Yet since the Keynesian system is collapsing it seems like now would be a good idea to go over how they got to technocratic planning from what is essentially the same starting point as the libertarian one. I think we would do well to exercise a great deal of our thoughts to thinking about this divergence.

A Warm Welcome

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , ,

Ladies and germs, may I present to you our newest member here at the consortium: Audrey Redford!

Audrey is currently a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University. She also works as a Graduate Research Assistant for the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. Audrey graduated from James Madison University in 2012 with a B.B.A. in Economics with a concentration in Political Economy.  Her research interests include Austrian economics & political economy, particularly their applications to analysis of the War on Drugs in the United States. She hails from Richmond, Virginia.

Her debut post can be found here. I’m extremely excited about having Audrey on board.

Moral Markets and Immoral “Capitalism”

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , , ,

The question, “Is capitalism moral?” was raised by Steven Pearlstein in a 15 March 2013 article in the Washington Post. He is a professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University and a column writer for the Washington Post.

Pearlstein writes that we in the US are engaged in a “historic debate over free-market capitalism.” Maybe so, but “free-market capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. There are two reasons why the economic system is called “capital”ism rather than “laborism” or “landism.” First is that capital dominates labor. The second reason to call the system “capitalism” is to hide the role of land, so that people focus only on the conflict between workers and capitalists. The chiefs of finance and real estate are able to dominate because of their political clout. They obtain privileges from government in subsidies, limits on competition, and periodic bail outs. In contrast, in a free market, there is no domination, with neither subsidies nor imposed costs.

Pearlstein then says that if “markets” were providing prosperity for most folks, there would be no need for governmental intervention. But we don’t have pure markets. We have a mixed economy, with intervention into markets, so one has to first analyze whether it is markets or else interventions that cause high inequality, instability, poverty, and unemployment. Since pure markets are not given an opportunity to work, how can they be responsible for economic woes?

He then asserts that for the past 30 years, the world has been moving towards a greater role for markets. That is so for China and the countries previously dominated by the USSR, and these economies have indeed experienced greater growth and prosperity.

But, contrary to Pearlstein’s assertion, the US has been moving away from a market economy. Frequent governmental crises – the fiscal cliff, budget deadlines, ever changing tax rates – threaten the stability of financial, industrial, and labor markets. The subsidies to real estate and its financial allies have never been greater. The domination of the Federal Reserve over money, banking, and interest rates has reached historic heights. The tax reforms of the 1980s have been reversed by Congress, which has made income taxes ever more complex. Costly regulations continue to pour out of Washington DC by the thousands each year. And now the government will dominate medical provision like never before.

The decline in the role of markets can be measured by an index of economic freedom. According to the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom, U.S. market freedom peaked out in the year 2000 at a rating of 8.5 out of 10, and then declined to 7.69 in 2010 as intervention grew. The US freedom ranking among countries dropped from third place in 2000 to 18th out of 144 in 2010, and most probably has continued sinking since then.

Critics of markets have asserted that stagnant household incomes and financial crises are the fault of a greater role for markets, when in fact, in the US and Europe, massive subsidies to real estate caused the recession, excessive government borrowing has caused the fiscal crises, and a governmental redistribution of wealth from workers to landowners has stagnated net wages.

I agree with Pearlstein that we should welcome the debate on economic morality. But we should use words that have real economic meaning, rather than propaganda terms. Any person who refers to “capitalism” other than with critical quotation marks contributes to the confusion. The critics of markets opportunistically use the term “free market” to refer to the mixed economy, and then use the term “capitalism” also for the concept of a pure free market. Hence they argue that “capitalism,” as the mixed economy, suffers from economic woes, and then jump to the false conclusion that “capitalism,” meaning the pure market, causes the problems.

A real debate should also unmask the role of land that hides under the label “capital”ism. Critics who speak of the “market’s” unequal distributions overlook the massive redistribution of income from workers to landowners, as taxes on wages pay for public goods that pump up rent and land values. Their call for higher taxes on the rich disregards the distinction between earned income from entrepreneurship and unearned income from governmental subsidies.

Pearlstein admits that “many of the arguments have been a bit flabby, with both sides taking refuge in easy moralizing.” That is true. An honest and robust debate should avoid the deceitful switching of meanings for “capitalism”, and indeed avoids using the flabby term altogether. Instead, use the clear and honest words “pure market,” “intervention,” and “mixed economy.” If we say that the mixed economy has economic woes, one cannot then conclude that the pure market has caused them, because the mix also includes intervention. Clear thinking about economic morality cannot begin until we have clear terms that reflect the full-spectrum of economic reality.

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them.

There have been huge advances in technology and substantial declines in trade barriers in recent years. While these developments have raised living standards they have been hard on people whose skills were rendered obsolete or uncompetitive. When changes evolve gradually, as when so many people left farming in the last century, the disruption is not so great. Changes are now coming faster and are extending to some high-paid professional jobs. Automated systems can now handle at least the routine aspects of some legal research and medical diagnosis.

Time and time again new doors have opened to workers as old doors closed. Machines replace workers, but they raise productivity and produce new employment opportunities. We can expect this pattern to continue for a long time to come. Still, it is within the realm of possibility that robots and computers could take over so much work that the demand for human workers would shrink drastically. But those very machines would mean higher productivity and thus higher living standards.

A great deal of work can be now be done remotely, providing an advantage to areas with low living costs. Substantial outsourcing of such jobs to foreign countries has occurred (though that trend may be reversing as low-cost areas of the United States become competitive and as customer dissatisfaction and problems with managing offshore workers come up). The benefits of outsourcing and other productivity enhancements are spread across all consumers, but the job losses are concentrated among small and sometimes vocal minorities. Continue reading →

Rare Earth Elements: Stockpile or Markets?

Warren Gibson Economics , , , , , , , , , ,

Quick, what do you know about lanthanum, praseodymium, neodymium, or dysprosium? If you said they are chemical elements, you are right: numbers 57, 59, 60, and 66, to be exact. They and their neighbors on the periodic table, collectively “rare earths,” were once mere curiosities tucked in between barium and tungsten. Now they’re having their day in the sun, thanks to new technology, as did uranium and plutonium when atomic energy was developed. The military may begin stockpiling them.

Good idea or not?

My first encounter with these elements was a project that developed high-tech shock absorbers to protect a replacement camera for the Hubble telescope during the camera’s rough ride to orbit. These devices, called M-Struts, pioneered the use of permanent magnets for shock mitigation. The only material our team found that would provide sufficient magnetic flux density (a measure of the strength of a magnetic field at a given point) was a rare earth alloy, NdFeB (neodymium-iron-boron). This material could only be procured from China.

M-Struts were a one-off project that had no discernible effect on the demand curve for neodymium. But now the demand curve is crowding up against the supply curve largely because of rare earth applications in “green” energy devices such as wind turbines (extra points if you knew that). Continue reading →