Certainly the shanghaiing of health care was center stage in Washington. Yet there is something more we can extract, something even profound, something freighted with more gravity than this mere perfidy - that would be the chilling instinct of so many to fly to government for security, for protection from the workings of free enterprise. Why?
Gary Becker and Milton Friedman founded the Chicago School of Economics. Both are Nobel laureates. We lost the great Friedman but Becker at 79 is still very active. The WSJ carried an interview with Becker at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
When asked about the health deal, "It's a bad bill," Becker replied. "Health care in the United States is pretty good, but it does have a number of weaknesses. This bill doesn't address them. It adds taxation and regulation. It's going to increase health costs—not contain them." Thank you.
But on pondering our key consideration - why for example capitalism has produced the highest standard of living in history and yet its beneficiaries sometimes forget that and look to government for protection, from higher health care premiums for example - Mr. Becker explains: "People tend to impute good motives to government. And if you assume that government officials are well meaning, then you also tend to assume that government officials always act on behalf of the greater good. People understand that entrepreneurs and investors by contrast just try to make money, not act on behalf of the greater good. And they have trouble seeing how this pursuit of profits can lift the general standard of living. The idea is too counterintuitive. So we're always up against a kind of in-built suspicion of markets. There's always a temptation to believe that markets succeed by looting the unfortunate."
Many of the left tend to feed exclusively on the bottom; like catfish or carp they feel secure down there. And they want the rest down there with them. But the notion that free enterprise is bad, that it spawns inequality of opportunity, is a myth. The easy way out, that chorus that the rich exploit the poor, or, to update, that insurance companies exploit consumers is utterly false IF government’s role is limited to preserving the rule of law. High health insurance premiums are no secret for goodness sake. But when a free market is permitted to operate then it is in everyone’s best interest, and, in all arenas including health.
And so we see that absent the left’s hijacking of the health sector, the fix would have been easy. As Becker explains, "Health savings accounts could have been expanded. Consumers could have been permitted to purchase insurance across state lines, which would have increased competition among insurers. The tax deductibility of health-care spending could have been extended from employers to individuals, giving the same tax treatment to all consumers. And incentives could have been put in place to prompt consumers to pay a larger portion of their health-care costs out of their own pockets."
Instead, BO artfully exploited the groundless fears of capitalism and the instinct of many to look to government for a fix. He understands the indolent nature of a good portion of our population, those whose library is stuffed with past issues of People, Newsweek and Cosmo but never an Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Buchanan, Stigler, Hayek or Friedman.
Robert Craven
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Role Model
Well shoot, good ‘ol Barney (T. F.) Frank, Dodd, BO and Clinton are darn lucky they weren’t N. Korean politicians. The "Dear Leader" there just executed his finance chief, one Pak Nam-gi for fouling up on currency reform. Whoa now. Since Barney, Dodd, BO and Clinton were smack dead center at ground zero, they’d have been toast. For the folks who put us in this economic mess, we here in the US are pretty darn forgiving are we not?
Maybe we should in the fashion of our own Dear Leader be more prone to adopt foreign ways. He may have something there. Poor Nam-gi merely stirred up a cesspool; BO, Dodd, Frank and the rest went big time - they fouled up an entire world economy.
Robert Craven
Maybe we should in the fashion of our own Dear Leader be more prone to adopt foreign ways. He may have something there. Poor Nam-gi merely stirred up a cesspool; BO, Dodd, Frank and the rest went big time - they fouled up an entire world economy.
Robert Craven
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Planners A Threat To Liberty
What we’ve all witnessed, past months, has been nothing short of stunning. We have a radical at the helm with the single intent of ironing his agenda smack into the fabric of America.
Consider health. Most now understand that Obama’s health plan is only incidentally about health; he’s made little secret of it. And even if the plan or parts of the plan had merit, to force, gestapo-style, the whole thing on all of us, most find repelling (he called the democratic process "unfortunate" in a recent interview). This all reeks of something not quite right underfoot does it not?
But as citizens we may wish to consider a larger side, the implications beyond the auto industry, beyond education, health and the economy to that of government planning itself. This consideration eclipses all others, our view.
What can history tell us? What can great thinkers tell us? Are we worry warts with this blog, or is there is real threat from Obama and his kind - the far-left - to our actual liberty?
If we re-read the lessons of those who inspired our Founders, of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, of Francis Hutchinson and Edmund Burke, and of Jefferson himself, and finally more contemporaneously, von Mises, Hayek and Friedman then we become immediately alarmed. What they all saw was that every step away from a free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom.
One need only return to England after WWII. She embraced socialism. I was there in 1967. It was all malaise; all was gray, bleak, seemingly without hope. There was no individualism by the way of thought or action. In their planned society, Brits found life less liveable, less free, less prosperous and less hopeful, and most damning of all, devoid of dignity. They had shed capitalism in the search for the easy, less messy way out.
Yet Hayek tells us that capitalism is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity. And to the extent we move away from that system, we empower the worst people in society - Obama & Co in the present case - to manage what they do not understand.
Smith and Jefferson saw it. From Friedman’s Free To Choose, "Smith and Jefferson alike have seen concentrated gov’t power as a great danger to the ordinary man; they saw the protection of the citizen against the tyranny of gov’t as the perpetual need." Jefferson expressed this in his first inaugural address (1801), stating that his ideal was, "...a wise and frugal gov’t, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement." Political freedom and economic freedom went hand in hand.
Indeed, Adam Smith explained that a complex, organized, smoothly running system can develop and flourish without central direction; he demonstrated how coordination can be achieved without coercion.
The US followed Smith fairly closely coming into the 20th century. But then policy makers began to take our prosperity for granted. The great depression caused a flight to security in the US as intellectuals finally found traction; that is, they resurrected, in spite of past failures (and in personifying Einstein’s definition of a dunce) ideas which had never worked but sounded good every time. They, like Obama and Woodrow Wilson were the best and the brightest, having greater powers of insight and discernment than us mortals. Of course it all ended badly.
But perhaps all is not lost. As Friedman reminded us 30 years ago, private ingenuity can overcome the deadening effects of government control. True, but private ingenuity can only do so much. If we do not stop now that statist agenda, that poison in Washington then as Friedman warned, "Sooner or later - and perhaps sooner that any of us expect - an ever bigger gov’t will destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence."
(This blog is too confined to explore this topic thoroughly. Ponder it a tad further folks, on your own. For our lefty friends, the exercise may change your orientation, going forward.)
Robert Craven
Consider health. Most now understand that Obama’s health plan is only incidentally about health; he’s made little secret of it. And even if the plan or parts of the plan had merit, to force, gestapo-style, the whole thing on all of us, most find repelling (he called the democratic process "unfortunate" in a recent interview). This all reeks of something not quite right underfoot does it not?
But as citizens we may wish to consider a larger side, the implications beyond the auto industry, beyond education, health and the economy to that of government planning itself. This consideration eclipses all others, our view.
What can history tell us? What can great thinkers tell us? Are we worry warts with this blog, or is there is real threat from Obama and his kind - the far-left - to our actual liberty?
If we re-read the lessons of those who inspired our Founders, of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, of Francis Hutchinson and Edmund Burke, and of Jefferson himself, and finally more contemporaneously, von Mises, Hayek and Friedman then we become immediately alarmed. What they all saw was that every step away from a free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom.
One need only return to England after WWII. She embraced socialism. I was there in 1967. It was all malaise; all was gray, bleak, seemingly without hope. There was no individualism by the way of thought or action. In their planned society, Brits found life less liveable, less free, less prosperous and less hopeful, and most damning of all, devoid of dignity. They had shed capitalism in the search for the easy, less messy way out.
Yet Hayek tells us that capitalism is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity. And to the extent we move away from that system, we empower the worst people in society - Obama & Co in the present case - to manage what they do not understand.
Smith and Jefferson saw it. From Friedman’s Free To Choose, "Smith and Jefferson alike have seen concentrated gov’t power as a great danger to the ordinary man; they saw the protection of the citizen against the tyranny of gov’t as the perpetual need." Jefferson expressed this in his first inaugural address (1801), stating that his ideal was, "...a wise and frugal gov’t, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement." Political freedom and economic freedom went hand in hand.
Indeed, Adam Smith explained that a complex, organized, smoothly running system can develop and flourish without central direction; he demonstrated how coordination can be achieved without coercion.
The US followed Smith fairly closely coming into the 20th century. But then policy makers began to take our prosperity for granted. The great depression caused a flight to security in the US as intellectuals finally found traction; that is, they resurrected, in spite of past failures (and in personifying Einstein’s definition of a dunce) ideas which had never worked but sounded good every time. They, like Obama and Woodrow Wilson were the best and the brightest, having greater powers of insight and discernment than us mortals. Of course it all ended badly.
But perhaps all is not lost. As Friedman reminded us 30 years ago, private ingenuity can overcome the deadening effects of government control. True, but private ingenuity can only do so much. If we do not stop now that statist agenda, that poison in Washington then as Friedman warned, "Sooner or later - and perhaps sooner that any of us expect - an ever bigger gov’t will destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence."
(This blog is too confined to explore this topic thoroughly. Ponder it a tad further folks, on your own. For our lefty friends, the exercise may change your orientation, going forward.)
Robert Craven
Friday, March 12, 2010
Fleeced
Worried about your kids’ welfare, given Obama’s health plans? Relax. No need. Forget the little darlings. BO’s not waiting for your kids.
The health heist is at center stage. This monster will 1) protect trial lawyers, the left’s bankers, 2) raise you health bills and 3) cost your kids plenty. Oh, we forgot; and then finally lead to rationing. But heck, you don’t need to wait for your kids to get screwed. You can enjoy it too.
You’re being fleeced right now. That would be the stimulus fraud and the taxes necessary to pay for it.
Many of us with a background in economics know by instinct that gov’t spending programs do not create economic activity on net. Others have gone a step further to document this reality. Scholars at UCLA have shown that the New Deal created nothing - a wash. Now Robert Barro, a prof of economics at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute brings us forward. "Viewed over five years, the stimulus package is a way to get an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. This is a bad deal." Oh, that.
For the curious, here is the article http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/85033172.html.
An economist or two (exactly two) support this government interference. Paul Krugman is one. Krugman ignores economic history at his followers' peril. The Japanese government tried this foolishness in the 1990's. Didn’t go too well did it Paul? Unless of course you call nearly two decades of economic stagnation a success.
The other would be Robert Frank (rhymes with crank, no just kidding), a Cornell University econ professor and (surprise!) also a columnist for the NYT’s. Here is what he had to say about those of us who opposed the so-called stimulus package: "The fact that stimulus opponents are far less numerous, have less distinguished academic credentials, on average, and are far less ideologically diverse than their counterparts does not guarantee they're wrong. But these factors should make rational consumers and investors less likely to side with them. And since this is really an argument about expectations, that's probably enough." My, my Bob but you’re special.
The reality that 5 Nobel laureates have joined us in declaring stimulus to be nonsense is merely an inconvenience for Bob. (Heck, I don’t need that stinking medal!) The fact is that every time "rational consumers" listen to the likes of Bob they shed the rational part. Bob and his kind never saw a tax or levy or program they didn’t like; they never saw an arm of government that wasn’t soft and furry; they never saw a job that wasn’t secure and privileged. Bob and the rest of the sophisticate elite see the real world - how the unwashed are led, fooled and mesmerized - as their flock, in need of constant herding.
Well, know what? Most of the left understand, at least those in Congress. They know that a dollar spent on a new lawnmower at the hardware store does not generate a single vote but a dollar spent on a new job mowing grass along an interstate highway certainly does.
And unlike most of their flock, they are posted in American history. They read. They’re twisted sure but not stupid. They knew what they were up to - 100%. But in the case of stimulus they also knew that if the masses didn’t do their homework (and economics puts most everyone to sleep) they could slip this one by. This is why this legislation is more than a tragedy; it is an act of deceit.
Robert Craven
The health heist is at center stage. This monster will 1) protect trial lawyers, the left’s bankers, 2) raise you health bills and 3) cost your kids plenty. Oh, we forgot; and then finally lead to rationing. But heck, you don’t need to wait for your kids to get screwed. You can enjoy it too.
You’re being fleeced right now. That would be the stimulus fraud and the taxes necessary to pay for it.
Many of us with a background in economics know by instinct that gov’t spending programs do not create economic activity on net. Others have gone a step further to document this reality. Scholars at UCLA have shown that the New Deal created nothing - a wash. Now Robert Barro, a prof of economics at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute brings us forward. "Viewed over five years, the stimulus package is a way to get an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. This is a bad deal." Oh, that.
For the curious, here is the article http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/85033172.html.
An economist or two (exactly two) support this government interference. Paul Krugman is one. Krugman ignores economic history at his followers' peril. The Japanese government tried this foolishness in the 1990's. Didn’t go too well did it Paul? Unless of course you call nearly two decades of economic stagnation a success.
The other would be Robert Frank (rhymes with crank, no just kidding), a Cornell University econ professor and (surprise!) also a columnist for the NYT’s. Here is what he had to say about those of us who opposed the so-called stimulus package: "The fact that stimulus opponents are far less numerous, have less distinguished academic credentials, on average, and are far less ideologically diverse than their counterparts does not guarantee they're wrong. But these factors should make rational consumers and investors less likely to side with them. And since this is really an argument about expectations, that's probably enough." My, my Bob but you’re special.
The reality that 5 Nobel laureates have joined us in declaring stimulus to be nonsense is merely an inconvenience for Bob. (Heck, I don’t need that stinking medal!) The fact is that every time "rational consumers" listen to the likes of Bob they shed the rational part. Bob and his kind never saw a tax or levy or program they didn’t like; they never saw an arm of government that wasn’t soft and furry; they never saw a job that wasn’t secure and privileged. Bob and the rest of the sophisticate elite see the real world - how the unwashed are led, fooled and mesmerized - as their flock, in need of constant herding.
Well, know what? Most of the left understand, at least those in Congress. They know that a dollar spent on a new lawnmower at the hardware store does not generate a single vote but a dollar spent on a new job mowing grass along an interstate highway certainly does.
And unlike most of their flock, they are posted in American history. They read. They’re twisted sure but not stupid. They knew what they were up to - 100%. But in the case of stimulus they also knew that if the masses didn’t do their homework (and economics puts most everyone to sleep) they could slip this one by. This is why this legislation is more than a tragedy; it is an act of deceit.
Robert Craven
Friday, March 5, 2010
Employment in February
OK folks, this am we received the key BLS monthly employment release, this one for Feb. It was not as soft as expected (frigid weather). The good news is that average job losses continue to shrink, mo to mo. The other two components we need to look at in today’s release are 1) the average work week which fell just a tad (0.2% to 33.1 hours vs the low of 33.0, 10/09) and 2) hourly earnings which rose 0.2% in February; earnings are now 2.2% above their year ago level. Weather was very bad during the survey week (where are the "warmers" when we need them?) which no doubt explains the lower hours - look for a rebound in March or April.
These numbers, while improved, certainly do not reflect vigor. True, this ‘ol economy of ours is sure giving it a shot. With JFK or Reagan here it would be so easy. The major hindrance, as we know is always true, is the far left. Prosperity and these extremists just don’t mix.
There are a heap of small business owners out there who are not extremists, but are registered Democrats nevertheless. Certainly they must look within for their problems.
Dodd, Frank, BO and other key Democrats - implicit at ground zero. But that was not enough to discourage the chatterers. Create a meltdown, blame it on Bush, and get elected. Too much.
Not being aware of the real-world implications of one’s party politics, yet charging ahead anyway and pulling the trigger makes it rough on everyone.
Robert Craven
These numbers, while improved, certainly do not reflect vigor. True, this ‘ol economy of ours is sure giving it a shot. With JFK or Reagan here it would be so easy. The major hindrance, as we know is always true, is the far left. Prosperity and these extremists just don’t mix.
There are a heap of small business owners out there who are not extremists, but are registered Democrats nevertheless. Certainly they must look within for their problems.
Dodd, Frank, BO and other key Democrats - implicit at ground zero. But that was not enough to discourage the chatterers. Create a meltdown, blame it on Bush, and get elected. Too much.
Not being aware of the real-world implications of one’s party politics, yet charging ahead anyway and pulling the trigger makes it rough on everyone.
Robert Craven
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