Who Belongs On Mount Rushmore?

David Henderson, of The Library Of Economics And Liberty, has made the unlikely claim that Warren Harding belongs on Mount Rushmore. 

In addition to letting Eugene Debs out of prison, Harding also was ahead of his time on racial issues.  Here's a quote from Henderson's post:

Instead of attempting to suppress the black vote, he was a Republican, who, in 1921, made a speech in Jefferson, Ala., supporting the right of black men to vote. 1921!

He said: "Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote." A reporter said that while the white section of the audience remained silent, the black section cheered.

Hardly enough to justify reshaping a mountain, but a good deed nonetheless. 

Other people have made other suggestions....

There's Reagan, who as best I can tell, had the advantage of not being Jimmy Carter....

And, of course, the Obamessiah, who has had the advantage of being black.  (I hate to go down that road, but if that damn fool's name was Barry O'Brien, and he was a white guy from East Armpit, Illinois, with the same non-achievements, he would've never made it into the Illinois State Legislature.)

Don Boudreaux, of the Café Hayek site, has chimed in with his .02 cents. 

I'd remove from Mt. Rushmore all people who are most famous for holding political office - which is to say, I'd blast off all four of the currently sculpted faces. I'd replace them with images of the faces of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Gustavus Swift, J.J. Hill (even though he was Canadian!), and either Gail Borden or Steve Jobs - people who really define, and who helped in notable and noticeable ways to sculpt, what is good about America. (If obliged to include a non-entrepreneur among the four, there's no question that the person whose visage I would choose is that wisest of all Americans, H.L. Mencken.)

If the suggestion is to ban politicians from being carved into mountainsides, I'll go with the following:

Sam Walton.  Walton brought more people out of bone-grinding poverty than anyone else in history.  He deserved a Nobel.  His company has provided millions of jobs to employees that you and I and Microsoft and Starbucks and Costco consider unemployable. 

Let's throw Norman Borlaug up there.  He came up with variations on wheat DNA that quadrupled yields.  He's called "the man who saved a billion lives", and because he did so without help from the Lefties, he's been widely criticized for doing so. 

David Koch.  Mostly to piss off the Statists, but also because he was an early, early advocate of ending the Nixon/Obama Drug War, legalizing Gay Marriage, ending the Fed, staying out of other people's wars, and lobbying for a smaller government.  Conde Nast has called him "one of the most generous, but low-key philanthropists in the USA".  Go here for a breakdown of just some of the money this man has given away.  (He's also given lots and lots of money to defeat the Obamacrats.  Unfortunately, all of it went to Republicans.)  The Libertarians ran him for V.P. in 1980. 

Milton Friedman.  He wrote Capitalism And Freedom, plus Free To Choose.  As a bonus, he and his wife Rose brought David Friedman into the world. 

I like those people.  Maybe one day they'll be carved into a mountainside and properly appreciated by a grateful nation. 

 

Whose picture should be on our currency?

Our currency in the U.S. (often known in the black community as "Dead Presidents") honors people who won wars.  Andrew Jackson killed a lot of Indians.  General Grant killed a lot of Confederates.  Franklin Roosevelt killed the economy. 

We should commemorate people who spread liberty and freedom. 

Don Boudreaux (who should be on a commemorative penny, at least) has come up with a list of people who we should honor on our Federal Reserve Notes and our debased coinage. 

Here's his list.  It's greatness.... !

$1 bill: George Washington.  For all of his flaws, Washington was not as mad for power as is the typical politician.  That character trait was enormously beneficial to the early American republic.

Ok.  Agreed.  They wanted him to be king, and he declined.  Although I sometimes think we would be better off with some hereditary despots who relied on promoting freed, as opposed to the current system of beauty contests. 

$2 bill: Henry Ford, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

I dunno.  Towards the end of his life, he became increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-liquor, 3 concepts that I like a lot. 

$5 bill: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

He added hundreds of hours of light (via kerosene) at increasingly lower prices to the common man.  You could make the argument that Rockefeller saved the whales !!

$10 bill: Gustavus Swift, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

Ok.  Good choice. 

$20 bill: Norman Borlaug, for saving countless millions of people from starvation.

Excellent choice.  He developed new strains of wheat (and was harshly criticized by many on the left, because it would increase population!) and probably saved a billion (with a "b") lives. 

$50 bill: Sam Walton, for being such a pioneering and innovative retailer.

Wouldn't that make the Statists go just absolutely batshit crazy?  Sam Walton helped bring one million people per month out of bone-grinding poverty in China.  He did more than anyone in history to hold down inflation in the era of the Fed.  He's the reason the jeans I'm wearing now cost less than they did in 1977.  Here's why he deserved a Nobel !!

$100 bill: Benjamin Franklin, for his scientific achievements and his bourgeois wisdom.

Meh.  Interesting guy, but I'd rather see Calvin Coolidge (greatest president) get a spot. 

One-cent coin: Richard Sears, for being such a pioneering and innovative retailer.

Ok.  He changed the world. 

Five-cent coin: Steve Jobs, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

Well, he did more good than Roosevelt. 

10-cent coin: John Bogle, for inventing the indexed mutual fund.

Ok. 

25-cent coin: Milton Friedman, for teaching not only the general public, but fellow economists, economics.

HELL TO THE YES.  YES, YES, YES!!

50-cent coin: Gail Borden, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

Ok. 

$1 coin: Andrew Mellon, a productive financial genius

And the opposite side of the Andrew Mellon coin should show Franklin Roosevelt burning in hell.  Read Amity Shlaes great account of The Roosevelt-induced Depression "The Forgotten Man" for details of how FDR persecuted this great man. 

That's Don Boudreaux's list.  You probably have your own. 

The difference in Bill Gates and me - not much

Take George Washington's parents and put them in a time machine.  Let them hang out with Bill Gates for a week.  This is what would impress them.....

Do a mental experiment. Imagine resurrecting an ancestor from the year 1700 and showing him a typical day in the life of Bill Gates. The opulence would obviously astonish your ancestor, but a good guess is that the features of Gates’s life that would make the deepest impression are the fact that he and his family never worry about starving to death; that they bathe daily; that they have several changes of clean clothes; that they have clean and healthy teeth; that diseases such as smallpox, polio, diphtheria, tuberculosis, tetanus, and pertusis present no substantial risks; that Melinda Gates’s chances of dying during childbirth are about one-sixtieth what they would have been in 1700; that each child born to the Gateses is about 40 times more likely than a pre-industrial child to survive infancy; that the Gateses have a household refrigerator and freezer (not to mention microwave ovens, dishwashers, and televisions); that the Gateses’s work week is only five days and that the family takes several weeks of vacation each year; that the Gates children will receive well over a decade of formal schooling; that the Gateses routinely travel through the air to distant lands in a matter of hours; that they effortlessly converse with people miles or oceans away; that they can, whenever and wherever they please, listen to a Mozart string quartet, a Verdi opera, or Frank Sinatra singing of romance.
In short, what would likely most impress a visitor from the past about Bill Gates’s life are precisely those modern advantages that are not unique to Bill Gates – advantages now enjoyed by nearly all Americans.

This kind of life is America's gift to the world.  How we did it, how we grew it, seems obvious to us when we think about it.  Hell there's not that much difference, climate-wise, between the U.S. and Haiti, right? 

And we are now burdened with a political class in Washington that is doing everything possible to screw it up, counting on your jealousy of Bill Gates to give them more and more power and control. 

 

TANSTAFHC

TANSTAFHC. 

TANSTAFHC is a bastard acronym fathered by Don Boudreaux and Robert Heinlein. 

"There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Health Care". 

Someone is paying for the free healthcare.  The doctor is being fed.  The medicine didn't create itself.  The electric bill really does have to be paid.  The nurse typically has to pay rent or a mortgage. 

It ain't free. 

Please do the world a service, and start slapping TANSTAFHC all over the U.S.  The Affordable Healthcare Act isn't free.  You will not get free healthcare. 

And the closer we get to the goals of the Affordable Healthcare Act, the further it's going to get from affordable. 

 

On "Secular Theism"

As a result of reading every scrap of libertarian/free market/Austrian economics scribbling that I can get my hands on, I've been thinking more and more about the idea of "Secular Theism". 

First, a few definitions...  A Deist is someone who believes that there is something called "god" and that god may or may not have set the world in motion.  Deists usually reject the Trinitarian formula of Father/Son/Holy Spirit.  Deists simply believe that there is a powerful entity out there called "god", and that there's just one of them.  And that's about it. 

Theists take it up a notch.  They believe that there is a god, and that god cares and god gets involved.  You could say that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and most of the other rigmaroles are all Theistic religions. 

The term "Secular Theist", as I've seen it used, is somewhat of an insult. 

I have friends and acquaintances on the left who are rabidly anti-Christian.  They are proud to tell you that they don't believe in ghosts, goblins, gods, spirits, witches, the afterlife, or anything supernatural.  So that makes them secular, right? 

But they also have a charming, creationist-style belief that nothing happens unless guided from above.  They are the first to ask "But who would build the roads in a libertarian society?", almost like the guy in the fundamentalist fable who finds a watch on the beach, and knows that if there is a watch, there must be a skilled watchmaker.  Roads wouldn't be built without god government. 

They can't imagine a free market medical system, a system whose costs and prices would plummet (like the costs associated with lap-band surgery, liposuction, boob jobs, etc.) in an environment where government stayed the hell out.  People would be left to die without god government.

My buddies on the left look at the success of somewhat deregulated countries like Korea, Taiwan, and China in the same way that Pentecostal preachers look at 65,000,000-year-old Brontosaurus bones.  It just doesn't compute for them.  Countries can't truly prosper without more god government.

Most of my liberal friends are Theists, and when I say this, I truly mean that they are Theists of the most superstitious sort. 

Does that sound kinda harsh?  Well, here's some Luddy Von Mises, quoted by Don Boudreaux:

Organization is an association based on authority, organism is mutuality.  The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never as having grown themselves, organically.  He sees the arrow which he has carved, he knows how it came into existence and how it was set in motion.  So he asks of everything he sees, who made it and who sets it in motion.  He inquires after the creation of every form of life, the authors of every change in nature, and discovers an animistic explanation.

"Nobody" made the internet.  It happened.  The process, no matter what Al Gore says, was an evolutionary process involving billions and billions of both good and bad decisions. 

The same can be said for our current healthcare system, your house, your first tricycle, your car, the device you're using to read this post, and every stitch of clothing you're now wearing.  Nobody made it.  Everybody made it.  (Unless you live in a Worker's Paradise like North Korea, where, if you're lucky and have a few of these items, they were provided for you as part of a process dictated by the gods at the top of the system.) 

The older I get, the less I believe in gods - secular or theological.  They're given too much credit for things they had little or no part in. 

Be sure to thank the people who didn't try to make it happen

If you're a tech geek, you've seen this picture.  Let's start at the top left and go clockwise.  There's a videocam, a primitive jam box, a radio, an electric typewriter, a calculator, some VHS tapes, a VCR, some things I don't recognize, a digital recorder, a pager, and a camera. 

We now have this.  It'll do everything shown above, will fit in your pocket, will probably last longer, and it costs a fraction of the gizmos shown above.  I'm not a techno-geek, and I've given up on going after the best stuff, so the phone I arbitrarily posted below is probably out-of-date already. 

I've got a 3 or 4 year old Blackberry knockoff, and I'm still getting accustomed to the joy of pulling up "Map" and typing in "Haircut" or "bar" or "bourbon" and being directed to the nearest supplier. 

Here's something from Gizmodo:

A company called Ampex put out the first "home entertainment" VTR in 1963, only it cost $30,000 in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, and was nicknamed Grant's Tomb because the product manager who thought it up was going to be shoved inside by the company's accountants. (He would have fit, too, the thing was so big.) Sony comes along in the middle of that decade and puts out a $1,200 "portable" VTR that came with a leatherette case and its own TV. It still weighed 65 pounds.

No one intended the glorious destruction of the VCR/VHS/tape recorder/typewriter industry.  It just kinda happened.  People wanted to make money.  Others were just tinkerers.  And for the most part, they were left alone.  There was no Central Planner in Washington, overseeing the evolution of what you probably have in your pocket or purse.  No Technology Czar carefully planning each step of the demolition of BetaMax.   (Had there been a Technology Czar, you would still be watching  Betamax or VHS tapes, at best.  Do some reading on Regulatory Capture.  Regulators and Czars almost always wind up protecting the status quo.) 

Here's a good summary of the undersigned, unplanned and spontaneous social order that many of us are still fortunate enough to live in.  Don Boudreaux at his best:

"....many people simply cannot conceive of social order that isn’t consciously designed and enforced by some secular creator (that is, by the state).  Most people are secular theists regarding social order.  Order must, for secular theists, be the result of a some higher power that designs, intends, imposes, and guides willfully the order that we see about us.  Without a higher secular power designing and keeping control of things, chaos or near-chaos would necessarily reign.

Get rid of this secular deity – or suffer it to fall under the influence of secular devils (for American “Progressives,” those devils today are tea-partiers) – and society must deteriorate.  Rules of the road would wither away, or certainly not be enforced; roads themselves would never be built; the electromagnetic spectrum would become a commons tragically overused (and, hence, rendered useless) by countless broadcasters scrambling for airtime; and automobiles – were they to exist at all – would be horrible death traps.

The great insight of the social sciences – which too few social scientists themselves get – is that society, to the extent that it is complex and functional, is necessarily the result of human action but not of human design.

Reasonable people can and do dispute how much sovereign intention and design are necessary or worthwhile to tweak, modify, polish, protect, top-off the emergent social order that not only did government not design but couldn’t possibly have even begun to design.*  But it is totally false and wrongheaded – yet it is the dominant view of almost everyone – that most of the economic and social order that we experience about us is the result of government and, hence, would necessarily disappear or collapse into disarray were government to disappear or fail to perform its duty well.

Sadly, most people are apparently just incapable of understanding that almost all social order emerges undesigned and unplanned.  Most people are and seemingly will remain naive secular creationists, ignorant that the forces of natural selection and evolution are constantly at play in society, and that these force are usually only thwarted or distorted by attempts to engineer society from on high.  And (here’s an irony) this sad ignorance of the nature of society afflicts even – perhaps especially – those people who have no difficulty understanding that very complex, beautiful, and highly functional non-social orders (such as biological order and the order of the cosmos) emerge unplanned and undesigned."

So next time you make a phone call, record a video, post a FB photo, send a text, snap a picture, get directions, post a blog rant, or watch a DVD, be sure to thank the person in Washington D.C. who didn't try to make it all happen. 

In Praise Of Planet-Warming, Highway-Congesting, Port-Clogging Shipping And Freight !!

I might stop putting original content on this site, and start scraping Don Boudreaux's and Russ Roberts' Café Hayek posts every day.  Just out of awe.  And maybe laziness. 
As long as those two are alive, I really don't have much to say about anything but dachshunds. 

Here's a recent post that Boudreaux put together about shipping and freight:

The Quotation Of The Day is from page 2 of Rose George’s 2013 Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes On Your Back, Gas In Your Car, and Food On Your Plate:

But who looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it?  Who cares about the man who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms?  How ironic that the more ships have grown in size, the less space they now take up in our imagination.

It is one of the most historically unique and amazing features of life in modern market economies: almost everything that each of us daily consumes – stuff mundane to us, such as toothpaste, laundry detergent, underwear, houses with solid floors, walls, and roofs, motor transportation, blueberries and pineapple year-round in Boston and Berlin – is stuff that no one person knows how to make.  It’s not just that you didn’t make and don’t know how to make, say, the drip-coffee maker that you used this morning to brew your cup of coffee.  No one knows how to make that coffee maker.  And nor is all of the knowledge necessary to make that coffee maker, and to get it at reasonably cost into your kitchen, available in any one place or to any one self-consciously cooperating group of minds.

Of course, there is an organization of people – working, say, for a company called Krups – in which there exists the knowledge of how to assemble various component parts – wires, metal, glass carafes, heating elements, and so on – into a coffee maker.  But Krups (as is the case with the likes of Braun, and Cuisinart, and Black & Decker) only does the final assembly (and, perhaps, had a creative idea or two for just how to assemble component parts together into an unusually good coffee maker).

But tap into all of the knowledge in all of the brains of all of the people who have ever worked for Krups and you’ll not get one one-billionth of all the knowledge that is necessary to transforms all of the materials that are ‘in’ your coffee maker from their raw stage and into the machine that now sits patiently on your kitchen counter, ready to allow you to brew more delicious coffee within minutes, with no sweat or danger, and with just a few small and minor muscle movements on your part.

     ****************************************

One day I'm going to write an illustrated post about how my employer makes products as fundamentally ridiculous as fruitstands, but showing how the process now involves people in four continents. 

I've been wanting to write this "I, Fruitstand" post for years. 

But, to Dr. Boudreaux's point, I'm around them every day. 

It doesn't fascinate me that the metal comes from Mexico just how we want it, and that the wood comes from the Appalachians and the casters from China and the plastic bumper from the Philippines, or wherever.  We take this process for granted, simply because it works. 

 

Who'd A-Thunk It ???

My unofficial economics mentor #1, Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek, is starting a new series called "Who'd a-Thunk it?" 

I assume he's going to post things about the inevitable consequences of government policy, and the shocked, shocked reactions from supporters of those policies when things don't work out as planned.  (You know, the law of unintended consequences, things seen and unseen, markets responding rationally to punishment, etc.) 

In other words, "Who'd a-Thunk that punishing businesses by making them pay for healthcare would cause businesses to hire fewer employees?"

Boudreaux is accepting your submissions.  The first to be published was supplied by my unofficial economics mentor #13 (yeah, I have them numbered), Greg Mankiw.  It's from an email he received Saturday morning:

I have been teaching multiple sections of economics for four years now at several Colleges and Universities in the State of Indiana. I have also been a frequent user of your texts in the classes that I teach.

With the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) these institutions are giving notification to their part-time faulty that their individual teaching schedules will now be limited to three sections. At the college this will likely result in the cancellation of 20-25% of the class sections in economics, and I would assume other areas will have a similar result. The students are not fully aware of the situation and many will be surprised that their desire to get a college education is now being impacted by the need to avoid the full implementation of the ACA.

Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat I would hope full-time faculty would voice their concern regarding the impact the implementation of the ACA could have on the attainment of higher education for the current student population and upon the lives of the dedicated part-time faculty that have been devoted to serving this student population.
My hope is that if faculty across the nation brought this to the public attention that we as a nation could have a more open and complete dialogue regarding the course we wish to set as a nation.

Good stuff, isn't it? 

Elections have consequences.  Who'd a-Thunk it? 


 

Laissez Faire - by Don Boudreaux

I have struggled, and failed, for the last 5 years to express what Don Boudreaux says here in just three paragraphs. 
Why in the hell would anyone opposed to The Religious Right or The Ultra-Secular Left want a larger, more intrusive government? 

If you are a modern “Progressive” and cannot abide the notion of conservatives, Christian or otherwise, having a say in who you sleep with and who you may marry, when and why you may get an abortion, what sorts of scientific research and artistic projects should be funded, what school curricula should and shouldn’t include, or when and why Uncle Sam goes on world-policing ventures, then why do you wish to expand the scope of government authority? Doing so in a society with a wide franchise, such as the U.S., inevitably invites those rubes to intrude their antediluvian superstitions and dogmas onto you and onto all that you hold dear and sacred.


If you are a modern conservative, Christian or otherwise, and cannot abide the notion of “Progressives” having a say in how you school your children, what your tax rates are, what size Big Gulps you may buy, or whether or not you may fill in ditches and water puddles on your land, then why do you tolerate – indeed, frequently applaud – activities such as government’s ‘war on drugs,’ Uncle Sam’s interventionist foreign policies, strict immigration restrictions, and tariffs on imports? Doing so – by creating a large and discretionary state – only encourages those obnoxious know-it-alls to use government against you and against all that you hold dear and sacred.

Here’s why I ask the above questions: every time I’m in a supermarket check-out lane and catch the headlines of the reading materials on sale there – soap-opera digests, magazines featuring Oprah and other entertainment celebrities, and the like – I literally get a bit of a queazy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It somewhat sickens me that people care who Jennifer Anniston is dating, what Oprah is eating, or why male hunk du jour just ditched female sex-goddess du jour for some other equally vacuous if va-va-va-voom!-inducing babe. I don’t wish to prevent anyone from reading about or caring deeply about these matters about which I truly couldn’t care less. But it scares me that people who read that nonsense – because they care about that nonsense - have a say in how my life is conducted. I resent the fact that such people, if only through the ballot box, have influence how government orders me about.

The more expansive is the scope of government authority, the more my life is subject to commands issued in part under the influence of people who read Us magazine.

Scary.

Not just scary.  Terrifying.  But people vote for more of it every 2 years. 

It wasn't the Rotary Club that segregated the public schools

Here are some goodies from Don Boudreaux on what would happen to Civil Rights and Civil Liberties without the heavy hand of government making us behave.

Remember: Jim Crow was legislation, not custom. PLEASE read the whole thing....

Letter to editor: Reacting to Rand Paul’s remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, you say that his libertarian philosophy “is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society….  It was only government power that … abolished Jim Crow” (“Limits of Libertarianism,” May 22).

Don Boudreaux: You’ve got it backwards.  Jim Crow itself was government power.  Jim Crow was legislation that forced the segregation of blacks from whites.  Research shows that people acting in the free market that you apparently believe is prone to racial discrimination were remarkably reluctant to discriminate along racial lines.  It was this very reluctance – this capacity of free markets to make people colorblind – that obliged racists in the late 19th century to use government to achieve their loathsome goals.*
Had Mr. Paul’s libertarian philosophy been followed more consistently throughout American history, there would have been no need for one government statute (the Civil Rights Act) to upend earlier government statutes (Jim Crow) and the business practices that they facilitated.

Once again, hit the link up top to read the whole thing....

How Mitt Romney will really harm the middle class

Almost every day of his life, George Mason University Economics professor Don Boudreaux writes a letter to the editor.  He's been doing this for years in a vain attempt to correct economic misinformation. 

Here's a recent corrective that Boudreaux sent to The Wall Street Journal, explaining that the John The Baptist Of ObamaCare is just as goofy as the founder of ObamaCare:

John Taylor is correct that Mitt Romney’s economic policies are less likely to thwart growth than are those of Pres. Obama (“The Romney Cure for Obama-Induced Economic Ills,” Oct. 4). The bar, alas, is low. Because entrepreneurs and investors aren’t keen to produce and take risks when the president threatens them with higher tax rates, saddles them with crushing regulations, and scolds them for allegedly being selfish, ungrateful, predatory, and (to boot!) not especially important to economic growth anyway, entrepreneurs and investors respond by producing less and taking fewer risks.

Mitt Romney does seem to be less hostile than is Barack Obama to entrepreneurship, commerce, and private investment.

Get ready people.... Get ready.  Here comes the patented Don Boudreaux Karate Kid Crane Kick !  THIS IS GONNA HURT !!!

But contrary to Mr. Taylor’s claim, Mr. Romney’s trade proposals are not clearly better than are the president’s. Mr. Taylor writes that “Mr. Romney intends to move ahead on trade agreements and create global enterprise zones to remove barriers to trade.” That would be grand. Yet what we hear most loudly about trade from Mr. Romney isn’t about freeing trade; it’s about restricting it. Mr. Romney repeatedly boasts that he’ll raise taxes on Americans who buy imports from China.

So rather than making a principled case for removing barriers, Mr. Romney’s singular trade obsession seems to be to raise barriers and thereby make trade less free.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

John Taylor, consider yourself bitch-slapped.  Please offend us no more in that way.  Boudreaux WILL come back. 
The Mason Nation logo at the top came from the George Mason University bookstore site.  My arch-nemesis, Dr. Ralph, was good enough to get me one of the shirts, which I wear often.  You know you're a political geek when you wear your favorite university shirt because of the economics department, not the football or basketball team !! 

On who makes our lives better

This morning I went to Jack-In-The-Box and got a sausage biscuit and some hash browns.  This particular location never closes.  They're open for me, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

I'm not particularly fond of their coffee, though, so I hit my Starbucks at Western Center Boulevard and I-35.  Had a double-espresso.  (Hit that link.  It's a good one.)  The Starbucks doesn't open until 5:30, but the workers had probably been there since 4:00 a.m. 

When I got to work, I looked at all the stuff we're doing for Kroger.  They love it.

I looked at what we're doing for Wal-Mart.  They love us, too.  We're busting our asses for those folks. 

Then I reviewed some stuff we're doing for another company, a company that will remain nameless.  (Don't want to call 'em out by name.  It's not going too well right now.)  If we don't get our shit together soon, they're going to replace us with someone that can keep them happy.  It's all up to us.

I walked through the big project we're doing for Radio Shack.  So far, they love us.

Then I broke open a China shipping container and pulled out a random box.  It's from my buddy Mr. Chen in Xiamen, China.  He provides us with all sorts of metal hardware and display fixtures.  The display dump bin that I pulled out of the container once took 30 minutes to assemble with a drill, a tap and die set, a pop-rivet gun, a rubber mallet and a screwdriver.  After a year's worth of emails, drawing revisions, hardware changes and, well, cussing, Mr. Chen has sent us a display bin that can be assembled in five minutes with nothing but a screwdriver.  I love Mr. Chen like a brother.   

Work, work, work, work. 

Here's something I found at the Cafe Hayek blog today, something on the same subject.  Every day of his life, Don Boudreaux of George Mason University fires off a letter to the editor of some Statist Rag, trying to correct misinformation about how the world really works.  This one was a beauty:

Edward Sage ridicules Charles Koch’s claim – from Mr. Koch’s essay ”Corporate Cronyism Harms America” (Sept. 10) - that “the role of business is to provide products and services that make people’s lives better.” Mr. Sage asks in response: “Since when? This sounds much more like a liberal take on the role of government. As a liberal I’d be over the moon if companies cared primarily about making lives better. Instead, this only happens if it’s the best way to make money” (Letters, Sept. 13).

Mr. Sage uses the word “only” to imply that it’s a mere occasional happenstance that the best way for businesses to make money is to supply goods and services that improve people’s lives. But because no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can force any consumer to buy its products – and because no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can prevent other businesses from competing for consumers’ dollars – no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can survive unless it supplies “products and services that make people’s lives better” (as judged by consumers themselves, of course, rather than by Mr. Sage and his fellow “liberals”).

Businesses do sometimes err. Consumers do sometimes err. But for Mr. Sage not to see that in private markets the profit motive generally drives businesses to seek ceaselessly and frantically for ways to supply outputs that improve people’s lives is for him to be blind to one of the most remarkable and transformative facts of the past two centuries.
Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Well said, sir.  Well said. 
If I ever make a ton of money, and the only honest way I can do this is by keeping a lot of people happy in exchange for their money, I'm going to go to Virginia and take classes from Don Boudreaux. 
It will happen. 

On Olympics uniforms made in China

Here's Don Boudreaux of the Cafe Hayek blog, on purchasing Olympics uniforms from China:

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) – a leader of a party whose members publicly preen themselves on their alleged devotion to science and realism – throws a conniption fit because the uniforms to be worn by U.S. athletes at the 2012 Olympics were stitched together in China rather than in America (“Burn US Olympic uniforms because they’re made in China,” July 12).

Mr. Reid’s outburst reveals his ignorance of a foundational conclusion of economic science, namely, that people are enriched when they’re free to purchase from whomever they choose regardless of political boundaries. Yes, there are economists who emphasize (mostly purely theoretical) exceptions to the case for free trade – none of which are relevant here – and even a few fringe economists who reject that case altogether. But economists’ overwhelming, non-partisan, and research-based consensus today is, as it has been for years, that free trade (even when unilateral) is beneficial. Mr. Reid’s temper tantrum proves that he is either inexcusably dimwitted about matters on which he legislates, or interested, not in science and realism and truth, but in scoring political points by appealing to the uninformed emotions of constituents.

If Mr. Reid had announced that locating water in the Mojave is easily done with divining rods, that cancer is best cured with crystals, or that the Senate chamber is haunted by Daniel Webster’s ghost, he’d be laughed out of office. But let him make a similarly laughable remark about trade and he continues to be treated as if he and his opinions deserve respect.

Sad.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Is it remotely possible that shortages are caused by price controls?

Don Boudreaux has read an article in the New York Holy Times, an article that speculates that maybe, perhaps, possibly, there is a potential theoretical smidgen of a chance that Bolivia's shortages are caused by price controls. You know, kinda like our current high minority unemployment rate is caused by price controls. Here's what Boudreaux wrote to the Times....

Regarding your report on the chronic shortages of consumer goods in Venezuela (“With Venezuelan Cupboards Bare, Some Blame Price Controls,” April 21): of course these shortages are caused by price controls. By preventing prices from telling the truth about underlying conditions of supply and demand, such controls spread economic lies. Producers and consumers are thus misled into acting destructively rather than productively.


Price controls, though, are only the most ham-fisted maneuver used by politicians to distort prices in order to mislead the public about market realities. Another favorite ploy is to condemn and threaten “speculators.” Consider Chavez himself. He irresponsibly increases the supply of the Venezuelan bolivar and then, when the inevitable inflation begins, combines overt price controls with a bellicose vow to punish what he sneeringly calls “bourgeoisie speculation.”

Such blame-shifting is very near a constant with politicians.

It’s worth noting that, although the President of the United States hasn’t the power of Generalisimo Chavez, Pres. Obama’s attacks on speculators are just as politically opportunistic and economically ignorant – and potentially as destructive – as are any such attacks issued by Latin American dictators.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Ouch.  And his attempt at reducing the price of healthcare hasn't even kicked in yet. 

The Obamabanana poster came from The People's Cube.    The George Mason University coffee mug shwon below was a gift from Dr. Ralph. 

Don Boudreaux rant coming in 5...4...3....

Go here. 

Get your giggles in. 

Then go here and wait.  This one will be good. 

On gasoline speculators driving up prices

This is BRILLIANT.  Don Boudreaux at his best:

Here’s a letter to the Programming Director at Washington, DC’s, WTOP Radio:

During this morning’s 8 o’clock hour I heard one of the most ironic lines that I’ve heard in some time. That this irony was unintentional makes it all the more telling.

Asked by your “pump patrol” reporter about rising gasoline prices, a motorist at a gasoline station noted that “My tank is actually way more than half full now. I’m topping it off because I’m sure the price will be even higher this weekend.” When your reporter then asked her “What do you think explains these rising prices?” she replied “Speculators.” Your reporter followed up with “Do you think they should be stopped?” The motorist responded immediately: “Of course! They’re criminal.”

Speculating that the price of gasoline will rise, this motorist took action today – buying gasoline that she otherwise wouldn’t have bought today – that puts upward pressure on the price of gasoline today.

Had your reporter pointed out that this motorist herself is speculating in gasoline, I wonder if this motorist would have persisted in regarding speculation as being criminal. I wonder, too, how she would react if government – heeding her advice to stop speculation – were to forcibly prevent motorists from topping off their tanks.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

And that is why I want to somehow make a lot of money and retire and go study economics at George Mason University with Don Boudreaux, Russ Roberts, Tyler Cowen and Walter Williams while they all still live and breathe and walk among us. 

The "Make The Speculators Pay" logo came from this unrelated article about the European Union trying to blame their troubles on people other than themselves.

They should sell it to me for less because we live close to each other !!!

Don Boudreaux teaches economics at George Mason University, the place where I'm going to get a Doctorate in Economics if I ever win the lottery and can afford the tuition.  Boudreaux has written a beautiful letter to Bill O'Reilly of Fox News. 

This letter should be studied by schoolchildren everywhere. 
Boudreaux and Russ Roberts are the proprietors of the Cafe Hayek blog. 
Here goes: 

Mr. Bill O’Reilly
The O’Reilly Factor
Fox News
New York, NY

Dear Mr. O’Reilly:

You’re all lathered up because U.S. oil companies are exporting much of their refined gasoline and heating oil to other countries and thereby putting upward pressure on fuel prices here in America. You conclude that these companies have a moral obligation not to export so much.

Your economics is wrong and your ethics convenient.

First some economics. Selling in the global market encourages firms to build larger factories and refineries that, in turn, enable outputs to be produced at lower costs per unit. So while in the short-run rising exports of oil products can cause fuel prices here to spike, the long-run effect might well be lower prices because of larger, more-efficient scales of operation. Also, more exports of fuel products means more imports of other goods and services. The result is lower prices in America for consumer goods such as clothing and furniture, as well as lower prices of inputs such as steel and industrial machinery used by American factories.

I was amused, by the way, that in your Feb. 17th discussion with Lou Dobbs, Mr. Dobbs shared your anger at rising U.S. oil exports. This is the same Mr. Dobbs who repeatedly complains that the problem with America’s involvement in the global economy is that foreigners stubbornly refuse to buy sufficient amounts of American exports. Go figure.

Now about your ethics. You’re paid so handsomely because there’s a large nation-wide demand for your commentary and bombast. In your career you’ve worked for broadcasters in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, and elsewhere. And before moving to Fox you were a correspondent for ABC News. You apparently never hesitated to sell your product to the highest bidder; you never hesitated to export yourself from one market to another in search of higher pay; you never resisted the bidding for your services by buyers (i.e., employers) far and wide which put upward pressure on the amounts of money that you are paid, both to appear on television and to deliver lunch and dinnertime speeches.

Get ready!!   Here comes the Don Boudreaux Karate Kid Crane kick !!!!!!!

So I ask: are you guilty of an offense against those many Americans who – as a result of your responding to market signals regarding the value of your services – must now pay higher prices for the privilege of hearing your commentary? Should you return to your long-ago job at a local Scranton television station, at your long-ago lower salary, and apologize to the good people of Lackawanna County for your greedy and evil habit of exporting yourself to wherever and whoever offers to pay you more money?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Don Boudreaux.  Often imitated, never duplicated. 

The coffee mug shown above was a gift from Dr. Ralph.  His son goes to GMU. 
The picture of Don Boudreaux morphed with Dr. Ralph came from Dr.Ralph.  It's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, despite serious competition from some incidents in my Mississippi childhood. 
At 2:00 this afternoon at The Corporate Image 5418 Brentwood Stair in East Fort Worth, I'll be playing guitar and singing with Dr. Ralph. 

Are you a Libertarian?

Are you a Libertarian? 

Go here to take yet another test. 

(These folks have been promoting their site on just about every message board, discussion group, blog aggregator, and recipe page.  Go there.  It's good stuff, sponsored by George Mason University's Institute For Humane Studies.  The lists of links under "Get Involved" and "Learn More" are worth bookmarking, BTW.)

Why Obama would be preferable to Gingrich

From Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Four more years of Obama in the Oval Office would be better, in my view, than four years of Gingrich there: each man is mad for power; each man’s Promethean opinion of himself is quite the opposite of what a realistic self-opinion would be; each man is a font of economic idiocy; and each man’s principles are such that each would – recalling Mencken’s description of FDR – fatten up a crew of missionaries on the White House lawn for slaughter if he thought that endorsing cannibalism would get him more votes. Yet the countless nutty and destructive policies that Pres. Gingrich would likely implement would inevitably be described by our crack mainstream press as “laissez faire” – thus creating more public misunderstanding. (Of course, four more years of Obama in the White House might also be better than four years of Romney there….)

Of course when Mencken made his crack about presidents trying to get the cannibal vote, he had no idea what would happen to the national mindset in another 75 years....  See below. 

From The Occupy Wall Street Protests. 

Let's assign each neighborhood a grocery store. One grocery store.

Don Boudreaux has produced another great parable:

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.


Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the proper amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different kinds and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. And, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.

When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers from out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival. Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.

And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrion and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket. (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)

************

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services? To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.


To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the system that we should continue to use?

I apologize for scraping the entire post.  Save a link to the Cafe Hayek website.  Worth reading daily.  Hourly.  Or more.