Thursday, 21 November 2024

Regulatory Reform: Timid and too easily tamed?

 

David Seymour's regulatory reform bill: less chainsaw and more milquetoast

While one crowd over there are making a fuss about one of David Seymour's bills—his Treaty Principles Bill—another one is heading to be cemented in as law. And it's ... not bad. 

It's his bill for "regulatory reform." And, you know, it's not Javier Milei's "chainsaw" model of bureaucratic reform, unfortunately, that's seen around 50,000 government jobs slashed and more than half Argentina's ministries shuttered — and inflation plummeting from a high of up to one-percent per day to arond 2.7% per month. That would be something to see.

But it might be longer lasting.

“The Bill will codify principles of good regulatory practice for existing and future regulations,” says Mr Seymour.
    “It seeks to bring the same level of discipline to regulation that the Public Finance Act brings to public spending, with the Ministry for Regulation playing a role akin to that of Treasury."

Wishful thinking, I suspect. 

There's already one problem here, of course: that before any regulations are even reformed we already have a whole new bureaucracy: a Ministry of Regulation. And there's a strong suspicion that this new ministry might be less a Treasury-like entity chainsawing offending clauses from new legislation, and more an ombudsman-like sounding board for regulatory nerds.

We shall see.

Seymour is optimistic however. (Well, he has to be.) He says his proposed Regulatory Standards Bill will include:
  • a benchmark for good regulation [sic] through a set of principles of responsible regulation 
  • mechanisms to transparently assess the consistency of new legislative proposals and existing regulation with the principles
  • a mechanism for independent consideration of the consistency of existing regulation, primarily in response to stakeholder [sic] concerns.
The last two will see whether or not the ministry will be any more than another drain on taxpayers' wallets. ("Issuing non-binding recommendations" suggests not.) It's the first one I want to look at here. What "principles of responsible regulation" could give a reliable standard for "good" regulation? (Given that, by my standards, I would say "none.")
The principles [says the Bill's preamble] cover 7 key areas, including the rule of law, protection of individual liberties, protection of property rights, the imposition of taxes and charges, the role of the courts, review of administrative decisions, and good law-making processes.

Rule of law, individual liberties, property rights ... sounds good. As enumerated principles. Except "Any incompatibility with the principles is justified to the extent that it is reasonable and can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." Justification for which is to be cleared by either a court so constituted, or a minister signing a certificate. (A bit like our toothless Bill of Rights.)

So expect to hear that exception wheeled out many times, as future ministers explain why keeping society "free and democratic" requires violating your individual liberties.

If they bother at all.

The problem of course is that "You can't address a fundamental problem by making marginal changes." Which is all this really is: raising the political cost of making bad laws, as Seymour admits, without actually stopping the bad laws being made. As Gus Van Horn comments on a somewhat similar approach being made in the US:
Absent a fundamental shift in which our politicians are guided by restoring government to its proper purpose, the protection of individual rights, there will only be this nibbling at the margins. Meanwhile the leviathan will grow out of control until the unsustainable mess mercilessly self-corrects.

"People condemn the wealth-generating institutions to which they themselves owe their existence."


"An anti-capitalist ethic continues to develop on the basis of errors by people who condemn the wealth-generating institutions to which they themselves owe their existence.
    “Pretending to be lovers of freedom, they condemn private property, contract, competition, advertising, profit, and even money itself.
    “Imagining that their reason can tell them how to arrange human efforts to serve their innate wishes better, they pose a grave threat to civilisation.”
~ F. A. Hayek on anti-capitalism sentiment in the West, from his book The Fatal Conceit: the Errors of Socialism 

 

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

A reminder ...


“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”
~ Thomas Sowell

 

Little Nicola's report card after one year: 'Not Achieved'


 

"National was elected on the promise of fixing the economy. Not talking about it; but to deliver the goods. ... How is Finance Minister Willis doing? [Answer:] She has not yet proved herself. ...
    "[T]he Kiwi economy is stagnant ... experiencing one of the lowest GDP growth rates in the world. [I]nflation is lower, [but] it has been coming down in most nations. ... [W]e held out hope there would be a drastic reduction in red tape and regulation. However the new Department of Regulation has done next to nothing yet, other than hire managers. ... Willis has sent no clear message to the markets that hers is a government of low taxes. Quite the opposite, she has kept top tax rates the same, as well as corporate taxes. ... [yet] the fiscal deficit will [still] worsen under Willis, unless the economy starts to rapidly pick up. The trimming of civil servants, whilst necessary, is not on a scale that will greatly shift the dial. ...
    "[O]n healthcare, Willis pretends that hiring Lester Levy is a reform. Parachuting in a cost cutting manager does not constitute a health-care policy. ... [O]n housing, once the propaganda is stripped away, National's reforms offer less of an increase in supply than was going to happen under the bi-partisan accord that the Party signed up to with Labour years ago. ... National's trumpeted Fast-Track Approvals is nothing more than a rejig of the Fast-Track Approvals process Labour enacted when in office, although with a lessening of environmental checks. ...
    "Willis ... represents ... a Sir Bill English-type, a steady-as- she-goes, status-quo, old-style, conservative Nat. Maybe it worked for him. It won’t for her. It won’t for the nation. ... New thinking is required."

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

"Parliament said in 1975 that the Treaty has two texts, when it does not, and justified recourse to 'principles' of the Treaty because of the fiction that the Treaty has two texts."


"[T]he idea that the Treaty has principles first surfaced publicly in Labour’s manifesto for the 1972 general election. It subsequently gained legislative status by its inclusion in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. ... giving the Waitangi Tribunal jurisdiction to make recommendations based on findings that actions were contrary to or inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty, rather than findings that actions which were a breach of the Treaty itself. 
    "[The reason for this, it was argued,] was that the treaty has two texts, one in Māori and the other in English. ... But as I have shown there is only one text, the one that was signed at Waitangi. There are two texts only because the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 said that there are. ....

"So, the situation is that Parliament said in 1975 that the Treaty has two texts, when it does not, and justified recourse to 'principles' of the Treaty because of the fiction that the Treaty has two texts. ...
    "The solution to the problem Parliament created must be either to undo what was done in 1975 upon the basis that what was done was based on flawed reasoning, or to accept that what has been done is done and to remedy the 1975 omission, by Parliament’s doing what it could have done in 1975 and defining the principles to be applied by the Waitangi Tribunal, the courts, and those agencies which are required in some way to observe the principles."

~ Gary Judd from his post 'Treaty of Waitangi “principles” — only one text'


"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy, or become an ethnocentric nation riven by ethnic tensions."

 

"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy where everyone counts, or we can become an ethnocentric nation based on identity politics and riven by ethnic tensions. Make no mistake; the current path where particular ethnicities are granted 'partnership' status can only lead to the eventual appearance of more ethnic parties fighting it out for a seat at the table."

~ Ananish Chaudari from his post 'Debate around ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill essential for a multi-ethnic nation'

 

"It has only just been revealed that the judiciary invented their own set of Treaty Principles..."


"The Treaty Debate is great. We've just found out, courtesy of our King's Counsels, what has broken the economic back of this nation. It has only just been revealed, thanks to their letter to the PM, that the judiciary invented their own set of Treaty Principles. ...
    "Most of us had heard about the 'principles' before, but until the Treaty Debate was opened recently, we had no idea that they were so embedded [by lawyers and judges] into our Constitutional arrangements.
    "Many countries have affirmative action programs. However I know of no country that has [embedded within it] a constitutional requirement of 'outcomes,' not opportunities, being equalised amongst the citizenry, other than maybe a few Communist States that failed & no longer exist. ...
    "[O]ur Judiciary seem not have the foggiest idea of the practicalities of the problem. Once you put equitable outcomes, not opportunities, in a Constitution, you're requiring governments to raise massive tax revenues to achieve equalisation. You're shifting taxation powers from elected officials to judges. Let's at least be grateful to our King's Counsels for explaining why NZ's standard of living has been falling, harming the livelihoods of all ethnicities."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Now We Know how NZ's economy became broken: The Judiciary wrote a Communist-style Constitution without Consultation; without People Knowing.'

Monday, 18 November 2024

"...He has assembled a cabinet of nihilists who will be loyal to him not their jobs. ..."


"Although Americans were warned that President-elect Donald Trump would staff his administration with loyalists, few expected the shock of his calamitous selections ...
"If Trump gets his way, we will have a defender of war criminals as Secretary of Defense, a Russian lackey as Director of National Intelligence, a criminal running the Department of Justice, and a crank promoter of quack remedies in charge of Health and Human Services.
   "This is a negation of government, an act of nihilism directed at the central function of each of our government’s agencies. ...
    "It’s not just that Trump has reserved his worst nominees for the things I regard as legitimate and necessary functions of government—defense, intelligence, law-enforcement, even disease control. It’s that he doesn’t seem to be trying to reduce the power of government, but rather to abuse it in the way he prefers. ... a cabinet of nihilists who will be loyal to him not their jobs. ...
    "It is a mistake to think that authoritarian leaders want to strengthen government. To the contrary, they want to weaken government’s institutions. They want an unstructured government, one without rules and procedures, so as to leave fewer impediments to their whims. That is the point of Trump’s anti-government: to provide more scope for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power."

~ Robert Tracinski from his post 'The Trump Administration Will Be the Government’s Evil Twin'

“Men in government, therefore, should be ... "


“Men in government, therefore, should be those who aim at making government as unnecessary as possible. Contraction, not expansion, should be the aim.” 
~ Leonard Read from his 1948 book Pattern for Revolt

Friday, 15 November 2024

Shock & Surprise: Lawyers oppose removal of lawyers' gravy train

 

Cartoon by Nick Kim 

I'd like to say I was astonished to read that 42 KCs (so-called "King's Counsels") signed an open letter opposing David Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill.

But why should anyone be astonished that 40 folk sucking off the Treaty tit would oppose the removal of their teat.

In the film The Castle Darryl Kerrigan describes these legal vultures as "rich folks' lawyers." People who prey upon uncertainty in law, on confusion in contracts, on doubtfulness in legal decisions, turning dubiety into billing hours. Their carrion is the many, many thousands of dollars a day they charge to pore over legal documents and invoice for all that uncertainty.

For them, the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi being undefined by parliament is not just a godsend, it's a meal ticket. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to make bank.

The very last thing they want is for those undefined Principles, placed by Geoffrey Palmer et al at the heart of so much law since the 1980s, to be defined. To be made clear. To leave no room for debate.

The very last thing they want is for that gravy train to be taken away.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, "Much of the vagueness and uncertainty in present law is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for the perversion in law of undefined principles that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils and cost that go with ongoing attempts to defined them. Every Waitangi Tribunal judge is a lawyer. So are most politicians. Every invasion of the plain rights of citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost half.”


COP 29: "The entire event was a monument to the contradictions of modern climate policy."



"Picture this: COP29, the annual climate circus where the world’s leaders gather to wag fingers and wring hands over carbon emissions, is hosted in none other than Azerbaijan—a country whose economy runs on fossil fuels like a muscle car guzzling premium gas. ...
    "[Azerbejani president Ilham] Aliyev ... point[ed] out that [Europe's] energy 'security' conveniently overrides their green ambitions ... only meeting Europe’s insatiable demand for natural gas because, you know, someone has to keep the lights on over there. The subtext? 'We’re saving you from freezing, so maybe chill with the climate scolding.'
    "Notably missing from the conference were key world leaders, a snub that suggests even they couldn’t stomach the irony. Or maybe they were too busy figuring out how to reconcile their Net Zero pledges with their growing reliance on oil-rich nations like Azerbaijan. Either way, the hypocrisy runs both ways. ... 
    "The Western delegates who flew to Baku in private jets to wag their fingers about emissions are no less hypocritical. There they sat, nodding politely as Aliyev defended fossil fuels while quietly hoping he keeps shipping that sweet, sweet natural gas their way.  ... The entire event was a monument to the contradictions of modern climate policy. ...
     "Azerbaijan hosting COP29 is the perfect encapsulation of why no one takes these climate conferences seriously anymore. They’re not about saving the planet; they’re about playing politics, appeasing donors, and virtue signaling on a global stage. Aliyev’s speech was a reminder that behind all the lofty rhetoric is a steaming pile of contradictions."

Thursday, 14 November 2024

15 YEARS AGO: Now a more bigoted state

Since this blog has been going now since 2005 (which is bloody frightening) I'll occasionally head back a few years to pull out something particularly prescient to re-post. Such as this (from almost fifteen years ago), a warning that wasn't heeded about what happens to everybody when big-government thuggery demands a "crack-down" — 'cos there's nothing big government likes more than a good crack-down, like a multi-million-plus mass deportation...

Just a bigoted state [update 4]

The only honest line British Prime-Minister-in-absentia Gordon Brown has ever been heard to utter came last week when he told aides that a women who had just confided to him the alleged evils of Eastern-European immigrants was “just a bigoted woman.”

And so she was. 

Cross the Atlantic now to Arizona, where a bigoted state now requires everyone to carry around their birth certificate, just so they aren’t mistaken for someone who’s living and working in the state without big-government’s blessing. 

If Gordon Brown’s apology for his momentary rush of honesty was the shot heard still being heard around the British electorate, then Arizona’s attack on personal liberty is the shot against individual freedom that’s being heard right around the world.  It’s a reminder that it’s not just the left side of the aisle that are big-government bullies--and a reminder too that neither side has a monopoly on taking advantage of those stateless souls who leave their homes in search of a better life.Cartoon by Henry PayneJust so we’re clear, This Is What Arizona Republicans Want America to Be Like—a place where people of a certain race can be arrested dragged off to jail at the whim of a policeman for the crime of not carrying their papers.  Only Godwin’s Law precludes me from pointing out a particular police state of which that might remind you.

The police-state crackdown is bad enough.  But what it’s demonstrated all too clearly is that for many people apparently committed to individual liberty and small government are anything but.  Scratch the surface of too many small-government conservatives, and what you find there is nothing more than stinking, ill-informed authoritarian racism.  (Just one reason I’ve taken the likes of Andrew Bolt off my blog roll).

I say ill-informed, because it’s the only possible defence people like Bolt might have for being bigoted men and women themselves.

Because the facts confound the bigots. The fact is that in a free society, more people are a boon, not a burden. 

That as author Robert Heinlein suggested, successful immigrants demonstrate just by their choice and gumption in choosing a new life that they are worthy of respect. 

And as James Kilbourne says, “God damn you if the only two words you can find to put together when talking about people who leave their homelands to seek a better life for themselves and their families are ‘illegal aliens.’”

The fact is—and let me say it again just to stress the point—that in a free society, more people are a boon, not a burden. You think that’s hyperbole?  Well, it’s not.  Look at the American experience—the country’s wealth was built upon open immigration—on the melting pot that was the result of the open immigration of the nineteenth-century. But even in more oppressive times of today, the facts are clear that that the freer the country, the more immigration is a boon for everybody—and that immigrants themselves are overwhelmingly more productive and better behaved than most of the bigots are.

Just consider the litany of facts the bigots need to contend with regarding American immigration:

  • The runaround needed to immigrate legally to the US is one prime reason so many do it illegally. 
  • 'Illegals' are not milking the government; if anything it is the other way around. The National Research Council found for example that most immigrant families "contribute an average of $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume over their lifetimes." 
  • Immigrants generally earn more than they receive. 
  • More than 60% of illegal immigrants pay income tax, and two-thirds kick in to Social Security (and most get nothing back). 
  • Immigrants help sustain economic growth and cultural dynamism. 
  • Immigrants "are generally less involved in crime than similarly situated groups," and crime rates in border towns "are lower than those of comparable non-border cities." 
  • Crime rates in the highest-immigration states have been trending significantly downward. 
  • Even economists who favour restrictive immigration policies admit low-skilled immigrants are a net plus to the economy. 
  • Unemployment is low and crime is down everywhere, especially in places teeming with immigrants. 
  • Immigration gives you the benefits of geniuses who were born elsewhere. Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems were all founded by immigrants. 
  • Immigrants are more likely than 'natives' to be self-employed. 
  • Immigrants tend to create their own work -- when they're allowed to. 
  • The power and reach of Spanish-language media in L.A. for example shows supply of productive people creating its own demand. 
  • Immigrant labour makes work easier for all of us, and brings new skills to the table. 
  • Immigrants and low-skilled American workers fill very different roles in the economy. 
  • Immigrant labour makes all businesses easier to start, thus spurring 'native' creativity. 
  • "Some argue that we should employ a more restrictive policy that allows in only immigrants with 'needed' skills. But this assumes the government can read economic tea leaves." - Tyler Cowen and Daniel M. Rothschild 
  • New arrivals, by producing more goods and services, keep prices down across the economy -- the net gain to US from immigration is about $7 billion a year. 
  • There's no reason that the North American Free Trade Agreement (or NZ's own free trade agreements) shouldn't apply equally to people as to widgets. 
  • Even in the halls of Congress, economic arguments against immigration are losing their aura of truthfulness, so pro-enforcement types are focussing on “national security.” 
  • "The only way to actually prevent terrorists from slipping in is to legalize as much 'illegal immigration' as possible. If one is looking for a needle in a haystack, as the saying goes, one has a hell of job. Finding that needle on a relatively clean floor, however, presents an achievable goal." - James Valliant
  • Immigration is good for the immigrants themselves. . . . 

Those facts were extracted from the following articles, which provide whole magazines full of ammunition against the bigoted and the ill-informed: 

And of course there are the two classic Harry Binswanger articles which are 'must-reads' for the moral and practical case behind open immigration (note, open immigrationnot open borders.): 

The fact is that there is neither fact nor right on the side of the bigots.  As George Reisman explains for America:

    “The philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that foreigners have a right to come and to live and work here, i.e., to immigrate into the United States. The land of the United States is owned by individuals and voluntary associations of individuals, such as private business firms. It is not owned by the United States government or by the American people acting as a collective; indeed many of the owners of land in the United States are not Americans, but foreign nationals, including foreign investors.     
“The private owners of land have the right to use or sell or rent their land for any peaceful purpose. This includes employing immigrants and selling them food and clothing and all other goods, and selling or renting housing to them. If individual private landowners are willing to accept the presence of immigrants on their property as employees, customers, or tenants, that should be all that is required for the immigrants to be present. Anyone else who attempts to determine the presence of absence of immigrants is simply an interfering busybody ready to use a gun or club to impose his will.

The fact remains that the only possibly human objection that well-informed people might have to open immigration is that immigration is a drain on the Welfare State. That they object to being forced to pay for people they’ve never met. This much is understandable. (That is the dark truth at the heart of the whole Welfare State—far from offering charity, it sets man against men.)   Again, George Reisman makes the argument: in summary, that Immigration Plus Welfare State Equal Police State.

    “Illegal immigrants are overwhelming the resources of the Welfare State: government–funded hospital emergency rooms are filled with them; public schools are filled with their children. On the basis of such complaints, many people are angry and want to close the border to new illegal immigrants and deport those who are already here.     “They want to keep new illegal immigrants out with fences along the border. It is not clear whether the fences would contain intermittent watchtowers with searchlights and machine guns. The illegal immigrants who are already here would be ferreted out by threatening anyone who employed them with severe penalties and making it a criminal offense not to report them.     
“This is a classic illustration of Mises’s principle that prior government intervention into the economic system breeds later intervention. Here the application of his principle is, start with the Welfare State, end with the Police State. A police state is what is required effectively to stop substantial illegal immigration that has become a major burden because of the Welfare State.”

And Tibor Machan makes a similar argument, that the biggest problem with the welfare state is not that it might lead to even greater control by government, but that in providing a pseudo-moral argument to treat other human beings like cattle, it habituates people to the sort of easy brutality seen now in Arizona, and in sundry other cases of inhumanity

But far from being a reason to abandon open immigration, the problems that state-enforced welfare cause for open immigration are reason instead to abandon the short-lived anti-human experiment that is the Welfare State. 

    “The philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that the immigrants do not have a right to be supported at public expense, which is a violation of the rights of the taxpayers. Of course, it is no less a violation of the rights of the taxpayers when native-born individuals are supported at public expense. The immigrants are singled out for criticism based on the allegation that they in particular are making the burden intolerable.
    “The implementation of the rights both of the immigrants and of the taxpayers requires the abolition of the Welfare State. Ending the Welfare State will end any problem of immigrants being a public burden.
    “Of course, ending the Welfare State is much easier said than done, and it is almost certainly not going to be eliminated even in order to avoid the environment of a police state.
     “But the burdens of the Welfare State and the consequent resentment against immigrants could at the very least be substantially reduced by means of some relatively simple, common-sense reforms in the direction of greater economic freedom. . . .”

And they could be reduced too by the simple and easily-introduced expedient of allowing existing citizens to sponsor and take financial and legal responsibility for new citizens.

But this would require a basic humanity that too many of the bigots seem to lack.

In the meantime then, you want an immediate solution to the 'problem of illegal immigration? Then here it is"

    “The problem of ‘illegal’ immigration can be solved at the stroke of a pen: legalize immigration. Screen all you want (though I want damn little), but remove the quotas. Phase them out over a 5- or 10-year period. Grant immediate, unconditional amnesty to all ‘illegal’ immigrants.”

There endeth the problem.

UPDATE 1:  More good anti-bigoted commentary here [hat tip Thrutch]:

  • THE NEW CLARION: The Rights of Man, the Privileges of Citizen
    This is the end-of-road for conservative anti-immigrationists:  the selective  degradation of the liberty to live in a particular place from a right to a “privilege”.  As a hostile commenter put it sarcastically… 

        “Nothing says freedom from government interference like ‘show me your papers.’ Of course, limited government only applies to people who are real Americans, not to Mexicans.”

    Let us examine the conservatives’ trip down the anti-immigration road, and see how it ended there — and what it means for conservatism’s purported fealty to Americanism….
    Read on to see many more anti-immigration shibboleths summarily dispatched. 

  •  PAJAMAS MEDIA: Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom: Welfare State Is Draw for Illegals
    While I commiserate with Arizona voters [says Gus Van Horn] public services are the problem, not ‘illegals.’
        …SB 1070 is wrong for Arizona for reasons far beyond civil rights issues.
        SB 1070 deserves only one fundamental criticism: It would fail to protect the individual rights of American citizens — even if it hermetically sealed our borders and the police never touched a single American hair in the process of enforcing it. This is because the biggest headaches attributed to illegal immigration are not caused by it at all…

UPDATE 2: I’m starting a list.  And in ‘tribute’ to Gordon, I’m calling it “Just Some Bigoted Arseholes.”

First on the list is Blair, for this . . . 

To which you can add Silent Running, run by a New Zealand blogger advertising “strong right-wing views” on his banner, who thinks “Mexico is polluting us”; Cactus Kate, who has “sanctimonious” on her banner (and bigotry in her waters); and Crusader Rabbit, who has “liberty” on his banner, and black thoughts about Mexican crowds being “a target-rich environment” in his heart …

UPDATE 3:  Says an editorial in the Arizona Republic

    “We need leaders.
    “The federal government is abdicating its duty on the border.
    “Arizona politicians are pandering to public fear.
    “The result is a state law that intimidates Latinos while doing nothing to curb illegal immigration.
This represents years of failure. Years of politicians taking the easy way and allowing the debate to descend into chaos…
    “Comprehensive [immigration] reform will make the border safer. When migrant labor is channeled through the legal ports of entry, the Border Patrol can focus on catching drug smugglers and other criminals instead of chasing busboys across the desert.
    “Real leaders will have the courage to say that.”

UPDATE 4Reason magazine, whose superb 2006 issue on immigration was the source of many of those linked articles above, has four online articles on the current melee that deserve the attention of everyone not already blinded by bigotry: 

  • Immigration Isn't the ProblemDavid Harsanyi, May 3, 2010 
      “For the most part, the controversy we face isn't about immigration at all. It's about the systematic failure of federal government to enforce the law or offer rational policy. There's a difference…
      “The uplifting tale of the hard-boiled immigrant, dipping his or her sweaty hands into the well of the American dream, is one thing. Today we find ourselves in an unsustainable and rapidly growing welfare state. Can we afford to allow millions more to partake?
      “When Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman was asked about unlimited immigration in 1999, he stated that ‘it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.’” 
  • Mysteries of an Immigration LawSteve Chapman, April 29, 2010 
      “The worst-case scenario is that Hispanics will face possible police harassment anytime they venture out of the house. Not to worry, says Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who helped draft the text.
      “He told The Washington Examiner that cops can ask for immigration information only when they have ‘lawful contact’ with someone—when ‘the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he's violated some other law.’
      “In fact, the law doesn't define the crucial term. One of the dictionary definitions of ‘contact’ is ‘immediate proximity,’ which suggests that anytime a possible illegal immigrant comes in sight of a cop, the cop has a legal duty to check her papers.” 
  • How Immigration Crackdowns BackfireSteve Chapman, April 22, 2010 
      “It's no surprise that Arizonans resent the recent influx of unauthorized foreigners, some of them criminals. But there is less here than meets the eye.
      “The state has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants. But contrary to myth, they have not brought an epidemic of murder and mayhem with them. Surprise of surprises, the state has gotten safer.
      “Over the last decade, the violent crime rate has dropped by 19 percent, while property crime is down by 20 percent. Crime has also declined in the rest of the country, but not as fast as in Arizona…” 
  • Don't Let Obama Touch Immigration ReformShikha Dalmia, April 13, 2010
    ”America's immigration system is badly broken and in desperate need of fixing. And that is precisely why President Barack Obama should not be allowed to touch it.”
  • Immigration & Crime, Steve Chapman, February 22, 2010
      “From listening to the more vigorous critics of illegal immigration, our porous borders are a grave threat to safety. Not only can foreign terrorists sneak in to target us, but the most vicious criminals are free to walk in and inflict their worst on innocent Americans.
      “In xenophobic circles, this prospect induces stark terror. Fox News' Glenn Beck has decried an ‘illegal immigrant crime wave.’ A contributor to Patrick Buchanan's website asserts, ‘Every day, in the United States, thousands of illegal aliens unleash a reign of terror on Americans.’
      “Sure they do. And I'm Penelope Cruz…
      “A 2007 report by the Immigration Policy Center noted that "for every ethnic group, without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population…
      “[Ron] Unz points out that in the five most heavily Hispanic cities in the country, violent crime is "10 percent below the national urban average and the homicide rate 40 percent lower." In Los Angeles, which is half Hispanic and easily accessible to those sneaking over the southern border, the murder rate has plummeted to levels unseen since the tranquil years of the early 1960s.
       “This is not really hard to understand. Today, as ever, most foreigners who make the sacrifice of leaving home and starting over in a strange land do so not to mug grandmothers or molest children, but to find work that will give them a better life. Coming here illegally does not alter that basic motivation.
      “In other words, they want to become full-fledged Americans, and they're succeeding. Is there something scary about that?”

Well, is there?

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

"I can’t predict what a Trump administration will do. Neither can Donald Trump."


"Unfortunately, my prediction of a Trump victory was correct.
    "I can’t predict what a Trump administration will do. Neither can Donald Trump.
    "But I can say there will be a price to pay. The form it will take is not predictable. Maybe, as in the first years of his first administration, the economy will improve. But the long-term consequences of an anti-conceptual, xenophobic, conspiracy-spinning president will overwhelm any short-term material gains."
~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'Some Positives'

'The Ungrateful Pedestrian' or 'When Do Politicians Deserve Our Praise?'




“The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom," says Don Boudreaux in this guest post, "is a special case of the pernicious deification of government. Such claims are preposterous. They are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedestrians with my car.”

The Ungrateful Pedestrian, or When Do Politicians Deserve Our Praise?

by Donald J. Boudreaux

Yesterday evening I drove to a nearby restaurant. On my way I passed several strolling pedestrians. I did not kill a single one!

Please note that I possessed near absolute ability to do so. A quick and easy flick of my wrist on the steering wheel at almost any time on my drive would have meant certain death for numerous pedestrians. But I refrained from running them over.

The above account is all true.

Suppose now that you were one of these pedestrians and I solicit from you expressions of gratitude for my not running you over. How would you react? Not only would you be indignant at my solicitation, you’d think me to be demented. And properly so. I would be insanely brazen to seek your gratitude for my not bulldozing you with my car.

And yet politicians routinely seek—and receive—praise for actions that differ in no fundamental way from the actions of drivers who avoid running down innocent pedestrians.

We are assailed with monotonous regularity with news reports and campaign ads boasting of how this minister or that politician “created” so-many-thousand new jobs, or is responsible for whatever amount of economic growth has occurred during his or her term of office. Such claims are preposterous. They are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedestrians with my car.

No politician creates jobs or prosperity. Jobs and prosperity are created by entrepreneurs and business firms whenever the economy is sufficiently free of government meddling. For government to avoid meddling—that is, for government to keep taxes low and to steer clear of regulating voluntary exchange—is indeed desirable. But to avoid interfering with voluntary exchange is not at all actually to create whatever jobs and prosperity emerge from voluntary exchange. To insist otherwise would be no different from my insisting that I, as a driver who did not run over Ms. Jones as she walked back from the supermarket, am responsible for the tasty dinner she cooked that evening for her family.

If a car is careening out of control onto a pedestrian walkway, anyone who leaps into the car to stop it is a genuine hero. This person does deserve applause and gratitude (while, incidentally, the persons who either intentionally or carelessly caused the car to be out of control deserve condemnation and, perhaps, jail time). But even this hero does not take credit for all that is created and produced by those who would have otherwise been killed.

Whenever that rarest of creatures—an honourable elected official—actually manages to loosen some part of government’s grip on us, that person does merit bona fide acclaim. Even he, however, doesn’t deserve credit for whatever economic growth and cultural flourishing follow. Such credit properly belongs to the countless people who create, innovate, take risks, save, and work hard to produce what consumers want.

The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom is a special case of the pernicious deification of government. When deified, government is mistakenly seen as responsible for all that happens in society.

A distressingly large number of writers contend that what looks like government’s refusal to intervene is really just a different form of government intervention. I offer here only two examples. One is left-wing economist Warren Samuels who, in a 1995 issue of Critical Review, wrote that deregulation is simply government regulation carried out by enforcing private property rights rather than by enforcing bureaucratic edicts. When the economy is deregulated, what Samuels sees is that “[o]ne system or structure of (nominally private) coercive power is substituted for another by the very institution, government, which helped establish and/or reinforce the first one.” According to Samuels, only the unsophisticated believe that when government deregulates it thereby reduces its sway over the economy.

This view isn’t confined to left-wingers. Louis Hacker, in an otherwise fine essay appearing in F. A. Hayek’s edited volume Capitalism and the Historians, insists that “the idea of laissez faire is a fiction. For the state, by negative action—that is, by refusing to adopt certain policies—can affect economic events just as significantly as when intervention occurs.” Well, yes–in the same way that I, by not running my car over pedestrians, can affect events just as significantly as if I do kill pedestrians.

Only in the most base materialist sense are Samuels and Hacker correct: insofar as government possesses power to restrict commerce and suffocate industry with its regulations, any self-restraint by government in its zeal to regulate can be said to “affect economic events.” But such sophistry sneakily erects as the benchmark for evaluating government activity the maximum possible destruction that government could possibly inflict. If the actual amount of destruction caused by government falls short of what government could have caused, then government is credited with producing all that it refrained from destroying. Using such a benchmark is lunacy.

The Soviet military could have annihilated the United States population with an atomic attack at almost any time during the cold war. Should we then credit the Soviet military for our current prosperity and our very lives? Does it really make sense to speak of the Soviet military as having “affected economic events” by not launching a nuclear strike against America? If so, then why not also credit the decision by the British military not to launch a nuclear attack against us as a cause of our prosperity?

Refraining from interfering in other people’s affairs is simply the right thing for everyone, including government, to do. 

Until someone convinces me that I deserve a ticker-tape parade every time that I don’t run down a pedestrian with my car, I will find intolerable the misbegotten gratitude and applause that politicians receive for not destroying even more of our liberties and wealth than they currently ravage.

* * * * 

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Mercatus Center Board Member, and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University.
This article first appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

Limited resources ...


“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”
~ David Friedman from his book The Machinery of Freedom

 

Monday, 11 November 2024

"But no, he doesn't want to be a dictator."


"And there it is," says Mark Coppock. "I knew it was coming, but even I didn't expect Trump to literally order it by fiat -- he will sign an executive order to override the 14th Amendment. But no, he doesn't want to be a dictator."


But no, he's pro-freedom, pro-capitalism, pro-America. He's going to end the administrative state ...
 

But no, they should just come in "legally" ...


But me no buts: When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Javier Milei: "How Import Tariffs Weaken the Economy and Your Wallet"

 



Friday, 8 November 2024

More on trade



Oops. 

"Here's the thing about Trump's tariff plans," explains David Henig, focussing just on the economic vandalism in the States. It will undoubtedly mean it will almost certainly be cheaper to simply manufacture everything outside the US and just import the final product.

He explains that a flat tariff, whether 20% as suggested for most non-US products—or up to 60%, as the moron is proposing for Chinese goods—would be levied in a "non discriminatory [fashion] between intermediate and finished goods. Trump may only be thinking of final consumer goods," if 'thinking'is really even the correct word to use in a context such as this, "but they [finished goods] may only account for 5% of imports." So ...
What does it mean for Trump's tariff plans that nearly all US goods inputs are intermediate goods? Essentially, that if all goods attract a 20% tariff, then it will almost certainly be cheaper to simply manufacture everything outside the US and just import the final product.
What does that mean in plain English?? 

"Intermediate goods" is what economists call stuff that businesses buy to make other stuff. So in that graph above, it means all those capital goods, industrial supplies, and car parts and engines are all intermediate goods. But so too are any consumer products that businesses buy intending to make subsequent salesthey are all, of them, inputs into the "final production" of American goods.
Thus [as Don Boudreaux explains], nearly all imports that are not raw materials are appropriately classified as intermediate components.

And so: 

the percentage of American imports that together comprise the category “intermediate components or raw materials” is far larger than 53%. Indeed, it’s likely well over 95%.
So what does that mean in simple economics? 

In economics so simple that even a moron (or a US president) could understand? 

It means that if tariffs are imposed as the moron intended then "it will almost certainly be cheaper to simply manufacture everything outside the US and just import the final product."

Oops.

Thursday, 7 November 2024

It's mourning in America again


 Thoughts on US politics from Johan Norberg, in Sweden ...

So, it’s mourning in America again. Some thoughts: 
The real loser is Joe Biden and his advisors. Had he stepped down in time, he would have given Democrats time for a competitive primary to select someone who did not have such a dismal campaign record. History will not be kind. No American I’ve met outside of an organised event was excited by Kamala Harris. And in times of trouble, voters prefer “strength” to “likeability.” 
My hunch that she would nonetheless take this was wrong. I remind myself of a taxi driver in Pennsylvania who told me he had thought a lot about Trump’s comment that Harris did not use to be black and now wanted to be black. “He has a way of saying things that just sticks in your mind.” That is disturbing, but should also worry Republicans. They won’t find another bully with that kind of crazed, hypnotic charisma again. When J D Vance or Tucker Carlson say similar things, they just seem weird. 
After 2028 Republicans are probably in opposition again. They should prepare by limiting executive powers and strengthening checks and balances. I fear they’ll do the opposite, to unleash the Trump. 
And since inflation and high prices decided this election (3/4 of voters said it caused them hardship), perhaps not increase prices even more with tariffs and deportation of a large share of the workforce? 
US public debt is 100% of GDP and the government now spends more on interest rates than the military. Trump has promised to make this much worse. In 2050, debt will be 160%. This is an existential risk for the US and the issue’s total absence during the campaign make me think that nothing will happen until there is a catastrophic bond-market event. 
As for the Democrats, many claim that voters rejected Harris because of racism and misogyny. Stop it. Exit polls suggest that Harris got fewer female voters than Biden did, and Americans knew that Obama was black before they voted for him twice. Of course, there is a disturbing bias, but this is mostly a way of clinging on to a sense of superiority when you lose, and will only stop you from adapting your agenda to win the next time. 
It’s high time to abandon a woke, anti-business progressivism that has been rejected again and again by voters (and fix your cities). I fear that four years under a rude far-right Trump will have the opposite effect on Democrats. 
Europe can no longer take America for granted, and has to rebuild its military to provide for its own defense and to support threatened democracies like Ukraine. The right time to start is some 30 years ago. 
Trump’s tariffs will primarily hurt Americans. Europe should not respond by hurting Europeans with retaliatory tariffs, but by offering alternative deals that might tempt Trump, and deepen free trade with a global coalition of the willing. 
Finally, the silver lining is that Americans suddenly trust their electoral system again, and Trump supporters will not storm the Capitol. At least, that’s something. 
Update 1: (Oh, and one more thing: Voters really loathe chaos at the border. For those of us who think our societies thrive on openness, a more orderly, lawful immigration system is absolutely essential.)

Update 2: Foreign policy? Yes, it's scary for sure. The only thing I'd add is that his unpredictability will come into play ... He might hate seeming weak on Ukraine more than he loves Putin. We'll see.