Infrastructure Or Infra-Stricture? The Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Bill

16 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by pnoetx in Big Government, Central Planning, infrastructure, Uncategorized

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Antonia Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Biden Administration, Budget Reconcilation Bill, Capital Gains, Civilian Climate Corps, Clean Energy, corporate income tax, dependency, Federal Reserve, Fossil fuels, Green Cards, infrastructure, Joe Manchin, Legal Permanent Residency, Paid Family Leave, Physical Investment, Productivity Growth, Social Infrastructure, Tax the Rich, Tragedy of the Commons, Universal Pre-School, Welfare State

The Socialist Party faithful once known as Democrats are pushing a $3.5 trillion piece of legislation they call an “infrastructure” bill. They hope to pass it via budget reconciliation rules with a simple majority in the Senate. The Dems came around to admitting that the bill is not about infrastructure in the sense in which we usually understand the term: physical installations like roads, bridges, sewer systems, power lines, canals, port facilities, and the like. These kinds of investments generally have a salutary impact on the nation’s productivity. Some “traditional” infrastructure, albeit with another hefty wallop of green subsidies, is covered in the $1.2 trillion “other” infrastructure bill already passed by the Senate but not the House. The reconciliation bill, however, addresses “social infrastructure”, which is to say it would authorize a massive expansion in the welfare state.

What Is Infrastructure?

Traditionally, public and private infrastructure are underlying assets that facilitate production or consumption in one way or another, consistent with the prefix “infra”, meaning below or within. For example, a new factory requires physical access by roads and/or rail, as well as sewer service, water, gas and/or electric supply. All of the underlying physical components that enable that factory to operate may be thought of as private infrastructure, which has largely private benefits. Therefore, it is often privately funded, though certainly not always.

Projects having many beneficiaries, such as highways, municipal sewers, water, gas and electrical trunk lines, canals, and ports may be classified as public infrastructure, though they can be provided and funded privately. Pure public infrastructure provides services that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, but examples are sparse. Nevertheless, the greater the public nature of benefits, the greater the rationale for government involvement in their provision. In practice, a great deal of “public” infrastructure is funded by user fees. In fact, a failure to charge user fees for private benefits often leads to a tragedy of the commons, such as the overuse of free roads, imposing a heavier burden on taxpayers.

The use of the term “infrastructure” to describe forms of public support is not new, but the scope of government interventions to which the term is applied has mushroomed during the Biden Administration. Just about any spending program you can think of is likely to be labeled “infrastructure” by so-called progressives. The locution is borrowed somewhat questionably, seemingly motivated by the underlying structure of political incentives. More bluntly, it sounds good as a sales tactic!

$3.5 Trillion and Chains

Among other questionable items, the so-called budget reconciliation “infrastructure” bill allocates funds toward meeting:

“… the President’s climate change goals of 80% clean electricity and 50% economy-wide carbon emissions by 2030, while advancing environmental justice and American manufacturing. The framework would fund:
• Clean Energy Standard
• Clean Energy and Vehicle Tax Incentives
• Civilian Climate Corps
• Climate Smart Agriculture, Wildfire Prevention and Forestry
• Federal procurement of clean technologies
• Weatherization and Electrification of Buildings
• Clean Energy Accelerator”

The resolution would also institute “methane reduction and polluter import fees”. Thus, we must be prepared for a complete reconfiguration of our energy sector toward a portfolio of immature and uneconomic technologies. This amounts to an economic straightjacket.

Next we have a series of generous programs and expansions that would encourage dependence on government:

“• Universal Pre-K for 3 and 4-year old children
• High quality and affordable Child Care
• [free] Community College, HBCUs and MSIs, and Pell Grants
• Paid Family and Medical Leave
• Nutrition Assistance
• Affordable Housing”

If anything, pre-school seems to have cognitive drawbacks for children. Several of these items, most obviously the family leave mandate, would entail significant regulatory and cost burdens on private businesses.

There are more generous provisions on the health care front, which are good for further increasing the federal government’s role in directing, regulating, and funding medical care:

“• new Dental, Vision, and Hearing benefit to Medicare
• Home and Community-Based Services expansion
• Extend the Affordable Care Act Expansion from the ARP
• Close the Medicaid “Coverage Gap” in the States that refused to expand
• Reduced patient spending on prescription drugs”

Finally, we have a series of categories intended to “help workers and communities across the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and reverse trends of economic inequality.”

“• Housing Investments
• Innovation and R & D Upgrades
• American Manufacturing and Supply Chains Funding
• LPRs for Immigrants and Border Mangt. • Pro-Worker Incentives and Penalties • Investment in Workers and Communities • Small Business Support

I might suggest that a recovery from the pandemic would be better served by getting the federal government out of everyone’s business. The list includes greater largess and more intrusions by the federal government. The fourth item above, grants of legal permanent residency (LPR) or green cards, would legalize up to 8 million immigrants, allowing them to qualify for a range of federal benefits. It would obviously legitimize otherwise illegal border crossings and prevent any possibility of eventual deportation.

Screwing the Pooch

How many of those measures really sound like infrastructure? This bill goes on for more than 10,000 pages, so the chance that lawmakers will have an opportunity to rationally assess all of its provisions is about nil! And the reconciliation bill doesn’t stop at $3.5T. There are a few budget gimmicks being leveraged that could add as much as $2T of non-infrastructure spending to the package. One cute trick is to add certain provisions affecting revenue or spending years from now in order to cut the bill’s stated price tag.

A number of the bill’s generous giveaways will have negative effects on productive incentives. It’s also clear that some items in the bill will supplement the far Left’s educational agenda, which is seeped in critical theory. And the bill will increase the dominance of the federal government over not only the private sector, but state and local sovereignty as well. This is another stage in the metastasis of the federal bureaucracy and the dependency fostered by the welfare state.

Taxing the Golden Goose

But here’s the really big rub: the whole mess has to be paid for. The flip side of our growing dependency on government is the huge obligation to fund it. Check this out:

“American ‘consumer units,’ as BLS calls them, spent a net total of $17,211.12 on taxes last year while spending only $16,839.89 on food, clothing, healthcare and entertainment combined,”

Democrats continue to dicker over the tax provisions of the bill, but the most recent iteration of their plan is to cover about $2.9 trillion of the cost via tax hikes. Naturally, the major emphasis is on penalizing corporations and “the rich”. The latest plan includes:

increasing the corporate income tax from 21% to 26.8%;
increasing the top tax rate on capital gains from 20% to 25%;
an increase in the tax rate for incomes greater than $400,000 ($450,000 if married filing jointly)
adding a 3% tax surcharge for those with adjusted gross incomes in excess of $5 million;
Higher taxes on tobacco and nicotine products;
halving the estate and gift tax exemption;
limiting deductions for executive compensation;
changes in rules for carried interest and crypto assets.

There are a few offsets, including the promise of tax reductions for individuals earning less than $200,000 and businesses earning less than $400,000. We’ll see about that. Those cuts would expire by 2027, which reduces their “cost” to the government, but it will be controversial when the time comes.

The Dem sell job includes the notion that corporate income belongs to the “rich”, but as I’ve noted before, the burden of the corporate income tax falls largely on corporate workers and consumers. Lower wages and higher prices are almost sure to follow. This would deepen the blade of the Democrats’ political hari-kari, but they pin their hopes on the power of alms. Once bestowed, however, those will be difficult if not impossible to revoke, and the Dems know this all too well.

The assault on the “rich” in the reconciliation bill is both ill-advised and unlikely to yield the levels of revenue projected by Democrats. Like it or not, the wealthy provide the capital for most productive investment. Taxing their returns and their wealth more heavily can only reduce incentive to do so. Those investors will seek out more tax-advantaged uses for their funds. That includes investments in non-productive but federally-subsidized alternatives. Capital gains can often be deferred, of course. These penalties also ensure that more resources will be consumed in compliance and tax-avoidance efforts. The solutions offered by armies of accountants and tax attorneys will tend to direct funds to uses that are suboptimal in terms of growth in economic capacity.

What isn’t funded by new taxes will be borrowed by the federal government or simply printed by the Federal Reserve. Thus, the federal government will not only compete with the private sector for additional resources, but the monetary authority will provide fuel for more inflation.

Fracturing Support?

Fortunately, a few moderate Democrats in both the House and the Senate are balking at the exorbitance of the reconciliation bill. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said he would like to see a package of no more than $1.5 trillion. That still represents a huge expansion of government, but at least Manchin has offered a whiff of sanity. Equally welcome are threats from radical Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Antonia Ocasio-Cortez that a failure to pass the full reconciliation package will mean a loss of their support for the original $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, much of which is wasteful. We should be so lucky! But that’s a lot of pork for politicians to walk away from.

Infra-Shackles

The so-called infrastructure investments in the reconciliation bill represent a range of constraints on economic growth and consumer well being. Increasing the government’s dominance is never a good prescription for productivity, whether due to regulatory and compliance costs, bureaucratization of decision-making, minimizing the role of price signals, pure waste through bad incentives and graft, and public vs. private competition for resources. The destructive tax incentives for funding the bill are an additional layer of constraints on growth. Let’s hope the moderate Democrats hold firm, or even better, that the tantrum-prone radical Democrats are forced to make good on their threats.

Central Planning With AI Will Still Suck

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Artificial Intelligence, Central Planning, Free markets

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Artificial Intelligence, central planning, Common Law, Data Science, Digital Socialism, Friedrich Hayek, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Machine Learning, Marginal Revolution, Property Rights, Robert Lucas, Roman Law, Scientism, The Invisible Hand, The Knowledge Problem, The Lucas Critique, Tyler Cowen

Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) will never make central economic planning a successful reality. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania has written a strong disavowal of AI’s promise in central planning, and on the general difficulty of using ML to design social and economic policies. His paper, “Simple Rules for a Complex World with Artificial Intelligence“, was linked last week by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Note that the author isn’t saying “digital socialism” won’t be attempted. Judging by the attention it’s getting, and given the widespread acceptance of the scientism of central planning, there is no question that future efforts to collectivize will involve “data science” to one degree or another. But Fernández-Villaverde, who is otherwise an expert and proponent of ML in certain applications, is simply saying it won’t work as a curative for the failings of central economic planning — that the “simple rules” of the market will aways produce superior social outcomes.

The connection between central planning and socialism should be obvious. Central planning implies control over the use of resources, and therefore ownership by a central authority, whether or not certain rents are paid as a buy-off to the erstwhile owners of those resources. By “digital socialism”, Fernández-Villaverde means the use of ML to perform the complex tasks of central planning. The hope among its cheerleaders is that adaptive algorithms can discern the optimal allocation of resources within some “big data” representation of resource availability and demands, and that this is possible on an ongoing, dynamic basis.

Fernández-Villaverde makes the case against this fantasy on three fronts or barriers to the use of AI in policy applications: data requirements; the endogeneity of expectations and behavior; and the knowledge problem.

The Data Problem: ML requires large data sets to do anything. And impossibly large data sets are required for ML to perform the task of planning economic activity, even for a small portion of the economy. Today, those data sets do not exist except in certain lines of business. Can they exist more generally, capturing the details of all economic transactions? Can the data remain current? Only at great expense, and ML must be trained to recognize whether data should be discarded as it becomes stale over time due to shifting demographics, tastes, technologies, and other changes in the social and physical environment.

Policy Change Often Makes the Past Irrelevant: Planning algorithms are subject to the so-called Lucas Critique, a well known principle in macroeconomics named after Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas. The idea is that policy decisions based on observed behavior will change expectations, prompting responses that differ from the earlier observations under the former policy regime. A classic case involves the historical tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Can this tradeoff be exploited by policy? That is, can unemployment be reduced by a policy that increases the rate of inflation (by printing money at a faster rate)? In this case, the Lucas Critique is that once agents expect a higher rate of inflation, they are unlikely to confuse higher prices with a more profitable business environment, so higher employment will not be sustained. If ML is used to “plan” certain outcomes desired by some authority, based on past relationships and transactions, the Lucas Critique implies that things are unlikely to go as planned.

The Knowledge Problem: Not only are impossibly large data sets required for economic planning with ML, as noted above. To achieve the success of markets in satisfying unlimited wants given scarce resources, the required information is impossible to collect or even to know. This is what Friedrich Hayek called the “knowledge problem”. Just imagine the difficulty of arranging a data feed on the shifting preferences of many different individuals across a huge number of products, services and they way preference orderings will change across the range of possible prices. The data must have immediacy, not simply a historical record. Add to this the required information on shifting supplies and opportunity costs of resources needed to produce those things. And the detailed technological relationships between production inputs and outputs, including time requirements, and the dynamics of investment in future productive capacity. And don’t forget to consider the variety of risks agents face, their degree of risk aversion, and the ways in which risks can be mitigated or hedged. Many of these things are simply unknowable to a central authority. The information is hopelessly dispersed. The task of collecting even the knowable pieces is massive beyond comprehension.

The market system, however, is able to process all of this information in real time, the knowable and the unknowable, in ways that balance preferences with the true scarcity of resources. No one actor or authority need know it all. It is the invisible hand. Among many other things, it ensures the deployment of ML only where it makes economic sense. Here is Fernández-Villaverde:

“The only reliable method we have found to aggregate those preferences, abilities, and efforts is the market because it aligns, through the price system, incentives with information revelation. The method is not perfect, and the outcomes that come from it are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including ‘digital socialism,’ are worse.”

Later, he says:

“… markets work when we implement simple rules, such as first possession, voluntary exchange, and pacta sunt servanda. This result is not a surprise. We did not come up with these simple rules thanks to an enlightened legislator (or nowadays, a blue-ribbon committee of academics ‘with a plan’). … The simple rules were the product of an evolutionary process. Roman law, the Common law, and Lex mercatoria were bodies of norms that appeared over centuries thanks to the decisions of thousands and thousands of agents.”

These simple rules represent good private governance. Beyond reputational enforcement, the rules require only trust in the system of property rights and a private or public judicial authority. Successfully replacing private arrangements in favor of a central plan, however intricately calculated via ML, will remain a pipe dream. At best, it would suspend many economic relationships in amber, foregoing the rational adjustments private agents would make as conditions change. And ultimately, the relationships and activities that planning would sanction would be shaped by political whim. It’s a monstrous thing to contemplate — both fruitless and authoritarian.

Renewables and Preempted Prosperity

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Renewable Energy

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carbon Sensitivity, David Middleton, Economic Cost of Carbon, Fossil fuels, Intermittancy, John Barry, Los Angeles Eland Project, Martin Heidegger, Matt Ridley, Michael Schellenberger, Murray Bookchin, Renewable energy

Coerced conversion to renewable energy sources will degrade human living conditions. That’s certainly true relative to a voluntary conversion actuated by purely private incentives. It’s likely to be true even in an absolute sense, depending on the speed and severity of the forced transition. A coerced conversion will mean lower real incomes during the transition (one recent estimate: $42,000 total loss per U.S. household to transition by 2030), and the losses will continue after the transition, with little redeeming improvement in environmental conditions or risk.

The Reality

There are several underpinnings for the assertions above. One is that the sensitivity of global temperatures to carbon forcings is relatively low. We know all too well that the climate models relied upon by warming alarmists have drastically over-estimated the extent of warming to date. The models are excessively sensitive to carbon emissions and promote an unwarranted urgency to DO SOMETHING… with other people’s money. There is also the question of whether moderate warming is really a bad thing given that it is likely to mean fewer cold-weather fatalities, increased agricultural productivity, and significant reforestation.

Another underpinning is that the real economics of renewable energy are vastly inferior to fossil fuels and will remain so for some time to come. Proponents of renewables tend to quote efficiencies under optimal operating conditions, free of pesky details like the cost of installing a vast support infrastructure and environmental costs of producing components. Solar and wind energy are tremendously inefficient in terms of land use. One estimate is that meeting a 100% renewable energy target in the U.S. today would require acreage equivalent to the state of California. And of course rare earth minerals must be mined for wind turbines and solar panels, and fossil fuels are needed to produce materials like the steel used to build them.

But the chief renewable bugaboo is that the power generated by wind and solar is intermittent. Our ability to store power is still extremely limited, so almost all surplus energy production is lost. Therefore, intermittency necessitates redundant generating capacity, which imposes huge costs. When the winds are calm and the sun isn’t shining, traditional power sources are needed to meet demand. That redundant capacity must be maintained and kept on-line, as these facilities are even costlier to power up from a dead start.

LA Hucksterism

These issues are typified by the unrealistic expectations of Los Angeles’ plan to replace 7% of the city’s power consumption with renewables. The cost predicted by LA regulators is slightly less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and even less for battery power, which are unrealistically low. For one thing, those are probably operating costs that do not account for capital requirements. The plan promises to provide power 16 hours a day at best, but it’s not clear that the 7% estimate of the renewable share takes that into account or whether the real figure should be 4.2% of LA’s power needs. The project will require 2,600 acres for solar panels, and if it’s like other solar plant installations, the stated capacity is based on the few hours of the day when the sun’s rays are roughly perpendicular to the panels. So it’s likely that the real cost of the power will be many times the estimates, though taxpayers will subsidize 30% or more of the total. And then there is the negative impact on birds and other wildlife.

The Question of Intent

Michael Schellenberger goes so far as to say that a degraded standard of living is precisely what many fierce renewable advocates have long intended. Modern comforts are simply not compatible with 100% renewable energy any time soon, or perhaps ever given the investment involved, but a target of 100% was not really intended to be compatible with modern comforts. In fact, the renewable proposition was often intermingled with celebration of a more austere, agrarian lifestyle. Schellenberger discusses the case of Martin Heidegger, an early anti-technologist who said in 1954 that modern technology “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy....” Of course, Heidegger was not talking about the use of solar panels. Others, like Murray Bookchin, were ultimately quite explicit about the “promise” of renewables to dial-back industrial society in favor of an agrarian ideal. And here’s a quote from a new book by John Barry, Professor of “Green Political Economy” (!) at Queen’s University Belfast:

“The first question which serves as the starting point of this chapter is to ask if the objective of economic growth is now ecologically unsustainable, socially divisive and has in many countries passed the point when it is adding to human wellbeing?”

If that’s the question, the answer is no! The quote is courtesy of David Middleton. Green Professor Barry has one thing right, however: growing anything will be tough after crowding erstwhile farm and forest land with solar panels and wind turbines. But at least someone “green” is willing to admit some economic realities, something many alarmists and politicians are loath to do.

Welfare Loss

Involuntary actions always involve a welfare loss, as “subjects” must sacrifice the additional value they’d otherwise derive from their own choices. So it is that coerced adoption of renewables implies a starker outcome than zero economic growth. Objective measurement of all welfare costs is difficult, but we know that the adoption of renewables implies measurable up-front and ongoing economic losses. Matt Ridley notes that the impact of those losses falls hardest on the poor, whose energy needs absorb a large fraction of income. This, along with fundamental impracticality and high costs, accounts for the populist backlash against radical efforts to promote renewables in some European states. The politics of forced adoption of renewables is increasingly grim, but attempts to sell a centrally-planned energy sector based on renewables continue.

Ridley is rightly skeptical of carbon doomsday scenarios, but the pressure to curb carbon emissions will remain potent. He advocates a different form of intervention: essentially a carbon tax on producers with proceeds dedicated to new, competing sequestration or carbon capture technologies. Still coercive, the tax itself requires an estimate of the “economic cost of carbon”, which is of tremendously uncertain magnitude. The tax, of course, has the potential to do real harm to the economy. On the other hand, Ridley is correct in asserting that the effort to fund competing carbon-capture projects would leverage powerful market forces and perhaps hasten breakthroughs.

Mandated Misery

The attempt to force a complete conversion to renewable energy sources is meeting increasing political challenges as its cost is revealed more clearly by experience. Alarmists have long recognized the danger of economic damage, however. Thus, they try to convince us that economic growth and our current standards of living aren’t as good as we think they are, and they continue to exaggerate claims about the promise of renewable technologies. One day, some of these technologies will be sufficiently advanced that they will be economically viable without taxpayer subsidies. The conversion to renewables should be postponed until that day, when users can justify the switch in terms of costs and benefits, and do so voluntarily without interference by government planners.

The UN’s Mass Extinction Fiction

20 Monday May 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Biodiversity, Central Planning, Environment

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African Elephants, Beepocalypse, Biodiversity, Bird Eater Tarantulas, CO2 Emissions, Dan Hannon, Extinction, Gary Wrightstone, Global Greening, Habitat Loss, IPCC, IUCN Red List, Jimmy Carter, Matt Ridley, Non-Native Species, Paris Accord, Polar Bears

A big story early this month warned of mass extinctions and a collapse of the planet’s biodiversity. This was based on a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). A high-level presentation of the data by IPBES was constructed in a way that is easily revealed as misleading (see below). But the first thing to ask about bombastic reports like this is whether the authors are self-interested. There is big money in promoting apocalyptic scenarios and public programs to avert them. Large government grants are at stake for like-minded scientists, and political power is at stake for biodiversity activists worldwide. Like many other scare stories reported as “news”, this one feeds into the statist political agenda of the environmental Left.

Exaggerated claims of species endangerment are not a new phenomenon. We’ve heard grossly erroneous forecasts of polar bear extinctions, frightening but false warnings of a “beepocalyse”, and faulty claims about declines in the population of African elephants. These are headline-grabbing and more thrilling to report than mourning the prospective loss of an obscure species of cave lichen. But a mass extinction is something else! Dan Hannon reminds us of the following:

“In 1980, for example, the Jimmy Carter administration distributed to foreign governments a report claiming that, by the year 2000, 2 million species would be wiped out. In fact, by 2010, there had been 872 documented extinctions.”

Of course, that figure does not account for the multitude of new species discovered. There are many. Recent examples just gruesome enough to garner attention are the three new species of bird eater tarantulas discovered in 2017.

In the more general mass-extinction context of the IPBES report, the blame for the extremely pessimistic outlook is placed squarely on human activity. The authors allege CO2 emissions as the primary culprit, which is at best a theory and one at odds with the chief driver of extinctions during the industrial era. That is the introduction of non-native species into environments having flora or fauna unable to withstand new competitors. Matt Ridley elaborates:

“The introduction by people of predators, parasites and pests, especially to islands, has been and continues to be far and away the greatest cause of local and global extinction of native fauna.”

There is no question that the IPBES report on extinctions was intended to create alarm. As Gary Wrightstone demonstrates, the lack of rigor and misleading expositional techniques used in the report are a tell:

“… the data were lumped together by century rather than shorter time frames, which, as we shall see accentuates the supposed increase in extinctions. … The base data were derived from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List, which catalogues every known species that has gone the way of the dodo and the carrier pigeon. Review of the full data set reveals a much different view of extinction and what has been happening recently.”

The more granular charts Wrightstone presents are indeed contrary to the narrative in the IPBES report. And Wrightstone also highlights the following in a postscript:

“In an incredibly ironic twist that poses a difficult conundrum for those who are intent on saving the planet from our carbon dioxide excesses, the new study reports that the number one cause of predicted extinctions is habitat loss. Yet their solution is to pave over vast stretches of land for industrial scale solar factories and to construct immense wind factories that will cover forests and grasslands, killing the endangered birds and other species they claim to want to save.”

The enduring extinction racket is one among other fronts in the war on capitalism. The IPBES report must use the term “transformative” a thousand times, as it recommends “steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth“. Matt Ridley highlights the faulty attribution of alleged declines in biodiversity to “western values and capitalism”:

“On the whole what really diminishes biodiversity is a large but poor population trying to live off the land. As countries get richer and join the market economy they generally reverse deforestation, slow species loss and reverse some species declines.”

And Ridley also says this:

“A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too.”

It’s no coincidence that future extinctions foretold by IPBES are predicted to have drastic impacts on less-developed countries. It thus appears that IPBES exists in a happy synergy with the UN’s climate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as proponents of the Paris Accord and the entire climate lobby. An objective that helps them garner support around the globe is to redistribute existing wealth to less-developed countries in the name of environmental salvation. That would prove a poor substitute for the kinds of free-market policies that would truly enhance prospects for economic growth in those nations.

The threat of mass extinctions is greatly exaggerated by the UN, IPBES, climate change activists, and members of the media who can’t resist promoting a crisis. Any diminished biodiversity we might experience going forward won’t be solved by limiting economic growth, as the IPBES report claims. Instead, advances in productivity, particularly in agriculture, can allow expansion of native habitat, as recent experience with reforestation and global greening demonstrates. This principle is as applicable to under-developed countries as anywhere else.

The kinds of centrally planned limits on human activity contemplated by the IPBES report are likely to backfire by making us poorer. Those limits would impose costs by misallocating resources away from things that people value most highly. They would also force people to forego the adoption of innovative production techniques, leading to the substitution of other resources, such as inefficient land use. And those limits would deny basic freedoms, including the unfettered use of private property.

You’re Welcome: Charitable Gifts Prompt Statist Ire

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Charity, Uncategorized

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Amazon, American Institute for Economic Research, central planning, Charity, Cloe Anagnos, Day 1 Fund, Doug Bandow, Forced Charity, Gaby Del Valle, Homelessness, Jeff Bezos, Redistribution, Russ Roberts, Scientism, Seattle Employment Tax, War on Charity

Charitable acts are sometimes motivated by a desire to cultivate a favorable reputation, or even to project intelligence. Perhaps certain charitable acts are motivated by guilt of one kind or another. Tax deduction are nice, too. But sometimes a charitable gift is prompted by no more than a desire to help others less fortunate. It’s likely a combination of motives in many cases, but to gainsay the purity of anyone’s charitable motives is rather unseemly. Yet Gaby Del Valle does just that in Vox, casting a skeptical eye at Jeff Bezos’ efforts to help the homeless through his Day 1 Fund.

“Last week, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, were donating $97.5 million to 24 organizations that provide homeless services across the country. The donation is part of Bezos’s $2 billion ‘Day 1 Fund, a philanthropic endeavor … that, according to Bezos, focuses on establishing ‘a network of new, non-profit, tier-one preschools in low-income communities’ and funding existing nonprofits that provide homeless services.”

Del Valle says Bezos deserves little credit for his big gift for several reasons. First, Amazon very publicly opposed a recent initiative for a $275 per employee tax on large employers in Seattle. The proceeds would have been used to fund public programs for the homeless. This allegation suggests that Bezos feels guilty, or that the gift is a cynical attempt to buy-off critics. That might have an element of truth, but the tax was well worthy of opposition on economic grounds — almost as if it was designed to stunt employment and economic growth in the city.

Second, because Amazon has been an engine of growth for Seattle, Del Valle intimates that the company and other large employers are responsible for the city’s high cost of housing and therefore homelessness. Of course, growth in a region’s economy is likely to lead to higher housing prices if the supply of housing does not keep pace, but forsaking economic growth is not a solution. Furthermore, every large city in the country suffers from some degree of homelessness. And not all of those homeless individuals have been “displaced”, as Del Valle would have it. Some have relocated voluntarily without any guarantee or even desire for employment. As for the housing stock, government environmental regulations, zoning policies and rent control (in some markets) restrains expansion, leading to higher costs.

Finally, Del Valle implies that private efforts to help the homeless are somehow inferior to “leadership by elected officials”. Further, she seems to regard these charitable acts as threatening to “public” objectives and government control. At least she doesn’t disguise her authoritarian impulses. Del Valle also quotes a vague allegation that one of the charities beholden to Amazon is less than a paragon of charitable virtue. Well, I have heard similar allegations that government isn’t celebrated for rectitude in fulfilling its duties. Like all statists, Del Valle imagines that government technocrats possess the best vision of how to design aid programs. That attitude is an extension of the scientism and delusions of efficacy typical of central planners. Anyone with the slightest awareness of the government’s poor track record in low-income housing would approach such a question with trepidation. In contrast, private efforts often serve as laboratories in which to test innovative programs that can later be adopted on a broader scale.

While selfishness might motivate private acts of charity in some cases, only voluntary, private charity can ever qualify as real charity. Government benefits for the homeless are funded by taxes, which are compulsory. Such public programs might be justifiable as an extension of social insurance, but it is not charity in any pure sense; neither are it advocates engaged in promoting real charity, despite their conveniently moralistic positioning. And unlike private charity, government redistribution programs can be restrained only through a political process in which substantial payers are a distinct minority of the voting population.

Public aid and private charity have worked alongside each other for many years in the U.S. According to Russ Roberts, private giving to the poor began to be “crowded-out” during the Great Depression by a dramatic increase in public assistance programs. (Also see Doug Bandow’s “War On Charity“.) It’s certainly more difficult to make a case for gifts to the poor when donors are taxed by the government in order to redistribute income.

The statist war on private charity can take other forms. The regulatory apparatus can crowd-out private efforts to extend a helping hand. Chloe Anagnos of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) writes of a charity in Kansas City that wanted to provide home-cooked soup to the homeless, but health officials intervened, pouring bleach into the soup. I am aware of similar but less drastic actions in St. Louis, where organizations attempting to hand-out sandwiches to the poor were recently prohibited by health authorities.

Private charity has drawn criticism because its source has driven economic growth, its source has opposed policies that stunt comic growth, and because it might interfere with the remote possibility that government would do it better. But private charity plays a critical role in meeting the needs of the disadvantaged, whether as a substitute for public aid where it falls short, or as a supplement. It can also play a productive role in identifying the most effective designs for aid programs. Of course, there are corrupt organizations and individuals purporting to do charitable work, which argues for a degree of public supervision over private charities. But unfortunately, common sense is too often lost to overzealous enforcement. In general, the public sector should not stand in the way of private charities and charitable acts, but real generosity has little value to those who press for domination by the state.

Liz Warren Pitches Another Goofball

23 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Property Rights, Regulation

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Accountable Capitalism Act, Board Activism, Don Boudreaux, Elizabeth Warren, Fifth Amendment, Kevin Williamson, Matt Yglesias, Richard Epstein, Unconstitutional Conditions

Elizabeth Warren wants to nationalize all private businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. She plans to introduce legislation called the “Accountable Capitalism Act” that would, if enacted, authorize an outright theft of private property from the owners of these companies. Among other things, her plan would require large companies to obtain a federal charter and set aside 40% of their board seats for members to be elected by employees. In addition, henceforth these businesses would be answerable not merely to shareholders, but to employees along with a limitless array of other “stakeholders”. That’s because under their federal charters, firms would have a duty to create a “general public benefit”. The operative assumption here is that merely creating a product or service does not produce adequate value for society, regardless of the benefits to buyers, income to employees and suppliers, taxes paid, and the returns earned by millions of working people who have invested in these companies via pension and 401(k) plans.

In the very first place, Warren’s bill is unconstitutional, as Richard Epstein points out. Owning a business is protected as a property right under several amendments to the U.S. Constitution, but particularly the Fifth Amendment. Warren would place unconstitutional conditions on this right via the requirements for a federal charter and the so-called public benefit. If enacted, her bill would quite likely be ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But if it stood, capital would quickly take flight from the U.S., depressing asset values.

Don Boudreaux notes that absent ownership, vaguely-defined “stakeholders” have risked nothing in the success of the company. Shareholders bear the financial risk that the company will fail to produce adequate earnings, lose value, or fail. Management has a fiduciary duty to protect the funds that shareholders invest in the firm, including a duty to protect the firm’s ability to acquire credit. Warren’s legislation would compromise these duties by elevating the objectives of non-owners to the same or greater status than those who have provided the equity capital. Again, this would happen in at least two ways: required representation of employee-elected board members, and the vague public-benefit mandate under the firm’s federal charter.

Significant employee representation on the board is likely to distort decisions about labor compensation and virtually any decision affecting employment. While 40% is short of a board majority, union pension funds already purchase shares in companies both as investments and as a way of driving labor issues before shareholders and into boardrooms. Those votes, along with the 40% board representation and oversight from federal bureaucrats, would give additional leverage to labor in influencing the firm’s decision-making. To take the simplest case, economic efficiency requires that the rate of labor compensation be the same as the marginal value of labor productivity. Warren’s proposal would surely result in wage payments exceeding this threshold, diminishing the economic value of the firm and its ability to raise capital. And by reducing the efficiency of the production process, it would raise costs to consumers and/or business customers.

There any number of other worker demands that would gain viability. For example, extended break times or extra paid-time-off would certainly raise costs, and such demands from a plurality of the board would be unrestrained by the need to negotiate other terms. Or how about a plant-closing decision? The upshot is that mandated board representation for labor would create instability and lead to a decline in the firm’s performance, competitiveness, and attractiveness to suppliers of capital. Ultimately, the very jobs on which labor depends would be threatened.

Further dilution of business objectives would arise from the requirement under the federal charter to produce a “public benefit”. Serving customers is not enough, but what will satisfy federal overseers that the firm has fulfilled its social obligations? And what are the limits of those social obligations? Again, these amorphous requirements would constitute a theft of resources from the business owners, requiring the payment of alms in order to produce something of value. There is already evidence that board activism in pursuit of non-business, social objectives destroys business value:

“Labor-affiliated pensions regularly file shareholder proposals, usually involving social and political concerns. Those social and political shareholder-proposal campaigns are associated with lower shareholder value. These labor investors also tend to attack companies facing ongoing union-organizing campaigns, as well as companies with political action committees that support Republicans.”

In time, the dilution of objectives undermines a firm’s viability, its health of its suppliers, and its ability to employ workers and hire other resources. Many of the suppliers hurt by Warren’s proposal would be smaller firms. It would ripple through the ranks of consultants, repair shops, electricians, plumbers, accounting firms, janitorial services, and any number of other businesses. But even before that, Warren’s proposal would send capital scrambling overseas.

I share Don Boudreaux’s astonishment that writers such as Matt Yglesias in Vox can assert that the Warren plan would have no costs. It might or might not have an impact on the federal budget, but the cost of destroyed economic value in the business sector would be massive, not to mention the jobs that ultimately would be lost in the process. It’s also astonishing that proponents can pretend that Warren’s bill would “save capitalism” when in fact it would do great harm.

Finally, here is Kevin Williamson expressing his disdain for Warren’s true intent in putting her bill forward:

“Warren’s proposal is dishonestly called the ‘Accountable Capitalism Act.’ Accountable to whom? you might ask. That’s a reasonable question. The answer is — as it always is — accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends. It is remarkable that people who are most keenly attuned to the self-interest of CEOs and shareholders and the ways in which that self-interest influences their decisions apparently believe that members of the House, senators, presidents, regulators, Cabinet secretaries, and agency chiefs somehow are liberated from self-interest when they take office through some kind of miracle of transcendence.”

Central Planning Fails to Scale, Unlike Spontaneous Order

05 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Markets, Price Controls

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Bronze Age, central planning, Client-Server Network, Decentralized Decision-Making, Economies of Scale, Federalism, Francis Turner, Industrial Policy, Liberty.me, Markets, Peer-to-Peer Network, Price mechanism, Property Rights, Scalability, Spontaneous Order

The proposition that mankind is capable of creating a successful “planned” society is at least as old as the Bronze Age. Of course it’s been tried. The effort necessarily involves a realignment of the economic and political landscape and always requires a high degree of coercion. But putting that aside, such planning can never be successful relative to spontaneous order of the kind that dominates private affairs in a free society. The task of advancing human well-being given available resources has never been achieved under central planning. It always fails miserably in this regard, and it always will fail to match the success of decentralized decision-making and private markets.

There are various ways to explain this fact, but I recently came across an interesting take on the subject having to do with the notion of scalability. Francis Turner offer s this note on th e topic at the Liberty.me blog. To begin, he gives a lengthy quote from a software developer who relates the problems of social and economic planning to the complexity of managing a network. On the topic of scale, the developer notes that the number of relationships in a network increases with the square of the number of its “nodes”, or members:

“2 nodes have 1 potential relationship. 4 nodes (twice as many) has 6 potential relationships (6 times as many). 8 nodes (twice again) has 28 potential relationships. 100 nodes => [4,950] relationships; 1,000 nodes => 499,500 relationships—nearly half a million.“

Actually, the formula for the number of potential relationships or connections in a network is n*(n-1)/2, where n is the number of network nodes. The developer Turner quotes discusses this in the context of two competing network management structures: client-server and peer-to-peer. Under the former, the network is managed centrally by a server, which communicates with all nodes, makes various decisions, and routes communications traffic between nodes. In a peer-to-peer network, the work of network management is distributed — each computer manages its own relationships. The developer says, at first, “the idea of hooking together thousands of computers was science fiction.” But as larger networks were built-out in the 1990s, the client-server framework was more or less rejected by the industry because it required such massive resources to manage large networks. In fact, as new nodes are added to a peer-to-peer network, its capacity to manage itself actually increases! In other words, client-server networks are not as scalable as peer-to-peer networks:

“Even if it were perfectly designed and never broke down, there was some number of nodes that would crash the server. It was mathematically unavoidable. You HAVE TO distribute the management as close as possible to the nodes, or the system fails.

… in an instant, I realized that the same is true of governments. … And suddenly my coworker’s small government rantings weren’t crazy…”

This developer’s epiphany captures a few truths about the relative efficacy of decentralized decision-making. It’s not just for computer networks! But in fact, when it comes to network management, the task is comparatively simple: meet the computing and communication needs of users. A central server faces dynamic capacity demands and the need to route changing flows of traffic between nodes. Software requirements change as well, which may necessitate discrete alterations in capacity and rules from time-to-time.

But consider the management of a network of individual economic units. Let’s start with individuals who produce something… like widgets. There are likely to be real economies achieved when a few individual widgeteers band together to produce as a team. Some specialization into different functions can take place, like purchasing materials, fabrication, and distribution. Perhaps administrative tasks can be centralized for greater efficiency. Economies of scale may dictate an even larger organization, and at some point the firm might find additional economies in producing widget-complementary products and services. But eventually, if the decision-making is centralized and hierarchical, the sheer weight of organizational complexity will begin to take a toll, driving up costs and/or diminishing the firm’s ability to deal with changes in technology or the market environment. In other words, centralized control becomes difficult to scale in an efficient way, and there may be some “optimal” size for a firm beyond which it struggles.

Now consider individual consumers, each of whom faces an income constraint and has a set of tastes spanning innumerable goods. These tastes vary across time scales like hour-of-day, day-of-week, seasons, life-stage, and technology cycles. The volume of information is even more daunting when you consider that preferences vary across possible price vectors and potential income levels as well.

Can the interactions between all of these consumer and producer “nodes” be coordinated by a central economic authority so as to optimize their well-being dynamically, subject to resource constraints? As we’ve seen, the job requires massive amounts of information and a crushing number of continually evolving decisions. It is really impossible for any central authority or computer to “know” all of the information needed. Secondly, to the software developer’s point, the number of potential relationships increases with the square of the number of consumers and producers, as does the required volume of information and number of decisions. The scalability problem should be obvious.

This kind of planning is a task with which no central authority can keep up. Will the central authority always get milk, eggs and produce to the store when people need it, at a price they are willing to pay, and with minimal spoilage? Will fuel be available such that a light always turns on whenever they flip the switch? Will adequate supplies of medicines always be available for the sick? Will the central authority be able to guarantee a range of good-quality clothing from which to choose?

There has never been a central authority that successfully performed the job just described. Yet that job gets done every day in free, capitalistic societies, and we tend to take it for granted. The massive process of information transmission and coordination takes place spontaneously with spectacularly good results via private discovery and decision-making, secure property rights, markets, and a functioning price mechanism. Individual economic units are endowed with decision-making power and the authority to manage their own relationships. And the spontaneous order that takes shape remains effective even as networks of economic units expand. In other words, markets are highly scalable at solving the eternal problem of allocating scarce resources.

But thus far I’ve set up something of a straw man by presuming that the central authority must monitor all individual economic units to know and translate their demands and supplies of goods into the ongoing, myriad decisions about production, distribution and consumption. Suppose the central authority takes a less ambitious approach. For example, it might attempt to enforce a set of prices that its experts believe to be fair to both consumers and producers. This is a much simpler task of central management. What could go wrong?

These prices will be wrong immediately, to one degree or another, without tailoring them to detailed knowledge of the individual tastes, preferences, talents, productivities, price sensitivities, and resource endowments of individual economic units. It would be sheer luck to hit on the correct prices at the start, but even then they would not be correct for long. Conditions change continuously, and the new information is simply not available to the central authority. Various shortages and surpluses will appear without the corrective mechanism usually provided by markets. Queues will form here and inventories will accumulate there without any self-correcting mechanism. Consumers will be angry, producers will quit, goods will rot, and stocks of physical capital will sit idle and go to waste.

Other forms of planning attempt to set quantities of goods produced and are subject to errors similar to those arising from price controls. Even worse is an attempt to plan both price and quantity. Perhaps more subtle is the case of industrial policy, in which planners attempt to encourage the development of certain industries and discourage activity in those deemed “undesirable”. While often borne out of good intentions, these planners do not know enough about the future of technology, resource supplies, and consumer preferences to arrogate these kinds of decisions to themselves. They will invariably commit resources to inferior technologies, misjudge future conditions, and abridge the freedoms of those whose work or consumption is out-of-favor and those who are taxed to pay for the artificial incentives. To the extent that industrial policies become more pervasive, scalability will become an obstacle to the planners because they simply lack the information required to perform their jobs of steering investment wisely.

Here is Turner’s verdict on central planning:

“No central planner, or even a board of them, can accurately set prices across any nation larger than, maybe, Liechtenstein and quite likely even at the level of Liechtenstein it won’t work well. After all how can a central planner tell that Farmer X’s vegetables taste better and are less rotten than Farmer Y’s and that people therefore are prepared to pay more for a tomato from Farmer X than they are one from Farmer Y.”

I will go further than Turner: planning can only work well in small settings and only when the affected units do the planning. For example, the determination of contract terms between two parties requires planning, as does the coordination of activities within a firm. But then these plans are not really “central” and the planners are not “public”. These activities are actually parts of a larger market process. Otherwise, the paradigm of central planning is not merely unscalable, it is unworkable without negative consequences.

Finally, the notion of scalability applies broadly to governance, not merely economic planning. The following quote from Turner, for example, is a ringing endorsement for federalism:

“It is worth noting that almost all successful nations have different levels of government. You have the local town council, the state/province/county government, possibly a regional government and then finally the national one. Moreover richer countries tend to do better when they push more down to the lower levels. This is a classic way to solve a scalability problem – instead of having a single central power you devolve powers and responsibilities with some framework such that they follow the general desires of the higher levels of government but have freedom to implement their own solutions and adapt policies to local conditions.”

Corporate Lapdogs of the Left

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Identity Politics, Progressivism, rent seeking

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central planning, Corporate Socialism, Corporatism, David Cay Johnston, Identity Politics, Interstate Commerce Commission, Kevin Williamson, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Political Action Committees, Political Correctness, rent seeking, Technocratic elite, William H. Whyte

ceo

Now don’t get me wrong, I definitely prefer to see private goods and services produced privately, not publicly. Private ownership of the means of production makes the world a better place because ownership and self-interest drive performance and value, to put it all too briefly. But corporate America is now so thoroughly encumbered by ideological distractions that it compromises the mission of creating value, risking shareholder returns and invested capital as well. Having spent the past 31 years employed successively by three gigantic corporate hairballs (with a 2-year stint at the central bank), the following thesis about corporate CEOs, and corporate America by extension, strikes me as wholly accurate:

“CEOs … mostly [reject] the ethos of rugged individualism in favor of a more collectivist view of the world. The capitalists [are] not much interested in defending the culture of capitalism. … the psychological and operational mechanics of large corporations [are] much like those of other large organizations, including government agencies … American CEOs [believe] that expertise deployed through bureaucracy [can] impose rationality on such unruly social entities as free markets, culture, family, and sexuality. The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism….“

I changed the tenses used above by Kevin Williamson, who attempts to explain why American corporations became such progressive activists. The beginning of the quote describes interviews conducted by William H. Whyte in the 1950s, but it’s as true now as it was then, and probably much more so. The technocratic view of organizational efficacy may be true up to a point. In fact, there is undoubtedly an optimal size for any organization that is dependent upon it’s mission, the technologies at its disposal, and the range of prices it is likely to face in input and output markets. It’s all too easy for a successful firm to expand beyond that point, however, as many now-defunct businesses have learned the hard way. However, the quote merely highlights the sympathetic view often held by corporate managements toward the notion of a planned society, guided by a class of technocrats. They share this scientistic line of thinking with the statist left, though the corporatist vision is a world in which their private organizations play a critical role, with risks mitigated by “partners” in government.

Private incentives can produce wonderful results, but they are corrupted by the scent of private advantage that can be gained via government intervention in markets. The corporate practice of seeking rents through legislative and administrative action has been going on since at least the 1880s, when railroads sought protection from competition and other shipping interests via federal regulatory action.The symbiosis between government and corporate interests, or corporatism, has been growing ever since. Whether it is lucrative contract awards, subsidies, or favorable regulation, government has lots of goodies at its disposal by virtue of its exclusive ability to exert coercive power. This quote of David Cay Johnston describes the end-product of corporate rent-seeking behavior:

“Corporate socialism is where we socialize losses and privatize gains. Companies that have failed in the marketplace stick the taxpayers with their losses, but when they make money they get to keep it, and secondly, huge amounts of capital are given to companies by taxpayers.”

Risk mitigation is at the heart of a second variety of corporate leftism, and Williamson notes the asymmetry in the political risks faced by most corporations:

“Conservatives may roll their eyes a little bit at promises to build windmills so efficient that we’ll cease needing coal and oil, but progressives (at least a fair portion of them) believe that using fossil fuels may very well end human civilization. The nation’s F-150 drivers are not going to organize a march on Chevron’s headquarters if it puts a billion bucks into biofuels, but the nation’s Subaru drivers might very well do so if it doesn’t. … The same asymmetry characterizes the so-called social issues.“

At this point, Williamson goes on to describe a few social issues on which corporate leaders are frequently harangued by the left. Those leaders may view conservative positions on those issues as aberrant, according to Williamson, because the leaders inhabit an insulated world of elitist, media-driven, politically-correct opinion. They wish to be seen as “progressive” and discount the risk of offending conservatives. While I do not take Williamson’s side on all of the social issues he mentions, I concede that there is some truth to the asymmetry he describes.

An avenue through which corporate America is strongly influenced by the left is identity politics. This is partly an unfortunate side-effect of civil rights legislation and other anti-discrimination law, but in today’s litigious environment, there are excessive legal risks against which corporations must take precautions. This is embedded in human resource policies to the point at which hiring the best individual to fill a role is subject to a series of costly, time-consuming hurdles, and is sometimes impossible. Then, there are the mandatory “Diversity and Inclusion” courses that all employees are required to complete. These overbearing attempts to “educate” the work force consume valuable staff time and are of questionable value in light of the aggravation and resentment they inspire in employees. Finally, I can’t keep count of all the corporate-sponsored activities devoted to celebrating one identity group after another. Can we please get back to work?

Today, as a consumer, it is becoming more difficult to engage in commerce without exposure to a seller’s political positioning. For example, I buy about 90% of my clothing from a particular clothier, but last weekend I learned that the company had taken an objectionable position (to me) in the debate over gun legislation. I am certain that activists badgered the company, and it succumbed, and so I will change my shopping habits. People often find that it’s easier to engage in arms-length transactions when the other party stays off the soapbox. But it goes further than that. Here is Williamson:

“Whereas the ancient corporate practice was to decline to take a public position on anything not related to their businesses, contemporary CEOs feel obliged to act as public intellectuals as well as business managers.“

Well, “ancient” might take it a bit too far, but as a customer, employee, and especially as a shareholder, I would urge any company to steer clear of political posturing. Do not dilute your mission of delivering value to customers, which dovetails with serving the interests of shareholders. You must pursue that mission in a way that you consider responsible and ethical, which just might narrow the scope of the mission. And that’s okay. Just be as neutral as possible on extraneous issues as you reach out to potential customers, and do not respond to politically-motivated threats except in the most diplomatic terms.

Should I bother to say that corporations should eschew public subsidies? That they should respond to competition by improving value, rather than lobbying for advantages and protection from lawmakers or regulators? That they should not badger their employees to give to their company’s Political Action Committee (PAC)?

I must be fantasizing! Corporations would never follow that advice, not as long as they can capture rents through the seductive expedient of big government. If that were the only reason for the hate reserved by leftists for corporate America, I’d be right with them. But in fact, leftist rhetoric condemns the profit motive generally, both in principle and as a method of scapegoating for any social ill. Williamson marvels at the incredible irony of the corporate enterprise-cum-lapdog of the Left, which is especially palpable as the Left beats the dog so unrelentingly.

Carried Interest and Your Private Sweat Equity

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Taxes

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Carried Interest, Diane Furchtgott-Roth, Economic Policy Journal, Greg Mankiw, Interest Deductibility, Peter Wayrich, Private equity, Senator Ron Johnson, Skin in the Game, Sweat Equity, TCJA

Suppose your rich uncle buys an old house to do some fix-ups and hopes to resell it at a gain. He has the cash and is willing to split the profit 50-50 if you’re willing to handle a few restorations over the next year. Even better, under the partnership he’ll form with you, your profit will be taxed as a pass-through capital gain. You’ll be taxed at only 15% (or 20% if your income is already very high). You’ll provide the labor, but your cut won’t be taxed at ordinary income tax rates.

That’s Just Like Carried Interest

A similar example is provided by Greg Mankiw, along with several others, to illustrate the ambiguity of “capital gains” under our tax law. What might surprise you is that the tax treatment of the deal with your uncle is exactly the same as the tax benefit received by the general partner (GP) in a private equity fund. The GP is the “worker”, as it were, who manages the capital paid-in by the fund’s investors (or limited partners). The GP attempts to build the fund’s value in various ways. The investors, on the other hand, take the same role as your uncle. The GP earns fees as a cut of the investment gains; those fees are essentially treated as capital gains for tax purposes. In the case of the private equity GP, however, the income is called “carried interest”, but there is no real difference.

The tax treatment of carried interest has been a target of progressives and populist critics for many years. This article in The Hill derides the GOP’s failure to close the carried interest “loophole” in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) recently signed into law by President Trump. Of course, wealthy private-equity players have sought to protect the rule with generous campaign contributions to key politicians. However, as illustrated by the partnership with your uncle, pass-through business taxation combined with the treatment of capital gains provides the same benefits to any business-person who invests “sweat equity” into the improvement of an asset for ultimate resale, including the business itself.

Should “sweat equity” earned by a worker be taxed more lightly than the direct receipt of “sweat wages”? The worker does not “own” the asset in question prior to the work effort, a fundamental distinction from what we normally consider to be a capital gain. On the other hand, the worker shoulders risk that the asset’s value will fail to meet expectations. My view is that it is not appropriate for the tradeoff between private risk and return to be managed via the income tax code or by government generally. Nevertheless, the sweat-equity conversion of labor value into asset appreciation is treated by tax law as a capital gain and is taxed at a lower rate than wages (except at low levels of taxable income).

Equal Protection Under the Tax Law

The carried interest rule and relatively “light” taxation of returns on capital are not at the root of the problem here. Rather, it is the disparate treatment of different kinds of income for tax purposes and the high taxation of ordinary income, even in the wake of the the TCJA’s passage. Diane Furchtgott-Roth argues that the low carried-interest tax rate is necessary to encourage productive investment. Peter Wayrich agrees, but again, that is not a good rationale for disparate (and high) taxation of labor income. This note in the Economic Policy Journal contains a quote on Senator Ron Johnson’s proposal to tax all productive entities at the 20% carried-interest tax rate. The potential loss of revenue might require a higher rate, but the proposition that rates should be equal across all forms of business organizations is more sensible than the complex changes promulgated for pass-throughs under the TCJA. Moreover, the progressive premise that tax rates on capital income should be high is a prescription for low rates of saving, a diminished pool of investment capital, and ultimately low growth in labor productivity and wages.

Demonizing Private Equity

The private equity business is criticized for reasons other than carried interest, but mainly due to superstition that these firms routinely engage in plundering healthy enterprises to extract value and victimize helpless employees by reducing wages or leaving them without work. Simple economics reveals the shallow thinking underlying such claims. As a first approximation, private equity can be profitable only when target firms are under-performing or undervalued. A healthy market for business ownership is necessary to ensure that firms with untapped value survive. Weak performance might stem from any number of circumstances but must be addressable under new management. That includes a management shakeup itself, and it could include a capital infusion to upgrade facilities, elimination of unprofitable product lines, a spin-off from a neglectful parent company, or wage renegotiation to improve competitiveness (but never ask a leftist if wages are too high, even as the employer fails).

Interest Deductibility

The tax benefits of carried interest enhance private equity deals relative to traditional merger and acquisition activity. Again, that illustrates the oddity of having different tax rules for different firms. In the past, the gains from carried interest have been magnified by another unfortunate aspect of the tax code: the interest-deductibility of business debt. The TCJA doesn’t completely eliminate this economic peculiarity, but it places a severe restriction on its use (see #6 on the list at the link).

In general, interest deductibility has favored the use of debt in the capital structures of all businesses. That leverage increases financial risk and bids up the level of interest rates faced by all borrowers. Private equity firms have made liberal use of debt in structuring buyouts. Their borrowing capacity combined with carried interest and the debt subsidy has undoubtedly made deals more attractive at the margin.

The new restriction on interest deductibility is likely to reinforce an existing trend in private equity: gradually, GPs have been putting more “skin in the game“. That is, they are risking a bit more of their own capital. That is generally a good thing for investors. The article at the last link was written in March 2017, so the data shown for 2017 is almost meaningless. In 2016, however, the average GP commitment as a percentage of fund size was still less than 8% and the median was just 4%. These percentages should continue to increase with competition for deals and more restricted deductibility of interest expense.

Taxes and Value

If you want to encourage value-maximizing behavior, then don’t tax its makers (or its markers) heavily. Carried interest extends the tax treatment of “sweat equity” to those who “police” the private sector for unexploited value: private equity firms. By eliminating waste, resuscitating formerly productive enterprises, and exploiting new profit opportunities, their efforts are socially accretive. The popular narrative of an “evil” and “vulturous” private equity industry is both misleading and destructive. Beyond that, there is no reason to tax different forms of productive activity at different rates, but we do. The TCJA has lessened the tax disparities to some extent, but more equalization should be a priority. At least the business interest deduction has been restricted, which should lessen the artificial reliance on borrowed capital.

Suspending the Economic Problem With Free Stuff

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Socialism, Subsidies

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Bernie Sanders, central planning, Confiscation, Contrived Scarcity, Don Boudreaux, Free Stuff, Hillary Clinton, incentives, Jeffrey Tucker, Nonprice Rationing, Overuse of Resources, Property Rights, Redistribution, Scarcity Deniers, Socialism

When things are scarce, they can’t be free. That’s an iron law of economics. It’s true of everything we ever wish for and almost everything we take for granted. Things are naturally scarce, but when we are told that things can be free, it always comes from likes of whom Jeffrey Tucker calls “scarcity deniers”. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have told America that a college education should be free, and a large number of people take that seriously. They are scarcity deniers. On one level, the Sanders/Clinton claim is like any other promise that simply cannot be met at the stated cost — a rather garden-variety phenomenon among politicians. These promises are not harmless, as such initiatives usually involve budget overruns, compromised markets, underproduction and wasted resources.

The Sanders/Clinton claim, however, is a form of scarcity-denial that comes almost exclusively from the political left. That is really the point of Tucker’s article:

“This claim seems to confirm everything I’ve ever suspected about socialism. It’s rooted in a very simple error, one so fundamental that it denies a fundamental feature of the world. It denies the existence and the persistence of scarcity itself. That is to say, it denies that producing and allocating is even a problem. If you deny that, it’s hardly surprising that you have no regard for economics as a discipline of the social sciences.“

Our socialist friends (who otherwise claim to be defenders of science) contend that free things can be offered to a broad swath of the population with little consequence. The least cynical among them (perhaps including Sanders) believe that the costs can be shouldered by the wealthy and/or big corporations and banks. Others (including Clinton) know that the cost of “free things” must be met by higher taxes on a broader share of the population. Doesn’t that mean they recognize scarcity? Only superficially, because they fail to grasp the dynamics of resource allocation, the subtle forms in which costs are imposed, and the true magnitude of those costs.

If a thing is scarce, available supplies must be balanced against demand. The reward to suppliers at the margin must match the willingness of buyers to pay. That means there is no surplus and waste, nor any loss attendant to shortage and non-price rationing. The price creates an incentive for consumers to conserve and an incentive for producers to bring additional supplies to market when they are demanded.

A crucial prerequisite for this to work is the establishment of secure property rights. Then, absent coercion, one can’t overuse what isn’t theirs. One can’t simply take a thing from those who create it without a mutually agreeable payment. Creators cannot be forced to respond on demand without compensation. No one can be required to husband resources for others to simply take. No one can be asked to pay for a thing that will be commandeered by others. The establishment of property rights serves these purposes. Incentives become meaningful because they can be internalized by all actors — those consuming and those producing. And the incentives solve the problem of scarcity by balancing the availability of things with needs and desires, and balance them against all other competing uses of resources. Then, the market-clearing price of a thing reflects its degree of scarcity relative to other goods.

The socialist bluster holds that all this is nonsense. Would-be central planners propose that more of a thing be produced because they deem it to be of high value. Furthermore, it must be made available to buyers at a price the planners deem acceptable, or quite possibly for free to their intended constituency! Property rights are violated here in several ways: first, the owner/producer’s authority over their own resources is declared void; second, the owner has no incentive to care for their resources in a responsible and sustainable way; third, a confiscation of resources from others is required to pay at least some of the costs; fourth, the beneficiaries overuse and degrade the resource.

We know a scarce thing cannot be provided for free. Here are some consequences of trying:

Overuse of resources. When the buffet is free, the food disappears.
The “free thing” will be over-allocated to those who benefit and value it the least. (Example: the education of students for whom there are better alternatives.)
Supplies will evaporate unless producers are fully compensated. Otherwise, quality and quantity will deteriorate. This is a form of “contrived scarcity” (HT: Don Boudreaux).
If supplies dwindle, new forms of rationing will be necessary. This might involve time-consuming queues, arbitrary allocations, bribes, side payments and favoritism.
If suppliers are compensated, someone must pay. That means taxes, public borrowing or money printing.
Taxes weaken productive incentives and chase resources away. The consequent deterioration in productive capacity undermines the original goal of providing something “for free” and inflicts costs on the outcomes of all other markets. This creates more contrived scarcity.
So-called progressive taxes tend to hit the most productive classes with the greatest negative force.
Government borrowing to fund “free stuff” today inflicts costs on future taxpayers. More fundamentally, it misallocates resources toward the present and away from the future.
Printing money to pay for a “free thing” might well cause a general rise in prices. This is a classic, hidden inflation tax, and it may involve the distortion of interest rates, leading to an inter-temporal misallocation of resources.

Scarcity denial is a carrot, but it inevitably becomes a stick. To voters, and to naive shoppers in the marketplace of ideas, the indignant assertion that things can and should be free is powerful rhetoric. Producers, too, might happily accept “free-stuff” policies if they expect to be fully compensated by the government, and they might be pleased to have the opportunity to serve more customers if they think they can do so profitably. However, serving all takers of “free stuff” will escalate costs and is likely to compromise quality. It is also likely to create unpleasant circumstances for customers, such as long waiting times and unfulfilled orders. The stick, on the other hand, will be brandished by the state, blaming and penalizing suppliers for their failure to meet expectations that were unrealistic from the start. The fault for contrived conditions of scarcity lies with the policy itself, not with producers, except to the extent that they allowed themselves to be duped by scarcity deniers. Tucker notes the following:

“Things can be allocated by arbitrary decision backed by force, or they can be allocated through agreement, trading, and gifting. The forceful way is what socialism has always become.“

Politicians and would-be planners with the arrogance to claim that naturally scarce things should be free are dangerous to your welfare. These scarcity deniers cannot provide for human needs more effectively than the free market, and ultimately their efforts will make you subservient and poor.

Sacred Cow Chips

Category Archives: Central Planning

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Renewables and Preempted Prosperity

The UN’s Mass Extinction Fiction

You’re Welcome: Charitable Gifts Prompt Statist Ire

Liz Warren Pitches Another Goofball

Central Planning Fails to Scale, Unlike Spontaneous Order

Corporate Lapdogs of the Left

Carried Interest and Your Private Sweat Equity

Suspending the Economic Problem With Free Stuff