• About

Sacred Cow Chips

Sacred Cow Chips

Tag Archives: Big government

Government Action and the “Your Worst Enemy” Test

03 Saturday Dec 2022

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government, Censorship

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Big government, Censorship, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Michael Munger, Munger Test, Nancy Pelosi, regulation, Social Media, Twitter, Unicorn Governance, Your Worst Enemy Test

A couple of weeks back I posted an admittedly partial list of the disadvantages, dysfunctions, and dangers of the Big Government Mess seemingly wished upon us by so many otherwise reasonable people. A wise addition to that line of thinking is the so-called Munger Test articulated by Michael Munger of Duke University. Here, he applies the test to government involvement in social media content regulation:

“If someone says “The STATE should do X” (in this case, decide what is true and what can be published in a privately-owned space), they need to make a substitution.

Instead of “The STATE” substitute “Donald Trump,” and see if you still belief it. (Or “Nancy Pelosi”, if you want).”

If approached honestly, Munger’s test is sure to make a partisan think twice about having government “do something”, or do anything! In a another tweet, Munger elaborates on the case of Twitter, which is highly topical at the moment:

“In fact, the reporters and media moguls who are calling for the state to hammer Twitter, and censor all those other ‘liars’, naively believe that they have a 1000 Year Reich.

You don’t. 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙜𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙥𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧 𝙜𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙢𝙮. Deal with it.”

The second sentence in that last paragraph is an even more concise statement of the general principle behind the Munger Test, which we might dub the “Worst Enemy Test” with no disrespect to Munger. He proposed the test (immodestly named, he admits) in his 2014 article, “Unicorn Governance”, in which he offered a few other examples of its application. The article is subtitled:

“Ever argued public policy with people whose State is in fantasyland?”

The answer for me is yes, almost every time I talk to anyone about public policy! And as Munger says, that’s because:

“Everybody imagines that ‘The STATE’ is smart people who agree with them. Once MY team controls the state, order will be restored to the Force.”

So go ahead! Munger-test all your friends’ favorite policy positions the next time you talk!

But what about the case of “regulating” Twitter or somehow interfering with its approach to content moderation? More on that in my next post.

Good Profits and Bad Profits

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Nuetzel in Health Care, Profit Motive

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ACA, Affordable Care Act, Big government, Corporatism, Cronyism, Economic Rents, Health Insurance, Opportunity cost, Profit Motive, Regulatory Capture, Reinsurance, rent seeking, Risk corridors, Supra-Normal Profit

Toles-on-Regulatory-Capture

There are two faces of profit. It’s always the fashion on the left to denigrate profits and the profit motive generally, as if it serves no positive social function. This stems partly from a failure to examine the circumstances under which profits are earned: is it through competitive performance, innovation, hard-won customer loyalty, and the skill or even luck to spot an underpriced asset? Such a “good” profit might even exceed what economists call a “normal profit”, or one that just covers the opportunity cost of the owners’ capital. On the other hand, profit can be derived from what economists call “rent seeking”. That’s the dark side, but the unrecognized spirit of rent seeking seems to lurk within many discussions, as if the word profit was exclusively descriptive of evil. The “rent” in rent seeking derives from “economic rent”, which traditionally meant profit in excess of opportunity cost, or a “supra-normal” profit. But it’s impossible to know exactly how much of any given profit is extracted by rent seeking; a high profit in and of itself is not prima facie evidence of rent seeking, even though we might argue the social merits of a firm’s dominant market position.

Rent seeking takes many forms. Collusion between ostensible competitors is one, as is any predatory attempt to monopolize a market, but the term is most often associated with cronyism in government. For example, lobbying efforts might involve favors to individuals in hopes of swaying votes on regulatory matters or lucrative government contracts. Sometimes, a rent seeker wants lighter regulation. At others, a rent seeker might work the political system for more regulation in the knowledge that smaller competitors will be incapable of surviving the heavy compliance costs. Government administrators also have the authority to change fortunes with their rulings, and they are subject to the same temptations as elected officials. In fact, in the aggregate, administrative rule-making and even enforcement might outweigh prospective legislation as attractors of intense rent-seeking.

Rent seeking is big-time and it is small-time. It takes place at all levels of government, from attempts to influence zoning decisions, traffic patterns, contract awards, and even protection from law enforcement. When it’s big time, rent seeking is the very essence of what some call corporatism and more generally fascism: the enlistment of coercive government power for private gain. A pretty reliable rule is that where there’s government, there is rent-seeking behavior.

Otherwise, the profit motive serves a valuable and massive social function: resources are attracted to profitable uses because they signal the desires of potential buyers. In this way, profits assure that resources are drawn into the most-valued uses. The market interactions between new competitors, drawn by the prospect of profits, and willing buyers leads to a self-correction: supra-normal profits get competed away over time. In this way, the spontaneous actions of voluntary market participants lead to a great achievement: all mutually beneficial trades are exhausted. Profit makes this possible in the short-run and it assures that trades evolve optimally with changes in tastes, technology and resource availability. By comparison, government fares poorly when it attempts to plan outcomes in the short- or the long-run. Rent seeking is an attempt to influence and even encourage such planning, and the profits it enables impose costs on society.

Good and Bad Profits In Health Insurance

I’ve written a few posts about health insurance reform recently (see the left margin). Health care is scarce. If relying on government is the preferred alternative to private insurance, don’t count on better access to care: you won’t get it unless you’re connected. Profits earned by health insurance carriers are roundly condemned by the left. It is as if private capital utilized in arranging coverage and carrying the risk on pools of customers deserves zero compensation, that only public capital raised by coercive taxation is morally acceptable for this purpose. But aside from this obvious hogwash, is there a reason to question the insurers’ route to profitability based upon rent seeking?

The health insurers played a role in shaping the Affordable Care Act (ACA, i.e., Obamacare) and certainly had hoped to benefit from several of its provisions, even while sacrificing autonomy over product, price, coverage decisions, and payout ratios. The individual and employer mandates would force low-risk individuals to purchase extensive coverage, and essential benefits requirements would earn incremental margins. Sounds like a nice deal, but those policies were regarded by the ACA’s proponents as necessary for universal coverage, stabilizing risk, and promoting adequate coverage levels. There were other provisions, however, designed to safeguard the profitability of insurers. These included an industry risk adjustment mechanism, temporary reinsurance to help defray the cost of  covering high-risk patients, and so-called risk corridors (also temporary).

As it turned out, the ACA was not a great bet for insurers, as their risk pools deteriorated more than many expected. With the expiration of the temporary protections in Obamacare, it became evident that offering policies on the exchanges would not be profitable without large premium hikes. A number of carriers have stopped offering policies on the exchanges.

It should be no surprise that health insurance profitability has been anything but impressive over the past three years. The average industry return on equity was just 5.6% during that time frame, and it was a slightly better 6.2% in 2016, about 60% of the market-wide average. It’s difficult to conclude that insurers benefitted greatly from rent seeking activity with regard to the ACA’s passage, but perhaps that activity had a sufficient influence on policy to stabilize what otherwise might have been disastrous performance.

The critics of insurance profits are primarily interested in scapegoating as a means to promote a single-payer health care system. While some are aware of the favors granted to the industry in the design of the ACA, most are oblivious to the actual results. Even worse, they wish to throw-out the good with the bad.

The left is almost universally ignorant of the social function served by the profit motive. Profits stimulate supply, competition and innovation in virtually every area of economic life. To complain about profits in general is to wish for a primitive existence. Unfortunately, the potential for government to change the rules of the market makes it a ripe target for rent-seeking, and it creates a fog through which few discern the good from the bad.

Enduring A Dead-Weight Dominion

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government, Macroeconomics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anthony de Jasay, Automatic Stabilizers, Big government, Boom and Bust Cycle, central planning, Code of Federal Regulations, Double Taxation, Federal Reserve, Final Output, Government intervention, infrastructure, Intermediate Transactions, John Maynard Keynes, Keynesian Economics, Malinvestment, Mark Skousen, Mercatus Center, Shovel-Ready Projects, Spontaneous Order, Stabilization policy, Too big to fail, Underconsumption

government-intervention

If you hope for government to solve economic problems, try to maintain some perspective: the state has unique abilities to botch it, and its power to distort and degrade the economy in the process of “helping” is vast. Government spending at all levels copped about 18% of the U.S.  economy’s final output in 2014, but the public sector’s impact is far more pervasive than that suggests. Private fixed investment in new structures and equipment accounted for only about 16% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); the nonresidential portion of fixed investment was less than 13% of GDP. I highlight these two components of GDP because no one doubts the importance of capital investment as a determinant of the economy’s productive capacity. But government is a larger share of spending, it can divert saving away from investment, and it creates a host of other impediments to productivity and efficient resource allocation.

The private economy is remarkable in its capacity to satisfy human wants. The market is a manifestation of spontaneous order, lacking the conscious design of any supreme authority. It is able to adjust to dynamic shifts in desires and resource constraints; it provides reliable feedback in the form of changing prices to modulate and guide the responses of participants through all stages of production. Most forms of government activity, however, are not guided by these signals. Instead, the state imposes binding and sometimes immediate constraints on the decisions of market participants. The interference takes a number of forms, including price controls, but they all have the power to damage the performance and outcomes of markets.

The productive base at each stage of the market process is a consequence of the interplay of perceived business opportunities and acts of saving or deferred consumption. The available flow of saving depends on its rewards, which are heavily influenced by taxes and government intervention in financial markets. It’s worth noting here that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, as well as double taxation of corporate income paid out to owners. In addition, the tax system is used as a tool to manipulate the allocation of resources, drawing them into uses that are politically favored and punishing those in disfavor. The damaging impact is compounded by the fact that changes in taxes are often unknown ex ante. This adds a degree of political risk to any investment decision, thus discouraging capital spending and growth in the economy’s productive base.

The government is also a massive and growing regulator of economic activity. Over 100,000 new regulatory restrictions were added to the Code of Federal Regulations between 2008 and 2012. Regulation can have prohibitive compliance costs and may forbid certain efficiencies, often based on flimsy or nonexistent cost/benefit comparisons. It therefore damages the value and returns on embedded capital and discourages new investment. It is usually uneven in its effects across industries and it typically reduces the level of competition in markets because small firms are less capable of surviving the costs it imposes. Innovation is stifled and prices are higher as a result.

From a philosophical perspective, even the best cost/benefit comparisons are suspect as tools for evaluating government intervention. Don Boudreaux quotes Anthony de Jasay’s The State on this point:

“What could be more innocuous, more unexceptional than to refrain from intervening unless the cost-benefit comparison is favourable? Yet it treats the balancing of benefits and costs, good and bad consequences, as if the logical status of such balancing were a settled matter, as if it were technically perhaps demanding but philosophically straightforward. Costs and benefits, however, stretch into the future (problems of predictability) and benefits do not normally or exclusively accrue to the same persons who bear the costs (problems of externality). … Treating it as a pragmatic question of factual analysis, one of information and measurement, is tacitly taking the prior and much larger questions as having been somehow, somewhere resolved. Only they have not been.“

Poorly-executed and inappropriate stabilization policy is another way in which government distorts decisions at all stages of production. There are many reasons why these policies tend to be ineffective and potentially destructive, especially in the long run. Keynesian economics, based on ideas articulated by John Maynard Keynes, offers prescriptions for government action during times of instability. That means “expansionary” policy when the economy is weak and “contractionary” policy when it is strong.  At least that is the intent. This framework relies on the notion that components of aggregate demand determine the economy’s output, prices and employment.

The major components of GDP in the National Income and Product Accounts are consumer spending, private investment, government spending, and net foreign spending. In a Keynesian world, these are treated as four distinct parts of aggregate “demand”, and each is governed by particular kinds of assumed behavior. Supply effects are treated with little rigor, if at all, and earlier stages of production are considered only to the extent that their value added is included, and that the finished value of  investment (including new inventories) is one of the components of aggregate demand.

Final spending on goods and services (GDP) may be convenient because it corresponds to GDP, but that is simply an accounting identity. In fact, GDP represents less than 45% of all transactions. (See the end note below.) In other words, intermediate transactions for raw materials, business-to-business (B2B) exchange of services and goods in a partly fabricated state, and payments for distributional services are not counted, but they exceed GDP. They are also more variable than GDP over the course of the business cycle. Income is generated and value is added at each stage of production, not only in final transactions. To say that “value-added” is counted across all stages is a restatement of the accounting identity. It does not mean that those stages are treated behaviorally. Technology, capital, employees, and complex decision-making are required at each stage to meet demands in competitive markets. Aggregation at the final goods level glosses over all this detail.

The focus of the media and government policymakers in a weak economy is usually on “underconsumption”. The claim is often heard that consumer spending represents “over two-thirds of the economy”, but it is only about one-third of total transactions at all levels. It is therefore not as powerful an engine as many analysts assert. Government efforts to stimulate consumption are often thwarted by consumers themselves, who behave in ways that are difficult for models to capture accurately.

Government spending to combat weakness is another typical prescription, but such efforts are usually ill-timed and are difficult to reverse as the economy regains strength. The value of most government “output” is not tested in markets and it is not subject to competitive pressure, so as the government absorbs additional resources, the ability of the economy to grow is compromised. Programmatic ratcheting is always a risk when transfer payments are expanded. (Fixed programs that act as “automatic stabilizers”, and that are fiscally neutral over the business cycle, are less objectionable on these grounds, but only to the extent that they are not manipulated by politicians or subject to fraud.) Furthermore, any measure that adds to government deficits creates competition for the savings available for private capital investment. Thus, deficits can reduce the private economy’s productive capacity.

Government investment in infrastructure is a common refrain, but infrastructure spending should be tied to actual needs, not to the business cycle. Using public infrastructure spending for stabilization policy creates severe problems of timing. Few projects are ever “shovel-ready”, and rushing into them is a prescription for poor management, cost overruns and low quality.

Historically, economic instability has often been a consequence of poorly-timed monetary policy actions. Excessive money growth engineered by the Federal Reserve has stimulated excessive booms and inflation in the prices of goods and assets. These boom episodes were followed by market busts and recessions when the Fed attempted to course-correct by restraining money growth. Booms tend to foster misjudgments about risk that end in over-investment in certain assets. This is especially true when government encourages risk-taking via implicit “guarantees” (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and “too-big-to-fail” promises, or among individuals who can least afford it, such as low-income homebuyers.

Given a boom-and-bust cycle inflicted by monetary mismanagement, attempts to stimulate demand are usually the wrong prescription for a weak economy. Unemployed resources during recessions are a direct consequence of the earlier malinvestment. It is better to let asset prices and wages adjust to bring them into line with reality, while assisting those who must transition to new employment. The best prescription for instability is a neutral stance toward market risks combined with stable policy, not more badly-timed countercyclical efforts. The best prescription for economic growth is to shrink government’s absorption of resources, restoring their availability to those with incentives to use them optimally.

The more that central authorities attempt to guide the economy, the worse it gets. The torpid recovery from the last recession, despite great efforts at stimulus, demonstrates the futility of demand-side stabilization policy. The sluggishness of the current expansion also bears witness to the counterproductive nature of government activism. It’s a great credit to the private market that it is so resilient in the face of long-standing government economic and regulatory mismanagement. A bureaucracy employing a large cadre of technocrats is a “luxury” that only a productive, dynamic economy can afford. Or can it?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Note On Output Measures

More complete aggregations of economic activity than GDP are gross output (GO) and gross domestic expenditures (GDE). These were developed in detail by economist Mark Skousen in his book “The Structure of Production“, published in 1990. GO includes all final transactions plus business-to-business (B2B) transactions, while GDE adds the costs of wholesale and retail distribution to GO. Or as Skousen says in this paper:

“GDE is defined as the value of all transactions (sales) in the production of new goods and services, both finished and unfinished, at all stages of production inside a country during a calendar year.“

GO and GDE show the dominance of business transactions in economic activity. GDE is more than twice as large as GDP, and B2B transactions plus business investment are twice the size of consumer spending. According to Skousen, GDE varies with the business cycle much more than GDP. Many economic indicators focus on statistics at earlier stages of production, yet real final spending is often assumed to be the only measure of transactions that matters.

 

Ev’rybody’s Gone Serfin’, Serfdom USA

11 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government, Regulation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Big government, Bureaucratic tyranny, Discovery, Due Process, Environmental regulation, Financial regulation, Friedrich Hayek, John Cochrane, Magna Carta, Regulatory fixers, Regulatory State, The Road To Serfdom, University of Chicago

image

Any new or existing enterprise can be strangled with ease when regulatory coercion is brought to bear. Whole industries can be strangled. And the strangulation of freedoms is not limited to business concerns. Individuals are impacted as well by the loss of employment choices and opportunities, choices in the marketplace, and even more basic freedoms such as speech and assembly. In an excellent paper, “The Rule of Law in the Regulatory State“, John Cochrane of The University of Chicago highlights the negative consequences of growth in the scope and complexity of regulation. It looks like a working paper with a few items in need of editorial attention. Nevertheless, it contains several interesting ideas, some noteworthy examples of regulatory overreach, and useful dimensions along which to think about regulatory power and its application.

Cochrane’s first two paragraphs give an overview of the pernicious social effects of regulation gone wild, yet they only scratch the surface:

“The United States’ regulatory bureaucracy has vast power. Regulators can ruin your life, and your business, very quickly, and you have very little recourse. That this power is damaging the economy is a commonplace complaint. Less recognized, but perhaps even more important, the burgeoning regulatory state poses a new threat to our political freedom.

What banker dares to speak out against the Fed, or trader against the SEC? What hospital or health insurer dares to speak out against HHS or Obamacare? What business needing environmental approval for a project dares to speak out against the EPA? What drug company dares to challenge the FDA? Our problems are not just national. What real estate developer needing zoning approval dares to speak out against the local zoning board?“

The centerpiece of Cochrane’s paper is his elaboration on a list of bullet points, or dimensions for assessing a regulatory process. The list is given below in italics (without quote marks), and each bullet is followed by my own brief clarification:

  • Rule vs. Discretion? – Rules are better. How much latitude shall a regulator have?
  • Simple/precise or vague/complex? – Simple is better. Vague/complex ≈ discretion.
  • Knowable rules vs. ex-post prosecutions? – Surprise! You’re busted. Vague ≈ unknowable. 
  • Permission or rule book? – Don’t make me ask. Review my plans non-arbitrarily. 
  • Plain text or fixers? – Must I hire a specialist with agency connections?
  • Enforced commonly or arbitrarily? – Objective vs. motivated enforcement.
  • Right to discovery and challenge decisions. – Transparency of evidence & standards.
  • Right to appeal. – to courts, not the agency.
  • Insulation from political process. – Limit discretion and scope of powers.
  • Speed vs. delay. – six months or approve by default.
  • Consultation, consent of the governed. – Formal representation in rule-making.

Sorry if lists make you snooze, but I think it’s a good list, even if the bullets aren’t mutually exclusive. The items highlight the always-present choice between restraining government’s exercise of coercive power versus restraining and coercing the governed.

Cochrane then takes the reader on a “tour” of regulatory areas, including several aspects of financial regulation, health care, foods & drugs, the environment, the internet, campaign finance, national security, immigration and education. These sections are brief, but in each of these areas, Cochrane highlights negative consequences of regulation that illustrate government failure based on the dimensions given in his list of bullets. Here’s an anecdote from his section on environmental regulation:

“Already, anyone opposed to a project for other reasons — like, it will block my view — can use environmental review to stop it. Delay is as good as denial in any commercial project.

The small story of Al Armendariz, head of EPA region 6 who proposed ‘crucifying’ some oil companies as an example to the others is instructive. He was caught on tape saying:

‘The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

…we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly.’

According to the story, Armendariz shut down Range Resources, one of the first fracking companies. Range fought back and eventually a Federal Judge found in its favor. But an agency that operates by “crucifying” a few exemplars, explicitly to impose compliance costs, is ripe to choose just which exemplars will be crucified on political bases.“

Cochrane closes by describing his vision of a “Magna Carta for the regulatory state” in order to protect “citizens from arbitrary power“:

“It is time for a Magna Carta for the regulatory state. Regulations need to be made in a way that obeys my earlier bullet list. People need the rights to challenge regulators — to see the evidence against them, to challenge decisions, to appeal decisions. Yes, this means in court. Everyone hates lawyers, except when they need one.

People need a right to speedy decision. A “habeas corpus” for regulation would work — if any decision has not been rendered in 6 months, it is automatically in your favor.“

Accomplishing great things is difficult, both in the physical world and in creating value in any form for which other free individuals will trade. By comparison, failure is easy, and so are regulatory decisions that precipitate failure. So often, so easily, so arbitrarily, and with little accountability, those decisions destroy freedom, value and our ability to improve human welfare.

Well-Intentioned Souls For Sale

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Nuetzel in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ayn Rand Institute, Big government, incentives, Inequality, John Cochrane, Police Power, Political contributions, Redistribution, rent seeking, statism, Steve Simpson, Thomas Piketty, Wall Street Journal

Paint_the_town_red_1885

Most would agree that power corrupts. Some believe that greater wealth begets power, yet they cling to a naive hope that larger government can protect against “evil” private accretion. These well-intentioned souls forget that those holding power in government will not always have preferences that match their own. More importantly, they fail to account for the real-world implications of concentrating power in the public sector, conveniently forgetting that “control” itself is a problematic solution to the perceived “problem” of private power. They would grant ever more controlling authority to an entity possessing the police power, managed by politicians, employees and technocrats with their own incentives for accretion. Public administrative power is often exercised by rule-making, asserting more control over private affairs. It usually results in the granting of favors and favorable treatment, compensable in various ways, to certain private parties. Big government begets big rent seeking and the subjugation of market discipline in favor of privilege. It’s a devil’s playground.

The confusion of the statists, if I can be so charitable, now extends to the desire for control over the related issues of wealth inequality and political contributions. John Cochrane, an economist from the University of Chicago, has an interesting piece on these topics on wsj.com entitled “What the Inequality Warriors Really Want” (if this is gated, try googling the author and title). He points out some of the obvious hypocrisies of those calling for more government control, including limits on political spending:

“… the inequality warriors want the government to confiscate wealth and control incomes so that wealthy individuals cannot influence politics in directions they don’t like. Koch brothers, no. Public-employee unions, yes. This goal, at least, makes perfect logical sense. And it is truly scary.”

The presumption that redistribution of income and wealth can be achieved at low cost ignores the terrible incentives that such policies create for both the nominal losers and winners. In the real world, redistribution is not zero-sum; it is negative sum with compounding. Steve Simpson of the Ayn Rand Institute has some further thoughts on Cochrane’s piece as well as the work of Thomas Piketty, the new intellectual light of the redistributive statists.

Follow Sacred Cow Chips on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Oh To Squeeze Fiscal Discipline From a Debt Limit Turnip
  • Conformity and Suppression: How Science Is Not “Done”
  • Grow Or Collapse: Stasis Is Not a Long-Term Option
  • Cassandras Feel An Urgent Need To Crush Your Lifestyle
  • Containing An Online Viper Pit of Antisemites

Archives

  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014

Blogs I Follow

  • Ominous The Spirit
  • Passive Income Kickstart
  • onlyfinance.net/
  • TLC Cholesterol
  • Nintil
  • kendunning.net
  • DCWhispers.com
  • Hoong-Wai in the UK
  • Marginal REVOLUTION
  • Stlouis
  • Watts Up With That?
  • Aussie Nationalist Blog
  • American Elephants
  • The View from Alexandria
  • The Gymnasium
  • A Force for Good
  • Notes On Liberty
  • troymo
  • SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers
  • Miss Lou Acquiring Lore
  • Your Well Wisher Program
  • Objectivism In Depth
  • RobotEnomics
  • Orderstatistic
  • Paradigm Library

Blog at WordPress.com.

Ominous The Spirit

Ominous The Spirit is an artist that makes music, paints, and creates photography. He donates 100% of profits to charity.

Passive Income Kickstart

onlyfinance.net/

TLC Cholesterol

Nintil

To estimate, compare, distinguish, discuss, and trace to its principal sources everything

kendunning.net

The future is ours to create.

DCWhispers.com

Hoong-Wai in the UK

A Commonwealth immigrant's perspective on the UK's public arena.

Marginal REVOLUTION

Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

Stlouis

Watts Up With That?

The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

Aussie Nationalist Blog

Commentary from a Paleoconservative and Nationalist perspective

American Elephants

Defending Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

The View from Alexandria

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads---in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. -- Jacques Barzun

The Gymnasium

A place for reason, politics, economics, and faith steeped in the classical liberal tradition

A Force for Good

How economics, morality, and markets combine

Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

troymo

SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers

Escaping the everyday life with photographs from my travels

Miss Lou Acquiring Lore

Gallery of Life...

Your Well Wisher Program

Attempt to solve commonly known problems…

Objectivism In Depth

Exploring Ayn Rand's revolutionary philosophy.

RobotEnomics

(A)n (I)ntelligent Future

Orderstatistic

Economics, chess and anything else on my mind.

Paradigm Library

OODA Looping

  • Follow Following
    • Sacred Cow Chips
    • Join 121 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Sacred Cow Chips
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...