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What’s To Like About Income Inequality?

22 Saturday May 2021

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Capital Gains, David Splinter, Emmanuel Saez, Fiscal Income, Founders, Gerald Auten, Hoover Institution, Income Redistribution, Inequality, Inheritance, Joel Kotkin, John Cochrane, Joint Committee on Taxation, Omitted Income, Paul Graham, Progressive Taxes, Thomas Piketty, Transfer Oayments

What’s to like about inequality?

That depends on how it happened and on the conditions governing its future evolution. Inequality is a fact of life, and no social or economic system known to man can avoid or eliminate it. It’s “bad” in the sense that “not everybody gets a prize,” but inequality in a free market economic system arises out of the same positive dynamic that fosters achievement in any kind of competition. Even the logic underlying the view that inequality is “bad” is not consistent: we can be more equal if the rich all lose $1,000,000 and the poor all lose $1,000, but that won’t make anyone happy.

Unequal Rewards Are Natural

Many activities contribute to general prosperity and create unequal rewards as a by-product. A capitalist system rewards knowledge, effort, creativity, and risk-taking. Those who are very good at creating value earn commensurate rewards, and in turn, they often create rewarding opportunities for others who might participate in their enterprises. A system of just incentives and rewards also requires that property rights be secure, and that implies that wealth can be accumulated more readily by those earning the greatest rewards.

Equality can be decreed only by severely restricting the rewards to productive effort, and that requires a massive imbalance of power. The state, and those who direct its actions, always have a monopoly on legal coercion. In practice, the power to commandeer value created by others means that economic benefits will waft under the noses of apparatchiks. The raw power and economic benefits usurped under such an authoritarian regime cannot be competed away, and efficiency and value are seldom prioritized by state monopolists. The egalitarian pretense thus masks its own form of extreme inequality and decline. Inequality is unavoidable in a very real sense.

Measuring Trends in Inequality

Beyond those basic truths, the facts do not support the conventional wisdom that inequality has grown more extreme. A research paper by Gerald Auten and David Splinter corrects many of the shortcomings of commonly-cited sources on income inequality. Auten works for the U.S. Treasury, and Splinter is employed by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. They find that higher transfer payments and growing tax progressivity since the early 1960s kept the top after-tax income share stable.

John Cochrane shares the details of a recent presentation made by Auten and Splinter (AS) at the Hoover Institution. A few interesting charts follow:

The blue “Piketty-Saez” (PS) line at the top uses an income measure from well-known research by Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez that contributed to the narrative of growing income inequality. The PS line is based on tax return information (fiscal income), but it embeds several distortions.

Realized capital gains are counted there, which misrepresents income shares because the realization of gains does not mark the point at which the true gains occur. Typically, the wealth exists before and after the gains are realized. Realized gains are often a function of changes in tax law and investor reaction to those changes. Moreover, neither realized nor unrealized gains represent income earned in production; instead, they capture changes in asset prices.

Income earned in production is about a third more than the income measure used by PS, even with the capital gains distortion. This omitted income and its allocation across earners is the subject of detailed analysis by AS. Their analysis is consistent in its focus on individual taxpayers, rather than households, which eliminates another upward bias in the PS line created by a secular decline in marriage rates. Then, AS consider the reallocation of income shares due to taxes and transfer payments. After all that, the income share of the top 1% shifts all the way down to the red line in the chart. The most recent observations put the share about where it was in the 1960s. 

The next chart shows income shares for broader segments: the top, middle, and lowest 20% of the income distribution. Taxes and transfers cause massive changes in the calculated shares and their trends over time. Again, these shares remain about where they were in the 1960s, contradicting the popular narrative that high earners are gobbling up ever larger pieces of the pie.

If income shares have remained about the same since the 1960s, that means high and low earners have made roughly equivalent income gains over that time. The next chart demonstrates that the bottom half of the income distribution has indeed seen significant growth in real incomes, despite the false impression created by PS and the common misperception of stagnant income growth among the working class. 

More Distributional Tidbits 

In a sense, all this is misleading because there is so much migration across the income distribution over time. Traditional calculations of income shares are “cross-sectional”, meaning they compare the same slices of the distribution at different points in time. But people near the low end in 1990 are not the same people near the bottom today. The same is true of those near the top and those in the middle. Income grows over time, and those lower in the distribution typically migrate upward as they age and acquire skills and work experience. Upward migration in income share is the general tendency, but there is some downward migration as well. Abandoning the cross-sectional view causes the typical story-line of rising income inequality to unravel.

There are many other interesting facts (and some great charts) in the AS paper and in Cochran’s post. One in particular shows that the average federal tax rate paid by the top 1% trended upward from the 1960s through the mid-1990s before flattening and trending slightly downward. This contradicts the assertion that high earners paid much higher taxes before the 1960s than today. In fact, the tax base broadened over that time, more than compensating for declines in marginal tax rates. 

Given the fact that more exacting measures of inequality haven’t changed much over the years, does that imply that redistributional policies have worked to keep the income distribution from worsening? That seems plausible on its face. If anything, taxes on high earners have increased, as have transfers to low earners and non-earners. Those changes appear to have offset other factors that would have led to greater inequality. However, the framing of the question is inappropriate. Maintaining a given income distribution is not a good thing if it inhibits economic growth. In fact, faster growth in production and greater well-being might well have led to a more unequal distribution of income. In other words, the whole question of offsetting inequality via redistribution is something of a chimera in the absence of a reliable counter-factual.

Wealth

Cochrane has a related post on the sources of wealth in America. Increasingly over the past few decades, wealth has been accumulated by self-made entrepreneurs, rather than through inheritance. That might come as a surprise to many on the left, to the extent that they care. Cochrane quotes Paul Graham on this point:

“In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.

Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.

How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders’ or early employees’ equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.”

The picture that emerges is one of great opportunity and dynamism. While the accumulation of massive fortunes might enrage the Left, these are the kinds of outcomes we should hope for, especially because the success of these new titans of industry is inextricably linked to tremendous value captured by their customers and lucrative opportunities for their employees. 

Here’s the best part of Cochrane’s post:

“We should not think about more or less inequality, we should think about the right amount of inequality, or productive vs. rent-seeking sources of inequality. Or, better, whether inequality is a symptom of health or sickness in the economy. Take Paul’s picture of the US economy at face value. What’s a better economy and society? One in which a few oligopolies … , deeply involved with government, run everything — think GM, Ford, IBM, AT&T, defense contractors — and it’s hard to start new innovative fast growing companies? Or the world in which the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world can start new companies, deliver fabulous products and get insanely rich in the process? “

No doubt about it! However, today’s tremendously successful tech entrepreneurs also give us something to worry about. They have become oligarchs capable of suppressing competitive forces through sheer market power, influence, and even control over politicians and regulators. As I said at the top, whether inequality is benign depends upon the conditions governing its evolution. And today, we see the ominous development of a corporate-state tyranny, as decried by Joel Kotkin in this excellent post. Many of the daring tech entrepreneurs who benefitted from advantages endowed by our capitalist system have become autocrats who seek to plan our future with their own ideologies and self-interest in mind.

Conclusion

For too long we’ve heard the Left bemoan an increasingly “unfair” distribution of income. This includes propaganda intended to distort poverty levels in the U.S. The fine points of measuring shifts in the income distribution show that narrative to be false. Moreover, attempting to equalize the distribution of income, or even preventing changes that might occur as a natural consequence of innovation and growth, is not a valid policy objective if our goal is to maximize economic well-being.

The worst thing about inequality is that the poorest individuals are likely to be destitute and with no ability or means of supporting themselves. There is certainly such an underclass in the U.S., and our social safety net helps keep the poorest and least capable individuals above the poverty line after transfer payments. But too often our efforts to provide support interfere with incentives for those who are capable of productive work, which is both demeaning for them and a drain on everyone else. The best prescription for improving the well-being of all is economic growth, regardless of its impact on the distribution of income or wealth.

Progs Give New Meaning To “Tax Distortions”

16 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Taxes

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Andrew Wilford, Bernie Sanders, CATO Institute, Chris Edwards, Christine Elba, Kamala Harris, Matthew Yglesias, National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Progressive Taxes, Tax Distortions, Tax Policy Center, Tax Refunds

Tax day has come and gone, but I’m struck by 1) the incredible misconceptions people express about the change in their tax liabilities caused by the 2018 income tax legislation; and 2) the confusion about how our progressive income tax system actually works! Some of these misapprehensions are encouraged by progressives who would rather misinform the public than evaluate policy on its own terms. I am not a fan of our income tax system, nor all aspects of the 2018 tax law, but let’s at least discuss it honestly.

First, a substantial majority of taxpayers paid lower taxes on their 2018 income than they would have under prior tax rules (also see here). However, as I’ve observed before, many people conflate the change in the amount of their tax refund with the change in their taxes paid. And again, the progressive media hasn’t helped to allay this misconception, as noted by Vox cofounder Matthew Yglesias when he tweeted this:

“Nobody likes to give themselves credit for this kind of messaging success, but progressive groups did a really good job of convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.”

Even worse, members of Congress misrepresent the facts with little media backlash. For example, Andrew Wilford of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reports the following:

“… the tax cut actually made the tax code more progressive, not less.  … Of course, none of this stopped Democrats such as Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) from claiming that the TCJA was a “middle-class tax hike.” Nor did it prevent three separate Democratic senators from claiming that the average family making up to $86,000 would see a tax hike of $794, despite the fact that the source for this claim clarified that this tax hike would apply to only 6.5 percent of households in this income bracket.”

It’s amazing just how drastically our income tax system is misunderstood or often misrepresented by the media. Apparently, it’s considered politically advantageous to do so. Chris Edwards offers the following quote from Christine Elba in the Washington Post:

“Meanwhile, the wealthier among us (remember: corporations are people, too!) are able to hire tax lawyers, consultants and accountants to clue them in on lightly advertised but heavily lobbied for loopholes that allow them to pay a lower tax rate or even no taxes at all.”

That is simply not a fair characterization of our income tax system. Edwards goes on to demonstrate the progressive nature of U.S. income taxes based on information from the Tax Policy Center. Not only do statutory federal income tax rates rise with income, but so do average effective tax rates, which account for the effects of deductions, credits and exclusions. In fact, average effective rates are negative in the lowest income groups and are zero on balance for the lowest 50% of earners. And average effective rates keep rising in the top quintile, moving up through the top 10%, 5%, 1% and 0.1%. Ms. Elba is clearly confused. And if she is aware of the pernicious double-taxation of corporate income, she probably would never admit it.

Apparently the current state of income tax progressivity is not enough to satisfy statists and redistributionists, who take license to lie about it in order to make their case for higher taxes on the rich, and even the not-so-rich. But here’s some advice for Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and others who insist that, while they are rich, they desperately want to pay more taxes: you are free to do so without penalty. Better yet, give it to a good charity instead!

Pawning Growth For Redistribution

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Equality, Redistribution

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Alan D. Viard, American Enterprise Institute, Angela Ranchidi, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea German, Dan Mitchell, Double Taxation, Economic Mobility, Fallacy of Redistribution, First Theorem of Government, Gallup, Household structure, Income Growth, John Cochrane, Minimum Wage, Poverty, Progressive Taxes, Redistribution, Third Way, Thomas Sowell, Welfare State

govt here to help

The following is no mystery: if you want prosperity, steer clear of policies that inhibit production and physical investment. This too: if you want to lift people out of poverty and dependency, don’t promote policies that discourage hiring and work incentives. Yet those are exactly the implications of policies repeatedly advocated by so-called redistributionists. The ignorance flows, in large part, from a distraction, a mere byproduct of economic life that has no direct relation to economic welfare, but upon which followers of Bernie Sanders are absolutely transfixed: income and wealth inequality. Attempts to manipulate the degree of inequality via steeply progressive taxes, transfers and market intervention is a suckers game of short-termism. It ultimately reduces the value of the economy’s capital stock, chases away productive activity, destroys jobs, and leaves us all poorer.

Absolute income growth is a better goal, and encouraging production is the best way to raise incomes in the long-run. Unless envy is your thing, income inequality is largely irrelevant as a policy goal. In “Why and How We Care About Inequality“, John Cochrane emphasizes that inequality may be a symptom of other problems, or perhaps no problem at all. His point is that treating a symptom won’t fix the underlying problem:

“A segment of America is stuck in widespread single motherhood … terrible early-child experiences, awful education, substance abuse, and criminality. 70% of male black high school dropouts will end up in prison, hence essentially unemployable and poor marriage prospects. Less than half are even looking for legal work.

This is a social and economic disaster. And it has nothing to do with whether hedge fund managers fly private or commercial. It is immune to floods of Government cash, and, as Casey Mulligan reminded us, Government programs are arguably as much of the problem as the solution. So are drug laws….“

The writers of the center-left Third Way blog give some details on income growth that might disappoint some progressives. They agree that the emphasis on redistribution is misplaced. Solving economic problems requires a different approach:

“From 1980 to 2010, income gains (after taxes and government transfers are included) favored the wealthy but were still spread across all income brackets: a 53% increase for the bottom quintile; a 41% increase for the next two; a 49% increase for the 4th; and a 90% increase for the richest fifth. Thus, while income inequality may offend our sense of justice, its actual impact on the middle class may be small.

With a singular focus on income inequality, the left’s main solutions are greater re-distribution and a re-writing of the rules to ‘un-rig’ the system. But, however well motivated, some of the biggest ideas into which they are directing their energy do not remotely address the underlying ‘Kodak’ conundrum—how do Americans find their place in a rapidly changing world? In fact, some would actually make the task of increasing shared prosperity significantly harder.“

The hubbub over inequality and redistribution is fueled by misconceptions. One is that the rich face low tax burdens, often lower than the middle class, a mistaken notion that Alan D. Viard debunks using 2013 data from a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO report accounts for double taxation of dividends and capital gains at the corporate level and at the personal level (though capital gains are taxed to individuals now, while the anticipated corporate income is taxed later). The CBO study also accounts for employers’ share of payroll taxes (because it reduces labor income) so as to avoid exaggerating the tax system’s progressivity. Before accounting for federal benefits, which offset the tax burden, the middle 20% of income earners paid an average tax rate of less than 15%, while “the 1%” paid more than 29%. However, after correcting for federal benefits, the middle quintile paid a negative average tax rate, while the top 1% still paid almost 29%. That is a steeply graduated impact.

Rising income inequality in the U.S. is more a matter of changes in household structure than in the distribution of rewards. This conclusion is based on the fact that income inequality has risen steadily over the past 50 years for households, but there has been no change in inequality across individuals. An increasing number of single-person households, primarily women over the age of 65, accounts for rising inequality at the household level. The greedy corporate CEOs of the “occupier” imagination are really not to blame for this trend, though I won’t defend corporate rent-seeking activities intended to insulate themselves from competition.

Measures of income inequality hide another important fact: one’s position in the income distribution is not static. Chelsea German notes that Americans have a high degree of economic mobility. According to a Cornell study, only 6% of individuals in the top 1% in a given year remain there in the following year. German adds that over half of income earners in the U.S. find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year of their working lives.

There are several reasons why redistributionist policies fail to meet objectives and instead reduce opportunities for the presumed beneficiaries to prosper. Dan Mitchell covers several of these issues, citing work on: the rational response of upper-income taxpayers to  punitive taxes; the insufficiency of funding an expanded welfare state by merely taxing “the rich”; the diversion of most anti-poverty funds to service providers (rather than directly to the poor); the meager valuation of benefits from recipients of Medicaid, and the fact that the program lacks any favorable impact on mortality and health measures. Mitchell features the “First Theorem of Government” in a sidebar:

“Above all else, the public sector is a racket for the enrichment of insiders, cronies, bureaucrats and interest groups.“

A few years back, the great Thomas Sowell explained “The Fallacy of Redistribution” thusly:

“You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.“

That future wealth can and should be enjoyed across the income spectrum, but punitive taxes destroy productive capital and jobs.

A great truth about poverty comes from Angela Ranchidi of the American Enterprise Institute: low wages are not at the root of poverty; it’s a lack of jobs. She quotes a Gallup report on this point, relative to the working-age poor in 2014:

“Census data show that, 61.7% did not work at all and another 26.6% worked less than full-time for the entire year. Only 11.7% of poor working-age adults worked full-time for the entire year in 2014. Low wages are not the primary cause of poverty; low work rates are. And if Gallup is correct, the full-time work rate may already be peaking.“

More than 88.3% of the working-age poor were either unemployed or underemployed! And here’s the kicker: redistributionists clamor for policies that would place an even higher floor on wage rates, yet the floor already in place has succeeded in compromising the ability of low-skilled workers to find full-time work.

Cochrane sums up the inequality debate by noting the obvious political motives of progressive redistributionists:

“Finally, why is “inequality” so strongly on the political agenda right now? Here I am not referring to academics. … All of economics has been studying various poverty traps for a generation…. 

[The] answer seems pretty clear. Because [the politicians and pundits] don’t want to talk about Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, bailouts, debt, the stimulus, the rotten cronyism of energy policy, denial of education to poor and minorities, the abject failure of their policies to help poor and middle class people, and especially sclerotic growth. Restarting a centuries-old fight about “inequality” and “tax the rich,” class envy resurrected from a Huey Long speech in the 1930s, is like throwing a puppy into a third grade math class that isn’t going well. You know you will make it to the bell.

That observation, together with the obvious incoherence of ideas the political inequality writers bring us leads me to a happy thought that this too will pass, and once a new set of talking points emerges we can go on to something else.“

Negative Net Taxes For Most Is Not A Good Sign

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Carpe Diem, CBO, Corporate tax, Cronyism, Inequality, Mark Perry, OECD, Progressive Taxes, rent seeking, Senate Budget Committee

IRS Spider

Carpe Diem (Mark Perry) reports on a new CBO study showing that nearly all net federal taxes (taxes net of transfer payments received) are paid by households in the highest income quintile. The fourth quintile pays a small, positive amount of net taxes, but the lowest 60% of  households pay negative net taxes, with average tax rates on market income plus transfers ranging from -13.7% for the middle income quintile to -35% for the lowest quintile. From Perry:

“The second-highest income quintile basically just barely covers its transfer payments, so it’s really the top 20% of “net payer” households that are financing transfer payments to the entire bottom 60% AND financing the non-financed operations of the entire federal government.”

A heavy concentration of taxes at one end of the income distribution is not a healthy development for a democracy when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

In a second post, Perry uses the same study to show that adjusting market income for net taxes reduces income inequality by almost 50%. Advocates for greater income equality always focus on market income alone because it tends to show a more dramatic gap between rich and poor. This distortion understates the extent to which policies already in place reduce income inequality and amplifies the unabating contention that more must be done. In addition, standard measures of income inequality tend to distort trends, as SCC has noted in the past.

At the same time, OECD data reveal that the U.S. has the most progressive tax system in the industrialized world. The author of the OECD post cited the data in testifying before the Senate Budget Committee:

“This prompted one Senator to point out that if the richest 10% of taxpayers earn the most of any OECD country, shouldn’t it make sense that they bear the largest tax burden of any country?”

The Senator’s premise was false, as there are countries with higher or similar income shares earned by the top decile, but the tax burden on that decile in the U.S. is the highest. In addition, the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, a point on which SCC has posted before.

The ongoing debate over inequality is counterproductive. Calls for higher taxes will certainly do nothing to encourage economic growth and job creation. Quite the opposite. And inequality, in principle, is not in any way synonymous with decreasing standards of living. However, I certainly agree that inequality can be harmful when it is induced by rent-seeking activity and cronyism, which become a way of life with growth in the public sector.

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