Tag Archives: regulation

Government Action and the “Your Worst Enemy” Test

03 Saturday Dec 2022

Posted by in Big Government, Censorship

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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.

Homeownership, Pensions, and the Wealth Distribution

13 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in Markets, Wealth Distribution

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My theme in “What’s To Like About Income Inequality?” was the existence of natural drivers of an unequal distribution of income, as where institutions reward merit and legal systems assign strong property rights. I also discussed trends in income and wealth inequality and how standard measures of inequality are distorted by income taxes and transfer payments, including differences in unrealized and realized capital gains. Furthermore, income mobility makes “snapshots” of inequality less compelling, as individuals are not “stuck” for all time at a point in the income distribution, but are typically moving across the distribution and usually upward as they age through their working years.

Wealth inequality is another matter, but a new paper by Daniel Waldenström entitled “Wealth and History: An Update” shows that wealth concentration, which he defines as the share of wealth held by the top 1%, declined markedly between 1920 and 1970 in Europe and the U.S. After 1970, however, the share remained flat in Europe and was flat in the U.S. as well if unfunded pensions and Social Security benefits are valued as wealth. However, the near-entirety of the earlier decline in U.S. wealth concentration occurred by about 1950.

So a great thinning in the fat right tail of the wealth distribution occurred during the middle years of the 20th century. Waldenström attributes this transition to growth of homeownership and pension assets. These are so-called “popular assets” because they are held more broadly than the legacy wealth of the 1800s and early twentieth century:

“… the structure of private wealth has changed over the twentieth century, from being dominated by elite fortunes in agriculture or businesses to consisting mainly of widely dispersed assets in housing and funded pensions.”

Waldenström concludes that the facts run contrary to claims that wealth inequality has worsened in Western, capitalist economies over the years:

“These new findings have implications for the historiography of Western wealth accumulation and wealth concentration. They cast doubt over the view that an unfettered capitalism, such as in pre-democratic and pre-taxation nineteenth-century Europe, generates extreme levels of capital accumulation. The new findings also question the pivotal role of wars, crises and progressive taxation as the sole important factors behind the wealth equalization of the twentieth century.

Waldenström considers the role of progressive taxation in equalizing wealth, but he acknowledges that taxes undermined wealth accumulation at all levels, so the effect was ambiguous. A point on which I’d take issue with Waldenström is the role of regulation, which he believes “curbed the growth of large fortunes”. That might be true in some cases, but this effect is also subject to ambiguity. Regulation is often welcomed by powerful market players as a way of consolidating market position and hindering new competition. The regulatory state has long been considered a primary channel for rent seeking, so the impact on the wealth distribution is likely to be mixed.

Market institutions, together with rising education levels, labor reforms, and gains in productivity enabled this broadening in the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Social Security certainly played a part as well, though we don’t know how private pensions might have evolved in its absence. Of course, Social Security has a terrible record as an “investment” of payroll taxes. Private control over the investment direction of those funds would have done far better, and still could, which would be a further boon to wealth for the lower 99%.

It is true that inequality in both income and wealth is to be expected under merit-based systems of rewards. However, Daniel Waldenström’s paper offers evidence that markets do not merely concentrate wealth at the expense of workers. Rather, they deliver gains to all participants, who are in turn free to accumulate wealth in the kinds of “popular assets” discussed by Waldenström.

Markets and Mobility

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Markets, Poverty

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Government aid programs tend to perform poorly, especially in developmental terms. In the U.S., anti-poverty programs keep the poor running in place, at best. Yes, they provide minimal income, but they seldom offer a way out and usually discourage it. Moreover, the administration of such programs diverts a significant share of funds to well-heeled civil servants and away from the intended recipients. Foreign aid programs are probably even worse, functioning as catch basins for funding corrupt officials. Progressives, in particular, persist in taking the paternalistic view that we must rely on government action to “care for” and “protect” the poor, able or not. Markets, on the other hand, are held to offer no promise in fighting poverty. In fact, the general assumption made by the progressive left is that markets exploit them.

The truth is that markets offer great promise for encouraging economic mobility. Arnold Kling offers a good conceptual construct in a recent post: while humans are often subject to irrational tendencies in their assessment of choices, their interactions in markets offer a way of smoothing irregularities and disparate bits of information, providing useful signals about the availability of resources and demands for their use. The result is a flow of information that best signals opportunity. Kling calls the process of market interactions the “collective mind”. Rather than encouraging individuals to fully participate in effective markets, free of intervention, we instead deny them the best opportunities for gain. The notion that the poor must be “protected” from markets is embedded in policies like wage and price controls, benefit mandates, overtime rules, drug laws, occupational licensing, and innumerable other harmful regulations. The poor should have the unfettered ability to avail themselves of the social efficiencies of Kling’s collective mind.

Last Thursday, Don Beaudroux’s “Quotation of the Day” was taken from an essay by Ludwig von Mises in which he characterized private property in a market economy as “property by consumer consensus”. In other words, consumers reward sellers who create value, and those rewards accumulate in the form of private property. Likewise, consumers punish poor performance, which has a cumulative negative impact on one’s ability to accumulate or hold onto private property. The benefits conferred by consumer preference do not stop with the owners of the firm. Others productively affiliated with the firm also reap gains in rewards, allowing them to accumulate private property. And of course, consumers are the beneficiaries in the first place: in their judgement the firm delivers value in excess of price. The key here is that free market rewards and penalties are deserved and based on productivity in meeting desires, and only the market can distribute property so efficiently. The able poor can certainly add value and thereby accumulate property, if only given the opportunity.

Jeffrey Tucker has stated that “Only Markets Can Win the War on Poverty” (ellipses are my edits):

“The default state of the world is grueling poverty, universal insecurity, and short lives. When governments do come along, they nearly always serve themselves first. … Capitalism made huge progress toward the conquest of poverty. For the first time in history, the productive resources of society turned from serving mainly the elites toward serving the common person. This change alone began to flip the power narrative of social evolution.

And this revolution continued for two some two-hundred years, during which time the average life span expanded dramatically, infant mortality collapsed, incomes rose, and the great project of universal ennoblement achieved an unprecedented boost. And this trend continues today wherever markets are given freedom to function, property rights are secure, and people can associate and trade without molestation by the elites. … In short, capitalism made huge progress toward the conquest of poverty.“

Markets are not harmful to the poor. To the contrary, as Tucker says, they have helped lift billions out of poverty around the globe. But government increasingly plays the role of big provider and arbiter of what can and can’t be traded, by whom, and at what price. The suspension of the market mechanism by this process denies the poor the opportunities made possible via participation in free markets, whereby Kling’s “collective mind” processes massive quantities of information and acts upon it spontaneously. But the “collective mind” concept, as a description of market interactions, is too simple: we know that individuals act on the signals provided by the market and are rewarded based on how effectively they do so. There is no doubt that the poor can do that too. It’s time to cast aside the paternalistic and destructive notion that the able poor must be insulated from markets.

Central Banks Stumble Into Negative Rates, Damn the Savers

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Central Planning, Monetary Policy

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Dollar Cartoon

Should government actively manipulate asset prices in an effort to “manage ” economic growth? The world’s central bankers, otherwise at their wit’s end, are attempting just that. Hopes have been pinned on so-called quantitative easing (QE), which simply means that central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) buy assets (government and private bonds) from the public to inject newly “printed” money into the economy. The Fed purchased $4.5 trillion of assets between the last financial crisis and late 2014, when it ended its QE. Other central banks are actively engaged in QE, however, and there are still calls from some quarters for the Fed to resume QE, despite modest but positive economic growth. The goals of QE are to drive asset prices up and interest rates down, ultimately stimulating demand for goods and economic growth. Short-term rates have been near zero in many countries (and in the U.S. until December), and negative short-term interest rates are a reality in the European Union, Japan and Sweden.

Does anyone really have to pay money to lend money, as indicated by a negative interest rate? Yes, if a bank “lends” to the Bank of Japan, for example, by holding reserves there. The BOJ is currently charging banks for the privilege. But does anyone really “earn” negative returns on short-term government or private debt? Not unless you buy a short-term bill and hold it till maturity. Central banks are buying those bills at a premium, usually from member banks, in order to execute QE, and that offsets a negative rate. But the notion is that when these “captive” member banks are penalized for holding reserves, they will be more eager to lend to private borrowers. That may be, but only if there are willing, credit-worthy borrowers; unfortunately, those are scarce.

Thus far, QE and zero or negative rates do not seem to be working effectively, and there are several reasons. First, QE has taken place against a backdrop of increasingly binding regulatory constraints. A private economy simply cannot flourish under such strictures, with or without QE. Moreover, government makes a habit of manipulating investment decisions, partly through regulatory mandates, but also by subsidizing politically-favored activities such as ethanol, wind energy, post-secondary education, and owner-occupied housing. This necessarily comes at the sacrifice of opportunities for physical investment that are superior on economic merits.

The most self-defeating consequence of QE and rate manipulation, be that zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) or negative interest rate policy (NIRP), is the distortion of inter-temporal tradeoffs that guide decisions to save and invest in productive assets. How, and how much, should individuals save when returns on relatively safe assets are very low? Most analysts would conclude that very low rates prompt a strong substitution effect toward consuming more today and less in the future. However, the situation may well engender a strong “income effect”, meaning that more must be saved (and less consumed in the present) in order to provide sufficient resources in the future. The paradox shouldn’t be lost on central bankers, and it may undermine the stimulative effects of ZIRP or NIRP. It might also lead to confusion in the allocation of productive capital, as low rates could create a mirage of viability for unworthy projects. Central bank intervention of this sort is disruptive to the healthy transformation of resources across time.

Savers might hoard cash to avoid a negative return, which would further undermine the efficacy of QE in creating monetary stimulus. This is at the root of central bank efforts to discourage the holding of currency outside of the banking system: the “war on cash“. (Also see here.) This policy is extremely offensive to anyone with a concern for protecting the privacy of individuals from government prying.

Another possible response for savers is to “reach for yield”, allocating more of their funds to high-risk assets than they would ordinarily prefer (e.g., growth funds, junk bonds, various “alternative” investments). So the supply of saving available for adding to the productive base in various sectors is twisted by central bank manipulation of interest rates. The availability of capital may be constrained for relatively safe sectors but available at a relative discount to risky sectors. This leads to classic malinvestment and ultimately business failures, displaced workers, and harsh adjustment costs.

With any luck, the Fed will continue to move away from this misguided path. Zero or negative interest rates imposed by central banks penalize savers by making the saving decision excessively complex and fraught with risk. Business investment is distorted by confusing signals as to risk preference and inflated asset prices. Central economic planning via industrial policy, regulation, and price controls, such as the manipulation of interest rates, always ends badly. Unfortunately, most governments are well-practiced at bungling in all of those areas.

 

 

 

Government Economy; Government Science: You Wanted Growth?

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Central Planning, Regulation, Technology

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Economic growth allows us to enjoy an improving material existence and the wealth to pursue other goals as a society, such as a clean environment. Yet we often pursue other goals in ways that strangle growth, when in fact those goals and growth are fundamentally compatible.

Two articles that caught my attention today approach this issue from different but complementary perspectives. One is by John Cochrane of the University of Chicago, a lengthy piece called simply “Economic Growth“. At the outset, Cochrane asserts that the one, ultimate source of economic growth in the long-run is through advancing productivity. He notes, however, that the U.S. has been falling short in that department of late. Re-establishing growth should start with a clean-up of the many harmful public policies that have cluttered the economic landscape, especially over the last few decades. Unfortunately, politics makes this easier said than done:

“The golden rule of economic policy is: Do not transfer incomes by distorting prices or slowing competition and innovation. The golden rule of political economics seems to be: Transfer incomes by distorting prices and regulating away competition. Doing so attracts a lot less attention than on-budget transfers or subsidies. It takes great political leadership to force the political process to obey the economic rule.“

Cochrane’s discussion is wide ranging, covering a number of areas of public policy that require “weeding”, as he puts it: the regulatory arena (finance, health care, energy and the environment), tax policy, debt and deficits, the design of social programs and entitlements, labor law and regulation, immigration, education, agricultural policy, trade, and the process of infrastructure investment. There may be a year’s worth of blog posts to be drawn from Cochrane’s essay, but I think “weeding” understates the difficulty of the tasks outlined by Cochrane to reignite growth.

The second article that interested me today dealt with technological advance, which is a primary driver of productivity growth. Economists and pundits often prescribe policies that they believe will lead to transformational breakthroughs in technology. This usually manifests in advocacy for increased public funding for basic scientific research. This is a mistake, according to Matt Ridley’s great article, “The Myth of Basic Science“. In fact, one might say that he’s identified another government-nourished weed for Cochrane to pull. I found Ridley’s opening paragraph intriguing:

“Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.“

Ridley’s thesis (actually, he credits several others for formulating this line of thinking) is that technology growth is very much an independent process, impossible to push or steer effectively. He goes so far as to say that it can’t be stopped, but he also cites ways in which it can be inhibited.

This perspective on technology has implications for patent law, a subject that Ridley explores to some extent. It also reflects badly on government efforts to direct and stimulate advances by granting subsidies to favored technologies and more aggressive funding of  “basic science”. Government, in Ridley’s view, is largely impotent in spawning technological advance. By pushing technologies that are uneconomic, government distorts price signals, diverts resources from more productive investments, and embeds inferior technologies in the economy’s productive capital base.

But Ridley’s point has more to do with the futility of basic science as a driver of technological advance, and the strong possibility that causation often runs in the other direction:

“It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration. The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles.

Technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do. As Adam Smith, looking around the factories of 18th-century Scotland, reported in ‘The Wealth of Nations’: ‘A great part of the machines made use in manufactures…were originally the inventions of common workmen,’ and many improvements had been made ‘by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines.’

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. This conclusion … is so heretical as to be incomprehensible to most economists, to say nothing of scientists themselves.“

It’s good to qualify that “industry will do this itself” only if it isn’t severely hamstrung by meddling politicians and regulators.

Ridley goes on to cite a few inconvenient historical facts that run counter to the narrative that public funding of science is a necessary condition for technical advance. He also cites empirical work suggesting that the return on publicly-funded R&D is paltry. In fact, he allows that government involvement in “basic science” may inhibit more economically viable advances and their adoption. There is no question that government often chooses unwisely without the discipline of market incentives. If it gets funded, then bad science, politically-driven “science” and ultimately nonproductive science might very well crowd-out better private science and innovation.

In a time of strained government budgets, public funding for basic science should be subjected to as much scrutiny as any other spending category. Like Ridley, I have much more faith in private tinkerers to choose wisely when it comes to the development of new technologies. Intimacy with actual markets and with the production process itself improve the odds that private developers and technologists will be more effective at boosting productivity.

The Government Inequality Machine

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Big Government

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Some perceive the government as an ideal agent of redistribution, but they fail to apprehend the many ways in which government policy undermines equality. Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann have written an excellent essay on this point entitled “Here’s What’s Driving Inequality” at National Review. They focus on three areas of government action with the unavoidable side-effect of upward redistribution: housing policy (at all levels of government), regulation, and excessive protections for intellectual property.

Sumner and Erdmann briefly cover Thomas Piketty’s controversial view that wealth becomes increasingly concentrated under conditions of secular stagnation. However, they note that over the past few decades:

“... almost the entire change in the share of domestic income going to capital in major developed economies was explained by rising rents on residential real estate. Non-rental capital income (including the corporate sector) still has a fairly stable share of domestic income.“

Housing policy has driven rents upward in myriad ways. For example, restrictive zoning laws, environmental regulation of new building and regulation of bank lending have all made homeownership less feasible and renting more expensive. If you’re already in your own home, you’re safe! If not, welcome to the have-nots! Here’s a story on government insurance programs that offer massive subsidies to wealthy homeowners. All these redistributional effects are compounded by a tax code that has inflated housing prices through the home mortgage interest deduction, and at the same time inflated rents via the incidence of higher taxes on rental income and real estate capital gains.

Regulation of private business activity is often viewed naively as a necessary, protective function of government, but regulation acts in perverse ways:

“Unfortunately, many government regulations tend to favor larger firms. In recent years we have seen the passage of some extremely complex regulations involving thousands of pages of rules, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and the Affordable Care Act. The Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, and the public health-care complex tend to create opportunities for uber-firms within industries, which act as clearinghouses for public contracts and regulatory demands.”

Large firms tend to pay higher wages and salaries than small firms. By favoring large firms, regulation in turn favors their relatively high-income workers. In addition, regulation such as occupational licensing, labor regulations and local wage controls damage the health and growth potential of small firms and the mobility of individuals at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Finally, Sumner and Erdmann discuss the often bizarre extension of intellectual-property (IP) rights and the way it favors large firms:

“Copyright protections once lasted for 14 years, applied only to maps and books, and could be renewed once if the author was still alive. Now they’ve been extended to many other products, extend for 50 years after the death of the author, and last for at least 95 years for corporations. These extensions are widely seen as reflecting the lobbying power of companies such as Disney. In the high-tech sector, patents are often granted for seemingly minor and obvious innovations.“

Sacred Cow Chips featured a piece on IP several months ago called “Is The Patent a Perversion?” The Libertarian view of IP is skeptical, to say the least, and favors limited protection at most. In that post, I quoted Jeffrey Tucker of the Beautiful Anarchy blog:

“Through intellectual property laws, the state literally assigned ownership to ideas that are the source of innovation, thereby restricting them and entangling entrepreneurs in endless litigation and confusion. Products are kept off the market. Firms that would come into existence do not. Profits that would be earned never appear. Intellectual property has institutionalized slow growth and landed the economy in a thicket of absurdity.“

There is little doubt that economic mobility is not well served by excessive grants of IP rights that extend monopolies indefinitely.

Government fosters inequality in many other ways. The mere existence of a confiscatory mechanism for legal revenue collection, and a complex bureaucracy in charge of distributing the spoils and making rules, will always attract high-powered rent-seeking resources and encourage cronyism. It is a graft machine. The very complexity of the tax code creates fertile ground for transfers via obscure breaks and carve-outs, while higher tax rates on others are required to fund the exceptions. Here’s another: the Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes exports for large corporations. A nice run-down of some of the many areas of “Welfare for the Rich” was provided a few years ago by Robert P. Murphy in The Freeman.

Unfortunately, direct efforts by the government to help the poor are often mere palliatives. At the same time, many of these programs are notorious for destroying work incentives, which undermines equality and economic mobility.

Government is simply not as well-suited to promoting equality as well-functioning markets, free of government meddling and government grants of monopoly. Profits in such markets attract new resources that compete away excess returns and bid prices downward, actions that tend to promote equality. The opportunity to compete without restraint not only vitiates artificial or permanent claims to profits; along with strong property rights, it encourages invention, economic mobility and growth.

Netflix: Oops… No, Let’s Not Regulate The Internet

10 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Net neutrality

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Netflix was heralded only recently as a strong supporter of net neutrality, but the company has changed its position in the wake the the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband ISPs as common carriers. The link goes to a Google search page. The top article listed there should be ungated, from L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal. I have posted a number of times on the misguided policy of net neutrality (see here, here, here, and here). While I hesitate to post on the topic again, I think a short description of the Netflix flip-flop, or should I say its “evolving position“, is worthwhile, and especially with a few quotes from the Crovitz article.

Crovitz notes that Netflix videos “take up one-third of broadband nationwide at peak times.” The company’s support for so-called neutrality seemed grounded in its frustration at the prospect of having to negotiate for massive use of resources controlled and sometimes owned by the ISPs. Here’s Crovitz:

“Today Netflix is a poster child for crony capitalism. When CEO Reed Hastings lobbied for Internet regulations, all he apparently really wanted was for regulators to tilt the scales in his direction with service providers. Or as Geoffrey Manne of the International Center for Law and Economics put it in Wired: ‘Did we really just enact 300 pages of legally questionable, enormously costly, transformative rules just to help Netflix in a trivial commercial spat?‘”

Indeed! But the powers at Netflix have had a revelation:

“Net-neutrality advocates oppose ‘fast lanes’ on the Internet, arguing they put startups at a disadvantage. Netflix could not operate without fast lanes and even built its own content-delivery network to reduce costs and improve quality. This approach will now be subject to the ‘just and reasonable’ test. The FCC could force Netflix to open its proprietary delivery network to competitors and pay broadband providers a ‘fair’ price for its share of usage.

There’s no need for the FCC to override the free-market agreements that make the Internet work so well. Fast lanes like Netflix’s saved the Internet from being overwhelmed, and there is nothing wrong with the ‘zero cap’ approach Netflix is using in Australia. Consumers benefit from lower-priced services.”

I will leave you with my favorite part of the Crovitz piece:

“Last week John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-Internet-evangelist, participated in a conference call of Internet pioneers opposed to the FCC treating the Internet as a utility. He called the regulatory step ‘singular arrogance.’

In 1996 Mr. Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ helped inspire a bipartisan consensus for the open Internet: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’“

Put Consumers In Charge

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Markets

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The interests of consumers should always be placed first. That’s what happens in a free market economy, with the consent of competitive producers, and that is how public policy should be crafted.  Too often, however, regulations and the laws on which they are based are  written primarily with producer interests in mind. Don’t be cowed by the appealing names given to pieces of legislation or their ostensible purposes. These may be couched in terms of consumer protections, but more often than not they create barriers to entry, stifle innovation and confer advantages to big players, thus restricting competition. A case in point is occupational licensing, which inflates prices by preventing the entry of innovative and less costly competitors. In this political exchange, consumers gain “protections” that are often of questionable value, especially when incentives for improved service are blunted by the licensing rules.

Consumer primacy is of value in a general sense, as Richard Ebeling explains in “Consumers’ Sovereignty and Natural Vs. Contrived Scarcities“. When consumers are sovereign in their ability to decide for themselves among competing alternatives, including their own personal comparison of value to price, they essentially take charge of the flow of resources into and out of various uses. And they capture a positive gap between value and price as a personal gain in any transaction to which they are (by definition) a voluntary party. At the same time, producers must reckon with real costs, which reflect natural scarcities. But, by virtue of competition, it is in the interests of producers to deliver the best values to consumers at the lowest prices compatible with costs. Here is part of Ebeling’s introduction:

“One of the great myths about the capitalist system is the presumption that businessmen make profits at the expense of the consumers and workers in society. Nothing could be further from the truth. … In the free market, consumers are the sovereign rulers who determine what gets produced, and with what qualities and features. … The ‘captains of industry’ are not the businessmen, but the buying public who steer the directions into which production is taken.”

Ebeling gives a number of good examples demonstrating the ways in which this efficient market process is compromised by the hand of government. Regulations, mandates, licensure, price floors and ceilings, taxes and subsidies all act to distort the normal workings of the market, creating direct and indirect scarcities. The perverse effect is to generate a flow of economic rents to producer interests at the expense of consumers (and taxpayers). And that is why is those same producer interests are often inclined to seek market interventions. The successful rent-seeking effort ends in legally-sanctioned restraint of trade.

An example of contrived scarcity given by Ebeling results from protectionist trade policy, which ostensibly “protects” domestic producers and workers from “cutthroat” foreign competition. The plight of workers seems to be an easy sell to the public, though historically protectionism has inured to the benefit of relatively highly-paid workers, often unionized, who have an interest in restricting competition. Consistent with Ebeling’s point of view, Matt Ridley writes that trade policy should be driven by the benefits to domestic consumers, rather than producers. Ridley focuses on the UK’s interests in negotiating a free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The following thoughts from Ridley should be taken to heart by anyone with an interest in trade policy, and especially those who fancy themselves liberal:

“The argument for free trade is paradoxical and much misunderstood. Free trade benefits consumers because it is the scourge of expensive or monopolistic national suppliers. It benefits both sides: yet it works unilaterally. Your citizens benefit if you let them buy cheap goods from abroad, while foreigners are punished if their government does not reciprocate. This creates more demand for local services and hence more growth and jobs in the importing country. 

Contrary to what most people think, therefore, it is imports that bring the greatest benefit, not exports — which are the price we have to pay to get the imports. At the centre of the debate lies David Ricardo’s beautiful yet counterintuitive idea of comparative advantage — that it will always pay a country (or a person) to import some goods from another, even if the first country or person is better at making everything. Truly free trade cannot be a predatory phenomenon.“

May No Window Be Unbroken

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Obamacare, Uncategorized

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Obama Work Done

The misallocation of resources precipitated by regulation is sometimes so thorough that proponents are apt to describe it as a feature, and not a bug! Apparently, that is how some think of new business startups and venture capital funding stimulated by Obamacare. Warren Meyer describes the situation in his post, “Worst Argument For Regulation Ever“. Providers confronting a thicket of new regulations, including a mandate for a massive reconfiguration of medical records, necessarily requires services that were heretofore unnecessary. As Meyer says:

“All this investment and activity is going into trying to get back to even from productivity losses imposed by the government, or is being spent addressing government mandates for new services that the market did not want or value. This is a diversion of resources from new value-creation to fixing things, and as such is just the broken windows fallacy re-written in a new form.”

The fallacy to which Meyer refers has a deep tradition in economic thinking, with a lineage tracing to Frederick Bastiat. A simple telling is that a broken window leads to more work for the glazier, more spending, and an apparent lift in income. Of course, someone must pay, and the broken window itself represents a loss of physical capital. But there are other consequences, since the glazier receives a payment that could have, and would have, purchased other goods and services that would have been preferred to window repairs. There are many broken windows in the case of Obamacare, including direct hits to providers, medical device manufacturers, and many of the previously insured. It was not enough for proponents to simply extend coverage to the uninsured. That simpler approach would have created plenty of challenges. But instead, Obamacare became a legal and regulatory behemoth in the hope that it would transform the health care industry… into what?

Noble intentions frequently motivate destructive actions out of sheer economic ignorance. That encompasses almost every effort to use government as an active manager of economic or social affairs. That’s the cogent message from Sheldon Richman in “The Economic Way of Thinking About Health Care“. Richman agrees that “health insurance for all” is an outcome to be hoped for, but he derides the notion that activist government can achieve it effectively. First,  the redistributive element in many government intrusions is a questionable economic strategy:

“When government provides health insurance through subsidies or Medicare or Medicaid, it presides over the disposal of the fruits of other people’s labor. Government personnel decide who gets what, even though they had no hand in producing the resources they “redistribute.” In other words, they traffic in pilfered property. Hence H.L. Mencken’s immortal insight: ‘Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.’”

The central planners decide who gets what in ways that are more destructive than simple redistribution. By way of demonstrating this phenomenon, Richman goes on to discuss the health insurance third-party payment system encouraged by government policy. Employer-paid coverage started as an unintended consequence of WW II wage controls. It also has tax-favored status as a popular fringe benefit. Unfortunately, this led to the bastardization of the concept of insurance itself:

“That [tax-favored status] gives employer-provided insurance an appeal it would never have in a free society, where taxation would not distort decision-making. Moreover, the system creates an incentive to extend “insurance” to include noninsurable events simply to take advantage of the tax preference for noncash compensation. Today pseudo-insurance covers screening services and contraception, which of course are elective. (This does not mean they are trivial, only that they are chosen and are not happenings.)”

Excess demand, owing to a marginal cost of routine care and elective services to the consumer that appears to be zero, sets off a series of unintended consequences:

“… the real prices of medical inputs to rise … the price of insurance goes up; the government’s health care budget rises, requiring higher taxes now or later (because of the debt); and resources and labor flow into the stimulated health care industry and away from other valued purposes, raising the prices of other goods and services. Higher insurance premiums in turn prompt demand for more government subsidies, higher taxes, and more debt.”

May that circle be broken. Richman mentions several steps at the link to promote more competitive, comprehensive and affordable health care.

Precaution Forbids Your Rewards

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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health-and-safety-cartoon

The precautionary principle (PP) is often used to justify actions that radically infringe on liberty, but it is an unreliable guide to managing risk, both for society and for individuals. Warren Meyer makes this point forcefully in a recent post entitled “A Unified Theory of Poor Risk Management“. The whole post is worth reading, but PP is the focus of second section. Meyer offers the following definition of the PP from Wikipedia:

“The precautionary principle or precautionary approach to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action.”

He goes on to explain several problems with PP, the most important of which is its one-sided emphasis on the risks of an activity while dismissing prospective benefits of any kind. Enough said! That shortcoming immediately disqualifies PP as a guide to action. Rather, it justifies  compulsion to not act, which is usually the desired outcome when PP is invoked. We are told to stop burning fossil fuels because CO2 emissions might lead to catastrophic global warming. Yet burning fossil fuels brings enormous benefits to humanity, including real environmental benefits. We are told to stop the cultivation of GMOs because of perceived risks, yet the potential benefits of GMOs are routinely ignored, such as higher yields, improved nutrition, drought resistance and reduced environmental damage. Meyer asks whether there is an irony in ignoring these potential gains, as it entails an acceptance of certain risks. Forced energy shortages would bring widespread economic decline. Less-developed countries face risks of continuing poverty and malnutrition that could otherwise be mitigated.

The terrifying risks cited by PP adherents are generally not well-founded. For example, climate models based on CO2 forcings have extremely poor track records. And whether such hypothetical warming would be costly or beneficial, on balance, is open to debate. The supposed risks of GMOs are largely based on pseudoscience and ignore a vast body of evidence of their safety. As Meyer says:

“… the principle is inherently anti-progress. The proposition requires that folks who want to introduce new innovations must prove a negative, and it is very hard to prove a negative — how do I prove there are no invisible aliens in my closet who may come out and eat me someday, and how can I possibly get a scientific consensus to this fact? As a result, by merely expressing that one ‘suspects’ a risk (note there is no need listed for proof or justification of this suspicion), any advance may be stopped cold. Had we followed such a principle consistently, we would still all be subsistence farmers, vassals to our feudal lord.”

The PP has obvious appeal to statists and fits comfortably into the philosophy of the regulatory state. But it’s a reasonable conjecture that widespread application of the PP exposes the world to greater natural and economic risks than without the PP. Under laissez-faire capitalism, human action is guided by the rational balancing of benefits against costs and risks, which has brought prosperity everywhere it’s been practiced.