Another Example of Editorial-Page Fiction at the New York Times

Are there any fact checkers at the New York Times?

Since they’ve allowed some glaring mistakes by Paul Krugman (see here and here), I guess the answer is no.

But some mistakes are worse than others.

Consider a recent column by David Stuckler of Oxford and Sanjay Basu of Stanford. Entitled “How Austerity Kills,” it argues that budget cuts are causing needless deaths.

Here’s an excerpt that caught my eye.

Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity.

The reason this grabbed my attention is that it was only 10 days ago that I posted some data from Professor Gurdgiev in Ireland showing that Sweden and Germany were among the tiny group of European nations that actually had reduced the burden of government spending.

Greece, Italy, and Spain, by contrast, are among those that increased the size of the public sector. So the argument presented in the New York Times is completely wrong. Indeed, it’s 100 percent wrong because Iceland (which Professor Gurdgiev didn’t measure since it’s not in the European Union) also has smaller government today than it did in the pre-crisis period.

But that’s just part of the problem with the Stuckler-Basu column. They want us to believe that “slashed” budgets and inadequate spending have caused “worse health outcomes” in nations such as Greece, Italy, and Spain, particularly when compared to Germany, Iceland, and Spain.

But if government spending is the key to good health, how do they explain away this OECD data, which shows that government is actually bigger in the three supposed “austerity” nations than it is in the three so-called “stimulus” countries.

Once again, Stuckler and Basu got caught with their pants down, making an argument that is contrary to easily retrievable facts.

But I guess this is business-as-usual at the New York Times. After all, this is the newspaper that’s been caught over and over again engaging in sloppy and/or inaccurate journalism.

• Asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• Accidentally confirming that tax competition is needed to control the greed of the political class.
• Writing that the sequester will mean “deep automatic spending cuts” when the budget actually will climb by $2.4 trillion.
• Claiming that Italy is more prosperous than the United States and that there is less poverty.
• Urging a tax-increase budget agreement based on a chart showing that the only successful budget deal was the one that cut taxes.

Oh, and if you want to know why the Stuckler-Basu column is wrong about whether smaller government causes higher death rates, just click here.

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Should Politicians Go on Trial for Economic Negligence?

I like to think I despise politicians more than 99.9 percent of the population. Even in my kindest moments, I see them as occasionally well-intentioned souls who are easily corrupted. Most of the time, they are a plague on society, as this cartoon illustrates.

So you might think I’m in favor of throwing them in prison on the slightest pretext. That’s surely an appealing thought, but one of the main traits of libertarianism is a belief in the rule of law. Arbitrary arrests, trumped-up charges, and unjustified imprisonments should not exist in a civilized society (though I’m ashamed to admit that such things are happening with increasing frequency in the United States).

I raise this topic because of a story I saw in the EU Observer. The former Prime Minister of Iceland is on trial, but as far as I can tell, his only crime is to have been in charge when that nation’s financial bubble expanded and popped. Here are some details from the story.

Iceland’s former Prime Minister Geir Haarde on Monday (5 March) became the world’s first leader to be put on trial on charges of negligence over the 2008 financial crisis. Haarde, who was a premier from 2006 to 2009, is being accused of “gross negligence” in failing to prevent the collapse of Iceland’s top three banks – Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki – all heavily involved in risky investments on the US real estate market. One of the main architects of Iceland’s transformation from a fishing nation into a financial services hub, Haarde is also accused of failing to control the country’s fast-growing banks and of having withheld information indicating the country was heading for financial disaster. He faces a sentence of up to two years in prison if found guilty. “None of us realised at the time that there was something fishy within the banking system itself, as now appears to have been the case,” Haarde told the Reykjavik court on Monday. He denied all charges and said that “only in hindsight is it evident that not everything was as it should have been.”

So what crime did he commit? If economic mismanagement and/or bad timing are crimes, can we make a citizen’s arrest of Obama? Of the entire Congress (other than Ron Paul and a small handful of compatriots)?

It is a good idea to hold politicians accountable for their actions, of course, but isn’t that what elections are for?

The bottom line is that politicians are despicable creatures and part of me wants to throw most of them in jail for the things they do to reduce freedom and undermine prosperity, but after-the-fact trials are not right unless real evidence exists of a law actually being broken.

So this is one of those cases where I’m conflicted. My emotions lead me one way, but I can’t overcome my belief in the rule of law. I don’t know if Iceland uses jury trials, but I’d be a not-guilty vote unless somebody showed evidence of genuine criminal behavior on the part of the former Prime Minister.

If you enjoy pondering this type of moral dilemma, here are some previous posts dealing with rather thorny topics:

o Vigilante justice

o Brutal tax collection tactics

o Child molestation

o Sharia law

o Healthcare

o Incest

o Speed traps

o Jury nullification, and

o Vigilante justice (again).

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Mega-Landslide Vote in Iceland Against Bailouts

An incredible 93 percent of voters in Iceland voted against financing British and Dutch bank bailouts. The politicians in England and the Netherlands argued that they were bailing out local subsidiaries of an Icelandic bank, so Iceland’s taxpayers should pick up the tab, but those branches was operating under the rules of the European Economic Area. More important, as Hannes Gissurason explains in the Wall Street Journal, endless bailouts encourage reckless behavior. It’s time someone took a stand, so give a cheer  for Iceland’s voters(they don’t deserve three cheers since it is easy to reject bailouts for foreign depositors and this is far from the right way to reduce government guarantees):

Icelanders sent a resounding message to the rest of the world: We are not paying the debts of reckless financiers. While we are few and powerless, we refuse to be bullied by our European neighbors. Some 93% said “No” to a recent deal negotiated by their government with its British and Dutch counterparts; only 7% voted for it. The deal concerned the so-called Icesave accounts that an Icelandic bank, Landsbanki, operated from 2006 in the U.K. and later also in the Netherlands. When the Landsbanki collapsed in October 2008, the British and the Dutch governments rushed in to pay depositors in their respective countries the amount insured under EEA (European Economic Area) regulations. They then demanded reimbursement from the Icelandic government, which reluctantly agreed to pay, against the wish of the great majority of Icelanders. The Icelanders argued that there was no legally binding government guarantee of the deposits. The Icelandic government had fully complied with EEA regulations and set up a Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund. If the resources of that fund were not sufficient to meet its obligations (which was almost certainly the case), then the Icelandic government was not legally bound to step in with additional resources. Thus the British and the Dutch governments had no authority to create new obligations on the part of the Icelandic government by paying their nations’ depositors. …The Icelandic government was forced to sign the deal by not-so-veiled threats of financial isolation and by the use of the IMF as a bounty collector, as the Icelanders put it, for the British and the Dutch: The IMF refused, in effect, to render any assistance to the beleaguered Icelanders unless they signed the deal. …There is however a more general point: If you reward recklessness, you will fill the world with reckless people. Why should any government accept the “Too Big to Fail” argument about banks? Why should depositors be able to shift the risk they take over to the public? In the case of Icesave, the British and Dutch governments chose to bail out their fellow countrymen for their own reasons, with an eye toward stemming a panic within their own banking system. This they were free to do, but it wasn’t done to benefit Iceland or its banks, and Icelanders are right to question whether they should have to pay for decisions made in Amsterdam and London. This in turn raises the broader question implicated in all the bailouts around the world during the panic that started in 2008: Should taxpayers have to cover the losses of reckless bankers, and their customers, while not sharing but indirectly in their possible profits? For their part, the Icelanders have answered: No.

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Using Gasoline to Douse a Fire? OECD Thinks Higher Tax Rates Will Help Iceland’s Faltering Economy.

Republicans made many big mistakes when they controlled Washington earlier this decade, so picking the most egregious error would be a challenge. But continued American involvement with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would be high on the list. Instead of withdrawing from the OECD, Republicans actually increased the subsidy from American taxpayers to the Paris-based bureaucracy. So what do taxpayers get in return for shipping $100 million to the bureaucrats in Paris? Another international organization advocating for big government. The OECD, for example, is infamous for trying to undermine tax competition. It also has recommended higher taxes in America on countless occasions. And now it is suggesting that Iceland impose big tax increases – even though Iceland’s economy is in big trouble and the burden of government spending already is about 50 percent of GDP: