The European Light at the End of the Tunnel

Too bad I didn’t have this Glenn Foden masterpiece when I did the political cartoonist contest last week.

I think it’s better than my previous favorite of his (about the “private sector doing fine”), and it’s thematically quite similar to the famous “European lemming” cartoon from Ramirez.

One tiny correction, though. The Europeans aren’t socialists anymore. It’s more accurate to describe the policy in France, Italy, and elsewhere as cronyism, corporatism, or statism.

Though Thomas Sowell prefers to use an even harsher adjective when analyzing Obama’s approach.

What about providing some evidence that Obama’s making America more like Europe? Well, just check out the data from the latest Economic Freedom of the World annual report.

There are now six European nations that score above the United States, including two of my favorite places – Switzerland and Estonia!

It doesn’t justify his bad policies, but it’s worth noting that Obama’s merely continuing a bad trend that started under Bush.

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What’s the Best Term for Describing Obamanomics and Obamacare?

I’m a big fan of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. Not only is he a successful, job-creating entrepreneur, but he also cited my work (specifically, this budget analysis) when interviewed by the statists at Mother Jones.

He also has some good insights about the economics of Obamacare. Here’s the key passage from the Washington Times report.

The CEO of Whole Foods compared President Obama’s health care law to “fascism” in a radio interview on Wednesday, a turnabout from earlier comments in which he compared the signature reforms to socialism. “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism,” John Mackey told NPR’s Morning Edition. “Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”

I’ve already provided my two cents on the underlying theory of Obamanomics, and I agree that socialism is not the right term.

Like Thomas Sowell and John Mackey, I think that it’s technically more accurate to say that Obamacare is fascism – nominal private ownership but government control.

But I’ve also concluded that it’s a distraction to use that term. Which is why I prefer to call Obama a statist or corporatist. Though maybe we should add redistributionist to that list.

P.S. Here’s the Obama version of Socialism for Kids.

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The French Version of a Pot Calling the Kettle Black, or Maybe the other Way Around

There are some races you don’t want to win.

I’m glad, for instance, that Greece instead of America is winning the race to fiscal collapse (though both the BIS and OECD predict the U.S. faces a bigger long-run challenge).

And I’m happy that California is farther down the path to chaos and meltdown than my state of Virginia (as illustrated by this amusing cartoon).

So you will understand that I am worried when a French socialist defends bad economic policy by saying that his country is copying the United States.

Here are some excerpts from a CNBC report about Obama being a role model for Hollande’s economic team.

“He’s not nearly as socialist as I am”

The French politician who said Indian steel company ArcelorMittal should leave the country has told CNBC that his government is only acting like U.S. President Barack Obama. Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, a member of the governing Socialist party, caused controversy last week when he said that the Indian company, which employs close to 20,000 people in France, should leave after it said it would have to close down a factory. The French government announced on Thursday that it could nationalize the factory in question… The news raised the specter of the nationalizations of the early 1980s, which were instigated by Hollande’s predecessor Francois Mitterrand. Montebourg told CNBC after a meeting with trade unions in Paris: “Barack Obama’s nationalized…” Montebourg brushed off comparisons with that era. He said: “It’s a very good sign to send out (to investors). Nationalizing is a very modern step to take. Especially when you not only nationalize losses but profits as well, when you make public/private partnerships. This is our strategy. …He declined to answer a question about comments from Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who told Indian businessmen earlier this week to come to London instead of France.

I don’t actually think we’re as bad as France, and the rankings from both Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom both show the United States with more economic freedom.

But a good overall score doesn’t mean that one nation is better than another in all regards. The United States still ranks above Sweden, even though the Swedes have implemented school choice and personal retirement accounts. And America still ranks above the Slovak Republic, even though that country (at least for now) has a simple and fair flat tax.

So maybe Monsieur Montebourg is right about the U.S. being a trendsetter for bad industry nationalization policy. Gee, what a high honor. I guess this is what it means to be called ugly by a frog.

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Obama’s Technically not a Socialist, but He Won’t Like How Thomas Sowell Describes His Philosophy

A couple of years ago, Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a socialist, causing some squawking and grousing about incivility from the more sensitive types in Washington.

I jumped to the President’s defense, pointing out that Obama is a different type of statist.

I’m gratified that Thomas Sowell of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution agrees with me.

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector. Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies… Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies.

So what is the right technical description of what Obama is proposing? Well, if you allow nominal private property, but impose government control, it’s called fascism. Sowell agrees, and also adds some history for the unenlightened.

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left. Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left. …What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat. …Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.

All this being said, I want to reiterate something else that I wrote back in 2010. It is counterproductive to call Obama a fascist because that term is now linked to the specific form of evil produced by Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

So if you disapprove of Obama’s policies, call him a statist or a corporatist. Heck, you can say he believes in cronyism or maybe even collectivism. Those terms get across that he wants more government without causing needless controversy that distracts from the main message.

But make sure you apply the same term to Republicans who impose the same types of policies, such as Bush and Nixon.

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When Hugo Chavez Battles Supply and Demand Curves, Guess What Happens?

Haiti may be the poorest nation in the Americas. Cuba may have the dictator with the longest lifespan. But Venezuela arguably has the worst government.

Not the clownish dictator, Hugo Chavez, is trying to repeal the laws of economics. How’s that working out for him?

Well, here’s some of what the New York Times wrote.

By 6:30 a.m., a full hour and a half before the store would open, about two dozen people were already in line. They waited patiently, not for the latest iPhone, but for something far more basic: groceries. …Venezuela is one of the world’s top oil producers at a time of soaring energy prices, yet shortages of staples like milk, meat and toilet paper are a chronic part of life here, often turning grocery shopping into a hit or miss proposition. Some residents arrange their calendars around the once-a-week deliveries made to government-subsidized stores like this one, lining up before dawn to buy a single frozen chicken before the stock runs out. Or a couple of bags of flour. Or a bottle of cooking oil. The shortages affect both the poor and the well-off, in surprising ways. A supermarket in the upscale La Castellana neighborhood recently had plenty of chicken and cheese — even quail eggs — but not a single roll of toilet paper. Only a few bags of coffee remained on a bottom shelf. Asked where a shopper could get milk on a day when that, too, was out of stock, a manager said with sarcasm, “At Chávez’s house.” At the heart of the debate is President Hugo Chávez’s socialist-inspired government, which imposes strict price controls that are intended to make a range of foods and other goods more affordable for the poor. They are often the very products that are the hardest to find. …many economists call it a classic case of a government causing a problem rather than solving it. Prices are set so low, they say, that companies and producers cannot make a profit. So farmers grow less food, manufacturers cut back production and retailers stock less inventory. Moreover, some of the shortages are in industries, like dairy and coffee, where the government has seized private companies and is now running them, saying it is in the national interest.

Here’s a chart that I’ve used before, using international data to compare living standards in Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile since 1980. One nation (take a wild guess) has tried statism, one nation has tried a mix of statism and capitalism, and the other has tried capitalism.

And just in case you need one more reason to despise Chavez’s despotic government, the regime is copying Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other murderous tyrants in imposing gun control.

(h/t: Greg Mankiw)

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Reagan Schools Obama

Last year, I did a popular post on what happens if you redistribute grades in a classroom.

Someone has turned this idea into a video, starring some well-known political figures.

And if you want to see a real-world example of how students react to this idea, here’s another good video.

By the way, I can’t resist being pedantic and re-explaining that socialism is not the same as redistributionism.

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Socialism for Kids, the Obama Version

I have several amusing posts about the left’s fixation on redistributionism, including this Halloween classic, this Elizabeth Warren takedown, this mockery of the Occupy Wall Street nitwits, and this caricature of Obama’s class warfare.

In this grand tradition, here’s a funny poster sent to me by a reader.

This is an appropriate point for the disclaimer that Obama is not a socialist, which technically requires government ownership of the means of production. As I’ve explained before, it’s much more accurate to say he’s a statist, a corporatist, or a redistributionist.

And since we’re looking at definitions and this post features young children, I’m reminded of the great description of libertarianism put forth by my Cato colleague David Boaz.

You could say that you learn the essence of libertarianism — which is also the essence of civilization –  in kindergarten: don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, keep your promises.

That definition isn’t amusing, like what’s portrayed in this satirical video or shown in this mocking poster featuring the 24 types of libertarians, but it has the advantage of being simple and accurate.

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Deconstructing Jonathan Alter’s “Five Myths about Barack Obama” in the Washington Post

The Washington Post is a left-wing newspaper, so I’m never surprised to find examples of biased reporting.

Last month, for instance, I made fun of the Post for asserting that Germany was “fiscally conservative.”

I also mocked the Post last March, when a reporter hysterically claimed that a proposal to trim $6 billion from a $3,600 billion budget would “slash” government.

Today, I want to analyze a column by Jonathan Alter.

Entitled “Five Myths about Barack Obama,” it’s in the opinion section, where people are supposed to present a point of view.

So I’m not going to complain about bias, but I am going to disagree about some of his judgments. Here are the five supposed myths, along with my two cents on whether Alter is correct.

Myth 1. Obama is a socialist.

I basically agree with Alter. As I explained two years ago, a true socialist wants “government ownership of the means of production.” To be sure, most self-avowed socialists today have given up on that goal and instead focus on redistribution. And since Obama also is a redistributionist, I understand why people call him a socialist. Nonetheless, it is much more accurate to call him a statist or corporatist.

Myth 2. Obama is a tool of Wall Street.

Alter is right and wrong. Obama is pursuing policies that Wall Street doesn’t like, such as class-warfare tax hikes. On the other hand, he supported the TARP bailout and pushed for the Dodd-Frank bailout legislation that was supported by Goldman-Sachs and the other big players on Wall Street.

Myth 3. Obama is an effective public speaker.

I’m not sure what to say about this assertion. I don’t find his pedantic ramblings effective or persuasive, but I’m not the target audience.

Myth 4. Obama’s stimulus failed.

This is Alter’s most absurd assertion. To bolster his claim, he cites a handful of institutions that have Keynesian models, including the laughably inaccurate crowd at the Congressional Budget Office. Wow, what a revelation. Keynesians support Keynesianism. What’s next, a poll of Obama campaign staff showing that people support the President’s reelection? Read this post for a good explanation of how Keynesianism has failed.

Myth 5. Obama is a weak leader.

This isn’t my area of expertise, but I mostly agree with Alter’s assessment. For better or worse (and you know how I feel), the President put everything on the line to enact Obamacare. That was bad for the nation, but I suppose it required effective leadership.

In closing, the Washington Post does deserve some credit for having diversity on the opinion page. Yes, Alter’s column has a leftist perspective, but the paper routinely carries people like George Will, Robert Samuelson, and Charles Krauthammer.

That doesn’t excuse the Post for displaying bias in news articles, as I mentioned above, but I think it’s better than the New York Times (damning with faint praise).

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the Post’s editorials are dogmatically statist (though it does support Postal Service privatization, perhaps because that affects the paper’s bottom line).

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China’s Economic Model Is Superior…if You Think U.S. Living Standards Should Drop by 80 Percent

I’m glad that China has taken some steps away from communism. According to Economic Freedom of the World, China was one of 10-worst nations for economic liberty back in 1980 and they’ve since climbed to 92nd place out of 141 nations.

I’ve even offered a small bit of praise for China’s shift to a more business-friendly environment, and I was greatly amused when the head of China’s sovereign wealth fund mocked the Europeans for destructive welfare state policies.

That being said, 92nd place is still a very anemic rank, far below the first- and second-place jurisdictions, Hong Kong and Singapore.

So I was flabbergasted when Andy Stern, a former union boss and long-time Obama ally, wrote a column for today’s Wall Street Journal praising the efficiency and vitality of China’s planned economy.

You probably think I’m pulling your leg and/or deliberately misrepresenting what he wrote, but his article was titled “China’s Superior Economic Model.”

And just in case you think that’s the fault of editors and he couldn’t possible say such a thing, let’s look through the piece.

He starts off praising the goals of China’s latest five-year plan.

The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development. Some Americans are drawing lessons from this. Last month, the China Daily quoted Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, as saying: “I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what is missing in America.”

Gee, that sounds so uplifting and inspirational. But there’s one tiny problem. China is still a very poor country. Here’s a chart showing the 2010 data from the World Bank.

Maybe I’m a crazy free-market ideologue, but I’d rather copy the Singapore or Hong Kong economic model.

But if I can’t choose one of those Asian tigers, I’ll stick with the U.S. system. Americans, after all, are about six times better off than the Chinese. Heck, China is still behind Albania.

Mr. Stern then writes about the supposed failures of “free-market extremism” in the United States.

The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model—so successful in the 20th century—is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA’s results—a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1%—are pathetic. …This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism. As painful and humbling as it may be, America needs to do what a once-dominant business or sports team would do when the tide turns: study the ingredients of its competitors’ success.

Since this is a pro-family blog, I won’t repeat the inappropriate words that came out of my mouth upon reading these passages.

Instead, I’ll simply call your attention to this post, which shows how America’s score in the Economic Freedom of the World ranking declined during the past decade. Indeed, the United States was among the five nations with the biggest declines over that 10-year period and the United States dropped from 3rd to 10th during those years.

If that was a period of “free-market fundamentalist” policies, then I guess I need to start cheering for socialism.

I’ll conclude by doing one of my favorite things – quoting myself. Here’s a bit of what I wrote last year.

China has been growing in recent decades, but it’s almost impossible not to grow when you start at the bottom – which is where China was in the late 1970s thanks to decades of communist oppression and mismanagement. And the growth they have experienced certainly has not been enough to overtake other nations based on measures that compare living standards. …This is not to sneer at the positive changes in China. Hundreds of millions of people have experienced big increases in living standards. …But China still has a long way to go if the goal is a vibrant and rich free-market economy.

I’ve probably exhausted everyone’s interest in this topic, but if anyone’s a glutton for punishment, I was part of a debate on English-language Russian TV about Chinese and American economic policy.

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Does Socialism Work? A Classroom Experiment

I posted a video making this point earlier in the year, and I also posted a version of this joke back in 2010, but here’s another version that’s worth sharing because of the five lessons to be learned at the conclusion.

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An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
It could not be any simpler than that.

There are five morals to this story:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

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I’ll make one final point. There are five morals to the story, but there are dozens of nations giving us real-world examples every day.

Sort of makes you wonder why some people still believe this nonsense?

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Government-Run Healthcare Can Be Emasculating…Literally

Courtesy of Powerline Blog, we have a story about how Sweden’s bureaucratic health system made a mistake and…well, I’m not sure how to delicately phrase this…so let’s just give you the headline of the story: “Man’s penis amputated following misdiagnosis.”

Here are some of the details from a news report about the incident.

The man, who is in his sixties, first visited a local clinic in Blekinge in southern Sweden in September 2009 for treatment of a urinary tract infection, the local Blekinge Läns Tidning (BLT) reported. When he returned in March 2010 complaining of foreskin irritation, the doctor on duty at the time diagnosed the problem as a simple case of inflammation. After three weeks passed without the prescribed treatment alleviating the man’s condition, he was instructed to seek further treatment at Blekinge Hospital. But it took five months before he was able to schedule an appointment at the hospital. When he finally met with doctors at the hospital, the man was informed he had cancer and his penis would have to be removed.

The fact that doctors amputated the man’s penis is not the point of this post. Bad things happen in any country, including medical mistakes by well-meaning people. But a five-month wait for an appointment is an indictment of Sweden’s government-run system. We don’t know if the man’s equipment could have been saved if he got a timely appointment, but a less-drastic approach surely would have been more likely.

But I doubt Sweden’s political elite are too concerned about this story, just like America’s beltway insiders probably don’t worry about the consequences of Obamacare. Waiting lines, after all, are for mere taxpayers. Folks such as Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi will always rig things so they get to jump to the front of the line.

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The Pilgrims Learned from Their Mistakes, so Why Can’t Obama?

There’s an odd debate in the blogosphere. As happens every Thanksgiving, libertarians and conservatives take joy in pointing out that there was mass starvation and suffering during the early years of the Plymouth Colony because of a socialist economic model. Here’s what John Stossel recently wrote.

Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it. The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally. That’s why they nearly all starved. When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years. “So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.” In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic. “This had very good success,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many.”

My colleague Dan Griswold has a blog post making the same point. And here’s a new video from the prolific folks at Reason TV.

This story must bother the statists. For the first time I can remember, they tried to push back this year. A blogger called Liberal Curmudgeon attempted to puncture the supposed myth, blaming the Colony’s woes on lazy Englishmen.

The real problem, though, was that the men recruited for Jamestown and Plymouth were expecting quick and easy riches without having to work at all.

That’s an interesting theory, and Andrew Sullivan swallows it, hook, line, and sinker (apparently any criticism of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck must be true).

But this argument suffers from a couple of flaws. Don Boudreaux deals with one of the problems in his post, but I have a much simpler criticism for Andrew Sullivan, the Liberal Curmudgeon, et al.

If the Plymouth Colony initially was failing because of the wrong type of people, why did those wrong people suddenly succeed once communalism was replaced with private property?

Maybe statists have a good answer to this question, but I won’t be holding my breath.

So the real lesson of Thanksgiving (at least from an economics perspective), is that incentives matter. The Pilgrims figured this out and changed course. Nearly four hundred years later, the question for today is whether Obama is similarly capable of learning from his mistakes.

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Now He Tells Us…

Here’s a story for the better-late-than-never file. Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro confessed that communism doesn’t work and that his nation’s economic system should not be emulated.

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago. The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel’s brother Raul, the country’s president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba’s 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows. Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore” Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

Too bad Castro didn’t have this epiphany 50 years ago. The Cuban people languish in abject poverty as a result of Castro’s oppressive policies. Food is harshly rationed and other basic amenities are largely unavailable (except, of course, to the party elite). This chart, comparing inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP in Chile and Cuba, is a good illustration of the human cost of excessive government. Living standards in Cuba have languished. In Chile, by contrast, the embrace of market-friendly policies has resulted in a huge increase in prosperity. Chileans were twice as rich as Cubans when Castro seized control of the island. After 50 years of communism in Cuba and 30 years of liberalization in Chile, the gap is now much larger.

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French Workers Protest against Reality

I sometimes joke that the French are the world’s most statist people. I have no idea if that is actually true, but the latest protests in France certainly are a good piece of evidence. French workers (especially government bureaucrats) are protesting a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62. They apparently think marching in the street will magically change demographic reality. I discuss this issue in a new Cato Institute Podcast.

Incidentally, my comments are not favorable to Sarkozy. I point out that his pension proposal is just a tiny step in the right direction, and that any positive impact is undermined by concomitant class-warfare tax increases.

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Venezuela’s Evil Government

Hugo Chavez is a palpably evil thug, and he confirms this status with a new proposal to issue cards that almost certainly will be used to ration food. Left-wing despots claim that their policies put “people above profits,” but they never can explain why people (especially the masses) have much higher living standards in countries where “capitalist greed” runs rampant.

Presented by President Hugo Chávez as an instrument to make shopping for groceries easier, the “Good Life Card” is making various segments of the population wary because they see it as a furtive attempt to introduce a rationing card similar to the one in Cuba. The measure could easily become a mechanism to control the population, according to civil society groups. “We see that in short-term this could become a rationing card probably similar to the one used in Cuba,” Roberto León Parilli, president of the National Association of Users and Consumers, told El Nuevo Herald. “It would use more advanced technological means [than those used in Cuba], but when they tell you where to buy and what the limits of what you can buy are, they are conditioning your purchases.” Chávez said Tuesday that the card could be used to buy groceries at the government chain of markets and supplies. …In theory, the government could begin to favor the import of products to be sold through the government chains and have more control over the type of products purchased and the people buying them. Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said that Venezuela’s current problems of scarce supplies are very similar to those Cuba faced when Fidel Castro introduced the rationing card. “The card emerged when goods began to become scarce,” Suchlicki said. “The government had seized many companies that did not work because the government managed them poorly. Then they decided to distribute groceries through those cards.” And although the cards were introduced as a mechanism to deal with scarcities, Suchlicki said, they later became an instrument of control.

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If Professors Really Believe in Socialism, Why Don’t They Try this Classroom Experiment?

This little story appeared in my inbox. It’s obviously meant to illustrate the perverse incentive structure created by redistribution, but one wonders why statists in the academic world don’t follow through on their convictions and use this grading system.

A professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too, so they studied little.

The second test average was a D. No one was happy.

When the third test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, and name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else.

To their great surprise, all failed. The professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder it is to succeed the greater the reward, but when a government takes all the reward away, no one will try so no one will succeed.

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It’s Not a Smart Move to Link Obama Tax Hikes to Nazi Invasion

A reader has asked me to weigh in on the mini-controversy that was triggered when a Wall Street financier said fighting Obama’s tax hikes was like a war and that the battle was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” While it seems clear that Stephen Schwarzman was not saying Obama was a Nazi or that his policies were akin to those pursued by the National Socialist Workers Party, he obviously should have used a better analogy. Even if the intent is totally innocent and/or intellectually legitimate, it distracts from the core message when you make references to Nazis or fascism (indeed, I’ve made this point in previous posts about whether Obama is a socialist). Here’s an excerpt for those who want to know more about the story.

The billionaire Blackstone private equity boss Stephen Schwarzman, who is among Wall Street’s most visceral proponents of the free market, has been obliged to apologise after comparing Barack Obama’s tax policies to the Nazi advance across Europe at the beginning of the second world war. The tycoon, whose empire stretches from Hilton hotels to the Weather Channel, United Biscuits and the London Eye, has worked himself up into a lather about a proposed tax hike on so-called “carried interest” profits – the gains made when private equity firms buy and sell businesses – from 15% to as much as 35%. “It’s a war,” he told a board members of a non-profit organisation, whose members leaked Schwarzman’s remarks to Newsweek on condition of anonymity. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” …Schwarzman expressed regret for his comments, telling the New York Post: “I apologise for what was an inappropriate analogy.” But he added: “The fundamental issue of the administration’s need to work productively with business for the benefits of the overall economy is still of very serious concern not only to me, but also to large parts of the business community.”

P.S. Obama’s tax hikes are very misguided. But the best analogy is that this is like…um…when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

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Obama and the “S” Word

According to a new poll from a Democratic firm, an astounding 55 percent of people think “socialist” is a term that describes Obama. Here’s a blurb from a National Review post.

Deep in the poll, they ask, “Now, I am going to read you a list of words and phrases which people use to describe political figures. For each word or phrase, please tell me whether it describes Barack Obama very well, well, not too well, or not well at all.” …When asked about “a socialist,” 33 percent of likely voters say it describes Obama “very well,” 22 percent say “well,” 15 percent say “not too well,” and 25 percent say “not well at all.” 

I’ve already commented on this issue twice, remarking that Obama technically is a fascist, but that it is much better to call him a statist or corporatist. But there is the tricky issue of whether a word should be defined by experts (to the extent economists are experts on anything) or whether it is more appropriate to accept the common understanding of what a word means. I don’t have a firm opinion on that issue, but if socialism now means someone who believes in lots of government intervention and redistribution, then Obama is a socialist (heck, Bush also would be a socialist). But if we stick with the official definition, which involves government ownership of the means of production, then Obama has relatively few policies that meet that standard.
 
Here’s what the Christian Science Monitor reported on the issue. The most amusing part of the story is that self-identified socialists are insulted to be linked to Obama.

The assertion is getting louder: President Obama is a socialist, a wealth-redistributing wolf in Democrat’s clothing gnawing at America’s entrepreneurial spirit. …So, is Mr. Obama trying to form The Socialist Republic of America? Or are the accusations mainly a political weapon, meant to stick Obama with a label that is poison to many voters and thus make him a one-term president? …[Some] refute the idea that government involvement in failing industries defines a president as socialist – or that wealth is being redistributed from the Forbes 500 richest Americans to the nation’s “Joe the plumbers.” What Mr. Johns, Mr. Gingrich, and others brandishing the “socialist” s-word are really complaining of is a return to the policies of John Maynard Keynes, the English economist who advocated vigorous government involvement in the economy, from regulation to pump priming, says labor historian Peter Rachleff of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. “Socialism suggests getting rid of capitalism altogether,” says Dr. Rachleff. “Mr. Obama is not within a million miles of an ideology like that.” For what it’s worth, socialists deny that Obama is one of them – and even seem a bit insulted by the suggestion. “I have been making a living telling people Obama is not a socialist,” says Frank Llewellyn, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America. “It’s frustrating to see people using our brand to criticize programs that have nothing to do with our brand and are not even working.”

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Brazil’s President Is Wiser than Obama

Every so often, perhaps inadvertently, a collectivist says something very smart. In the case of Lula da Silva, Brazil’s socialist president, he made the common-sense observation that you can’t redistribute without first producing. He didn’t quite realize what he was saying, one imagines, since he presumably would have realized that capitalism is a superior system in both the short run and long run, but at least he recognized the role of wealth creation. Obama, by contrast, acts as if the blessings of a free market economy automatically exist and that people will continue to produce even if he persists with his statist plans to simultaneously subsidize sloth and penalize productive behavior. Here’s the excerpt with the Brazilian President’s amazing statement:

He described the situation when he was elected Brazilian president: “The country had no credit, had no working capital or financing or income distribution. What kind of capitalism was that? A capitalism without capital. I decided then that it was necessary to first build capitalism, then make socialism, we must have something to distribute before doing so.”

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Anybody Know If This Is True?

I’m sure it could be true, so it’s worth sharing even if it is an urban legend.

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More on Obama and Socialism

I got some interesting feedback about my pseudo-defense of Obama against the accusation that he is a socialist. It was a faux defense because my goal was simply to point out that Obama is guilty of a different form of statism. For those interested in more information, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism book is first rate (and he has a discontinued blog on the topic for those too impatient to wait for a book), and Steve Horowitz does a great job addressing this topic for the Freeman:

Talking the talk of “free markets” but proposing policies that mostly amount to collaborations between well-placed private-sector interests and the State is the hallmark of “corporatism,” or “state capitalism,” or even economic fascism.  From the bailouts of the banking system to “green jobs” to health insurance “reform” to various pieces of the “stimulus,” the real winners from the Obama administration’s policies (and Bush’s before him) have been those in corporate world lucky enough to be in the favored industries and to have sufficient political connections to benefit from the changes. Rather than take over various industries, Obama seems to believe he can work with industry leaders and labor to negotiate and manage them collectively in the national interest.  This is the essence of the “third way” of Italian Fascism.  It is not socialism, as private ownership is nominally maintained, but it is not capitalism, since private owners are not fully allowed to make independent decisions based on perceived profitability.  Those decisions must take a back seat to predetermined  national priorities. Again, consider the health insurance package.  It’s not a single-payer system, which would arguably be more truly socialist.  Instead, we will have a system of nominally private insurance companies heavily regulated and controlled so that they serve political goals, such as trying to guarantee that everyone has insurance regardless of income or medical history.

Keep in mind, though, my point about it being foolish to call Obama a fascist since the term is now inextricably linked to racism and militarism. Far better to point out that he is a statist or a corporatist.

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Obama Is Not a Socialist

Newt Gingrich writes in the Washington Post today to defend his assertion that Obama is a socialist. He cites several examples of the President’s big-government agenda, which are excerpted below. These are all examples of bad policy, to be sure, but other than the student loan takeover, these are all examples of fascism rather than socialism. Socialism, technically speaking, is government ownership of the means of production. Fascism, by contrast, involves government control and direction of resources, but cloaked by a system of nominal private ownership.

Calling Obama a fascist, however, is counterproductive. Other than a few economists and historians, people don’t understand that fascism developed (with Mussolini perhaps being the best example) as a social/economic system. Instead, most people associate it with Hitler’s lunatic ideas on matters such as race and militarism. That’s why I prefer to call Obama a statist or a corporatist. Those words accurately describe his governing philosophy without creating the distractions caused by calling him a socialist or fascist.

Creating czar positions to micromanage industry reflects the type of hubris of centralized government that Friedrich von Hayek and George Orwell warned against. How can a White House “executive compensation czar” know enough to set salaries in multiple companies for many different people? Having a pay dictatorship for one part of the country sets the pattern for government to claim the right to set pay for everyone. If that isn’t socialism, what word would describe it?

Violating 200 years of bankruptcy precedent to take money from bondholders and investors in the auto industry to pay off union allies is rather an anti-market intervention.

Proposing that the government (through the Environmental Protection Agency or some sort of carbon-trading scheme) micromanage carbon output is proposing that the government be able to control the entire U.S. economy. Look at the proposals for government micromanagement in the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. (I stopped reading when I got to the section regulating Jacuzzis on Page 442.) If government regulates every aspect of our use of power, it has regulated every aspect of our lives. What is that if not socialism?

Nationalizing student loans so that they are a bureaucratic monopoly. This will surely lead to fraud on the scale we see in Medicare and Medicaid, from which more than $70 billion per year is stolen.

Expanding government mortgage intervention to 90 percent of the housing market.

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Yes, Simon, People in the United Kingdom Die Because of Government-Run Healthcare

For those of you who saw this segment of Wednesday’s show on CNBC, my co-host got quite agitated when I said I did not want America to have a substandard government-dictated healthcare system. Simon expressed doubt about my assertions, so it’s rather serendipitous that Investor’s Business Daily just editorialized about a new report (from the UK) about the failings of one British hospital system:

American health care is not British health care, at least not yet. But if Democrats get their way, this country will rush to adopt a system much like the one that is killing people in Great Britain. Democrats say that what they have planned for U.S. health care is not a copy of the British system. But a nationalized health care system, no matter how it’s tailored, will collapse like other socialist programs. Government-run health care may at times look like it works, but it is unsustainable — and deadly. Consider the British hospital trust that was the focus of a recently completed independent inquiry. According to U.K. media reports, the review found that at least 400 and as many as 1,200 patients died from 2005 to 2008 because of poor care by Mid Staffordshire National Health Service Foundation Trust, which operates two hospitals. …The inquiry also noted “serious departures from the standard of basic care which every patient is entitled to expect,” abuses of elderly patients, and the too-common presence of unwashed patients and bedding “soiled with urine and feces for considerable periods of time.” Other sanitation problems included the presence of blood, discarded needles and used dressings. These problems shouldn’t be unexpected. Last year, the media reported that up to 10,000 cancer patients were dying needlessly in the U.K. each year because their condition was diagnosed too late, according to research by the government’s director of cancer services. Also in 2009, there were reports that the health secretary ordered a probe into “claims that patients are dying due to poor care in at least 27 hospitals around the country.”

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Reagan Warns Against Socialized Medicine

This video has been circulating around the Internet for a while, but it’s a classic. If you haven’t seen it, take a look. And if you have seen it, it’s refreshing to watch it again.

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If Government-Run Toilet Paper Doesn’t Work, Imagine What Will Happen with Government-Run Health Care

The socialist paradise off the coast of Florida is having a slight problem with toilet paper. But since the Cuban government has a hard time providing any basic necessity, that is hardly a surprise. What is remarkable, though, is that there are some people who think that it is a good idea to put politicians and bureaucrats in charge of health care:

Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said on Friday. …Cuba’s financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep the economy afloat. “The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper,” an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde.

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