Great Moments in Government Stupidity

This is not a story from The Onion. Instead, the Associated Press has a report of a school in Rhode Island that banned the hat of little eight-year old David Morales because he decorated it with a couple of toy soldiers that…gasp…had tiny little plastic weapons. I’m not even sure what to say about this, other than that the school bureaucrats probably applied for jobs with TSA and were demonstrating that they were qualified. On the other hand, if the school’s history classes teach that we beat the Nazis by prevailing in a game of rock-paper-scissors, then perhaps the school truly does have a “zero tolerance” policy about weapons. Here’s the relevant section of the report:

Christan Morales said her son just wanted to honor American troops when he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and small plastic Army figures. But the school banned the hat because it ran afoul of the district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy. Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns. “His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate,” Morales said. Morales’ 8-year-old son, David, had been assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would meet their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat. Earlier this week, after the hat was banned, the principal at the Tiogue School in Coventry told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn’t have any, according to Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro.

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Government Intervention and the Great Depression

Citing a scholarly book by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, Tom Sowell concisely explains that government intervention caused the Great Depression.

Right here and right now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must “do something” to get the economy moving again. FDR’s intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way. …Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed– and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930. This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to “do something.” What the government decided to do in June 1930– against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it– was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods. This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn. Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits– and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started. If more government regulation of business is the magic answer that so many seem to think it is, the whole history of the 1930s would have been different.

I particularly like that Sowell compares the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes. The market actually fell more in 1987, but Reagan wisely did nothing and the economy continued growing.

The very fact that we still remember the stock market crash of 1929 is remarkable, since there was a similar stock market crash in 1987 that most people have long since forgotten. What was the difference between these two stock market crashes? The 1929 stock market crash was followed by the most catastrophic depression in American history, with as many as one-fourth of all American workers being unemployed. The 1987 stock market crash was followed by two decades of economic growth with low unemployment. But that was only one difference. The other big difference was that the Reagan administration did not intervene in the economy after the 1987 stock market crash– despite many outcries in the media that the government should “do something.”

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Will the Euro Turn into the Argentinian Peso or the Zimbabwean Dollar?

I hope the title to this blog post is completely wrong, but the news out of Europe is very grim. Politicians have been over-spending and going deeper and deeper into debt. This negatively affects the private sector in the usual ways (higher taxes, unproductive allocation of resources, etc), but also creates instability in the financial sector since many banks and other institutions have naively lent lots of money to corrupt and inefficient governments. And as this story from the Telegraph indicates, the European Central Bank has been forced to surrenders its independence and is now monetizing government debt. In theory, the ECB is taking other steps to compensate, but the problem is so large (and the political willingness to solve the problem by radically shrinking government is so small) that it is difficult to see a good ending to this saga.

Fitch Ratings has warned that it may take massive asset purchases by the European Central Bank to prevent Europe’s sovereign debt crisis escalating out of control. …The ECB agreed to start buying Greek, Portuguese, and Irish bonds in April to help buttress the EU’s `shock and awe’ package, known as the European Financial Stability Facility. Total purchases so far have been €47bn (£39bn). It has focused its firepower on Greece, mopping up some €25bn of government bonds. This has prevented a collapse of the Greek debt market but at the high political price of letting banks and funds dump their holdings onto the EU taxpayer. ECB council member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo said it was “not entirely correct” to assume that the ECB was the sole buyer of the debt. “We will continue buying bonds until the situation has stabilized,” he said. …Fitch said European banks must refinance nearly €2 trillion of long-term debt by the end of 2012 in an unfriendly market. “There’s an awful lot of debt coming due in 2011 and 2012, and that is becoming a concern,” said Bridget Gandy, the agency’s banking expert.

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