Trump Treasury Secretary Supports French Tax Harmonization Scheme

Much to the consternation of some Republicans, I periodically explain that the Trump Administration is – at best – a mixed blessing for supporters of limited government.

It’s not just that Trump is the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, though that’s certainly a damning indictment.

The Trump White House also has been very weak on government spending, and the track record on that issue could get even worse since the President supports a new entitlement for childcare.

Yes, there are issues where Trump has been a net plus for economic liberty.

The overall regulatory burden is declining (though the Administration’s record is far from perfect when looking at anti-market interventions).

And the President gets a good mark on tax policy thanks to the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

But Trump’s grade on that issue may be about to drop thanks to horribly misguided actions by his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Here are some excerpts from a report by France 24.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that the US supported a push by France for a minimum corporate tax rate for developed countries worldwide… “It’s something we absolutely support, that there’s not a chase to the bottom on taxation,” Mnuchin said in Paris after talks with Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. Le Maire said last month a minimum tax rate would be a priority for France during its presidency of the G7 nations this year. …France in particular has railed against Amazon, Google and other technology giants that declare their European income in low-tax countries like Ireland or Luxembourg.

Needless to say, it’s utterly depressing that a Republican (in name only?) Treasury Secretary explicitly condemns tax competition.

Politicians and their flunkies grouse about a “race to the bottom” when tax competition exists, not because tax rates would ever drop to zero (we should be so lucky), but because they don’t like it when the geese with the golden eggs have the ability to fly away.

They like having the option of ever-higher taxes.

In reality, the world desperately needs tax competition to reduce the danger of “goldfish government,” which occurs when vote-seeking politicians can’t resist the temptation to destroy an economy with too much government (see Greece, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc).

I’ll close with a remarkable observation.

The Obama Administration supported a scheme that would have required American companies to pay a tax of at least 19 percent on income earned in other jurisdictions, even if tax rates were lower (as in Ireland) or zero (as in Cayman).

This was very bad policy, completely contrary to the principle of “territorial taxation” that is part of all market-friendly tax reforms such as the flat tax.

Yet Trump’s Treasury Secretary, by prioritizing tax revenue over prosperity, is supporting a proposal for global minimum tax rates that is much worse than what the Obama Administration wanted.

And even further to the left compared to the policy supported by Bill Clinton.

P.S. I’m sure the bureaucrats at the European Commission and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are delighted with Mnuchin’s policy, especially since American companies will be the ones most disadvantaged.

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Hard Brexit Is a Much Better Option than Brexit in Name Only

My views on Brexit haven’t changed since I wrote “The Economic Case for Brexit” back in 2016.

It’s a simple issue of what route is most likely to produce prosperity for the people of the United Kingdom. And that means escaping the dirigiste grasp of the European Union.

The European Union’s governmental manifestations (most notably, an über-powerful bureaucracy called the European Commission, a largely powerless but nonetheless expensive European Parliament, and a sovereignty-eroding European Court of Justice) are – on net – a force for statism rather than liberalization. Combined with Europe’s grim demographic outlook, a decision to remain would guarantee a slow, gradual decline….Leaving the EU would be like refinancing a mortgage when interest rates decline. In the first year or two, it might be more expensive because of one-time expenses. In the long run, though, it’s a wise decision.

But if I was rewriting that column today, I would change the title to “The Economic Case for Hard Brexit.”

That’s because Prime Minister Theresa May and other opponents are pushing for a watered-down version of Brexit. Sort of Brexit in Name Only.

Indeed, Dan Hannan, a member of the European Parliament, explains in the Washington Examiner that the deal negotiated by Theresa May is the worst possible outcome.

This is the sort of deal that a country signs when it has lost a war. Under its terms, Britain will remain subject to all the costs and obligations of EU membership, but will give up its vote, its voice and its veto. …EU exporters will enjoy privileged access to the world’s fifth-largest economy. They won’t need to worry about world competition. …In the two-and-a-half years since the referendum, civil servants, politicians, financiers and politically-connected business cartels have worked assiduously to overturn to result. …Some, including George Soros and Tony Blair, sought to overturn the result outright with a new referendum. Others, more craftily, sought instead to ensure that, while something technically called Brexit may happen, nothing actually changes. Sadly, they have achieved something far worse than no change. Their deal — Theresa May’s deal — will leave Britain in a more disadvantageous place than either leaving cleanly or staying put. It keeps the burdens of EU membership but junks the advantages.

Brian Wesbury and Bob Stein, both with First Trust Advisors, point out that Hard Brexit is the best option. Trade would continue, but based on WTO rules instead of the EU’s free trade agreement.

Some analysts and investors are concerned about a “Hard Brexit,” in which the U.K. supposedly plunges into chaos as it crashes out of the EU without an agreement. …Count us skeptical. …Any harm to the U.K.’s economy would be relatively mild… It’s not like there would be no trade between the U.K. and the EU after a Hard Brexit. Trade rules would simply shift to the ones that apply between the EU and other countries under the World Trade Organization, like those that apply to EU-U.S. trade.

While WTO rules are quite good, they’re not as good as complete free trade.

But there would be pressure to move in that direction under a Hard Brexit.

…the EU would be under enormous pressure to lower tariffs and cut a new deal with the U.K. In 2017, the rest of the European Union ran a roughly $90 billion trade surplus with the U.K. So if a Hard Brexit makes it tougher for the rest of the EU to export to the U.K., every national capital in the EU would be flooded with lobbyists asking to cut a deal. Meanwhile, leaving the EU means the U.K. would have the freedom to make free trade deals with the U.S. and Canada, and any other country it wanted, without having to wait for the EU. Yes, a Hard Brexit risks some financial jobs, but the same argument was used when the U.K. decided not to join the Euro currency bloc, after which London kept its role as Europe’s financial center.

For what it’s worth, I’m more interested in whether we can get a really good trade deal between the US and UK following a Hard Brexit.

Regardless, any possible slippage on trade between the UK and EU would be more than offset by the likelihood of better policy in other areas.

…there’s another basic reason why a Hard Brexit would be in the long-term interests of the U.K….any organization powerful enough to overrule the democratic process in the U.K. regarding economic laws and regulations…is also powerful enough to impose anti-free market policies… And, over time, since men are not angels and power corrupts, any international body with such power would gravitate toward policies that aggrandize the international political elite… In fact, the EU has already issued rules that stifle competition, like setting a standard minimum Value-Added Tax rate.

Felix Hathaway from London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, debunks Project Fear in an article just published by Cayman Financial Review.

…the only option ahead with a clear path, and requiring no new legislation in parliament, is some form of ‘Hard Brexit.’ …By Hard Brexit I mean the U.K. leaving the EU on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement. Unlike most other options, this does not require the cooperation of the EU to proceed. In this scenario, the U.K. leaves both Single Market and Customs Union of the European Union at 11 p.m. on March 29, 2019, along with leaving the various political institutions of the EU and the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU. …many of the more alarming warnings of no cooperation at all can be dismissed as fanciful. A more believable ‘no deal’ Brexit might look as follows. …the Commission is doing all it can to publicly rule out this sort of “managed no deal,” yet in doing so has stated that it would unilaterally extend agreements in selected sectors, including for financial services, following a WTO exit. …one could reasonably expect further agreements, possibly at the 11th hour in March… These would likely cover citizens’ rights, road haulage, and facilitated customs checks for certain classes of goods, and would be negotiated with the member states with which the U.K. does the most business.

For what it’s worth, I think vindictive EU bureaucrats probably want to inflict some needless harm, even though it will hurt them as much – and maybe more – than it would hurt the UK.

But Felix is right that common sense – sooner or later – will lead to agreements to smooth over any bumps in the transition. Indeed, he just wrote another article demonstrating how this is already happening.

Here’s the most important part of his article, which I like because it echoes my arguments about the pressure for better policy in an independent United Kingdom.

Ultimately, the most significant factor will be domestic policy decisions by the U.K. government, particularly in areas of taxation and housing. This may be fairly unexciting news at the end of an article about Brexit, but if the U.K. is to succeed as a “free trading, buccaneering nation,” such success will depend in large part on the ability of companies to attract investment through low corporate taxes, and the ability of workers to move to where they will be most productive through further housebuilding in key areas. …perhaps as an unexpected consequence of the conversation surrounding Brexit,… A recent ComRes poll found that, although divided on almost every other aspect, a clear two thirds of voters agree that when Brexit is complete, “the U.K. should try to become the lowest tax, business-friendliest country in Europe, focused on building strong international trade links.”

And keep in mind that bureaucrats in Brussels are pushing to make the European Union more statist (which, sadly, is contrary to the continent’s historical tradition), so it’s becoming ever-more important to escape.

This is why what happens with Brexit is among my greatest hopes and fears for 2019.

Let’s close with a bit of humor.

The Cockburn column in the Spectator mocks the New York Times for its anti-Brexit fanaticism.

The Times usually supports democracy in backward and violent states, but it hates Brexit. No news is too fake for the Times to print when it comes to Brexit. This week, the Times hit new heights of fantasy. ‘Roads gridlocked with trucks. Empty supermarket shelves. An economy thrown into paralysis,’ a would-be novelist named Scott Reyburn wrote earlier this week. His story, ‘As Brexit Looms, the Art World Prepares for the Fallout’, was recycled as a front-page item on the Times’s international edition. …Britain is in a ‘crazed Brexit vortex’, adds Roger Cohen, holder of the Tom Friedman Chair in Applied Chin-Stroking. …Yes, the British government are useless. But nobody in London is stockpiling food. Nobody is fighting in the streets, as the French are every weekend. The markets factored in their Brexit uncertainty two years ago. The supermarkets and roads are as jammed as ever. …The economy is doing much better than the Eurozone, which is slipping into recession. Polls show the British, who the Times characterize as sliding down a neofascist vortex, to be more welcoming of immigration than any other European people.

Bad journalism from the New York Times is hardly a surprise.

I’m mostly sharing his column because this satirical paragraph got me laughing.

The scene that met Cockburn’s eyes upon exiting the terminal at Heathrow reminded him of his days as a foreign correspondent during the Lebanese civil war, or a night out in south London. A dog was eating the innards of a corpse, because supplies of Romanian dog food have broken down. A naked fat man had carved off a slice of his own buttock and was roasting it over a burning tyre, because imports of Bulgarian lamb are held up at Calais. A woman offered to prostitute herself for an avocado, and to sell both of her blank-eyed children for a packet of French butter. There were no black taxis either, because London’s notoriously pro-Brexit taxi drivers had all joined one nationalist militia or other. Finally, a black-market cheese dealer with a rocket launcher affixed to the back of his pickup agreed to take Cockburn into the city. They bribed their way through the checkpoints with wedges of brie. Or not.

Speaking of laughs, Hitler parody videos have become a thing.

Here’s a new Brexit-related installment in the series.

Not as clever as the first Hitler parody I shared as part of my collection of Brexit humor, but it has some funny moments.

And if you have time, this Brexit tapestry is quite amusing.

P.S. There are some anti-Brexit people who support free markets, which is rather baffling since I can’t imagine why they would want the U.K. to be part of a bureaucracy that tries to brainwash children in favor of higher taxes. Indeed I was only semi-joking when I wrote that Brussels was “the most statist place on the planet.”

P.P.S. Though there are many reasons to question whether U.K. politicians can be trusted to adopt good policy.

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The Cayman Islands: A Role Model for Harmony and Prosperity

I’m currently in the Cayman Islands, which is one of my favorite places since – like Bermuda, Monaco, Vanuatu, Antigua and Barbuda, and a few other lucky places in the world – it has no income tax.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the absence of an income tax has helped make the Cayman Islands very prosperous, 14th-richest in the world according to the latest data from the World Bank on per-capita economic output (top 10 in the world if you exclude oil-rich jurisdictions).

This does not mean, incidentally, that economic policy is perfect in the Cayman Islands.

There is a overly large and excessively compensated government bureaucracy. Indeed, financing the civil service is becoming such a burden that the Cayman Islands almost made a suicidal decision to impose an income tax earlier this decade.

And the absence of an income tax doesn’t mean an absence of taxes. Here’s a chart from a 2010 report on the jurisdiction’s fiscal challenges. Yes, the tax burden is low compared to many nations, but the government nonetheless collects plenty of revenue from import duties, fees on financial services, and tourism.

But the key thing to understand is that not all taxes are created equal. Some levies impose much more damage than others.

Richard Rahn, a fellow member of the Cayman Financial Review editorial board, explained this insight a few years ago in a column for the Washington Times.

Cayman is prosperous… Critics of Cayman and other offshore financial centers call them “tax havens,” ignoring the fact that they all have many taxes, particularly on consumption — which is good tax policy — rather than on productive labor and capital — which is bad tax policy. The statist political actors in the high-tax jurisdictions will not admit that people do not work, save and invest if they are going to be overly taxed and otherwise abused by their own governments.

And it’s also worth noting that the Cayman Islands are a role model for racial tranquility.

There are people from 135 nations and “mixed” is the largest racial category.

Here are some excerpts from a column published by Forbes about the progressive social structure of the Cayman Islands.

Somebody recently said to me “The Cayman Islands is just a mailbox.”  I started wondering if that was fair. The Cayman Islands are a real places where people live.  And they are not all attorneys and accountants, although they do have more than their fair share.  …a big upside to the Caymans. …Mr. Leung, who is of Asian descent, noticed a whiff of it in Scotland, but finds the Caymans utterly devoid of racism.  Pirates, refugees, shipwrecked sailors and enslaved people might not seem to be the best material to start a country to some, but clearly there is an upside.

I’ll close by noting that there is some trouble in paradise.

The Cayman Islands faces unrelenting pressure from international bureaucracies and high-tax nations. There is a lot of resentment because the jurisdiction is so successful.

The Cayman Islands will not be bullied by countries that cannot compete with this jurisdiction on a level playing field, Premier Alden McLaughlin told an audience… He said that despite the Cayman government’s cooperation on international standards, the Netherlands and others are more concerned about the zero tax rate here. …“But we will not be bullied by those who are jealous of our success, resentful of our tax policies and unable to compete with us on a level playing field,” McLaughlin said.

What makes these attacks so ironic and unfair is that the Cayman Islands actually has much tougher standards than “onshore” nations such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Since I began this column by looking at World Bank data on the most prosperous, let’s wrap up by perusing the U.N.’s numbers.

Hmmm…, lots of so-called tax havens are on this list. I wonder if we can draw any conclusions?

Folks on the left have accused me of “trading with the enemy” for supporting these jurisdictions, but the real story is that we should emulate rather than prosecute these low-tax jurisdictions.

P.S. My affection for the Cayman Islands is mutual.

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Six Key Things to Understand for Sensible Fiscal Policy

When I’m asked for a basic tutorial on fiscal policy, I normally share my four videos on the economics of government spending and my primer on fundamental tax reform.

But this six-minute interview may be a quicker introduction to spending issues since I had the opportunity to touch on almost every key principle.

Culled from the discussion, here is what everyone should understand about the spending side of the fiscal ledger.

Principle #1 – America’s fiscal problem is a government that is too big and growing too fast. Government spending diverts resources from the productive sector of the economy, regardless of how it is financed. There is real-world evidence that large public sectors sap the private sector’s vitality, augmented by lots of academic research on the negative relationship between government spending and economic performance.

Principle #2 – Entitlements programs are the main drivers of excessive spending. All the long-run forecasts show that the burden of spending is rising because of the so-called mandatory spending programs. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were not designed to keep pace with demographic changes (falling birthrates, increasing longevity), so spending for these program will consume ever-larger shares of economic output.

Principle #3 – Deficits and debt are symptoms of the underlying problem. Government borrowing is not a good idea, but it’s primarily bad because it is a way of financing a larger burden of spending. The appropriate analogy is that, just as a person with a brain tumor shouldn’t fixate on the accompanying headache, taxpayers paying for a bloated government should pay excessive attention to the portion financed by red ink.

Principle #4 – Existing red ink is small compared to the federal government’s unfunded liabilities. People fixate on current levels of deficits and debt, which are a measure of all the additional spending financed by red ink. But today’s amount of red ink is relatively small compared to unfunded liabilities (i.e., measures of how much future spending will exceed projected revenues).

Principle #5 – A spending cap is the best way to solve America’s fiscal problems. Balanced budget rules are better than nothing, but they have a don’t control the size and growth of government. Spending caps are the only fiscal rules that have a strong track record, even confirmed by research from the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Here’s one final principle, though I didn’t mention it in the interview.

Principle #6 – Increasing taxes will make a bad situation worse. Since government spending is the real fiscal problem, higher taxes, at best, replace debt-financed spending with tax-financed spending. In reality, higher taxes loosen political constraints on policy makers and “feed the beast,” so the most likely outcome – as seen in Europe – is that overall spending levels increase and long-term debt actually increases.

In an ideal world, these six principles would be put in a frame and nailed above the desk of every politician, government official, and bureaucrat who deals with fiscal policy.

Not that it would make much difference since their decisions are guided by “public choice” no matter what principles they see at their desk, but it’s nice to fantasize.

Here are a few other observations from the interview.

• Yes, we got much better fiscal results from the Clinton Administration than we did from Bush or Obama. If you go back farther in history, Reagan is the best role model.
• Donald Trump, on the other hand, is allowing government spending to increase even faster than what was projected when he took office.
• Some politicians in Washington want to step on the gas by radically expanding the burden of government spending.
• There’s a lot to like about Switzerland’s ability to attract high-value immigrants, but that issue has nothing to do with the nation’s admirable fiscal policy.

P.S. Needless to say, I wish limits on enumerated powers were still a guiding principle for fiscal policy. Sadly, the days of Madisonian constitutionalism are long gone.

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Ocasio-Cortez Humor

I have an entire page dedicated to columns that mock the evils of socialism and communism.

But we may need a special section for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her vapid – yet earnest – smiley-face statism.

I’ve already shared some AOC humor, but only incidental examples while making other points.

Today, the entire column is dedicated to the younger version of Crazy Bernie.

We’ll start by mocking things she has actually said. Our first item is self-explanatory, at least for anyone with a passing familiarity with 20th-century history.

Our next example captures her utopian statism.

Just think Green New Deal.

I don’t believe this next example is an exact quote, but she is a rabid climate alarmist (though hopefully not this extreme or this extreme) and did say something about time running out, which makes this next bit of satire rather amusing.

Though we should already be boiling to death according to some of Al Gore’s fevered statements, so you can probably still make long-term plans.

AOC is also amazingly ignorant of America’s system of government (probably on purpose since I’m sure she would be horrified about the views of the Founders), though this doesn’t stop her from pontificating on the topic.

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House."

The 3 branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial. pic.twitter.com/8rPSpzottE

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 19, 2018

Let’s get briefly serious.

Some people say we shouldn’t be giving AOC so much attention.

I disagree. Her ideas are so nutty that she presumably helps ordinary people realize that big government is a bad idea.

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal agrees that her radicalism will backfire on Democrats.

The Republican Party has a secret weapon for 2020. It’s especially effective because it’s stealthy… All Republicans have to do is sit back and watch 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez… In a few months she’s gone from an unknown New York bartender to the democratic socialist darling of the left and its media hordes. …Republicans don’t know whether to applaud or laugh. Most do both. …what’s not to love? …She’s made friends with Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, who has been accused of anti-Semitism. She’s called the American system of wealth creation “immoral” and believes government has a duty to provide “economic security” to people who are “unwilling to work.” …Ms. Ocasio-Cortez unveiled her vaunted Green New Deal…which AOC is determined to force a full House vote. That means every Democrat in Washington will get to go on the record in favor of abolishing air travel, outlawing steaks, forcing all American homeowners to retrofit their houses, putting every miner, oil rigger, livestock rancher and gas-station attendant out of a job, and spending trillions and trillions more tax money. Oh, also for government-run health care, which is somehow a prerequisite for a clean economy. …The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution. …AOC may not prove able to eradicate “fully” every family Christmas or strip of bacon in a decade, but that’s the goal. …Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.

Now back to having some fun.

Let’s look at two made-up quotes, both of which are very amusing because you could easily imagine her making these statements.

We’ll start with her proof that socialism is successful.

And here’s a made-up observation about trade policy.

Actually, I don’t recall her supporting protectionism, so it’s possible that there may be an issue where she actually is on the side of economic liberty.

As we begin to wrap up, here’s a satirical video that’s been circulating. Enjoy.

Last but not least, I don’t know if she actually said this next statement, but I’m including it because it made me laugh (though since Venezuelans are eating zoo animals and household pets, I realize it’s not funny in real life).

I also wish the creator of this meme used somebody other than Trump. After all, he’s also guilty of supporting some big-government policies, so he’s hardly the best person to throw stones at socialism since he’s in a house that’s part glass.

But let’s not get hung up on technicalities. I’m for good political satire, even if I don’t agree with the message.

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Are Billionaires Good or Bad?

I don’t always fully agree with Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Institute, but I’m an avid reader of his work because he writes intelligently on issues that I care about.

I especially like it when we’re on the same side. A good example is his recent column about billionaires in the New York Times. He starts by observing that politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are demonizing the super-rich.

Socialists have long held that large stores of private wealth are tantamount to violence against those in need. …Thanks at least in part to Bernie Sanders and the sizzling rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,… Enthusiasm for radical leveling is whistling out of the hard-left fringe… Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s policy adviser, Dan Riffle, contends that “every billionaire is a policy failure”… He’d like to see the 2020 Democratic primary contenders answer a question: Can it be morally appropriate for anyone to be a billionaire?

Will answers Mr. Riffle’s question by noting that the world’s most successful nations operate on the principles of classical liberalism.

…the existence of virtuous three-comma fortunes is a sign not of failure but of supreme policy success. …The empirical record is quite clear about the general form of national political economy that produces the happiest, healthiest, wealthiest, freest and longest lives. There’s no pithy name for it, so we’ll have to settle for “liberal-democratic welfare-state capitalism.” There’s a “social democratic” version, which is what you get in countries like Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. And there’s a “neoliberal” (usually English-speaking) version, which is what you get in countries like Canada, New Zealand and the United States. …in comparative terms, they’re all insanely great. The typical citizen of these countries is as well-off as human beings have ever been. …guess what? There are billionaires in all of them. Egalitarian Sweden, an object of ardent progressive adoration, has more billionaires per capita than the United States.

Spot on.

Nations with a lot of economic freedom produce both billionaires and a high quality of life for ordinary people.

And, yes, that does include some Northern European welfare states (though, if I wrote the column, I would have noted that those nations became rich before welfare states were adopted).

But let’s not digress. Here’s the accompanying chart for Will’s column, which compares how nations score on the U.N.’s Human Development Index (based on lifespans, education, and income) and how many billionaires they have as a share of their populations.

I can’t resist pointing out that Hong Kong and Singapore both score highly, so the “welfare-state” part of “liberal-democratic welfare-state capitalism” certainly isn’t necessary to get on this list.

Indeed, the same is true of the other countries on the list if you look at the history of their economic development.

But I’m digressing again. Let’s get back to the column.

Will issues a very relevant challenge to the class-warfare crowd.

So what’s the problem? Preventing billion-dollar hoards guards against the bad consequences of … having the best sort of polity that has ever existed? …Inspect any credible international ranking of countries by democratic quality, equal treatment under the law or level of personal freedom. You’ll find the same passel of billionaire-tolerant states again and again. If there are billionaires in all the places where people flourish best, why think getting rid of them will make things go better?

And he makes a final point about how honestly earned wealth (i.e., not using government coercion) produces big benefits for the rest of us.

…there’s a big moral difference between positive-sum wealth production and zero-sum wealth extraction — a difference that corresponds to a rough-and-ready distinction between the deserving and undeserving rich. The distinction is sound because there’s a proven a way to make a moral killing: improve a huge number of other people’s lives while capturing a tiny slice of the surplus value. …According to William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, innovators capture about 2 percent of the economic value they create. The rest of it accrues to consumers. Whatever that is, it’s not a raw deal. The accumulation of these innovations over time is the mechanism that drives compounding economic growth, which accounts for a vast improvement over the past 100 years in the typical American standard of living. Some people may have made an ungodly sum in the course of helping make this humanitarian miracle happen, but that’s O.K.

It’s not just O.K., it’s great news.

This is what has produced the unparalleled prosperity of western nations.

Though I fear some of our friends on the left won’t be convinced. At least not the ones who are fixated on inequality.

Some of them very openly admit they are willing to hurt lower-income and middle-class people so long as rich people suffer even more. The International Monetary Fund has even produced studies (yes, more than one!) justifying this harsh ideological view.

Margaret Thatcher is spinning in her grave.

P.S. There is a “Modest Proposal” to “solve” inequality by eliminating the rich.

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Debating the IRS Budget

I recently appeared on CNBC to talk about everyone’s favorite government agency, those warm and cuddly folks at the IRS.

Our tax system is a dysfunctional mess, but you’ll notice that I mostly blamed politicians. After all, they are the ones who have unceasingly made the internal revenue code more complex, starting on that dark day in 1913 when the income tax was approved.

But I don’t want to give the IRS a free pass.

I’ve cited IRS incompetence and misbehavior in the past, most notably when discussing political bias, targeted harassment, and other shenanigans.

And, as illustrated by these five examples, we can always cite new evidence.

Such as lack of accountability.

…a new report from the Cause of Action Institute reveals that the IRS has been evading numerous oversight mechanisms, and it refuses to comply with laws requiring it to measure the economic impact of its rules. Congress has passed several laws, including the Regulatory Flexibility Act and the Congressional Review Act, that require agencies to report on their rules’ economic impact to lawmakers and the public. …These good-government measures are meant to ensure unelected bureaucrats can be checked by the public. …the IRS has made up a series of exemptions that allow it to avoid basic scrutiny. The agency takes the position that its rules have no economic effect because any impact is attributable to the underlying law that authorized the rule.

Such as inefficiency.

Private debt collectors cost the Internal Revenue Service $20 million in the last fiscal year, but brought in only $6.7 million in back taxes, the agency’s taxpayer advocate reported Wednesday. That was less than 1 percent of the amount assigned for collection. What’s more, private contractors in some cases were paid 25 percent commissions on collections that the I.R.S. made without their help…the report stated, “the I.R.S. has implemented the program in a manner that causes excessive financial harm to taxpayers and constitutes an end run around taxpayer rights protections.”

Such as rewarding scandal.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued more than $1.7 million in awards in fiscal 2016 and early fiscal 2017 to employees who had been disciplined by the agency, a Treasury Department watchdog said. “Some of these employees had serious misconduct, such as unauthorized access to tax return information, substance abuse and sexual misconduct,” the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said in a report made public this week. …in fiscal 2016 and early fiscal 2017, the IRS had given awards to nearly 2,000 employees who were disciplined in the 12 months prior to receiving the bonus.

By the way, the IRS has a pattern of rewarding bad behavior.

Such as pursuing bad policy.

…for 35 years the Internal Revenue Service has exempted itself from the most basic regulatory oversight. …Tax regulations (like all regulations) have exploded in recent decades, and of course IRS bureaucrats impose their own policy judgments. The IRS has in recent years unilaterally decided when and how to enforce ObamaCare tax provisions, often dependent on political winds. In 2016 it proposed a rule to force more business owners to pay estate and gift taxes via a complicated new reading of the law. …Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury…department is inexplicably backing IRS lawlessness with a string of excuses.

Again, this is not the first time the IRS has interfered with congressional policy.

Such as stifling political speech.

The Internal Revenue Service infamously targeted dissenters during President Obama’s re-election campaign. Now the IRS is at it again. Earlier this year it issued a rule suppressing huge swaths of First Amendment protected speech. …The innocuously named Revenue Procedure 2018-5 contains a well-hidden provision enabling the Service to withhold tax-exempt status from organizations seeking to improve “business conditions . . . relating to an activity involving controlled substances…” The rule does not apply to all speech dealing with the listed substances, only that involving an “improvement” in “business conditions,” such as legalization or deregulation. …This is constitutionally pernicious viewpoint discrimination.

In other words, the bureaucrats didn’t learn from the Lois Lerner scandal.

Now that I’ve hopefully convinced people that I’m not going soft on IRS malfeasance, let’s look at the budgetary issue that was the focus of the CNBC interview.

Is the IRS budget too small? Should it be increased so that more agents can conduct more audits and extract more money?

Both the host and my fellow guest started from the assumption that the IRS budget has been gutted. But that relies on cherry-picked data, starting when the IRS budget was at a peak level in 2011 thanks in part to all the money sloshing around Washington following Obama’s failed stimulus legislation.

Here are the more relevant numbers, taken from lines 2564-2609 of this massive database in the OMB’s supplemental materials on the budget. As you can see, IRS spending – adjusted for inflation – has nearly doubled since the early 1980s.

In other words, we shouldn’t feel sorry for the IRS and give it more money.

To augment these numbers, I made two simple points in the above interview.

• First, we should demand more efficiency from the bureaucracy.
• Second, we should reform the tax code to eliminate complexity.

The latter point is especially important because we could dramatically improve compliance while also shrinking the IRS if we had a simple and fair system such as the flat tax.

Last but not least, here’s a clip from another recent interview. I explained that the recent shutdown will be used as an excuse for any problems that occur in the near future.

Standard operating procedure for any bureaucracy.

P.S. My archive of IRS humor features a new Obama 1040 form, a death tax cartoon, a list of tax day tips from David Letterman, a Reason video, a cartoon of how GPS would work if operated by the IRS, an IRS-designed pencil sharpener, two Obamacare/IRS cartoons (here and here), a collection of IRS jokes, a sale on 1040-form toilet paper (a real product), a song about the tax agency, the IRS’s version of the quadratic formula, and (my favorite) a joke about a Rabbi and an IRS agent.

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Supreme Court Chips Away at Egregious Scam of Civil Asset Forfeiture

It’s not easy being a libertarian. Thanks to senseless and harmful government policies, you run the risk of being perpetually outraged.

• One day, you get angry because an innocent person is being harassed by the bureaucracy.
• The next day, you’re upset because insiders are using their political connections to get unearned wealth.
• The following day, your blood boils when you learn the government stole somebody’s property.

Well, we have some good news about that final example.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the odious practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Professor Ilya Somin, from George Mason University’s Law School, explains the legal issues.

The decision is potentially a major victory for property rights and civil liberties. The key questions before the Court are whether the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is “incorporated” against state governments and, if so, whether at least some state civil asset forfeitures violate the Clause. The justices answered both questions with a unanimous and emphatic “yes.” As a result, the ruling could help curb abusive asset forfeitures, which enable law enforcement agencies to seize property that they suspect might have been used in a crime – including in many cases where the owner has never been convicted of anything, or even charged. Abusive forfeitures are a a widespread problem that often victimizes innocent people and particularly harms the poor. …the Court…previously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates nearly all of the rest of the Bill of Rights against the states, including the Excessive Bail and Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clauses of the very same amendment. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion offers a good explanation of why incorporation of the Clause is easily justified under the Court’s precedents.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal opined favorably on the ruling.

Police and prosecutors around America have long used asset forfeiture as a cash cow, but a unanimous Supreme Court ruling Wednesday should make them think twice. The Bill of Rights keeps paying dividends even after 228 years. …Justices left and right agree. In her opinion for the Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held that the safeguard on excessive fines, quoting earlier cases, is “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” …the Court’s ruling in Timbs v. Indiana puts states and cities on notice. Some police departments have set annual targets for asset seizures, and a limiting legal principle has been nowhere to be found. During oral argument, Indiana’s solicitor general said that if a driver in a Ferrari was going five miles over the speed limit, that could be grounds for police to take the car. …defendants trying to protect their property against unjust state seizure will now have the Constitution firmly on their side.

While this decision is good news, let’s not get too excited.

What we really need is for the Supreme Court to rule that the entire practice of civil asset forfeiture is unconstitutional.

Unlike criminal asset forfeiture, there’s no finding of illegal behavior in cases of civil asset forfeiture. Indeed, in many cases, the government steals the property of people who aren’t even charged with a crime!

That’s why it is so outrageous and immoral.

Here’s a short video on the topic from the Institute for Justice (which, incidentally, deserves credit for the victory at the Supreme Court).

P.S. It’s worth noting that the first two people to lead the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture division have repented their sins and say the racket should be ended. Too bad Trump is on the wrong side.

P.P.S. Given the human misery it has caused, we shouldn’t laugh about asset forfeiture, but this bit of humor is very entertaining.

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New York vs. Florida, Round #1

I shared data a couple of weeks ago showing that Florida is the freest state in America (for both overall freedom and economic freedom) while New York is in last place (in both categories).

Well, it seems that freedom has consequences when people can “vote with their feet.”

We’ll start with an op-ed in the Miami Herald by Ed Pozzuoli.

In a recent press conference, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo…mentioned Florida as an attractive option for New Yorkers who are unhappy… a Census Bureau report late last year detailing the states that lost residents because of high taxes, overregulation and dwindling opportunities. Leading the list? New York. …what jurisdiction did the Census folks say benefits the most from domestic “in-migration? You guessed it — Florida… our low-tax, business-friendly welcome to asylum seekers from Big Government states like New York… It’s Florida’s low taxes and reasonable regulatory environment that attract businesses here. Florida ranks sixth among states for new business creation. …Unlike the federal government, Florida balances its budget and does so without an income tax. New York can keep its big progressive government.

And that “big progressive government” means onerous and punitive taxes, as the Wall Street Journal opined.

New York City’s combined state and local top rate of 12.7% hits taxpayers earning more than $1 million and is the second highest in the country after California. The deduction limit raised New York’s top rate by an effective 5%, though this was partially offset by the tax reform’s 2.6 percentage-point reduction in the federal top rate. …According to IRS data we’ve examined, New York state lost $8.4 billion in income to other states in 2016 (the latest available data), up from $4.6 billion annually on average during the prior four years. Florida raked in the most New York wealth. Mr. Cuomo says that “a taxpayer in Florida would see no increase, or a decrease” under the GOP tax reform and “Florida also has no estate tax.” New York’s 16% estate tax hits assets over $10.1 million. …Mr. Cuomo promised to let New York’s tax surcharge on millionaires expire. But he has extended it again and again and now wants to renew it through 2024 because he says the state needs the money. Meantime, he warns that a wealth exodus could force spending cuts for education and higher taxes on middle-income earners. All of this was inevitable, as we and others warned. Yet rather than propose to make the state’s tax burden more competitive, Mr. Cuomo rages against a tax reform that has helped the overall U.S. economy, even in New York.

I especially enjoy how Governor Cuomo is irked because his state’s profligacy is no longer subsidized by an unlimited federal deduction for state and local taxes.

Investor’s Business Daily shares a similar perspective.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo…we appreciate his recent frankness on taxes. …”I don’t believe raising taxes on the rich,” Cuomo said. “That would be the worst thing to do. You would just expand the shortfall. God forbid if the rich leave.” …In support of his comments, Cuomo cited “anecdotal” evidence that showed high-income earners are leaving the high-tax Empire State for other low-tax states. But the evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. It’s a fact. …From 2010 to mid-2017, New York had a net outmigration of over 1 million people, more than any other state. No, they’re not all rich. But many are. …the wealthy have choices that others don’t. One of those choices is to move if taxes become not merely burdensome, but punitive. That’s what’s happening in New York. …Many high-income taxpayers are leaving New York for low-tax states, tired of paying the state’s bills and then being demonized leftist activists for being “rich” and told they must give more.

Let’s close with some excerpts from a column in the Washington Times by Richard Rahn. He compares New York, Virginia, and Florida.

…many high-income New Yorkers have been moving their tax homes to Florida, undermining the New York tax base. …Florida imposes no state and local income taxes… Florida is booming, with a budget surplus, while New York is mired in debt. Only 50 years ago, New York had four times the population of Florida, and now Florida is larger than New York. …the state of Florida…created an environment where businesses could flourish without undue tax burdens and government interference. It went from being a poor state to a prosperous one. …citizens of New York should be asking: Why they are required to pay such high state and local income tax rates while the citizens of Florida get by perfectly well without any state income tax; Why they have three times more per capita debt than Floridians, and infrastructure that is in far worse shape; …Why it takes a third more of their citizens’ personal income to run the government than in Virginia or Florida; Why their state takes twice the percentage of per capita income in taxes than Virginia and Florida; …When it comes to taxes and government services, people’s feet tell more about how they feel than their mouths.

And if you want to know why so many people are traveling down I-95 from New York to Florida, this table from Richard’s column tells you everything you need to know.

For what it’s worth, there are people who are willing to pay extra tax to live in certain high-tax states. New York City has an allure for some people, as does California’s climate and scenery.

But are those factors enough to compensate for awful tax systems? Will they save those states from economic decay?

At best, they’ll delay the day of reckoning. For what it’s worth, I actually think New Jersey or Illinois will be the first state to fiscally self-destruct.

You can cast your vote by clicking here.

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Trade, Congress, Separation of Powers, the Administrative State, and the Constitution

One of the interesting games in Washington is deciding who on the right (however defined) is a “Trumpie” and who is a “Reaganite.”

Here are a few indicators.

• If you claim to be for small government, but cheer Trump’s support of greater federal involvement in child care, you’re not a Reaganite.
• If you claim to be for small government, but supported Trump when he broke the spending caps, you’re not a Reaganite.
• If you claim to be for small government, but no longer care about entitlements because Trump opposes reform, you’re not a Reaganite.

But, given the huge gap in their views, trade is probably the biggest way of separating the Trumpies from the Reaganites.

And if you want a clear dividing line for Members of Congress, just see whether they support the “Reciprocal Trade Act” or the “Congressional Trade Authority Act.”

The former is sponsored by Congressman Sean Duffy of Wisconsin and would empower Trump to impose more taxes on trade.

Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union is wisely skeptical.

…treating our trading partners as allies rather than adversaries has paid enormous dividends for Americans. Just since 1990, world tariffs fell by nearly two-thirds as U.S. exports more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation. …The Reciprocal Trade Act would turn this successful approach to trade on its head. …proponents who endorse this approach often argue that tariff reciprocity is needed to as a lever to reduce foreign trade barriers. But the White House’s own case studies show this is untrue. …Trump wants to replace a successful post-World War II policy based on the understanding that trade is win-win with one that is likely to encourage foreign governments to retaliate against Americans. …History shows trade policy is more likely to succeed if it is based on the Golden Rule instead of on hostile eye-for-an eye reciprocity. It turns out that the United States benefits when we treat our trading partners the way we would like them to treat us. …Princeton University’s Robert Keohane described how countries benefit from this “sequential reciprocity”… The goal of the Trump administration’s trade policy should be to promote reciprocal trade, not reciprocal taxes.

Here’s a chart from Bryan’s study that shows how trade liberalization in recent decades has been very successful.

In an article for National Interest, Clark Packard also pours cold water on the Reciprocal Trade Act.

The United States Reciprocal Trade Act, which will soon be introduced by Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), would expand the president’s already enormous unilateral authority to impose tariffs and other import restrictions. …the Reciprocal Trade Act would grant the president the authority to match the tariff applied to any given product by a trading partner. To use one of the administration’s favorite examples, the Europe Union applies a 10 percent tariff on imported automobiles, while the United States levies a 2.5 percent tariff on its imports. The Reciprocal Trade Act would allow the president unilaterally to raise the tariff to 10 percent on European cars as leverage for further negotiations.

He lists some of the reasons why the proposed law is bad policy.

The bill is enormously flawed and should be a nonstarter for myriad reasons. …violates U.S. commitments to the WTO’s Most-Favored Nation (MFN) principle of nondiscrimination. …The bill also would violate U.S. commitments under Article II of GATT. …the effect of the law would be that countries would retaliate against American exports and ensnare unrelated industries in a tit-for-tat. …The United States has been successful in getting other countries to lower tariffs and other trade barriers through negotiations. …the Reciprocal Trade Act would jeopardize this American-led system that has paid enormous dividends.

All of his points are accurate, though I don’t expect the president’s supporters would care about violating WTO obligations since they presumably would cheer if Trump pulled the U.S. out of the the agreement – even though it has been very beneficial for the United States.

Now let’s look at the Congressional Trade Authority Act, which would restrict rather than expand the ability of the executive branch to impose higher taxes on trade.

Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks explains the principles at stake.

…the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act would ensure that all tariffs imposed by the executive branch in the name of national security must first be approved by Congress. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution establishes that Congress “shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” The framers, in their wisdom, made this the very first power they delegated specifically to the legislative branch of the United States. Tariffs are taxes, and they adversely impact American consumers. Such measures should be enacted only after thoughtful debate by the elected representatives most accountable to the people of the United States. They should not be handed down unilaterally from the White House. …it’s time for Congress to reclaim their enumerated Article I power over trade. …FreedomWorks agrees with Rep. Gallagher and Sen. Toomey on the need to respect our Constitution and ensure Congress has full control over its Article I authority.

The Wall Street Journal opines favorably about Senator Toomey’s legislation.

…some on Capitol Hill are trying again to rein in the President’s tariff powers. …the Pennsylvania Republican…Mr. Toomey’s bill would require Congress’s blessing. Once a tariff is proposed, lawmakers have 60 days to pass a privileged resolution—no Senate filibuster to block consideration—authorizing it. No approval, no tariff.This is a serious reassertion of the Article I trade powers that Congress has long shirked. Since the bill is retroactive, President Trump would have to convince Congress that his tariffs on steel and aluminum are necessary. If lawmakers didn’t agree, the tariffs would end. …But that’s not all. The Commerce Secretary is now responsible for declaring that an import endangers national security. This bill would give the task, sensibly, to the Defense Secretary.

I like what Senator Toomey is trying to achieve. And I like it, not only because I don’t want politicians interfering with trade, but also because I support the Constitution.

America’s Founders deliberately set up a system based on Separation of Powers because they understood that unilateral power was a recipe for government abuse.

Interestingly, many Trumpies also claim to support the Constitution. Indeed, they are some of the biggest critics of the “administrative state,” which developed as federal agencies began to exercise legislative powers.

Which gives me an opportunity to contribute something to this discussion. I’m a great admirer of the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry, in part because of his very clever hypocrisy-exposing Venn Diagrams (taxation and incentives, the War on Drugs, minimum wage, Food and Drug Administration, and consenting adults).

So, in hopes of showing Trumpies the error of their ways, here’s my humble attempt to copy Mark.

P.S. Even though open trade is very beneficial for American prosperity, I would not want a future president to assert unilateral power to eliminate tariffs. Yes, I want better policy, but I also support the Constitution and the rule of law.

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Low-Income Workers Are Victimized by Spain’s Suffocating Taxation

I’m not an optimist about the future of Europe, mostly because welfare states are unaffordable in nations suffering from demographic decline.

Given the grim trends on the continent, I expect many other nations (probably led by Italy) will experience the fiscal and economic mess that we’ve seen in Greece.

Let’s dig into this issue by reviewing a story in the New York Times about economic stagnation in Europe, focused mostly on Spain.

After decades of living comfortably in Spain’s upper middle class, the middle-aged couple are struggling with their decline. Spain’s economy, like the rest of Europe’s, is growing faster than before the 2008 financial crisis and creating jobs. But the work they could find pays a fraction of the combined 80,000-euro annual income they once earned. …Since the recession of the late 2000s, the middle class has shrunk in over two-thirds of the European Union…they face unprecedented levels of vulnerability.

So why are middle-class workers in such bad shape?

As you read the article, you find references to factors such as the “financial crisis” and “weakened social protections,” but no coherent explanation for why the private sector is languishing.

Unless you read all the way down to the 22nd paragraph, where you finally get an interesting detail that probably explains much of Spain’s economic malaise. Taxes are so absurdly high that a guy with a modest income only gets to keep one-third of the money he earns! This is such a jaw-dropping factoid that I’ve made it an image rather than an indented excerpt.

Wow, the confiscatory tax rates that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders want to impose on “rich” people in the United States already are already being imposed on low-income taxpayers in Spain.

No wonder Spaniards are so inventive about avoiding taxes.

And this story is a perfect example of why I constantly warn that European-type redistribution policies in the United States would result in much higher taxes for lower-income and middle-class taxpayers.

By the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the current Spanish government (just like a previous Spanish government) wants to make a bad situation even worse.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez… The Socialist leader grabbed power last summer with the fragile backing of Podemos, the left-wing anti-austerity party. Warning of middle-class frustrations, his embattled government ordered a 22 percent rise in the minimum wage in January, and has vowed to reverse some labor laws, increase social spending and raise taxes on companies and the rich.

There’s an election in April, so we’ll see whether Sánchez’s plan to impoverish his country actually gets adopted.

My only prediction, based on what’s happened in the past, is that tax increases will not be successful.

P.S. The story has two additional excerpts that help to explain Spain’s anemic performance. We have very strong evidence in the United States that unemployment benefits subsidize joblessness. Spain appears to be learning the same lesson, though the government still pays people to be unemployed for 1-1/2 years.

Unemployment benefits…that state money, with budget cuts, now lasts 18 months, down from 24.

I’ve also written about how so-called labor-protection laws discourage hiring. Well, seems like Spain is a very grim example of how this type of intervention backfires on intended beneficiaries.

…temporary and part-time contracts…can lead to steady work and better incomes. But companies and Europe’s public sector have mostly used them to dodge protections for permanent employees. In Spain alone, 90 percent of new jobs in 2017 were temporary.

P.P.S. Spain has a member of the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, though the guy who “put a decimal point in the wrong place” probably also deserves induction.

P.P.P.S. Here’s a sobering look at pre- and post-1990 growth in Spain and Poland.

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Basic Income and Handouts for People Who Are “Unwilling to Work”

When I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called Green New Deal, I mostly focused on the very expensive fiscal implications. I also noted that AOC’s proposed 70 percent tax rate on the rich wouldn’t even pay for a tiny fraction of the multi-trillion dollar cost (in other words, you and me would be pillaged).

Others focused on some of the inane goals of the legislation, such as phasing out cows and air travel.

But the part of the plan that produced the most controversy was the promise to provide “economic security” to those “unwilling to work.” This generated so much mockery that it no longer appears in any supporting documents and some supporters even claim that it never was part of the plan.

But some true believers aren’t backing down. Let’s look at some excerpts from Christine Emba’s recent column in the Washington Post.

The rollout of the progressives’ Green New Deal has been less than smooth. One major reason: the release of an FAQ that listed “economic security” for those “unwilling to work” as one of the program’s goals. “Unwilling”? The now-retracted FAQ made other eyebrow-raising claims, but conservatives pounced on that word in particular. …welfare as a reward for laziness, it was called extreme, absurd…a “Communist Manifesto, 21st Century.”

Give Ms. Emba credit.

She didn’t pretend, like many other folks on the left, that the promise of no-strings handouts for the indolent wasn’t part of AOC’s original plan. For this reason, we should probably add her to our collection of honest leftists.

But while I applaud the honesty at the start of her column, the analysis that follows is profoundly awful.

She basically argues that the success of welfare should be judged by whether recipients are happy to get free money.

…is the idea of unconditional economic security really so extraordinary? …A state-dispensed, unconditional cash stipend for every single citizen — whether willing to work or not — has been touted as a way to…perhaps end deep poverty …most Americans look askance at the idea of giving anyone anything free, let alone something as intangible as well-being. It’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, after all. Actually getting it is up to you. But what if we thought differently? Well-being — happiness in some sense… Health is a key measure of well-being. Adequate food and housing support it. …Which outcomes do we really care about? …Work isn’t all that matters. Improving well-being is a more than respectable goal.

And she even cites the failed program from Finland to justify her position.

Finland recently completed a landmark basic income project… One of the main goals of the Finnish project was to test whether a basic income would promote employment. …the program wasn’t much of a success: During the first 12 months, at least, basic income recipients fared no better or worse at finding employment than a control group. But it made a radical difference in other ways. “The basic income recipients of the test group reported better well being in every way,” chief researcher Olli Kangas told Reuters.

For all intents and purposes, Ms. Emba is lowering the bar for success. Basic income no longer should be supported because it will encourage more work (as some claim). Instead, we should support it because non-working people will be happy to get more handouts.

Let’s think about what that means. I wrote about socialism a week ago and I shared a very persuasive cartoon that shows why the theory has an inherent practical flaw.

While I’m tempted to recycle that cartoon again, this Wizard-of-Id parody makes the same point.

The bottom line is rather grim. A society that taxes productivity and subsidizes idleness over time will get less of the former and more of the latter.

P.S. While recipients express positive thoughts when they get more handouts, Arthur Brooks has explained that depending on others is not a route to a genuinely happy and fulfilled life.

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part V: With 162+ Choices, How Many Nations Qualify?

Over the past four days, I’ve looked at the supposed socialism of Venezuela, the Nordic nations, Greece, and France.

And I chose those nations deliberately because I used them as examples in this clip from a recent interview.

All of them are sometimes labeled as socialist countries, but if you look at the rankings from Economic Freedom of the World, you notice that this analysis doesn’t make much sense.

For example, the Nordic nations have a lot of economic liberty and are only slightly behind to the United States, which is why I explained last year that if those nations are socialist, then so is America.

And there is a big gap between the Nordic nations and France. And then another big gap before getting to Greece, and also a big gap before reaching Venezuela at the bottom. Should all of those nations get the same label?

So where do we draw the line to separate socialist nations from non-socialist nations?

I confess that I don’t have an answer because (as I’ve noted many times) we don’t have a good definition of socialism.

If socialism is central planning, government-determined prices, and government ownership of the means of production, then the only nations that really qualify are probably Cuba and North Korea. And they aren’t even part of the rankings because of inadequate economic data.

But if having a welfare state is socialism, then every jurisdiction other than Hong Kong and Singapore presumably qualifies.

Given this imprecision, I’m very curious to see where people think the line should be drawn.

P.S. This is why I usually just refer to statism or statists.

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part IV: French Dirigisme

My multi-part series on Socialism in the Modern World has featured Venezuela, the Nordic nations, and Greece.

But no discussion of dirigiste policy would be complete without a look at France.

After all, not only does France have a history of imposing 100-percent-plus tax rates, it also hold the dubious honor of being Europe’s biggest welfare state.

And it has the highest overall burden of government spending.

These are not good numbers, especially when you consider the demographic changes that are happening in Europe.

Sadly, there’s a long history of French statism. Andras Toth of the Carl Menger Institute explained some of the France’s grim economic history.

If there is an example of a dirigiste, interventionist state, then that is France in Europe. France was the birthplace of the mercantilist, absolutist monarchy in the early modern period. …the practice of mercantilist protection and monopolization of key industries, including the state-mandated “industrial development policies” …Under the rule of the famous finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert… France sank into a series of crises and lost her preeminent position in Europe. …The modern French state is the stepchild of the political culture of the Bourbons. It is the prime example of dirigisme. It redistributes as much as 56 percent of annual GDP and imposes the highest tax burden in Europe. The French state directly manages key industries and sustains one of the largest welfare states in Europe. It also imposes complicated bureaucratic red tape on economic actors, trailing way behind the Scandinavian states and Germany as far as ease of business is concerned.

Though he also explains that the current president seems to understand that France needs less government and more economic freedom.

Macron was the first French politician to build his election campaign on reform and competitiveness in order to keep up France’s position in the world. Those who voted for him knew what to expect. As a member of Hollande’s team, he proposed increasing the work week from 35 to 37 hours to lessen the tax burden on higher incomes, and the competitiveness package he developed aimed to lessen the protection of workers and companies in order to promote growth. …France is again at a crossroads: She has to choose between the policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and those of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the great French liberal economist who was the economic minister of France between 1774 and 1776 and who argued for free trade, less taxation, and less regulation.

I also sympathize with what Macron is trying to achieve (at least with regard to domestic reforms).

But I fear it may be too little and too late.

Especially since the New York Times reports that Macron is increasingly unpopular.

…attacks…that Mr. Macron is a self-seeking servant of society’s fortunate… The undisguised hostility has made clear that, less than a year into this new presidency, anti-Macron sentiment is emerging as a potent force. It is being fueled by a pervasive sense that Mr. Macron is pushing too far, too fast in too many areas — nicking at the benefits of pensioners and low earners, giving dollops to the well-off and slashing sacred worker privileges.

Though he does deserve some of his unpopularity. He imposed green taxes late last year that triggered nationwide riots from motorists and other unhappy citizens.

But he’s also unpopular for some of his good policies, which leads me to fear that France may be past the tipping point, meaning that genuine and meaningful reform no longer is possible because too many voters are on the government teat.

I hope that’s not the case. France used to be one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world. But now its living standards are barely average according to the OECD’s AIC numbers.

Because of the ongoing debate about what the term actually means, it’s unclear whether France’s tepid economic performance can be blamed on socialism.

But we shouldn’t doubt that the country is paying a considerable price for having too much government.

P.S. My favorite cartoon about French socialism actually features Barack Obama.

P.P.S. One of the world’s greatest economists was French, but politicians in France obviously ignored Bastiat just like they ignored Turgot.

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part III: The Tragedy of Greece in Five Charts

In Part I of this series, we examined the horrific tragedy of Venezuelan statism, and in Part II of this series, we looked at the Scandinavian “free-market welfare state.”

Today, Part III will look at the ongoing deterioration of Greece.

I’ve written many times about how the mess in Greece was caused by an ever-rising fiscal burden.

Let’s look at two charts, drawing from the government spending section of Our World in Data, that confirm my argument.

This first chart shows the overall burden of government spending starting in 1880. As you can see, spending generally consumed a bit more than 20 percent of the nation’s economy (other than during wars) all the way from 1880 to the mid-1960s.

And then the spending burden exploded.

What drove that unfortunate increase in the spending burden?

We get that answer in our next chart, which shows that redistribution outlays have skyrocketed in recent years.

In other words, the welfare state is 100-percent responsible for the Greek fiscal crisis, whether you look at short-run data or these long-run numbers.

Has all this additional spending generated any good results?

Hardly.

As government has become larger and crowded out the private sector, that has dampened hopes for the Greek people. As reported by the Washington Post, they are responding with fewer children and more emigration.

During the country’s deep and prolonged crash, which began in late 2009 and worsened in 2011 and beyond, an already low birthrate ticked down further, as happened throughout the troubled economies of southern Europe. Greece was also hit by a second factor, with half a million people fleeing the country, many of them young potential parents. …Greece’s fertility rate, of about 1.35 births per woman, is among the lowest in Europe, and well below the rate of 2.1 needed for a stable population… In 2009, just before the fiercest parts of the crisis, there were 117,933 births in Greece. The number has since fallen steadily, becoming well eclipsed by the number of deaths. The birth total in 2017, 88,553, was the lowest on record.

This chart from the story is amazing, though in a very grim way.

This demographic implosion might not be a big problem if Greece was like Hong Kong and had a privatized system for Social Security.

But that’s obviously not the case. Instead, Greece is a morass of expensive entitlements.

Notwithstanding all the bad news, special interests in Greece continue to lobby for more spending and favors.

And they have allies in Europe, as indicated by this report in the EU Observer.

Dunja Mijatovic, the CoE’s commissioner for human rights, told EUobserver that Greeks are still suffering from the aftermath of international bailouts and imposed economic structural reforms. …Her comments follow the publication of her 30-page report on the impact of austerity measures in Greece, which says the fallout has violated people’s right to health, enshrined in the European Social Charter, and eroded the quality of schools. …Mijatovic, who toured Greece over the summer, says she was struck at the large cuts in areas like maternal and child health services.

Though I want to be fair.

There is occasional progress in the country, as indicated by another story from the EU Observer.

Greece has taken one step closer to the separation of church and state by removing 10,000 church employees off the public payroll. A deal agreed between prime minister Alexis Tsipras and archbishop Ieronymos II also includes a settlement of a decade-old property dispute between the Greek state and the Orthodox Church – which is one of the country’s largest real estate owners.

I consider this a small step in the right direction.

The Israeli government may even want to learn something from this reform.

And there are other hopeful signs, as illustrated by this story from Der Spiegel.

Olga Gerovasili, …administrative reform minister…is overseeing an administrative overhaul that could transform the country like nothing else has since Greece joined the EU. She wants to abolish Greek clientelism. …For centuries, the Greek administration was little more than an excuse for legal nepotism. …Relationships were more important than skills for filling official positions. …Job appointments are no longer to be in the hands of powerful local politicians… The aim of the system is also to use it to remove incompetent officials. …Another revolution. The Greek administration was legendarily labyrinthian. Files could travel for years through dozens of official offices. When bureaucrats aren’t hired for their skills, they need to justify their existence by signing as many things as possible. …Much like the nepotism, this is also to become a thing of the past.

I hope these reforms are real and permanent.

After all, a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy is one of the primary causes of excessive spending in Greece. But time will tell.

After all, it’s not easy taking away goodies from an entitled population.

“Greece finally needs to open its markets — that’s the most important thing,” says Aristides Hatzis, 51, a law professor at the University of Athens. Hatzis has written one of Greece’s most surprising bestsellers of the past few years: an introduction to laissez-faire thinking. It’s surprising because economic liberalism doesn’t have any deep roots in Greece. …”In the past decades, the governments have so overwhelmingly failed that Greeks blame everything that goes wrong on the state,” says Hatzis. …”It’s difficult to take away the privileges of influential lobby groups.” As long as that doesn’t happen, he says, the country won’t recover.

Having looked at the evolution of Greece’s economy, let’s now look at how the nation’s politicians have been responding to the crisis.

Are they liberalizing, or are they digger the hole deeper? In other words, are the good reforms larger than the backsliding, or vice-versa?

Naomi Klein will be happy with the answer. Here are two more charts, based on numbers from Economic Freedom of the World, both of which show that Greece is moving in the wrong direction.

First, we see that Greece’s score has dropped over the past 10 years.

And why has economic freedom declined?

The main cause is that fiscal policy has become much worse, thanks in large part to the IMF and various bailouts (which actually were designed to bail out irresponsible banks in nations such as France and Germany).

In any event, the nation’s politicians gladly accepted bad advice and used bailout money as an excuse to impose higher taxes, followed by higher taxes, and then decided to push taxes even higher.

The bottom line is that it is difficult to be optimistic about Greece.

Yes, there are some signs of hope. More and more people realize that big government has been bad for Greece.

But it’s not easy to get good reforms in a nation where most voting-age adults are directly or indirectly mooching off taxpayers.

P.S. Democratic socialism is better than totalitarian socialism, but it doesn’t produce good results.

P.P.S. Folks on the left argue that Greece is not a good example of socialism. They say it’s a cronyist economy rather than a socialist economy. Given the various definitions of socialism, they’re both right and wrong. I’ll simply note that there are many state-owned enterprises in Greece and the government has been dragging its feet about auctioning them to the private sector. So Greece is definitely closer to socialism than Sweden.

P.P.P.S. Here’s some Greek-related humor. This cartoon is amusing, but this this one is my favorite. And the final cartoon in this post also has a Greek theme.

We also have a couple of videos. The first one features a video about…well, I’m not sure, but we’ll call it a European romantic comedy and the second one features a Greek comic pontificating about Germany.

Last but not least, here are some very un-PC maps of how various peoples – including the Greeks – view different European nations. Speaking of stereotypes, the Greeks are in a tight race with the Italians and Germans for being considered untrustworthy.

P.P.P.P.S. If you want some unintentional humor, did you know that Greece subsidizes pedophiles and requires stool samples to set up online companies?

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part II: The Nordic Model

In Part I of our series on Socialism in the Modern World, we looked at the tragic story of Venezuela.

Today, we’re going to look at what we can learn from the Nordic nations. And the first thing to understand, as I explain in this interview, is that these nations are only socialist if the definition is watered down.

As I noted in the interview, real socialism is based on government ownership and control of the “means of production.” But Nordic countries don’t have government-owned factories, government-controlled allocation of resources, or government regulation of prices.

In other words, those nations are not socialist (government ownership), they’re not fascist (government control), and they’re not even corporatist (cronyism).

So what are they?

In a column for the Washington Post, Max Boot accurately describes them as free-market welfare states.

…rigging elections and locking up or killing political opponents. This is one model of socialism — the same approach that has been applied in Cuba and the Soviet Union. But there are many other varieties that are far more benign. …the Scandinavian model. …Denmark, Norway and Sweden…show that a “free-market welfare state” isn’t an oxymoron. …By some measures, moreover, they are freer, economically…than the United States.

That last sentence isn’t a typo. The United States has more overall economic freedom than the Nordic nations, but both Denmark and Finland actually rank above America when looking at factors other than fiscal policy.

And Sweden and Norway only trail the United States by 0.03 and 0.06 points, respectively.

That being said, a big lesson to learn is that fiscal policy is a mess in the Scandinavian countries.

…there is nothing sinister about wanting to emulate the Scandinavian example. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s practical. The Scandinavians have lower corporate tax rates than the United States but much higher individual taxes. …The Scandinavian countries also charge hefty value-added taxes of 25 percent on consumption. The United States doesn’t have a national sales tax, and the average rate for state sales taxes is only 7 percent. In all, Scandinavians pay $25,488 a head in taxes compared with $14,793 a head in the United States — 72 percent more. This is what it takes to finance a Scandinavian-style social welfare state. It can’t be done simply by raising marginal tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers to 70 percent, as Ocasio-Cortez suggests, because few taxpayers pay the top rate. It requires a massive tax hike on the middle class.

Amen. This is a point I have frequently made, most recently when writing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statist agenda. Ordinary taxpayers will pick up most of the tab if the left’s agenda is adopted.

But I’m digressing. Let’s return to today’s main issue, which is the Nordic nations and socialism.

Technically, there’s no connection. As I said in the interview, those countries have never been socialist. Heck, if those nations are socialist, then so is the United States.

There is a lesson to be learned, however, and that lesson is relevant whether one uses the technical or common definition of socialism.

Simply stated, the relative success of those nations is due to free markets and a history of small government, but the imposition of big welfare states starting in the 1960s has weakened the region’s economic vitality.

This chart tells you everything you need to know.

P.S.  Actually, there is more your should know. Nima Sanandaji’s data on how Americans of Nordic descent are richer than residents of Nordic nations is very illuminating.

P.P.S. And we have specific data from Sweden showing how that nation lost ground after it adopted the big welfare state (and has subsequently gained ground thanks to pro-market reforms such as nationwide school choice and partial pension privatization).

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part I: The Collapse of Venezuela

With the surprising success of Senator Bernie Sanders in the last presidential race and the more-recent instant-celebrity status of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, some are wondering if the United States is about to enter a “socialist era”.

I’ve criticized some of the proposals that are part of this movement, such as confiscatory tax rates and the so-called Green New Deal, so it goes with saying that I’m not a fan.

To learn more about the implications of socialism, let’s look around the world.

We’ll start with Venezuela, which is the focus of a very interesting article in the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts.

Did socialism kill Venezuela? Blessed with the world’s largest oil reserves, this South American nation was once the region’s richest per capita. Twenty years after the launch of the late Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, it is now one of the poorest. …In Washington…Republicans are seizing on Venezuela to score points against those Democrats who have newly embraced the term… But socialism’s role in Venezuela’s collapse, observers say, is not as clear as either side likes to think. At least fleetingly, socialist policies propped up by state petrodollars helped bolster the country’s status as one of the Western Hemisphere’s most equitable societies. But state-heavy policies that distorted prices and exchange rates, coupled with corruption, mismanagement and official repression, turned Venezuela’s economic landscape into scorched earth. …But it is also not communist Cuba or North Korea, where foreign investment and private ownership are strictly limited. …wealthy Venezuelans still own private companies and high-walled mansions in elite neighborhoods. They play golf at country clubs and are taxed at a relatively manageable 34 percent.

This is very fair reporting.

All the main points are accurate: Living standards have plummeted in Venezuela, oil money complicates the analysis, and the economy isn’t quite as statist as Cuba and North Korea.

The article goes on to cite the views of several Venezuelans.

“All the wrongs were created under Chávez,” said Henkel Garcia, head of Econometrica, a Caracas-based financial analysis firm. “The economy only survived as long as it did because of high oil prices.” …Today, roughly a third of the nation, pollsters say, still appears to back socialism — although only half that many remain loyal to Maduro. …With hyperinflation causing acute shortages of food and medicine, more and more former Chavistas, or adherents of Chávez’s ideals, are saying mea culpas and increasingly turning out against Maduro. “Before I die, I want socialism gone from Venezuela,” said Yessid Merlano, a 50-year-old waiter. …Scarcities of food and medicine first surfaced years ago but are now so chronic that he and millions of other Venezuelans have shed pounds and sought work abroad. Before returning to Caracas last year, he spent 10 months working as a laborer in neighboring Colombia, “where all I saw were Venezuelans begging in the streets,” he said. “I feel guilty that I was a Chavista,” he said. “It’s all my fault, all the suffering.”

I’m glad that many Venezuelans now realize that socialism is misguided.

Though I wonder if they will support the reforms that will be necessary once the current regime is deposed (and given the perverse incentives of politicians, I’m even more worried whether a new government will implement those reforms).

The article concludes with some damning data on the country’s economic decay.

State health care, once a pride of the socialists, collapsed as hyperinflation and shrinking resources left hospitals with shortages of syringes and antibiotics, as well as broken equipment too expensive to repair. …Chávez purged skilled managers, engineers and technicians from the state-owned oil giant PDVSA, stocking it with government loyalists. That set it up for a catastrophic failure as global prices fell from record highs. Venezuelan oil output is now at its lowest levels since the 1950s. Industries nationalized by Chávez, who expropriated 1,500 companies, collapsed as regulated prices distorted markets. In two decades, the government seized nearly 5 million acres of productive farmland that has now been largely abandoned. In 1999, there were 490,000 private companies in Venezuela. By last June — the most recent count available — that number had fallen to 280,000.

None of this is a surprise. Venezuela is a basket case.

But that’s not our topic today. We’re focusing instead on whether there are any lessons that the United States can learn from the Venezuelan debacle.

Or, to be more accurate, I think the key question is whether advocates of democratic socialism in America have learned anything from Venezuela’s miserable performance.

Plenty of leftists, including Sen. Sanders, praised the awful policies of Chavez and Maduro.

Now that the chickens have come home to roost and Venezuela’s economy has tanked, have any of them apologized? Or tried to rationalize what happened? Or even expressed second thoughts about the supposed wisdom of socialism?

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Government Programs Lure Older Workers into Idleness and Dependency

When I write about Social Security, I normally focus on the program’s huge fiscal imbalance ($44 trillion and climbing).

But it’s not just a fiscal crisis. Social Security is also an increasingly bad deal for workers. Especially minorities with lower average lifespans. When compared to what they would get from a private retirement system, people are paying in too much and getting out too little.

There’s also another major problem with the program.

Academic experts have quantified how older workers are lured out of the labor force when they get money from the government. And since economic output is a function of the quality and quantity of labor and capital, this means we’re sacrificing wealth and reducing prosperity.

Here are some excerpts from a study by Professors Daniel Fetter and Lee Lockwood.

Many of the most important government programs, including Social Security and Medicare, transfer resources to older people… Standard economic theory predicts that such programs reduce late-life labor supply and that the implicit taxation reduces the ex-post value of the programs to recipients. Understanding the size and nature of such effects on labor supply and welfare is an increasingly important issue, as demographic trends have increased both the potential labor supply of the elderly and its aggregate importance, while simultaneously increasing the need for reforms to government old-age support programs. …We address these questions by investigating Old Age Assistance (OAA), a means-tested program introduced in the 1930s alongside Social Security that later became the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program.

Here are charts illustrating how people are retiring earlier in part because of government payments.

And here are some calculations from the study.

Our estimates indicate that OAA significantly reduced labor force participation among older individuals. The basic patterns that we explore in the data are evident in Figure 2, which plots male labor force participation by age, separately for states with above- and belowmedian OAA payments per person 65 and older. Up to age 65, the age pattern of labor force participation was extremely similar in states with larger and smaller OAA programs. At age 65, however, there was a sharp divergence in labor force participation between states with larger OAA programs relative to those with smaller programs, and this divergence continued at older ages. Our regression results, which isolate variation in OAA program size due to state policy differences, imply that OAA can explain more than half of the large 1930–40 drop in labor force participation of men aged 65–74. …Our results suggest that Social Security had the potential to drive at least half—and likely more—of the mid-century decline in late-life labor supply for men. …Taken as a whole, our results suggest that government old-age support programs can have large effects on labor supply, through both their transfer and taxation components.

This chart captures how old-age payments in various states were associated with varying degrees of labor force participation.

By the way, I’m not sharing this information because it’s bad for people to retire at some point.

I’m merely establishing that there’s academic support for the common-sense observation that people are more likely to leave the labor force when there’s an alternative source of income (though it’s worth noting that there should be a sensible and sustainable system for providing that retirement income).

Moreover, people are likely to stop working when government systems give them money before age 65.

Three academics, Andres Erosa, Luisa Fuster, and Gueorgui Kambourov, have a study quantifying this problem in European nations.

There are substantial differences in labor supply and in the design of tax and transfer programs across countries. The cross-country differences in labor supply increase dramatically late in the life cycle…while differences in employment rates among eight European countries are in the order of 15 percentage points for the 50-54 age group, they increase to 35 percentage points for the 55-59 age group and to more than 50 percentage points for the 60-64 age group. In this paper we quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+) across European countries and the United States. … The social security, disability insurance, and taxation systems in the United States and European countries in the study are modelled in great detail.

Here’s a sampling of their results.

The main findings are that the model accounts fairly well for how labor supply decreases late in the life cycle for most countries. The model matches remarkably well the large decline in the aggregate labor supply after age 50 in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. The results support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle for these European countries relative to the United States, with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects… relative to the United States, the hours worked by men aged 60-64 is…49% in the Netherlands, 66% in Spain, 44% in Italy, and 29% in France. …government policies can go a long way towards accounting for labor supply differences across countries. Social security rules account for the bulk of cross country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (with its contribution varying from 50% to 100%), but other policies also matter. In accounting for the low labor supply relative to the US at ages 60 to 64, taxes matter importantly in the Netherlands (6%), Italy (6%), and France (5%); disability insurance policies are important for the Netherlands (7%) and Spain (10%).

And here’s one of their charts comparing hours worked at various ages in Switzerland, Spain, France, and the United States.

The good news is that we don’t push people out of the labor force as much as the French and the Spanish.

The bad news is that we’re not as good as Switzerland (probably in part because the Swiss have a retirement system based on private saving, so they have the ideal combination of good work incentives and comfortable retirement).

But it shouldn’t matter whether other countries have good systems or bad systems. What does matter is that America’s demographic profile is changing. We’re living longer and having fewer children and our system of entitlements is a mess.

We should be reforming these programs, both for fiscal reasons and economic reasons.

P.S. It’s not just Social Security. Other programs also lure people out of the job market and into government dependency, with Obamacare being an especially harmful example.

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The Unworkable Paradox of Voluntary Socialism

As an economic system for a nation, socialism is a miserable failure. Especially real socialism (government ownership of the means of productions, government-dictated prices, etc).

But that doesn’t stop some people from defending socialism. They claim the theory is noble since it is based on sharing and equality.

And they even say that many things we like in society – such as the family, neighborhoods, community groups – are based on socialist principles.

I think it would be more accurate to say those institutions are based on non-market principles rather than socialist principles, but that raises an interesting question.

Would socialism be okay if it was voluntary?

In a column for FEE, Tim Worstall explains that we shouldn’t object to socialism – so long as it isn’t coercive.

…voluntary socialism does work sometimes, and it’s habitual now to mention Mondragon as an example of industrial companies that succeed as worker-owned organizations. But the two important words there are voluntary and sometimes. …worker ownership works better sometimes and that more capitalist organizational forms work better elsewhere. What we need is a method of sorting through what works best when—and that’s where the market comes in. …an interesting observation to make about that claimed superiority, of performance at least, of the socialist form. If it were truly more productive always and everywhere, then it would have taken over the economy already.

In the real world, though, it’s hard to find examples of successful socialist entities.

Consider what just happened to Panera Cares.

…after nine years of being in business, Panera Bread’s socialist pay-what-you-want restaurant, Panera Cares, will officially be closing shop on February 15 due to the business model’s unsustainability. …Panera tried to create a socialist system in which meals were offered at a suggested donation price. That means some people would pay more while others would pay less based on what they felt like or could afford. …Panera completely removed any incentive for patrons to meet even the lowest standards of consumer/retailer exchange. The result: some people paid their fair share while others enjoyed a “free lunch.” …company founder Ron Shaich said the cafe was designed as a quasi-test on human sensibility… “In many ways, this whole experiment is ultimately a test of humanity.”

If it was “a test of humanity,” then we failed.

None of the restaurants were self-sustaining, with some locations reportedly being “mobbed” by students along with homeless people looking for a free meal. “The Portland-based Panera Cares was reportedly only recouping between 60 and 70 percent of its total costs,” reports Eater. “The losses were attributed to students who ‘mobbed’ the restaurant and ate without paying, as well as homeless patrons who visited the restaurant for every meal of the week…” Though Shaich said the restaurants tried to educate people about “sharing responsibly, people ultimately came to the locations for a handout.” …As with every socialist experiment, the natural harmony between the commoners and the power-brokers devolved into hostility. “Patrons reported security guards roaming the entrance and ‘glaring at customers,'”… Shaich stepped down as CEO in 2017. He admitted to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2018 that “the nature of the economics did not make sense.”

Interesting confession by Shaich. I wonder if we’ll ever see Bernie Sanders of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admit socialism doesn’t make sense.

The Kibbutz in Israel were perhaps the most famous example of voluntary socialism. The late Gary Becker explained their collectivist structure.

…nowhere is the failure of socialism clearer than in the radical transformation of the Israeli kibbutz. …Kibbutzniks, as they were called, replaced those fundamental features of modern societies and set up agricultural collectives in which all property was owned by the kibbutz, adults were treated equally regardless of productivity… The kibbutz movement was motivated in part by the Marxist dictum of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

But this system has basically disappeared.

By abolishing capitalistic organization, the founders expected members to live in contentment and harmony and to work for the common good. From what I was told and could observe during my brief visit, there was little harmony. Jealousy abounded, directed at those who were only a little better off… Kibbutzniks were also angry at slackers who appeared to be living off the labor of others. …the socialist zeal that propelled the kibbutz movement in its early days has now largely disappeared. …Many were forced into bankruptcy… Self-interest and family orientation are products not of capitalism but of a human nature developed under evolutionary pressure over eons. They will outlive any utopian experiment. …Utopian socialistic experiments like the kibbutz movement, and countries that tried to create large-scale efficient socialism, all failed for the same reasons.

Indeed, not only have the Kibbutz faded away, but the entire nation of Israel has moved significantly in the direction of free markets. Some stories do have happy endings.

I’ll close with this cartoon, which perfectly illustrates why socialism doesn’t work, regardless of the level of coercion.

P.S. I can’t resist sharing an unrelated excerpt from Tim Worstall’s column.

One of the primary objections to capitalism is the boilerplate insistence that in a capitalist system, the worker doesn’t gain the full value of her labor. This is exploitation, and something must be done about it. The argument has a major logical fault: It is a two-way street, for the capitalist doesn’t gain the full product of the use of their capital, either, meaning the capitalist is equally exploited.

Amen.

Labor and capital are complementary factors of production. Labor helps capital generate a return, and capital helps labor generate income.

Which is why it is in the best interest of workers to get rid of capital gains taxes, lower the corporate tax rate, eliminate the death tax. The more investment we have, the more productivity goes up, and the more wages increase.

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Hong Kong, Singapore, and Using Good Policy to Bust the Middle-Income Trap

International development experts often write about a “middle-income trap.”

According to this theory, it’s not that challenging for nations to climb out of poverty, but it’s difficult for them to take the next step and become rich countries.

The theory makes sense to many people because it describes much of what we see in the real world.

We even see the trap at higher levels of income. European nations were catching up with the United States after World War II, but then the convergence process stalled.

But I don’t think there’s actually a “middle-income trap.” Instead, nations don’t enjoy full convergence because they are hamstrung by bad policy.

And Hong Kong and Singapore are the best evidence for my hypothesis. These two jurisdictions have routinely ranked #1 and #2 for economic freedom.

And their solid track record of free markets and small government has paid big dividends. Here a chart, for Our World in Data, which shows how they have fully converged with the United States after starting way behind.

The performance of Hong Kong and Singapore is particularly impressive because the United States historically has been a top-10 nation for economic liberty (notwithstanding all my grousing about bad policy in America, we’ve been fairly good compared to the rest of the world).

So it takes extraordinarily good performance to catch up.

But it can happen.

P.S. By the way, one thing I noticed in the above chart is that Singapore has surpassed Hong Kong in the past couple of decades. This could just be a statistical blip, though I wonder if this is a result of the transfer of Hong Kong from British control to Chinese control. Yes, China has wisely chosen not to interfere with Hong Kong’s domestic policy, but perhaps investors and entrepreneurs don’t fully trust that this economic autonomy will continue.

P.P.S. Don’t forget that comparatively rich nations can de-converge if they adopt bad policy.

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New Jersey’s Message to Taxpayers: Move or We Will Tax You to Death

According to Freedom in the 50 States, which we reviewed a couple of days ago, New Jersey is in the bottom 10 and has been moving in the wrong direction.

This dismal ranking is not an anomaly. New Jersey also is in the bottom 10 of states according to Economic Freedom of North America, and the Garden State is dead last according the State Business Tax Climate Index and State Fiscal Condition.

In a perverse way, I admire New Jersey’s politicians. They’re not satisfied with the state’s low scores. They want to become even less competitive. If that’s even possible.

As I noted in the interview, the latest proposal for a “rain tax” isn’t necessarily objectionable if examined in isolation.

But in the context of New Jersey’s fiscal deterioration, it’s almost as if politicians are writing another passage in a very long suicide note for the state.

Consider what happened recently with the gas tax, as explained by the Wall Street Journal.

…a silver lining used to be the Garden State’s relatively low gasoline tax of 14.5 cents a gallon—second lowest in the U.S. No more, and therein lies a tale of why taxing the rich to finance government is an illusion. In October 2016, then-Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill raising the gas tax by 22.6 cents to 37.1 cents a gallon…the bill also included a clause that automatically raises the gas tax if it doesn’t produce the expected revenue each year. This is a self-fulfilling economic prophesy. A higher gas tax causes people to drive less, which in turn has meant that revenues have fallen short of the expected $2 billion target. So on Oct. 1 the gas tax will rise another 4.3 cents to 41.4 cents per gallon, which will be the ninth highest in the U.S. …This will be the state’s third tax increase in four months, following June’s increase in income and corporate tax rates. …The larger lesson is that sooner or later the middle class always gets the bill for bigger government. Higher income and corporate taxes drive the affluent out of the state, which means less revenue. That leaves the middle class to pay in higher sales, property and now gasoline taxes.

Needless to say, New Jersey’s taxaholic lawmakers want even more revenue.

Here are some excerpts from a report by Politico.

Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday he may propose new tax increases when he unveils his budget in March, saying he’s worried that the state has not done enough to achieve what he called “tax fairness.” …The governor…had sought some $1.7 billion in new taxes… Murphy was met with fierce resistance from fellow Democrats in the Legislature… Murphy ultimately agreed to…$1.6 billion in annual revenue. …Murphy, speaking at a church in Newark where he delivered a speech on his first-year accomplishments, said he needs to leave his options open as he starts to prepare a budget… “I would say everything is on the table. Period, full stop,” he added when pressed again about the idea of new tax increases.

If all this sound worrisome, that’s because it is.

But it gets even worse. As I warned at the end of the interview, the 2017 tax law restricts the ability of federal taxpayers to deduct taxes paid to state and local governments.

And that means the full burden of those taxes is now much more explicit, which means more and more taxpayers in high tax rates are going to “vote with their feet” and move to states with less onerous fiscal regimes.

In other words, New Jersey politicians are making their tax system worse at precisely the moment that the geese with the golden eggs have more incentive to fly away.

Insane.

P.S. Given this grim news, I’m surprised that fewer than 9 percent of people picked New Jersey to be the first state that will suffer fiscal collapse.

P.P.S. What’s really remarkable – albeit in a very sad and tragic sense – is that New Jersey in my lifetime used to be like New Hampshire, with no state income tax and no state sales tax.

P.P.P.S. There is a Jersey with good tax policy, but it’s far away from the American version.

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The War on Wealth

I did not like Bill Clinton’s 1993 class-warfare tax hike, and I also opposed Barack Obama’s 2012 fiscal-cliff tax increase on the so-called rich.

But those were incremental measures.

Today’s leftist politicians have much more grandiose schemes, such as 70 percent tax rates, wealth taxes, and extortionary death taxes.

And even those proposals may not be enough.

In a column for the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo actually suggests that billionaires should be taxed out of existence. Literally, not just figuratively.

…if we aimed, through public and social policy, simply to discourage people from attaining and possessing more than a billion in lucre, just about everyone would be better off. …Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are floating new taxes aimed at the superrich, including special rates for billionaires. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires. …the question is getting so much attention because the answer is obvious: Nope. Billionaires should not exist… Abolishing billionaires might not sound like a practical idea, but if you think about it as a long-term goal in light of today’s deepest economic ills, it feels anything but radical. …Billionaire abolishment could take many forms. It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty, but more likely it would mean higher marginal taxes on income, wealth and estates for billionaires and people on the way to becoming billionaires. …But abolishment does not involve only economic policy. It might also take the form of social and political opprobrium. …Why should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world? …When American capitalism sends us its billionaires, it’s not sending its best. It’s sending us people who have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing inequality. They’re bringing injustice.

Wow, I’m not even sure how to respond to this demonization of success. Should I focus on the vicious populism? The economic ignorance?

Maybe I should joke about how Mr. Manjoo wants to turn David Azerrad’s satire into reality?

Fortunately, I don’t have to come up with a response. I can simply rely on Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Daily Telegraph.

He explains, in his latest column, that these crazy ideas are a real threat.

Hard-Left ideas are uber-trendy: they are making a catastrophic comeback in the world’s most powerful universities, capturing many young minds, and are now being proposed by a new generation of supposedly modern politicians around the world. …pro-capitalist arguments…are met with derision by this new generation of intellectuals. Higher taxes bad for the economy? Hilarious! Nationalisation doesn’t work? Laughable! Venezuela? Nothing to do with actual socialism, all America’s fault. It’s a dialogue of the deaf… The old Left used to argue (falsely) that entrepreneurs, investors and executives aren’t really put off by high tax, which means that rates can be jacked up safely, raising lots to “redistribute”, without discouraging work and investment. The new Left has turned the argument on its head. It now admits the “rich” would work less if they were highly taxed – but claim this would be a good thing, as it would make society less unequal… As Harvard’s Greg Mankiw puts it, the Left now believes that “we can no longer afford the rich”.

If such policies were ever enacted, the results would be catastrophic.

The impact would be Venezuelan-style: it would lead to a collapse in GDP… Only the richest are being targeted at first: but everybody will suffer when the economy tanks, and such taxes are always eventually extended to the prosperous middle classes. …We could thus be on the cusp of a new socialist era, where even zero GDP growth will be seen as a good year. …we are on the brink of a new war on wealth.

Here’s what worries me.

Allister’s warning about terrible economic consequences is accurate, but I’m not sure that matters.

When I talk to hard-core leftists, I usually make the following three points.

• A war on wealth is a war on capital (increased double taxation is needed since rich people have a lot of saving and investment).
• A war on capital is a war on productivity (every economic theory agrees there is no added output without saving and investment).
• A war on productivity is a war on workers (every economic theory agrees that there is a link between wages and how much workers produce).

In the past, leftists would disagree. Maybe they would claim government could make investments. Or perhaps they would assert that government could somehow compel employers to pay higher wages.

But it’s now quite common for my leftist friends to simply assert that lower living standards are an acceptable result. For all intents and purposes, hurting the rich is more important than helping the poor.

You may think I’m joking, or that only a small handful of crazies actually want this outcome.

But the establishment left also advocates for lower living standards. The International Monetary Fund has financed and publicized research that explicitly embraces the twisted notion that it would be ideal to reduce everyone’s living standards so long as rich people suffered the bigger declines.

Margaret Thatcher is spinning in her grave.

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Separate the Baby from the Bathwater to Defend the Rules-Based Postwar Order

Donald Trump and other populist leaders frequently are condemned for undermining the “rules-based system” that is the basis of the “postwar order.”

What exactly is meant by this criticism? In the case of Trump, is it disapproval of his protectionism?

Yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The broader accusation is that Trump and the others are insufficiently supportive of the so-called “international architecture” of treaties and organizations (the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, World Bank, G-7, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, NATO, etc) that western nations created after World War II.

And the critics are right, in my humble opinion.

But that’s besides the point. What’s really needed is a case-by-case analysis to determine whether the aforementioned treaties and organizations are making the world a better place.

To help understand this topic, let’s look at some excerpts from an anonymously authored article in  the latest issue of Cayman Financial Review.

What is the oft-cited “postwar order” that ostensibly is being threatened by populism? …begin with some history. There have been three major attempts to create an international architecture in hopes of discouraging war and encouraging peaceful commerce among world’s countries. The first occurred after the Napoleonic wars, the second occurred after World War I, and the third occurred after World War II.

The article explains that first postwar order was a big success, with 100 years of relative peace and prosperity between 1815 and 1914.

But the second postwar order, which followed World War I, was a miserable failure.

…the urgent economic problems that World War I had created – the need for demobilization, the restoration of the gold standard, the resumption of international trade flows, and the reconstruction of war-ravaged areas. Reparations burdened Germany and contributed to hyperinflation. …Germany depended on American loans to make its reparations payments to France and the United Kingdom. In turn, France and the United Kingdom depended on German reparations to repay their wartime loans from the United States. This financial merry-go-round was inherently unstable. …In the 1930s, many countries tried economic nationalism to escape from the Great Depression. Abandonment of the interwar gold standard, high tariffs to discourage imports, and competitive devaluations to boost exports became widespread. However, these “beggar-thy-neighbor” failed economically, caused the collapse of international trade, and contributed to rising international tensions.

And this grim experience was in the minds of policymakers as they sought to restore a system based on peace and open commerce.

…neither Churchill nor Roosevelt wanted to punish ordinary Germans, Italians or Japanese. Instead of the postwar harshness of Clemenceau, Churchill and Roosevelt favored the postwar magnanimity of Metternich, in which Germany, Italy, and Japan would be reconstructed as democratic capitalist countries. …both Churchill and Roosevelt thought that other new international organizations would be needed to help finance postwar reconstruction, provide stable exchange rates, and promote the progressive liberalization of international trade. …At the risk of oversimplifying, there are four major pieces of what is now loosely though of as the postwar order.

1. The United Nations and other multilateral bodies
2. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank
3. The World Trade Organization and affiliated trade pacts
4. NATO and other military/security alliances

The article is filled with details on how these various institutions evolved.

But for our purposes, let’s focus on ostensible threats to this order. Here’s what “Hamilton” wrote.

All four components of the current international architecture have critics, but they should be examined separately.

1. The United Nations is routinely condemned for being ineffective, wasteful and anti-Western. However, the UN part of the post-war order is not under serious threat. However, the OECD is subject to considerable attacks because of its statist policy agenda.
2. The IMF and World Bank are routinely condemned for being wasteful and anti-market. The IMF also is singled out for bailout policies that are said to encourage profligacy in developing nation and to reward sloppy lending practices by big western banks. Notwithstanding the instability than many say is caused by the IMF, this part of the postwar order is not under serious threat.
3. The WTO and regional FTAs are under threat from a populist backlash in the United States and Europe, driven in large part by angst over financial prospects for lower-skilled workers. This part of the postwar order is under serious threat, especially because U.S. laws give the president significant unilateral powers over trade policy.
4. NATO and other security arrangements are being questioned for both cost and changing geopolitical factors (e.g., the rise of China, Islamic terrorism). While unlikely at this point, dramatic policy changes from the United States could substantially alter the structure and/or operation of these military alliances.

How depressing. The part I like is the part that is under assault.

Here are the key points from the article’s conclusion.

The so-called postwar order is not a monolithic entity. …Some have been very successful. Consider, for instance, the sweeping reduction in trade barriers and the concomitant rise in cross-border commerce. …But other parts of the post-war order do not have very strong track records. Bureaucracies such as the IMF and OECD arguably deserve some hostile attention because of their support for anti-market policies. Policymakers who want to preserve the best parts of the post-war order may want to consider whether it is time to jettison or reform the harmful parts.

This is spot on.

Parts of the “postwar order” should be preserved. The World Trade Organization definitely belongs on that list. And presumably nobody wants to disrupt or eliminate the parts of the “international architecture” that facilitate things such as cross-border air travel, international shipping, and global telecommunications.

But the helpful work of those entities doesn’t change the fact that other entities engage in activities that are counterproductive. A “rules-based order” is only good, after all, if it advancing good rules.

• Is it helpful for the OECD to push for rules hindering tax competition?
• Is it helpful for the IMF to push for rules exacerbating moral hazard?
• Is it helpful for the EU to push for rules requiring tax harmonization?
• Is it helpful for the UN to push for rules undermining civil liberties?’
• Is it helpful for the Basel folks to push for rules increasing systemic risk?

Needless to say, the answer to all of these questions is no.

Which brings to mind the old saying about “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

As “Hamilton” wrote, the bad parts of the postwar order should be jettisoned to preserve the good parts.

For those interested in this topic, Adam Tooze of Columbia University has a very interesting article on the same topic.

Published in Foreign Policy, his article basically applies a “public choice” description of how the current postwar order evolved. And he says it initially was not very successful

For true liberals in both the United States and Europe, who hankered after the golden age of globalization in the late 19th century, the resulting Cold War economic order was a profound disappointment. The U.S. Treasury and the first generation of neoliberals in Europe fretted against the U.S. State Department and its interventionist economic tendencies. Mavericks such as the young Milton Friedman—true advocates of free markets in the way we take for granted today—demanded a bonfire of all regulations. …The reality of the liberal order that supposedly came into existence in the postwar moment was the more or less haphazard continuation of wartime controls. It would take until 1958 before the Bretton Woods vision was finally implemented. Even then it was not a “liberal” order by the standard of the gilded age of the 19th century or in the sense that Davos understands it today. International mobility of capital for anything other than long-term investment was strictly limited.

Tooze argues that genuine liberalism (i.e., open markets and trade) didn’t really take hold until the 1980s, with the market-based revolution of Thatcher and Reagan, the “Washington Consensus,” and the collapse of communism.

The stakeholders in the 1970s were obstreperous trade unions, and that kind of consultation was precisely the bad habit that the neoliberal revolutionaries set out to break. …the global victory of the liberal order required a more far-reaching struggle. …the market revolution of the 1980s…  the aftermath of the Cold War, the moment of Western triumph. …the defeat of inflation, this was the age of the Washington Consensus.

For those not familiar with this particular piece of jargon, the “Washington Consensus” refers to the 1980s-era acceptance of free markets as the ideal route for economic development.

And “neoliberal” refers to classical liberalism, not the modern dirigiste version of liberalism found in the United States.

I’ll close by recycling this visual, which attempts to distinguish between good globalism and bad globalism.

The image uses the example of trade and jurisdictional competition, so I don’t pretend is captures all the issues and controversies that we discussed today.

But it reinforces why it is wrong to blindly accept and support the anti-market components of the postwar order simply because there are other parts that deserve our support. The goal is more global prosperity, not less.

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America’s Most Libertarian State Is…?

I wrote a couple of days ago about America’s best and worst cities for pro-market policy, and I noted that there are several rankings of economic liberty for states and nations.

But what if you want to know the place with the most overall freedom? In other words, what is the most libertarian place to live based on both economic liberty and personal liberty?

If you don’t mind a bit of travel, the answer is New Zealand.

For those who prefer to stay in the United States, Will Ruger and Jason Sorens periodically crunch numbers to calculate Freedom in the 50 States.

Their previous edition had New Hampshire in first place, so let’s take a look at the newest version.

This 2018 edition of Freedom in the 50 States presents a completely revised and updated ranking of the American states on the basis of how their policies promote freedom in the fiscal, regulatory, and personal realms. …More than 230 policy variables and their sources are now available to the public on a new website for the study. …the 2018 edition provides annual data on economic and personal freedom and their components back to 2000. …Freedom in the 50 States is an essential desk reference for anyone interested in state policy and in advancing a better understanding of a free society.

The publication is loaded with data, as you’ll see from the following charts.

To put all this data in context, the report separately calculates fiscal freedom, regulatory freedom, and personal freedom.

We’ll start with the fiscal section, which includes variables about taxes and spending, as well as other measures such as debt and government employment.

For those interested, the report has plenty of analysis and explanation about the variables that are used and the weights that are assigned.

Most of us, though, simply want to see which states get good scores and which ones get bad scores.

I’m not surprised to see that zero-income-tax states – led by Florida – are at the top. And I’m also not surprised that flat-tax states – led by Pennsylvania – also are well represented.

I assume nobody is surprised to see New York in last place.

Now let’s shift to regulatory policy and see where the burden of red is most onerous.

This part of the ranking covers a range of issues, most notably controls on land use and restrictions on the use of markets in health care.

But there are other important variables, including the extent and burden of occupational licensing.

Indeed, before getting to the overall rankings for regulation, I want to share those scores because it is so galling and upsetting that politicians impose barriers that limit the freedom of people to earn income.

Colorado deserves hearty applause for being at the top, edging out Idaho by a narrow margin. And even though Vermont was near the bottom of the fiscal rankings, it merits a mention for being good on the issue of occupational licensing.

California deserves hearty condemnation for being in last place. And I’m not surprised to see states like Illinois and New Jersey near the bottom.

I’m very disappointed, however, that Texas and Florida have such a dismal record.

But let’s not fixate on just one of the variables. If we look at the rankings for all regulatory issues, Kansas is in first place, followed by Nebraska and Idaho.

The worst states (hardly a surprise) are New York, New Jersey, and California.

Now let’s combine fiscal policy and regulatory policy and see the report’s ranking for overall economic freedom.

Florida is in first place by a comfortable margin, followed by three other zero-income-tax states (though the absence of a state income tax does not guarantee a good score, as you can see from the poor performance of Alaska, Wyoming, and Washington).

New York wins the Booby Prize by a large margin.

Hawaii and California also stand out in a bad way.

The above table tells us which state enjoys the most economic liberty, but that doesn’t tell us where to live if you want the maximum amount of overall freedom.

To identify the nation’s most libertarian state, we also need to look at rankings for personal liberty.

This means, in part, whether people are harassed and persecuted for victimless crimes, but it also includes measures of educational freedom and gun rights.

Speaking of which, I can’t resist sharing the data on which states most respect the 2nd Amendment.

Kansas gets the best score, followed by Vermont(!), Arizona, Idaho, and Mississippi.

Hawaii is the worst state by a significant margin and we (again) find California near the bottom.

Another issue which is near and dear to my heart is asset forfeiture.

I am nauseated and disgusted that governments are allowed to steal property from people who have not been convicted of any wrongdoing.

So let’s applaud New Mexico, Nebraska, and New Hampshire for putting limits on this awful practice.

And let’s heap unending scorn on Rhode Island for having the nation’s worst track record on this issue.

But what happens when we combine all issue relating to personal freedom?

Well, that’s exactly what the authors did, which means we get a comprehensive ranking for personal freedom. I’m not surprised that Nevada, Colorado, and New Hampshire are in the top 5, but I’m surprised to see that Maine leads the pack.

Likewise, I guess I’m not too surprised that Texas and other bible-belt states are socially conservative.

But Hawaii next to last?!?

In any event, the report combines economic freedom and personal freedom and tells us which state could be considered the most libertarian.

And the winner is the Sunshine State of Florida, followed by New Hampshire, Indiana, Colorado, and Nevada. I’m surprised that Florida does so well, though some of the other high-scoring states make sense (especially when I look at data on who reads these columns).

By contrast, the most dirigiste state is New York. That doesn’t surprise me, and I’m also not shocked by some of the other bottom dwellers.

I’m tempted to end here since we’ve already surveyed so much information.

But there’s one final chart which hopefully should be very fascinating.

We just looked at the data on how states currently rank for overall liberty.

This final selection tells us which ones have been moving in the right direction and wrong direction since the turn of the century.

Kudos to Oklahoma for adopting a lot of good reform. Same for New Mexico. And it’s also interesting to see that several states from the Great Lakes region boosted their scores (with Illinois being a laggard, of course).

Vermont has the dismal distinction of having moved the fastest in the wrong direction (No wonder it’s the Moocher State).

Hawaii also deserves an unfavorable mention, while the deterioration of New Jersey and New York is hardly a surprise.

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The Rich Pay More with Lower Tax Rates

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute is most famous for his Venn diagrams that expose hypocrisy and inconsistency.

• Taxation and incentives
• The War on Drugs
• Minimum wage
• Food and Drug Administration
• Consenting adults

But he also is famous for his charts.

And since I’m a big fan of sensible tax policy and the Laffer Curve, we’re going to share Mark’s new chart looking at the inverse relationship between the top tax rate and the share of taxes paid by the richest Americans.

Examining the chart, it quickly becomes evident that upper-income taxpayers started paying a much greater share of the tax burden after the Reagan tax cuts.

My left-leaning friends sometimes look at this data and complain that the rich are paying more of the tax burden only because they have grabbed a larger share of national income. And this means we should impose punitive tax rates.

But this argument is flawed for three reasons.

First, there is not a fixed amount of income. The success of a rich entrepreneur does not mean less income for the rest of us. Instead, it’s quite likely that all of us are better off because the entrepreneur created some product of service that we value. Indeed, data from the Census Bureau confirms that all income classes tend to rise and fall simultaneously.

Second, it’s not even accurate to say that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer.

Third, one of the big fiscal lessons of the 1980s is that punitive tax rates on upper-income taxpayers backfire because investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners will choose to earn and report less taxable income.

For my contribution to this discussion, I want to elaborate on this final point.

When I give speeches, I sometimes discover that audiences don’t understand why rich taxpayers can easily control the amount of their taxable income.

And I greatly sympathize since I didn’t appreciate this point earlier in my career.

That’s because the vast majority of us get the lion’s share of our income from our employers. And when we get this so-called W-2 income, we don’t have much control over how much tax we pay. And we assume that this must be true for others.

But rich people are different. If you go the IRS’s Statistics of Income website and click on the latest data in Table 1.4, you’ll find that wages and salaries are only a small fraction of the income earned by wealthy taxpayers.

These high-income taxpayers may be tempting targets for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and the other peddlers of resentment, but they’re also very elusive targets.

That’s because it’s relatively easy – and completely legal – for them to control the timing, level, and composition of business and investment income.

When tax rates are low, this type of tax planning doesn’t make much sense. But as tax rates increase, rich people have an ever-growing incentive to reduce their taxable income and that creates a bonanza for lawyers, accountants, and financial planners.

Needless to say, there are many loopholes to exploit in a 75,000-page tax code.

P.S. There’s some very good evidence from Sweden confirming my point.

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The Best and Worst Cities in the United States

There are several options if you want to measure economic freedom and competitiveness among nations (rankings from the Fraser Institute, Heritage Foundation, and World Economic Forum).

You also have many choices if you want to measure economic freedom and competitiveness among states (rankings from the Tax Foundation, Mercatus Center, and Fraser Institute).

But there’s never been a good source if you want to know which local jurisdiction is best.

Dean Stansel of Southern Methodist University is helping to fill this gap with a report looking at the relative quality of government policy in various metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs encompass not just a city, but also economically relevant suburbs).

…the level of economic freedom can vary across subnational jurisdictions within the same country (e.g., Texas and Florida have less-burdensome economic policies and therefore much greater economic freedom than New York and California). However, levels of economic freedom can also vary within those subnational jurisdictions. For example, the San Jose metro area has substantially higher economic freedom than Los Angeles. The same is true for Nashville compared to Memphis. In some places, metropolitan areas straddle state borders, skewing state-level economic data. This report quantifies those intra-state disparities by providing a local-level version of the EFNA, ranking 382 metropolitan areas by their economic freedom levels.

So who wins this contest?

Here are the five most-free MSAs. It’s worth noting that all of them are in states with no income tax, which shows that good state policy helps.

What if we limit ourselves to large cities?

Here are the five most-free MSAs with population over 1 million. As you can see, Houston is in first place and zero-income-tax Texas and Florida are well represented.

Now let’s shift to the localities on the bottom of the rankings.

Which MSA is the worst place for economic freedom in America?

Congratulations to El Centro in California for winning this booby prize. As you can see, jurisdictions in New York and California dominate.

What if we look are larger jurisdictions, those with over 1 million people?

In this case, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario is the worst place to live.

Though if you want to focus on big cities, the NYC metro area deserves special mention.

Now let’s consider why economic freedom matters.

I’ve shared charts showing how more economic freedom leads to more prosperity in nations.

The same thing is true for states.

So you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that it also is true for metro areas.

Last but not least, here’s a map showing freedom in all MSAs.

I’m not surprised to see so much red in California and New York, but I didn’t realize that Ohio (thanks for nothing, Kasich), Oregon, and West Virginia were so bad.

And the good results for Texas and Florida are predictable, but I didn’t think Virginia would look so good.

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The OECD Wants to Impose Higher Taxes and Bigger Government on Poor Nations

When I ask friends on the left to answer my two-question challenge about prosperity and the size of government, they sometimes will flip the script and demand that I answer their version of the same question.

Name a jurisdiction that became rich with small government, they ask!

I’ve always viewed that as a grossly ineffective debating tactic because I have so many good responses. For instance, I often point to Hong Kong and Singapore as modern-era examples of poor places that became rich places thanks to free markets and small government.

But my favorite examples are from North America and Western Europe. If you look at the historical data, nations in the western world evolved from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity in the 1800s and early 1900s when the burden of the public sector was minuscule.

It’s true that all of those nations, after they became prosperous, then chose to adopt welfare states of various sizes. That was an unfortunate development (though somewhat offset by trade liberalization and other pro-market policies), but at least they got rich before making that mistake.

After providing all these examples, I then tell my friends that it is their turn. Please, I ask, give me just one example of a nation that adopted big government and then became rich?

I’ve never received a good answer.

And this is why I’m so disappointed (but not surprised) that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a project to increase the fiscal burden in poor nations.

The Paris-based OECD actually asserts that higher taxes and more spending will lead to more prosperity. I’m not joking.

The OECD has a unique role to play in supporting developing countries to generate domestic revenues to finance their sustainable development. …While the ratio of tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in OECD countries averaged 33% in 2008, in developing countries it was only around half this level, indicating that there was great potential yet to be exploited. …a growing focus on taxation as a development priority…as it is clearly the primary source of financing for development. …to unlock the potential of countries…the design and delivery of “modernised, progressive tax systems, improved tax policy and more efficient tax collection” were high on the list of must-dos.

I’m sure that poor people in developing nations will be delighted to learn that their politicians are conspiring with the OECD to “exploit” them with “progressive” and “efficient” tax regimes.

And I’m both amused and disgusted that the OECD report has creative euphemisms for higher taxes, such as “domestic resource mobilization” and “capacity building.”

But the section on how taxes supposedly are good for growth is downright unbelievable.

Taxation enables governments to invest in development, relieve poverty and deliver public services to underpin long-term growth. Strong tax systems not only raise crucial revenues: they also promote inclusiveness… Above and beyond the direct benefits to developing countries themselves, international co-operation in the area of taxation is essential in today’s globalised world. …Such actions can realise the potential of taxation to help drive development on a global scale.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the OECD does not provide any empirical evidence to back up this rhetoric.

The bureaucrats don’t even provide a single anecdote or example. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Instead, we’re supposed to believe that there’s a mysterious alchemy that somehow leads transforms higher taxes and bigger government into greater prosperity.

By the way, the OECD isn’t the only international bureaucracy pushing this message. I had the surreal experience of being a credentialed observer at a United Nations conference where seemingly every other participant was on the other side. And the International Monetary Fund is also guilty of this peculiar form of economic malpractice.

This video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity examines whether big government is the right way to boost prosperity in poor nations.

P.S. I don’t know whether to characterize this as irony or hypocrisy, but OECD bureaucrats don’t pay tax on their lavish remuneration. Perhaps this explains why they are so oblivious to the real-world consequences of higher tax burdens.

P.P.S. I feel sorry for the professional economists at the OECD, who often produce very good studies. It must be embarrassing for them when the political appointees push bad policies.

P.P.P.S. Needless to say, I’m not happy that American taxpayers are financing the OECD’s statist agenda.

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Trump, Xi, Trade, and the Need for a Second Stage of Pro-Market Economic Reform in China

Since trade promotes prosperity, I want increased market-driven, cross-border commerce between China and the United States.

But you can see in this CNBC interview that I’m worried about achieving that outcome given protectionism from President Trump and mercantilism from President Xi in China.

There’s never much chance to elaborate in short interviews, so here’s some additional analysis on the key points.

1. China’s economy is weak because of insufficient liberalization.

I have written about how China got great results – especially huge reductions in poverty – thanks to partial economic liberalization last century. But those reforms were just a step in the right direction. The country currently ranks only #107 according to Economic Freedom of the World, largely because so much of the economy is hampered by subsidies, regulation, protectionism, and cronyism. Sweeping pro-market reforms are needed if China’s leaders want their country to become rich.

2. Trump’s unthinking protectionism hurts both sides, but China may be more vulnerable.

I mentioned in the interview that Trump’s protectionism meant that he was harming both nations. This is what always happens with protectionism, so I wasn’t saying anything insightful. But it is quite likely that China will suffer more because its economy doesn’t have the flexibility and durability of America’s more market-oriented system.

That is one of the conclusion from a recent news report.

Policymakers in Europe have spared no effort to emphasize that there can be no winners in an escalated trade conflict between the United States and China. But a fresh study shows there are several beneficiaries. …But a study by research network EconPol Europe suggests such an assertion isn’t quite true — in fact, it isn’t true at all. The survey analyzes the impact of tariffs imposed by the US on China and the effect of China’s retaliatory tariffs. …The EconPol Europe study calculates that Chinese exporters are bearing approximately 75 percent of the costs… in Asia, Vietnam has been gaining the most from firms relocating their production away from China. Malaysia, Singapore and India have also been profiting from this development.

3. China’s cronyism presents a challenge for supporters of unilateral free trade.

I’m a supporter of unilateral free trade. America should eliminate all trade barriers, even if other nations want to hurt themselves by maintaining their restrictions. That being said, it’s not genuine free trade if another country has direct or indirect subsidies for its companies. As I noted in the interview, some economists say we shouldn’t worry since the net result is a wealth transfer from China’s taxpayers to America’s consumers. On the other hand, that approach means that some American workers and companies are being harmed. And if supporters of free markets are upset when American workers and companies are hurt by domestic cronyism, we also should be upset when the same thing happens because of foreign cronyism.

The challenge, of course, is whether you can use trade barriers to target only cronyism. I worry that such an effort would get hijacked by protectionists, though Professor Martin Feldstein makes a good argument in the Wall Street Journal that it’s the right approach.

China’s strategy is to give large government subsidies to state-owned companies and supplement their research with technology stolen from American and other Western companies. …That is the real reason why the Trump administration has threatened tariffs of 25% on $200 billion of Chinese exports to the U.S.—nearly half the total—unless Beijing reforms its policies. …The purpose of the tariffs is not to reduce the bilateral trade deficit but to counter Chinese technology theft and forced transfer. …the U.S. could impose heavier tariffs and other economic penalties in order to force China to play by the rules, ending its attempt to dominate global markets through subsidies and technology theft.

4. Trump should have used the World Trade Organization to encourage Chinese liberalization.

I wrote last year that the President would enjoy more success if he used the WTO to apply pressure on China.

It’s not just me making this claim. Here are some excerpts from a story in the Washington Post.

Pressure from Europe and Japan is amplifying the president’s vocal complaints about Chinese trade practices… “it wasn’t a Trump issue; it was a world issue,” said Jorge Guajardo, …a former Mexican ambassador to China. “Everybody’s tired of the way China games the trading system and makes promises that never amount to anything.” …Germany and the United Kingdom joined the United States this year in tightening limits on Chinese investment. …In September, trade ministers from the United States, European Union and Japan issued a joint statement that blasted the use of subsidies in turning “state owned enterprises into national champions and setting them loose in global markets.” The statement…also rejected forced technology transfer… The United States did win E.U. and Japanese support for a complaint to the WTO alleging China has violated U.S. intellectual property rights. But rather than use the global trade body for a broader attack on China, the administration has demanded changes in the way the organization operates. To critics, the administration missed an opportunity to marshal China’s trading partners behind an across-the-board indictment of its state-led economy.

5. The imperfect Trans-Pacific Partnership was an opportunity to pressure China to reduce cronyism.

Because of my concerns about regulatory harmonization, I wasn’t grievously disappointed when the United States chose not to participate in the TPP, but I fully recognized that the pact had very positive features. Including the pressure it would have placed on China to shift toward markets and away from cronyism.

6. Additional Chinese reform is the ideal outcome, both for China and the rest of the world.

Three years ago, I wrote that China needs a Reagan-style revolution of economic liberalization. That’s still true today. The bottom line is that China’s leaders should look at the progress that was achieved last century when the economy was partially liberalized and decide that the time is ripe for the free-market version of a great leap forward. In other words, the goal should be great economic success, not modest economic success.

I’ll conclude by pointing out that I don’t want China to copy the United States, even though that would be a step in the right direction.

According to data from Economic Freedom of the World, there’s a much better role model.

Indeed, I would like the United States to copy Hong Kong as well.

The recipe for prosperity is the same all over the world. The challenge is getting politicians to do what’s best for citizens rather than what’s best for themselves.

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