Pathetic Russia Analysis from Tucker Carlson

A few years ago, I explained why Tucker Carlson was wrong to cite Hungary a role model.

Today, let’s analyze why his (widely condemned) praise of Russia’s economy is utterly delusional.

We’ll start with the big-picture comparison based on data from the IMF, Maddison, the UN, and World Bank. As you can see, Americans are far richer than their Russian counterparts.

The IMF and Maddison data are based on purchasing power parity, so they adjust for the fact that some things are less expensive in Russia (and the Maddison data is based on 2011 dollars, so those numbers would look more like the IMF numbers if based on today’s dollars).

The bottom line is that Americans should not envy the Russian economy, regardless of which data source one prefers.

This does not mean, by the way, that the U.S. economy is perfect. Or that America should be immune from criticism. Most of my professional life has been devoted to trying fix bad U.S. policies. Or trying to prevent new mistakes from happening!

But I’m very grateful that I live in a nation where policy is inadequate rather than a country where policy is terrible.

And even though I’m an economist, I’m also very aware that the United States is also much better when comparing basic political and social freedoms.

Is the U.S. perfect in those areas? My Victims-of-Government page confirms that we have some problems. That being said, we are far better than Russia (where 47-year old political dissidents mysteriously die in Siberian prisons).

Before concluding, let’s return to economic comparisons. Here’s a tweet that captures the difference between a rich country and a struggling country.

And I’ll also cite a few sentences from a 2022 column in the Washington Post by AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt.

Putin is flailing against the history of modern economic development. The wealth of modern nations is overwhelmingly generated by human beings and their capabilities. Natural resources (land, energy and all the rest) have accounted for a shrinking share of global output for the past two centuries, with no end in sight. …for all its vaunted oil and gas riches, Russia’s export earnings last year were actually lower than Belgium’s. Like other Western democracies, Belgium manages to augment and unlock the economic value residing in human beings. Putin’s petro-kleptocracy is woefully inept on both counts. …Since the invasion of Ukraine, some of Russia’s best talent has been voting with its feet, heading abroad any way it can. …the Russian system produces remarkably little private wealth. According to Credit Suisse, total private wealth in Russia in 2020 amounted to $3 trillion: one-ninth of Japan’s, one-sixth of Germany’s, and scarcely more than Sweden’s (a country with a population 14 times smaller).

The bottom line is that Russia is way behind the United States.

Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or dishonest. Even those who assert equivalence are wildly wrong.

P.S. I did a similar column last year to show that China’s economy is still very backwards.

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The Sleazy Combination of Big Business and Big Government

I gladly defend profits. I even defend profits for big companies.

But I usually include an all-important caveat that profits are only good if earned in a competitive marketplace.

At the risk of understatement, I get angry when big companies get money because of special favors from government. That’s because goodies from politicians and bureaucrats unavoidably come at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, and small businesses.

Sadly, there are many examples of big business and big government being in bed together.

Now we can add to the list. In a column for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney shines a light on a new case study of big business using big government to thwart choice and innovation.

He starts by describing a development in the air travel industry that most people would see as a good thing.

SkyWest is a small air carrier that operates flights for some of the big airlines. They want to branch into a new field: operating regularly scheduled flights on small planes from private terminals. JSX Air is one company that already offers this product. Legally known as a “public charter” or “scheduled charter” operator, JSX flies small planes out of private terminals, but at fares far closer to commercial coach than to private air travel. …The main advantage is a more reasonable boarding process — particularly, no TSA security theater. …it also allows you to bring on your own snacks, drinks, and jars of local marmalade — all of which our Transportation Security Agency has deemed too dangerous to fly.

But not everyone approves.

The massive legacy airlines hate this, because it is a competitor who is more much pleasant to fly, operating at about the same costs. Thus the airlines and their pilot union are trying to get Uncle Sam to clamp down on public charters.

And what are their arguments?

The unions have hired revolving-door former congressman Peter DeFazio as their lobbyist, opposing this license. Their argument includes attacking the business model already used by JSX. …Their main argument is that SkyWest and JSX would be allowed to use veteran pilots who are over 65 — which is the mandatory retirement age for pilots of larger aircraft. Also, pilots who don’t yet have 1,500 flying time are allowed to captain smaller planes but not large planes, and so SkyWest could use these slightly greener pilots, too. The pilots and the airlines will make safety arguments against the expansion of public charters, but these fall short. Already rich people can fly without TSA screening out of private terminals, and already rich people can charter jets with 66-year-old pilots or captains with only 10,000 miles. So the big airlines’ argument amounts to: This is safe enough for rich people, but not for our potential customers.

Is it possible that it is marginally more dangerous to fly on a plane with an older pilot or a pilot with fewer than 1,500 hours of flying time?

I have no idea, but I think consumers, shareholders, Boards of Directors, and insurance companies should be the ones driving the decision, not bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, or rival companies.

Tim identifies the real issue.

The anti-SkyWest and anti-JSX campaign is really about using the government to outlaw competition.

Amen. We need genuine free enterprise, not cronyism.

P.S. The controversy over “stakeholder capitalism” is partly about the unseemly alliance between big government and big business.

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More Evidence of China’s Faltering Economy

At the risk of oversimplifying, here’s the three-sentence trajectory of Chinese economic policy.

• Crippling communist failure and suffering under Mao.
• Partial reform during the “Washington Consensus” era.
• Backsliding to more statism under President Xi.

So what’s all that mean? Well, when you start with awful policy, then take a few steps in the right direction, only to then move back in the wrong direction, you probably won’t be an economic powerhouse.

And that’s exactly what we see in the data.

Here’s a chart showing that there is a huge gap between per-capita economic output in the United States and China. And that gap exists whether we rely on data from either the IMF, Maddison,* the UN, or World Bank.

That chart is the bad news (and it may be even worse than shown in the above data).

The good news is that China is no longer a miserably poor nation, like it was during the fully communist years under Mao.

But it also looks like China will never become a rich nation.

Especially when the government penalizes success. Which has very negative effects, as reported by the Economist.

Regulatory crackdowns have devastated once-thriving sectors like private education. Officials rage against “money worship”… China’s wealthy…have been looking to leave. …in 2022 some 10,800 high-net-worth individuals, who have an average wealth of $6m, left the country, with the flow accelerating at the end of the year as covid controls eased. …Even more are expected to leave in 2023… In recent years, Singapore has been favoured. The city-state is the top destination for Chinese billionaires considering emigration… According to data from Singapore’s central bank, …it is likely that as many as 750 Chinese family offices were registered in Singapore.

Needless to say, it’s not a good sign when the geese with the golden eggs are flying away.

That being said, the problems in China go well beyond class warfare.

The country has a major problem with cronyism (a.k.a., industrial policy).

But I’ve written many times about that issue, so let’s look at another example of China’s bad policy. Li Yuan has an article in The New York Times about wasteful spending and excessive debt in the nation’s cities.

As part of the ruling Communist Party’s all-in push for economic growth this year, local governments already in debt from borrowing to pay for massive infrastructure are taking on additional debt. They’re building more roads, railways and industrial parks even though the economic returns on that activity are increasingly meager. …China’s local governments..are in fiscal disarray. …According to official data, China’s 31 provincial governments owed around $5.1 trillion at the end of 2022, an increase of 66 percent from three years earlier. An International Monetary Fund report puts the number at $9.5 trillion, equivalent to half the country’s economy. …China is full of wasteful infrastructure that the government likes to brag about but that doesn’t serve the most urgent needs of the public. …The Chinese government likes to say the country has the longest and fastest high-speed railways in the world. But…most lines operate below capacity and at a great loss.

Sounds like Amtrak, but on steroids.

The bottom line is that China’s economy is both weak and fragile.

Which is unfortunate. A thriving China presumably is more likely to be a friendly China.

* The Maddison data is for 2018, and uses $2011 dollars rather than current dollars, which explains why it seems significantly different than the other sources.

P.S. Rather than invade Taiwan, China should copy its economic policies. Or copy the policies of other better-performing Asian Tigers. Heck, the recipe for prosperity is not complicated.

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Industrial Policy and Mitchell’s Law

Most examples of Mitchell’s Law involve government passing a bad law (increase in minimum wage) that leads to a bad consequence (fewer jobs), which then becomes the excuse for a new bad law (job training programs).

Sometimes, though, politicians don’t even wait for bad results before coming up with new excuses for bigger government.

Last year, a handful of clueless Republicans in the Senate sided with Democrats to enact Joe Biden’s scheme for industrial policy (the so-called CHIPS Act).

There were all sorts of reasons to oppose the proposal, including a miserable track record of failure for industrial policy in nations such as post-war Japan and modern-day China.

But it also should have been opposed because it opened the door for additional forms of government intervention.

Here’s a tweet from Adam Ozimek that summarizes some of the ways that the Biden Administration is using subsidies as a lure to impose a dirigiste agenda.

Here’s what has happened. Politicians have driven a lot of manufacturing away from the United States because of red tape, mandates, and taxes.

So then politicians figured they could bring production back to American with a big package of subsidies for high-tech companies.

Yet those same politicians are now attaching lots of strings to those subsidies. Companies can only get the handouts if they accept red tape, mandates, and taxes.

Here’s some of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the topic.

Government subsidies are never free, and now we are learning the price U.S. semiconductor firms and others will pay for signing on to President Biden’s industrial policy. They will become the indentured servants of progressive social policy. …the Administration is using the semiconductor subsidies to impose much of the social policy that was in the failed Build Back Better bill. …Start with child care, which chip makers applying for more than $150 million in federal aid will be required to provide to their employees and construction workers. …Chip makers will also have to pay construction workers prevailing wages set by unions and will be “strongly encouraged”—i.e., required—to use project labor agreements (PLAs), which let unions dictate pay, benefits and work rules for all workers. …chip makers will have to describe their “wraparound services to support individuals from underserved and economically disadvantaged communities,” such “as adult care, transportation assistance, or housing assistance.” The Administration is imposing a cradle-to-grave welfare system via corporate subsidies.

The editorial concludes with some very sensible observations about the willful stupidity of the self-styled national conservatives who were cheerleaders for this expansion of government power.

The irony is rich because chip makers have shifted manufacturing to Asia to reduce costs. Producing chips in the U.S. is 40% more expensive than overseas. One reason is the U.S. permitting thicket. But chip makers that receive federal largesse will still have to comply with more regulation under the National Environmental Policy Act. …What a wonderful life if you’re a politician. First, pile on regulation that increase business costs. Then dangle subsidies to drive your social policy… We took a lot of grief from the big-government right for opposing the Chips Act, but these conservatives look like chumps for voting for an industrial policy that is now an engine for progressive policy. And one subsidy is never enough. …Welcome to French industrial policy.

The bottom line is that Biden got a victory, but the American economy suffered a defeat.

Politicians and bureaucrats now have a new tool that they can use to make government a bigger burden on the economy’s productive sector.

At the risk of understatement, that’s not a recipe for economic vitality and competitiveness.

American lawmakers should not by copying the policies of nations with much weaker economies.

Especially when we already know the right way to get more prosperity.

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China’s Failed Industrial Policy

One of my frustrations in life is that my friends on the left seem more interested in good intentions rather than good results.

With regards to overall public policy, I challenge them with my “never-answered question” and they are unable to respond.

With regards to specific issues such as fiscal policy, I show them my list of nations that enjoyed success with spending restraint, yet they are unable to respond when I ask for a list of nations that got good results with tax increases.

The same thing is true with industrial policy. I share lots of evidence that free enterprise is the best system for prosperity, yet they put forth zero examples for their view that we somehow will enjoy more growth if politicians and bureaucrats have power to steer the economy.

Actually, to be fair, they do offer examples. Just not good examples.

I explained last month that Japan’s experiment with industrial policy was a failure, helping to produce “lost decades” for that nation’s economy.

Today, let’s look at the other commonly cited example and explain why China is not a role model. I’ve already made this argument, but let’s put more nails in the coffin by reviewing a new working paper authored by Lee G. Branstetter (Carnegie Mellon), Guangwei Li (Shanghai Tech), and Mengjia Ren (Carnegie Mellon).

Here are some key excerpts, starting with their explanation of the key issues they addressed.

Each year, governments worldwide spend an enormous amount of money subsidizing businesses. …In this paper, we try to peek into the black box of government subsidies to businesses in the context of China. …In this paper, we…fill this gap in the literature by analyzing firm-level subsidy data for companies listed on the Chinese stock exchanges. …we explore the following questions. Which firms are likely to get higher subsidies those with higher productivity or lower productivity? Does the receipt of subsidies, especially those related to R&D and innovation or industrial and equipment upgrading, raise firms’ productivity in subsequent years?

And what did they find?

You won’t be surprised to learn that industrial policy is backfiring in China.

Our results provide little evidence to support the view that government subsidies have been given to more productive firms or that they have enhanced the productivity of the Chinese listed firms. First, at the aggregate level, subsidies seem to be allocated to less productive firms, and the relative productivity of firms’ receiving these subsidies appears to decline further after disbursement. Second, using the categorized subsidy data, we find that neither subsidies promoting R&D and innovation promotion nor subsidies promoting industrial and equipment upgrading are positively associated with firms’ subsequent productivity growth.

The first thing to understand from this study is that industrial policy meant that unproductive firms got the subsidies.

And the second thing to understand is that already low levels of productivity declined further after getting handouts.

Why? Because politicians and bureaucrats give away money on the basis of what makes political sense, not on the basis of what makes economic sense.

Which raises the obvious question of why people in the United States want to copy that failed approach?

P.S. What’s doubly frustrating about the issue of industrial policy is that there are proponents on the right as well as on the left.

P.P.S. Some advocates assert that taxpayers should provide subsidies to American companies because there are national security reasons to reduce reliance on Chinese companies. But if that’s true, that’s simply an argument for restricting economic relations with China, not an argument for domestic cronyism (or global protectionism).

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Japan’s Failed Experiment in Industrial Policy

I’ve expressed opposition numerous times to so-called industrial policy because I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats to provide special favors to certain businesses or industries at the expense of everyone else.

That’s a practice known as cronyism, and it is absurd to think that selfish, election-focused politicians somehow correctly identify and subsidize the technologies of tomorrow.

But there are still people who think government should try to steer the economy – including some supposed conservatives.

Let’s remind ourselves why this is a bad idea. Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research has a new article about the topic for National Review.

…several polling outfits have indicated an uptick in the number of Americans who say they are disillusioned with capitalism and willing to consider socialism as an alternative. This, however, isn’t the most immediate threat to American capitalism. …It is best labeled “corporatism.” …Examples of full-blown corporatism include distinctly authoritarian regimes such as Mussolini’s Italy, Dollfuss’s Austria, and Franco’s Spain until the mid 1950s. …Following World War II, corporatism took on milder expressions. …whatever the form, corporatism creates serious political and economic problems. Even soft versions of corporatism provide established companies with political mechanisms to advance their interests over those of consumers, taxpayers, and new entrepreneurs… This undermines the ability of businesses to make necessary but often difficult changes. The chances of a business’s becoming complacent and disappearing, along with the jobs it provides, thus multiply. …The expansive versions of stakeholder capitalism favored by progressives and woke capitalists are almost indistinguishable from corporatism. …World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab, for instance, wants a trinity of governments, businesses, and NGOs working together to pursue political goals that are always of the progressive variety. …Not every corporatist is a fascist, but every fascist is a corporatist. Authoritarian economics isn’t just economically foolish. It is also an affront to human liberty and dignity.

Writing in August for Reason, Michael Farren documented the failure of industrial policy.

The once-beleaguered CHIPS Act…reflect a cross-party shift toward embracing industrial policy—the idea that the government should jump into the economy with both feet and have fun getting wet. Facetiousness aside, the neoliberal era from the late 1970s through the 1990s—when economic thinking carried more political sway and resulted in massive deregulation of airlines, railroads, and interstate trucking and the privatization of the internet—is far behind us. …Whether it’s encouragement via subsidies or constraint via regulation, using the government to guide the economy is akin to thinking that just a little bit of cyanide won’t hurt. …Compounding the problem is that people, not some agnostic supercomputer, determine which industries and companies are considered worthy of a boost. Humans are subject to influence and pressure, turning industrial policy into a contest of who can secure the most government favoritism… Lastly, industrial policy motivates “unproductive entrepreneurship.” Some of the best and brightest minds inevitably withdraw from productive activities premised on voluntary exchange, and instead use their skills to find autocratic mechanisms to extract political payoffs… The crystal balls policy makers peer into are easily clouded by charlatans, and we all lose when they win.

For those who want real-world evidence, the unhappy experience of Japan is very enlightening. Adam Thierer wrote last year about the failure of industrial policy in that nation.

American pundits and policymakers are today raising a litany of complaints about Chinese industrial policies, trade practices, industrial espionage and military expansion. …In each case, however, it is easy to find identical fears that were raised about Japan a generation ago. …In 1949, the Japanese government created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to work with other government bodies (especially the Bank of Japan) to devise plans for industrial sectors in which they hoped to make advances. …By the late 1970s, however, U.S. officials and market analysts came to view MITI with a combination of reverence and revulsion, believing that it had concocted an industrial policy cocktail that was fueling Japan’s success at the expense of American companies and interests. …Just as Japan phobia was reaching its zenith in the early 1990s, Japan’s fortunes began taking a turn for the worse. The Japanese stock market crashed… The Nikkei Index peaked at 38,915.87 on Dec. 29, 1989, then began a dramatic fall. It has never reached that level since. …Japan suffered a brutal economic downturn that became known as the Lost Decade, which really lasted almost two decades. Microeconomic planning failures—including many missteps by MITI—were also becoming evident during this time. MITI had made a variety of industrial policy bets that were originally feared by U.S. pundits, only to become embarrassing failures a few years after inception. …by the late 1990s many scholars came to view most Japanese industrial policy initiatives as a costly bust. Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted in a 2007 study of Japanese industrial policy efforts, “Attempts to formally model past industrial policy interventions uniformly uncover little, if any, positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare. …Perhaps most notable in this regard was the Japanese government’s own admission that the MITI model had not worked as well as planned. A 2000 report by the Policy Research Institute within Japan’s Ministry of Finance concluded that “the Japanese model was not the source of Japanese competitiveness but the cause of our failure.”

Writing for Forbes, Stuart Anderson also debunks the notion that industrial policy helped Japan.

…it appears each generation must relearn the lessons of the past as today governments in China, Europe and the United States support industrial policy. Policymakers are convinced that government planning will make national economies better than market forces. “Industrial policy in Japan was not responsible for the country’s economic achievements in the post-war era or the international performance of leading sectors, including autos and electrical machinery,” according to a new study by economist Richard Beason for the National Foundation for American Policy. …He found Japanese industrial policy from 1955 to 1990 did not improve growth rates by sector, provide greater efficiency through economies of scale or result in improved productivity growth or “competitiveness.” …To conduct the research, Beason examined four measures of industrial policy used by the Japanese government during the 1955-1990 period: 1) subsidized government loans to industry, 2) subsidies, 3) tariff protection and 4) tax relief. …“Industrial policy tools generally also had no positive and significant impact on productivity growth (“competitiveness”) for the various sub-periods from 1955 to 1990. …Beason notes that policymakers in Japan abandoned industrial policy, viewing the policies costly, unsuccessful.

Sadly, many American politicians now want to copy those unsuccessful policies.

Will that make the United States as bad as today’s China? Or the former Soviet Union?

Fortunately not. Today’s industrial policy is cronyism, not full-fledged central planning. But it is nonetheless a bad idea to move in the wrong direction.

P.S. Both in the past and today, industrial policy is very vulnerable to corruption.

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Big Government, Big Business, and the Clowns at the Chamber of Commerce

Supporting free enterprise does not mean supporting big companies.

Why? Because as John Stossel and Tim Carney discuss, big businesses are more than willing to get into bed with big government and oppose capitalism.

The goal should be genuine consumer-driven, market-based competition. And that means that politicians should not put their thumbs on the scale in favor of specific companies or industries.

Unfortunately, that certainly has happened in countless cases.

At varying times, both Republicans and Democrats have provided special favors to Wall Street, General Motors, airlines, health insurance companies, Boeing, Big Pharma, and banks.

These odious examples help to explain why companies give money and support to politicians from both parties.

But sometimes that approach backfires. Let’s consider how the Chamber of Commerce can be blamed for the looming enactment of Biden’s horribly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this issue today.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce…bet in 2020 that supporting “centrist” House Democrats would protect against anti-business policies has been a bust. …How does that calculation look now…? Every one of the 15 voted for the $1.9 trillion spending bill in March 2020, despite Chamber opposition to sweeping jobless benefits that stoked labor shortages and stimulus checks that fed inflation. They also voted for the PRO Act, a radical pro-union rewrite of labor law. …Now comes the big moment of truth as the Schumer-Manchin tax and spend bill heads to the House… The chance of Democratic defections is slim. Despite aggressive Chamber lobbying, all 15 rolled over for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill last year.

Amazingly, the Chamber bent over backwards to endorse these politicians, notwithstanding their consistent track record of support for bigger government.

Nearly all had publicly expressed support for scrapping the 2017 corporate tax reform, and for new climate, banking and healthcare regulations. The only reason most qualified for endorsements is because the Chamber altered its voting scorecard to allow extra points for “leadership” and “bipartisanship.” …It’s not too much to say that the Chamber was crucial in midwifing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 222-211 seat majority.

The Washington Post wrote last year about the Chamber’s controversial decision to side with Democrats.

Here are some excerpts from the story by Tory Newmyer and Aaron Gregg.

 …the Chamber has been the object of sharp attacks by leading conservatives. …The decision to endorse so many freshman Democrats, rather than give them time for their voting records to take shape, was a dramatic break from past procedure. …the conservative backlash has led to alarm even among some of the organization’s closest allies. A veteran U.S. Chamber board member, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal, said: “It is a legitimate question how well-thought out this strategy is. People are concerned, and they’re discussing where else they can send revenues to support free enterprise.” …Seeing Chamber-endorsed Democrats support pro-union legislation “is like the national right to life organization saying they now support some abortions,” said a former U.S. Chamber executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person feared reprisal.

If you want examples of conservative hostility, here’s a tweet from Hugh Hewitt.

The ⁦@USChamber⁩ opposes President Biden’s massive tax hikes. Too bad none of the Democrats they supported over GOP candidates last year care. The whole management team should quit or be fired. They got played. Badly. https://t.co/Cty77pXgjV

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) April 1, 2021

And here’s a tweet from Oren Cass.

One of the major recent developments in American politics is the nasty divorce underway between the Republican Party and conservatives on one side and the Chamber of Commerce and big business on the other. What's causing the breakup? 🧵

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) November 15, 2021

Interestingly, this is not the first time the Chamber of Commerce has sided with the left.

In a column for National Review earlier this year, Nate Hochman recounts what happened during the Hillarycare fight back in 1993.

In March 1993, the Chamber of Commerce surprised many of its allies by coming out in favor of Clinton’s plan for universal coverage with an employer mandate, reversing its earlier opposition to both proposals. …The Chamber’s attempt to curry favor with the new administration provoked a furious conservative backlash. Congressional Republicans — led by John Boehner of Ohio, then the head of the 75-member House Conservative Opportunity Society — organized a mass boycott of the Chamber, urging local and state chapters to disaffiliate in protest. The campaign was devastatingly effective: By the time the dust had settled, the Chamber had lost one-fifth of its membership.

As far as I’m concerned, any business owners who favor free enterprise should not support the Chamber of Commerce. It would be heartwarming to see the organization lose members.

But this brings me back to what I wrote at the start of today’s column. Many business owners don’t support capitalism. They prefer cronyism.

That’s particularly true for large companies, which often see big government as a way of thwarting competition from small companies (such as Amazon’s support for a higher minimum wage).

P.S. The Chamber of Commerce is not the only business association governed by fools. Yes, I’m referring to the Business Roundtable.

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Shareholders Over Stakeholders, Part II

In Part I, I warned that “stakeholder capitalism” is not just empty virtue signaling. Some advocates are using the concept to promote a statist agenda.

For Part II, let’s start with this video.

The main message of the video is that ethical profits are good for shareholders, but also good for everyone else (the supposed stakeholders).

By contrast, companies that don’t prioritize profits wind up hurting workers and consumers, not just the company’s owners (i.e., shareholders).

Let’s dig deeper into this topic.

Stakeholder theory reflects the more interventionist approach of continental Europe’s “civil law” while the shareholder approach is more consistent with the “common law” approach of the Anglosphere (the United Kingdom and many of its former colonies, including the United States).

That’s a key observation in Samuel Gregg’s column for Law & Liberty, which reviews a book by Professor Nadia E. Nedzel.

…stakeholder theory reinforces continental European rule through law inclinations and vice-versa, not least because of shared hard-communitarian foundations. …Such goals undermine the ability of corporations to produce prosperity. An emphasis on stability and maintaining levels of employment, for instance, exacts a cost in terms of organizational dynamism, not least by discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship. …Without such adjustments, however, a business will become complacent and uncompetitive. Eventually it will disappear, along with all the jobs once provided by the business. Likewise, if boards of directors are not focused on delivering shareholder value because profit is considered only one of many company objectives, a decline in earnings is sure to follow. …To the extent that stakeholder theory draws upon hard-communitarian principles which it shares with continental European rule through law models, it risks undermining already fragile commitments to rule of law in America and elsewhere. That’s just one more reason to shore up the priority of shareholder interests throughout corporate America. These priorities help explain the weaker economic performance of many corporations in civil law jurisdictions compared to those businesses located primarily in the Anglo-American sphere.

Allison Schrager of he Manhattan Institute wrote for the City Journal that Biden is on the wrong side and that his mistake, along with others, is failing to understand that so-called stakeholders benefit when companies are profitable.

…one thing that stood out was Biden’s vow to “put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism.” …disdain for the notion that a corporation’s primary objective is to maximize value for its shareholders has united the disparate likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and the Davos/Larry Fink crowd. It’s no surprise that Joe Biden is against it, too. …Maximizing shareholder value…does not create conflicts between different stakeholders, because economic success is not zero-sum. …long-term success requires happy and loyal employees, a healthy relationship with the community, and a thriving environment.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita shared their research showing that CEOs who pontificate about stakeholders don’t actually change their behavior.

…we dug deeper, investigating an array of corporate documents for the 136 public U.S. companies whose CEOs signed the statement. …we found evidence that the signatory CEOs didn’t intend to make any significant changes to how they do business. …We’ve identified almost 100 signatory companies that updated their corporate governance guidelines by the end of 2020. We found that the companies that made updates generally didn’t add any language that elevates the status of stakeholders, and most of them reaffirmed governance principles supporting shareholder primacy. …We also found that about 85% of the signatory companies didn’t even mention joining the “historic” statement in their proxy statements sent to shareholders the following year. Among the 19 companies that did mention it, none indicated that joining the statement would cause any changes to how they treat stakeholders.

Speaking of insincere hypocrites, that’s a good description of the Davos crowd. Matthew Lesh of the Adam Smith Institute wrote about their trendy support for stakeholders in a column for CapX.

…the man behind the World Economic Forum has declared that Covid warrants a ‘Great Reset’. With tedious predictability, Klaus Schwab’s bogeymen are the twin menaces of “neoliberal ideology” and “free market fundamentalism”. …he’s also calling for a “stakeholder model of corporate capitalism”… But it’s an idea based on a false dichotomy. A business that fails to return a profit to its shareholders cannot do anything for its other stakeholders, such as providing useful products to customers, paying its staff, procuring from suppliers… Delivering for shareholders is ultimately indivisible from benefiting your other ‘stakeholders’ because you can’t do one without the other. …Shivaram Rajgopal of Columbia Business School has found that top European companies who brandish their social and environmental credentials do no better in these criteria than American companies. But the European firms are much worse at ensuring good corporate governance. For example, worker representation on Germany’s supervisory boards has often meant worker representatives teaming up with managers to push against new technology and methods. In the longer run, this undermines returns to shareholders, but also means poorer products for customers, lower salaries for employees.

The bottom line is that there are lots of misguided attacks against capitalism, but none of the criticisms change the fact that free enterprise is the only system to ever deliver mass prosperity to ordinary people.

And that’s true even if big companies don’t support the system that enabled their very existence (perhaps because they fear they will got knocked from their perch by the the forces of “creative destruction“).

P.S. Just like yesterday, I can’t resist adding this postscript about the left-leaning executive who thought he was rejecting Milton Friedman, but actually did exactly as Friedman recommended.

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Shareholders Over Stakeholders, Part I

My warm and fuzzy feelings for “capitalism” turn sour when someone promotes a modified version such as “common-good capitalism.”

Why? Because I worry such terms imply a Trojan Horse for statism. And that’s definitely the case with so-called “stakeholder capitalism.”

As you can see, my core argument is that stakeholder capitalism is just another way of saying cronyism. And if I was being lazy, I would simply point out that Elizabeth Warren is a big proponent of the idea. That, by itself, should convince every thinking person that it’s a bad idea.

But I’m not going to be lazy. I’m going to cite some experts to show why stakeholder capitalism is bad news.

But first, I mentioned Milton Friedman’s famous quote in the above video clip.

Here’s the full quote, and notice that he explicitly says companies should follow rules – both legal and ethical – as they pursue profits.

Friedman was advocating what is sometimes referred to as “shareholder capitalism,” which is the notion that a company should strive to earn honest profits for its owners.

So what, then is stakeholder capitalism? In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Professor Alexander William Salter warns us that it is an invitation for intervention.

…beneath the lofty rhetoric, stakeholder capitalism is mostly a front for irresponsible corporatism. …Stakeholder capitalism is used as a way to obfuscate what counts as success in business. By focusing less on profits and more on vague social values, “enlightened” executives will find it easier to avoid accountability even as they squander business resources. While trying to make business about “social justice” is always concerning, the contemporary conjunction of stakeholder theory and woke capitalism makes for an especially dangerous and accountability-thwarting combination. …profits are an elegant and parsimonious way of promoting efficiency within a business as well as society at large. Stakeholder capitalism ruptures this process. When other goals compete with the mandate to maximize returns, the feedback loop created by profits gets weaker.

Writing for the Washington Post, George Will has a similarly scathing assessment.

…everyone who values economic dynamism, and the freedom that enables this, should recoil from the toxic noun “stakeholder.” …Stakeholder capitalism violates fiduciary laws that require those entrusted with investors’ money to employ it “solely in the interest of” and “for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to” the investors. …In a dynamic society, resources are efficiently disposed by corporate managements whose primary duty, which other corporate activities do not compromise, is to maximize shareholder value… Self-proclaimed stakeholders, parasitic off others’ labor and accumulation, assert that everything is their business.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon point out that today’s stakeholder capitalism is very similar to feudalism, which was a pre-industrial form of socialism.

…because of the misery Marxism has imposed, the world has a living memory and therefore some natural immunity to a system in which government takes the commanding heights of the economy. No such immunity exists to the older and therefore more dangerous socialism of the pre-Enlightenment world. In the communal world of the Dark Ages, the worker owed fealty to crown, church, guild and village. Those “stakeholders” extracted a share of the product of the sweat of the worker’s brow and the fruits of his thrift. …The 18th-century Enlightenment liberated…people to…own the fruits of their own labor and thrift. …These Enlightenment ideas spawned the Industrial Revolution and gave birth to the modern world… Remarkably, amid the recorded successes of capitalism and failures of socialism rooted in Marxism, pre-enlightenment socialism is re-emerging in the name of stakeholder capitalism. …the biggest losers in stakeholder capitalism are workers, whose wages will be cannibalized.

Amen. The only economic system to ever produce mass prosperity for workers is capitalism (or, if you prefer, free enterprise or classical liberalism).

And the pursuit of profit is what generates efficiency, which is economic jargon for higher living standards. And that’s good for rich people and poor people.

The bottom line is that I’m not surprised when politicians support so-called stakeholder capitalism. After all, the crowd in Washington likes to have more power.

Based on what I said at the end of the above video, I’m disappointed – but not surprised – when big businesses (such as the Business Roundtable or Larry Fink of Blackrock) embrace the idea. After all, “creative destruction” is not so appealing when you’re already as the top.

P.S. I was very amused by the left-leaning CEO who criticized Friedman, but then did exactly as Friedman recommended.

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D.C. Politicians Are Pushing Industrial Policy

Politicians in Washington very much like the idea of industrial policy.

Steve Forbes, however, warns that legislation to expand cronyism would be a very bad idea.

As Steve notes, politicians foolishly claim we need our own version of industrial policy so we can compete with China’s industrial policy.

But China is suffering in part because of that form of intervention.

So why on earth do American politicians think we should copy the policies of a nation where living standards are only a fraction of U.S. levels?

The bad news, as James Pethokoukis recently observed for the American Enterprise Institute, is that this pork-barrel legislation may soon get through Congress.

…during President Biden’s State of the Union address…he said it was “so important” for Congress to pass something called the “Bipartisan Innovation Act.” To the best of just about anyone’s knowledge, no such legislation existed. Save the “senior moment” wisecracks. Biden was breaking out a new name for a couple of bills making their way through the House and Senate. …few Americans have ever heard of the House’s America Competes Act or the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, despite their huge price tags. But they might want to get up to speed, ASAP. …there’s the substance of the bills themselves, …the parts that seem intent on mimicking top-down Chinese industrial policy, such as the funding for semiconductor manufacturing and efforts to create “Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs” across America.

So what will happen if politicians approved this example of cronyism?

The easy answer is that we will have more politicization of the economy. And that’s not a good outcome.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this legislation last year.

Competition with China will define the coming decades, and Congress wants to get into the game. Alas…the Senate’s nearly 1,500-page Innovation and Competition Act that won’t help innovation or competitiveness. …the bill’s bipartisan support has less to do with China than with its typical Congressional spending blowout and parochial politics. …political strings…always attach to industrial policy. Companies left to their own devices will allocate capital to its most productive use, but government subsidies will steer investment where politics directs. …Many Republicans support the bill because they believe the U.S. needs to mimic Beijing’s directed capital to defeat Beijing. But the U.S. strength has always been its capitalist system, which encourages private investment and innovation through market competition, strong intellectual property rights, and, yes, profits. That’s how the U.S. transcended Japan’s challenge in the 1980s and 1990s. …China’s strategy has long been to subsidize inefficient state-owned enterprises and national champions like Huawei, which has hamstrung smaller potential competitors. …The China challenge requires a better response than the U.S. has mustered to date. But the industrial policy of this bill will waste taxpayer money and divert private capital to less efficient purposes. America can’t out-compete China by imitating it.

Veronique de Rugy also addressed this issue last year.

Here are excerpts from her National Review column.

Industrial policy looks great on paper. The government simply has to identify an industry that needs support, prop it up with subsidies, loans, tax breaks, or protect it from foreign competition with tariffs and other trade regulations, and we will be on our way to fixing many of our problems. …the winners picked by the government may not all turn out to be the champions we hope they will become. …And yet, we continue to believe that somehow, this time, industrial policy will work better. You even hear conservatives make arguments like, “It works in China, so we have to do the same.” It’s as if some people are convinced that the problems that have plagued past and current central-planning efforts in the U.S. government don’t exist in China. But the truth is that China’s successes may not look as good relative to the U.S. if you look closely at the data and facts.

Veronique is right. China is not a role model

Just like the Soviet Union was not a role model.

Just like Japan of the 1980s was not a role model.

Industrial policy has always been a failure, anywhere and everywhere, whether done on a big scale (central planning) or a small scale (business subsidies).

Free markets are the right answer. Though I guess it is not much fun being a politician if your role is to simply leave people alone.

P.S. In his article, Pethokoukis expresses sympathy for having the government fund basic research instead of picking winners and losers. I think he is far too optimistic about getting good results with government-financed research and development.

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Government and Baseball

You can actually learn a lot about sensible tax policy by looking at the behavior of professional athletes and sports franchises.

Simply stated, people respond to incentives.

That’s true in the United States. And it’s true overseas.

We can also learn about the pitfalls of cronyism by looking at sports.

And maybe we can also learn why socialism is a mistake.

Not just watered-down tax-and-spend socialism-lite. In this case, we’re talking unvarnished government-ownership-of-the-means-of-production socialism.

At least sort of. Matthew Walther wrote a satirical column (or was it semi-satirical?) for the New York Times about how politicians should take over baseball to save it.

It pays to be honest up front about what nationalizing baseball would entail. While I like to think the Biden administration could seize all 30 teams and dissolve the league by executive order, citing language buried somewhere in the text of the Patriot Act, it’s more realistic to assume that Congress should be involved. . The legislation would allow teams to be purchased at their current (and absurdly inflated) market value. Players, coaches and other staff would become federal employees. The general manager would be appointed by the governor of the state in which the team plays its home games; manager would be a statewide office that citizens vote for every six years. There would be no term limit. …Revenues, though reduced, would be more equitably distributed. I imagine gate receipts and merchandise sales are being given en bloc to local authorities in cities where teams play, bolstering the coffers of many struggling municipalities. Public funding of stadiums would continue, but instead of being a cynical grab of money by destitute owners, it would be a noble enterprise, accepted by indifferent citizens as one of those worthwhile cultural enterprises like the Smithsonian Institution that governments are obliged to support.

The lesson the rest of us should take from this column is that baseball may be declining in popularity…and a government takeover would be the surest way of completely killing the sport.

Matt Welch of Reason understands. He responded to Walther’s column with a serious point about the baleful impact of government-subsidized stadiums.

…both the essay and the spectacle of an ambivalent Opening Day are timely reminders that much of what plagues the sport is not solvable by government, it emanates from government. …Giving out subsidies and tax breaks for sports business owners is self-evidently terrible enough, as have concluded virtually every non-corrupted economist who has ever studied the issue. …Self-funders are also incentivized to stay put, rather than jilting the local fan base. “When governments become landlords,” I wrote last year, “sports businesses, no matter how deep their pockets, start acting like tenants: always eyeing the exits for a potentially better deal. If you build it, they will leave.” Baseball doesn’t need to be nationalized, it needs to be privatized—no more subsidies, no more finger-wagging congressional hearings, no more State of the Union address moralizing, no more unique-to-this-one-sport carve outs from federal law. It’s time for these welfare queens to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and compete for audience share as if their bottom lines depended on that as much as it does on the ribbon-cutting innumeracy of dull-witted politicians.

Amen.

P.S. Back in 2012, I waxed poetic in a TV interview about politicians investigating steroid use.

P.P.S. I also opined that year about Olympic athletes being taxed by the IRS.

P.P.P.S. In 2016, Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers learned a very painful lesson about marginal tax rates.

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Stadium Subsidies, Reverse Redistribution, and Cronyism

Redistribution is bad economic policy.

As the great Thomas Sowell observed, the people who finance redistribution are hurt because they get taxed for working and producing. And the people on the receiving end often are hurt because they get lured into dependency.

But not all forms of redistribution are equally bad.

For instance, I don’t like America’s welfare state, which redistributes from the rich to the poor.

But I utterly despise government programs that redistribute from the poor to the rich (such as the Export-Import Bank, the National Endowment for the Arts, bailouts for student loan deadbeats, ethanol subsidies, etc).

Amazingly, some politicians even want to subsidize millionaires and billionaires. It’s happening in my state!

Sarah Rankin of the Associated Press summarizes a sweetheart deal that Virginia politicians have prepared for the local NFL team (formerly the Redskins, now the Commanders).

Virginia lawmakers are advancing a measure intended to lure the Washington Commanders to the state by allowing the NFL team to forgo what could be $1 billion or more in future tax payments to help finance a potential new football stadium. The move…is intended to help Virginia secure its first major pro sports franchise. …“They’re going to go someplace. Absent some kind of incentive, they’re likely not to be here,” Tray Adams, a lobbyist representing the team, told a panel considering the legislation. …The House and Senate passed differing versions of the measure this month with broad bipartisan support… Both versions of the legislation would create a Virginia Football Stadium Authority tasked with financing the construction of a stadium and related facilities. The nine-member authority would be allowed to issue bonds, then recapture certain tax revenues to pay down that debt. …Virginia’s newly inaugurated Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, seemed to throw support to the idea… In an interview with the AP, Youngkin said he hoped he and the Legislature could reach agreement on a bill that would “best reflect the interests of Virginia taxpayers and hopefully bring the Washington Commanders to Virginia.”

As a Virginia taxpayer, I can assure the Governor that it’s not in my interest if I have to pay taxes while millionaire players and a billionaire owner get a sweetheart deal.

In a column for the Washington Times, Michael Farren and John Mozena explain why taxpayers are the big losers when politicians subsidize sports stadiums.

Proving that bipartisan ideas can be just as bad as those cooked up by a single party, legislation just passed in both the Virginia House and Senate to create a “Virginia Football Stadium Authority” — a government entity that would fund construction of a new stadium… Here’s what most people don’t understand about Virginia’s multibillion-dollar proposal: …it looks like nearly all taxes — sales, corporate income and personal income — collected at the stadium and entertainment complex will go to the stadium authority, not Richmond. The stadium authority then funnels the tax revenue back to the team, meaning the legislation creates a miniature tax haven for the team owners. In other words, ..other Virginia residents and businesses will have to compensate for the fact that the Commanders will pay almost nothing at all. …three leading sports economists — J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys — just threw a penalty flag. Their recent research summarizes more than 120 academic studies from the past 30 years regarding the effects of stadium subsidies… “The large subsidies commonly devoted to constructing professional sports venues are not justified as worthwhile public investments.” That confirms the results of a University of Chicago survey of some of the nation’s leading economists, including seven Nobel Laureates. The consensus was that subsidies cost communities more than they deliver in economic benefits. Only 4% disagreed. …Maybe a better team name would be the Washington Tax Demanders.

For what it’s worth, I think the Washington Leeches would have been the best name. And I’ve thought that ever since I moved to Virginia in the 1980s.

Though I confess that’s simply because so many member’s of D.C.’s parasite class root for the team.

But I’m digressing. The message of today’s column is that cronyism is bad, but the worst kind of cronyism is upside-down redistributionism that gives special preferences to the rich and powerful.

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A Primer on Free Enterprise vs. Big Government

I’ve made the case for capitalism (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V) and the case against socialism (Part I, Part II, and Part III), while also noting that there’s a separate case to be made against redistribution and the welfare state.

This video hopefully ties together all that analysis.

If you don’t want to spend 10-plus minutes watching the video, I can sum everything up in just two sentences.

1. Genuine socialism (government ownership, central planning, and price controls) is an utter failure and is almost nonexistent today (only in a few basket-case economies like Cuba and North Korea).
2. The real threat to free enterprise and economic liberty is from redistributionism, the notion that politicians should play Santa Claus and give us a never-ending stream of cradle-to-grave goodies.

For purposes of today’s column, though, I want to focus on a small slice of the presentation (beginning about 2:00).

Here’s the slide from that portion of the video.

I make the all-important point that profits are laudable – but only if they are earned in the free market and not because of bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, or a tilted playing field.

This is hardly a recent revelation.

I first wrote about this topic back in 2009.

And many other supporters of genuine economic liberty have been making this point for much longer.

Or more recently. In a new article for City Journal, Luigi Zingales emphasizes that being pro-market does not mean being pro-business.

The first time I visited the Grand Canyon many years ago, I was struck…by a sign that said, “Please don’t feed the wild animals.” Underneath was an explanation: you shouldn’t feed them because it’s not good for them. …We should post something of this kind on Capitol Hill as well—with the difference being that the sign would read, “Please don’t feed the businesses.” That’s not because we don’t like business. Quite the opposite: we love business so much that we don’t want to create a situation where business is so dependent on…a system of subsidies, that it is unable to compete and succeed… This is the…difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. If you are pro-business, you like subsidies for businesses; you want to make sure that they make the largest profits possible. If, on the other hand, you are pro-markets, you want to behave like the ranger in the Grand Canyon: …ensuring that markets remain competitive and…preventing businesses from becoming too dependent on a crony system to survive.

Amen.

Cronyism is bad economic policy because government is tilting the playing field and luring people and businesses into making inefficient choices.

But I also despise cronyism because some people mistakenly think it is a feature of free enterprise (particularly the people who incorrectly assume that being pro-market is the same as being pro-business).

The moral of the story is that we should have separation of business and state.

P.S. There’s one other point from Prof. Zingales’ article that deserves attention.

He gives us a definition of capitalism (oops, I mean free enterprise).

We use the term “free markets” so often that we sometimes forget what it actually means. If you look up “free markets” in the dictionary, you might see “an economy operating by free competition,” or better, “an economic market or system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and not controlled by a government.”

For what it’s worth, I did the same thing for my presentation (which was to the New Economic School in the country of Georgia).

Here’s what I came up with.

By the way, the last bullet point is what economists mean when they say things are “complementary.”

In other words, capital is more valuable when combined with labor and labor is more valuable when combined with capital – as illustrated by this old British cartoon (and it’s the role of entrepreneurs to figure out newer and better ways of combining those two factors of production).

One takeaway from this is that Marx was wrong. Capital doesn’t exploit labor. Capital enriches labor (just as labor enriches capital).

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Baptists, Bootleggers, and (Pretend-) Meat

I’ve written many times about how big businesses often climb in bed with politicians to lobby for anti-market policies such as subsidies, bailouts, and protectionism.

To get these special favors, they often deploy the “baptists and bootleggers” strategy, which means finding some nice-sounding reason for special interest policies.

For instance, the big health insurance firms lobbied for Obamacare because they liked the idea of getting undeserved profits by having the government force people to buy their products.

But they pretended that their motive was more access to health care.

Another example is the way some large companies are embracing “stakeholder capitalism” to curry favor with politicians and interest groups.

Today, let’s look at an additional version of this unsavory phenomenon.

The BBC reports that the CEO of a pretend-meat company likes the idea of big tax on his more tasty competitors.

The founder of the world’s biggest plant-based meat company has suggested that a tax on meat could help tackle some of the problems from growing meat consumption. Asked if he backed a tax on meat, Beyond Meat’s Chief Executive, Ethan Brown told the BBC “the whole notion of a Pigouvian tax, which is to tax negative, you know, things that are high in externalities, I think is an interesting one. I’m not an economist, but overall that type of thing does appeal to me”. …A tax on meat consumption would definitely be beneficial to companies such as Beyond Meat because it would make their products cheaper in comparison, says Rebecca Scheuneman, an equity analyst at US financial services firm Morningstar.How much of an advantage it would give “depends how significant the tax would be”, she told the BBC.

The woman from Morningstar is quite correct that a tax on meat would help the bottom line of companies that offer competing products.

Just as I wrote in 2012 that a tax increase on small businesses would tilt the playing field in favor of big businesses.

Matthew Lesh of the London-based Adam Smith Institute wrote about a potential meat tax in an article for CapX.

Beyond Meat’s call for a meat tax is a textbook example of ‘bootleggers and baptists’: a policy supported by a coalition of profiteering rent seekers hiding on the moral high ground. …does any of that make a new meat tax a good idea? …a cost-benefit analysis conducted by the University of Bristol concluded that a meat tax “could do more harm than good”. The researchers found it would cost £242 million a year but only save £100 million per annum in reduced carbon emissions. …Then there’s the most simple argument of all – most people enjoy meat. We get satisfaction and it provides important nutrients. …most people do not want to stop eating meat and there is substantial growing demand from the rising middle class in Asia and Africa.

While he makes a good point about the costs and benefits of meat taxation, I especially like Mr. Lesh’s point about people wanting to consume meat.

This is also why I don’t want politicians imposing sugar taxes.

Or taxes on other things that fall into disfavor, such as tobacco.  Or things that rise into favor, such as marijuana.

There are plenty of things in life that are unhealthy and/or dangerous. Maybe I’m just a knee-jerk libertarian, but I think adults should be free to make their own choices about the levels of risk they’re willing to incur.

And I certainly don’t want nanny state policies that – in reality – are the result of big companies trying to get unearned profits.

Remember, only earned profits are moral.

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U.S. vs. China: You Don’t Beat Cronyism with Cronyism

China is not going to surpass the United States as the world’s dominant economy.

As I first wrote back in 2010, China is a paper tiger. Yes, there was some pro-market reform last century, which helped reduce mass poverty, but China only took modest steps in the right direction.

According to the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World, China scores just 6.21, which places it 124th out of 162 nations.

Is that better than a score of 3.69, which is where China was in 1990?

Yes, of course.

But does that score indicate that China will become richer than the United States, which has a current score of 8.22 (the world’s 6th-highest level of economic liberty)?

Of course not.

My answer might change of China engaged in more economic liberalization, as I have urged. But it seems the opposite is happening and China is backsliding toward more state control.

And that means the United States almost surely will remain far more prosperous.

(While Joe Biden is doing his best to drag economic policy in the wrong direction, but it would takes decades of far-worse policy to bring the U.S. down to the level of France (#58) or Greece (#92), much less all the way down to being on par with China).

But some people must not be very familiar with data about China and its economy.

For instance, President Trump’s former top trade official, Robert Lighthizer, wrote that the United States should copy China’s cronyism in a column in the New York Times.

I’m not joking. Mr. Lighthizer openly embraces industrial policy and protectionism.

…we need a multifaceted long-term strategy. …Our strategy must include…an industrial policy that includes subsidies to foster the development of the most advanced science and technology…and a robust plan to combat China’s unfair trade practices. …The Senate legislation would achieve some of what is needed. It calls for $200 billion to bolster scientific and technological innovation, $52 billion to rebuild our capacity to make semiconductors, and a supply-chain resiliency program… The House should perfect the provisions of the Senate bill that restructure and enhance federal support for science and innovation and strip out those that weaken our trade laws and encourage Chinese imports.

Geesh, no wonder Trump’s trade policy was such a disaster.

Lighthizer not only doesn’t understand economics, he also doesn’t know history.

Adam Thierer of the Mercatus Center points out that the current angst about China is a repeat verse of a song we heard over and over again in the late 1980s.

Back then, everyone though Japan was on the verge of overtaking the United States, ostensibly because that nation had wise politicians and bureaucrats who knew how to pick winners and losers.

Thierer’s article tells us what really happened.

In 1949, the Japanese government created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to work with other government bodies (especially the Bank of Japan) to devise plans for industrial sectors in which they hoped to make advances. Although not as heavy-handed as Chinese planning authorities are today, MITI came to have enormous influence over private-sector research and investment decisions during the next five decades. The organization used a variety of the same policy levers that Chinese officials do today, with a particular focus on trade management and industrial policy investments in sectors perceived to be “strategic” for future economic advance. …By the late 1970s…, U.S. officials and market analysts came to view MITI with a combination of reverence and revulsion, believing that it had concocted an industrial policy cocktail that was fueling Japan’s success at the expense of American companies and interests. …By the end of the 1980s, fears about “Japan Inc.” had reached a fever pitch. …Just as Japan phobia was reaching its zenith in the early 1990s, Japan’s fortunes began taking a turn for the worse. The Japanese stock market crashed in 1990… Japan suffered a brutal economic downturn that became known as the Lost Decade, which really lasted almost two decades. …by the late 1990s many scholars came to view most Japanese industrial policy initiatives as a costly bust.

Amen.

I wrote that Japan was a “basket case” back in 2013. A bit of hyperbole, to be sure, but I was trying to drive home the point that the nation’s politicians have made some costly mistakes.

Not just industrial policy, but also tax increases, Keynesian spending, and other forms of intervention.

No wonder the country has gone downhill in terms of competitiveness.

But let’s not focus too much on Japan (which, despite all my grousing, still ranks #20 for economic liberty).

For purposes of today’s column, the main points are 1) that China is no threat to overtake the United States, and 2) that copying that nation’s industrial policy would be a mistake.

P.S. If China wants to pursue industrial policy and other forms of cronyism, that’s a mistake that mostly hurts the Chinese people. To the extent such policies are designed to subsidize exports (as Lighthizer argues), the best response is to utilize the World Trade Organization, not to copy China’s misguided interventionism.

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Moral Inequality and Immoral Inequality

While debunking OECD and IMF research on inequality, I explained that it’s important to distinguish between income that is earned honestly and loot that is obtained thanks to government cronyism.

That’s also the message of this video from the Hoover Institution.

In the video, David Henderson contrasts how our lives are improved when an entrepreneur develops a new product.

The entrepreneur almost surely gets richer faster than we get richer, but we all wind up better off. Indeed, there’s a clear relationship between the share of rich people in a society and overall prosperity.

And that’s a good description of what has actually happened in market-oriented nations such as the United States.

Heck, it even happened to some degree in China when there was partial reform.

By contrast, government favoritism is a recipe for inefficiency and stagnation (and since LBJ was an awful president, I like that David used him for the example of corrupt cronyism).

In a column for CapX, Andrew Lilico correctly differentiates between moral inequality and immoral inequality.

The only legitimate questions about the distribution of wealth concern whether it is truly the property of those that possess it, as opposed to having stolen or extorted it. …Wealth is property. If it has been innocently acquired, people should be able to enjoy their property without censure or the (quite incorrect) suggestion that their flourishing causes others harm.

Not only is it incorrect to suggest that one person’s flourishing causes harm to others, it is completely wrong.

As pointed out in the video, Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus calculated that entrepreneurs only capture a tiny fraction (2.2 percent) of the wealth they create for society. That means 97.8 percent for the rest of us.

And other academic scholars have produced similar results.

The bottom line is that the recipe for growth and prosperity is the same recipe for helping the less fortunate.

P.S. As you can see from his Wikipedia page, Professor Nordhaus is not a libertarian or conservative, so it should be clear he wasn’t trying to come up with a number to justify capitalism.

P.P.S. I also recommend my four-part series (see here, here, here, and here) on why we should care about poverty reduction rather than pushing for coerced equality, as well as my two-part series (here and here) on how statist policies produce the immoral type of inequality.

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Amazon’s Shameful Effort to Sabotage Small Businesses

Assuming they behave ethically and earn money honestly, I applaud big companies and their wealthy owners.

That’s why I recently defended Jeff Bezos’ large fortune. The owner of Amazon mostly (but not entirely) became rich by providing value to the rest of us.

Today, though, I’m very disappointed in Bezos and Amazon. Why? Because the company wants to use the coercive power of government to screw over its competitors in the small business community.

Here’s a look at the company’s full-page advertisement in support of a higher minimum wage.

As a very rich company that already relies on a high degree of automation, it easily can afford to pay $15 per hour and above to every employee.

Indeed, it made a very showy decision back in 2018 to have a company-wide floor on compensation. Which is their choice.

But it’s utterly despicable to then climb in bed with politicians and urge a costly mandate on small-business competitors.

And it’s utterly callous for the company to take such a step when it will means unemployment for hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of workers with marginal skills.

The company is behaving just as badly as the unions that push higher minimum wages in order to push competing workers out of the market.

P.S. Don’t forget that many state governments already screwed over small businesses by mandating their closure while not imposing the same pandemic-related restrictions on Amazon and big box stores.

P.P.S. It is possible that Amazon is also motivated by a desire to appease the Biden Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress. In other words, the company openly endorses statist policies such as the higher minimum wage in hopes that it won’t be targeted with other actions (antitrust, wealth tax, etc). Or maybe Amazon has a deal to support the higher minimum wage in exchange for the Biden Administration opposing the European Union’s tax raid on American tech companies. But those excuses don’t justify screwing over small businesses and low-skill workers.

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Time to Shut Down the Ethanol Racket

When I wrote yesterday that Trump’s overall rating on economic policy was “bad,” a few people wrote to complain.

I did acknowledge in the column that it may be too soon to give the current president a grade, but it’s not looking good. He not only has a bad record on big issues such as spending and trade, but he also is prone to cronyist policies in other areas.

Such as goodies for the coal industry.

Such as goodies for the housing lobby.

And goodies for corn growers, which is the topic of today’s column.

But we’re not going to look at traditional agriculture subsidies (which are awful in their own right). Instead we’re going to focus on government handouts that bribe corn growers and others into turning crops into fuel.

This is a policy that’s bad for taxpayers, bad for consumers, bad for the environment, and probably bad for motherhood and apple pie.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote last year about this boondoggle.

President Trump has again sought changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)… The previous reform effort granted ethanol producers and corn growers their request to raise the amount of ethanol allowed year-round in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent (E-15)… But this did not create peace. Pro-RFS forces soon demanded both E-15 and fewer small refinery waivers. Now, the administration has announced that, while it will still grant small refinery exemptions, it will reallocate the waived amounts to non-exempt refineries and thus preserve the 15 billion gallon maximum set out in the law. It will also ease the labelling requirements for gas stations selling E-15. …Lost in the debate between the biofuels industry and the petroleum industry is what the RFS means for consumers. Gasoline prices are relatively low right now, but not because of the RFS. And we are always one bad corn crop away from an ethanol-induced price spike. …The proposed changes can only add to the upward pressure on pump prices.

The year before, the Independent Institute criticized Trump’s approach.

…instead of terminating the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) — which mandates a sharp increase in renewable fuel consumption by 2022 — the Trump administration has doubled-down on biofuels. President Trump has said that he supports ramping up ethanol production even further by allowing gasoline containing 15 percent ethanol to be sold year-round. Doing so would expand ethanol use and encourage the EPA to ratchet that percentage up in subsequent years. …a comprehensive meta-analysis in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found the greenhouse gas benefits of ethanol to be almost zero. For other pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ozone, ethanol actually is worse than gasoline. Because 40 percent of the nation’s corn crop is used in the production of biofuels, ethanol production also raises food costs. As a result, consumers pay higher prices for beef, milk, poultry and pork, among other items. …Because the RFS moved corn growing to areas that require more water, more fertilizer, and more acreage, prairies and other wild-lands are disappearing, soil is eroding, groundwater is being depleted, and ocean dead zones are expanding. …If ethanol truly were a good substitute for gasoline, no E10 or E15 mandate would be necessary.

Ironically, Trump’s misguided handouts aren’t necessarily buying him any friends.

As reported by Bloomberg, one of the big recipients says it may diversify away from ethanol unless subsidies are increased.

American ethanol makers have for years been reliant on a government policy that mandates biofuel use. But industry stalwart Green Plains Inc. wants to break away from that dependence… The Omaha, Nebraska-based company has lost faith that the ethanol industry will get the support it needs from parts of the Trump administration, said Chief Executive officer Todd Becker. …“We are going to spend half a billion dollars transforming this company to be not dependent on government policy,” Becker said in an interview. The EPA is “no friend of ethanol. They’ve done everything they can to destroy the market for us. They’ve done everything they can to destroy this industry.” …The U.S. ethanol industry was born out of government support. In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter asked agribusiness leaders to make biofuels… The industry got another boost in 2007, when the Renewable Fuels Standard expanded the mandate to blend ethanol into gasoline.

This takes chutzpah. Ethanol arguably could be the most subsidized product in the United States, yet beneficiaries say they may exit the industry without ever-increasing handouts.

I’m not sure how to react to this supposed threat.

• Should I say, “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry”?
• Should I channel Clint Eastwood and say, “Go ahead, make my day”?
• Or should I simply say, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out”?

The bottom line is that ethanol handout were bad policy when they were first created and they are bad policy today. These handouts are misguided when Democrats are in charge, and they’re misguided when Republicans are in charge.

I’d like Trump to switch his position because of a newfound appreciation for free enterprise, but I’ll be happy if he shifts in the right direction simply because he doesn’t appreciate greedy complaints from the ethanol industry.

P.S. Trump isn’t the only Republican who is bad on this issue. Indeed, the GOPers who support free markets – such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz – may be in the minority of the Party.

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Coronavirus and the Risky Mix of Bailouts, Big Business, and Big Government

Since government officials have imposed severe restrictions on economic activity, I’m sympathetic to the notion that businesses should be compensated.

But, as I warn in this CNBC interview, I have major concerns about big government and big business getting in bed together.

As is so often the case with interviews on live TV, there are many issues that didn’t get appropriate attention (either because there was too little time or because I failed to address a key point).

• A major risk of bailouts is that politicians will insist on having a say in how companies operate. Indeed, that’s what Christian Weller was calling for in the final part of the interview. I should have pointed out the huge economic downside of having government in the boardroom.
• There’s a rationale for short-run emergency legislation, but we should be very concerned that self-interested politicians and power-hungry bureaucracies will use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to permanently expand their power and control over the economy’s productive sector.

P.S. I usually try to avoid making predictions (economists are lousy forecasters), but I feel confident in asserting that my friends on the left – once the coronavirus crisis has ended – will be complaining about big businesses having too much power.

I’m not against large companies, per se. But I don’t want bigger firms to gain an advantage over small companies by getting in bed with government.

If we want fair and honest competition, we need separation of business and state. No bailouts, no cronyism, no subsidies, and no favoritism.

That’s the part folks on the left don’t understand.

P.S. If you want more information on the economic damage caused by bailouts, watch this video and this video.

P.P.S. Speaking of videos, here’s some satire about the toys that politicians get for their children.

P.P.P.S. I wish this was satire, but American taxpayers are helping to underwrite cronyism in other countries.

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Government-Run Companies vs. Private-Run Companies

In pure socialist systems, governments own and operate companies (the “means of production“). Such an approach also requires central planning and price controls.

But you don’t need socialism to have government-controlled companies. There are plenty of “state-owned enterprises” that exist in supposedly market-oriented nations.

Including in the United States. The federal government, for instance, owns and operates the air traffic control system and the postal service, to cite two big examples.

So what happens when politicians are de facto shareholders?

Today, thanks to some new research from the Asian Development Bank Institute, we’re going to look at the economic consequences of such firms.

Throughout history, and especially since the end of World War II, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been created in much of the world… Although private companies play a dominant role in market-based societies, enterprises with government ownership are still key players in the global economy, making their performance important for economic growth and competitiveness… Thus, scholars and policymakers around the world have been left with a task of reassessing the efficiency of state ownership. …In this paper, we aim to investigate whether certain ownership types consistently show superior economic performance relative to others when controlling for other economic factors. …we aim to fill in this gap and report further empirical evidence on the relative efficiency of public and private companies.

According to the study, state-run companies play a very large role in some countries.

The authors consider some of the theoretical reasons why state-run firms might not be very efficient, including “public choice.”

Agency theory…states that in a corporation, managers (or agents) may follow a personal agenda rather than work on behalf of, and for the interest of, the principals who own the corporation. Within a SOE, in particular, …the managers of SOEs are those who are appointed by the government…and seek firm-specific rents, such as high pay, fringe benefits, and low effort levels. Unlike their peers who operate in private-owned enterprises and may face the risk of replacement and dismissal due to their firms’ low performance…, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of SOEs are put under little financial constraint, and their compensation is not necessarily linked to firm performance… Public choice theory…also provides a cornerstone conceptual framework on which SOEs’ underperformance can be explained. This framework assumes that…special interests affect…governments’ own objectives.

They put together a dataset of more than 25,000 companies, both government and private, and then looked at key performance metrics.

Not surprisingly, government-run firms are not very efficient compared to their private counterparts.

…we find significant evidence that SOEs are outperformed by their POEs counterparts. The findings are consistent over both simple univariate comparisons and multivariate regressions. Government firms appear to be less profitable than POEs. They are also more dependent on debt and financial support from outside sources rather than equity. Hence, we provide support for the view that public firms are less efficient than private firms… The cross-sectional comparisons also show that government firms tend to be more labor intensive and have higher labor costs than non-government ones. …The differences in profitability appear to be economically important. The average return on assets for private firms is 8.010, almost twice that for SOEs. …SOEs have a higher liabilities-to-assets ratio, meaning that they tend to rely more on debt than shareholder funds. … state-owned companies…generate smaller sales volumes and have a higher cost per one employee. In other words, firms owned by private sectors are more labor efficient than government ones. …our findings suggest that privatization could be considered as a driver for firm efficiency.

For those that like perusing quantitative results, here are the results of their statistical regressions.

I’ve highlighted the key difference.

As already noted, government-run firms accumulate more debt.

This is presumably because investors assume that government-run companies won’t default.

Not because they don’t lose money, but rather because the political pressures that led to their creation also will prevent their demise.

SOEs can enjoy a “soft” budget constraint since they are backed by the government for their funding… They have the advantage of borrowing funds at a lower rate rather than accessing the equity market to raise capital… Thus, the discipline that capital markets impose on state-held firms and the threat of financial distress for them is less important than their private counterparts. …it is worth noting that such “soft” budget constraints, to a certain extent, could also be a source of inefficiency in government firms.

In other words, the growth-enhancing process of “creative destruction” is blocked when governments are in charge of companies.

For what it’s worth, this is a big problem in nations such as China.

Though we also saw a version of this in the United States, with the big bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which are government-sponsored enterprises (private ownership, but created by government and controlled by government).

And there are many other examples of bad results when the federal government has intervened in the business world.

The bottom line is that government should not be owning, operating, controlling, or directing private companies. These forms of intervention inevitably produce inefficiency, subsidies, cronyism, corruption, and waste.

And it means that people like you and me wind up with less income and lower living standards because politicians are misallocating labor and capital.

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The Trump-Obama Approach on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Will Lead to Future Financial Instability

The 2008 financial crisis was largely the result of bad government policy, including subsidies for the housing sector from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This video is 10 years old, but it does a great job of explaining the damaging role of those two government-created entities.

The financial crisis led to many decisions in Washington, most notably “moral hazard” and the corrupt TARP bailout.

But the silver lining to that dark cloud is that Fannie and Freddie were placed in “conservatorship,” which basically has curtailed their actions over the past 10 years.

Indeed, some people even hoped that the Trump Administration would take advantage of their weakened status to unwind Fannie and Freddie and allow the free market to determine the future of housing finance.

Those hopes have been dashed.

Cronyists in the Treasury Department unveiled a plan earlier this year that will resuscitate Fannie and Freddie and recreate the bad incentives that led to the mess last decade.

This proposal may be even further to the left than proposals from the Obama Administration. And, as Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute explained in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, this won’t end well.

…the president’s Memorandum on Housing Finance Reform…is a major disappointment. It will keep taxpayers on the hook for more than $7 trillion in mortgage debt. And it is likely to induce another housing-market bust, for which President Trump will take the blame.The memo directs the Treasury to produce a government housing-finance system that roughly replicates what existed before 2008: government backing for the obligations of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , and affordable-housing mandates requiring the GSEs to encourage and engage in risky mortgage lending. …Most of the U.S. economy is open to the innovation and competition of the private sector. Yet for no discernible reason, the housing market—one-sixth of the U.S. economy—is and has been controlled by the government to a far greater extent than in any other developed country. …The resulting policies produced a highly volatile U.S. housing market, subject to enormous booms and busts. Its culmination was the 2008 financial crisis, in which a massive housing-price boom—driven by the credit leverage associated with low down payments—led to millions of mortgage defaults when housing prices regressed to the long-term mean.

Wallison also authored an article that was published this past week by National Review.

He warns again that the Trump Administration is making a grave mistake by choosing government over free enterprise.

Treasury’s plan for releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their conservatorships is missing only one thing: a good reason for doing it. The dangers the two companies will create for the U.S. economy will far outweigh whatever benefits Treasury sees. Under the plan, Fannie and Freddie will be fully recapitalized… The Treasury says the purpose of their recapitalization is to protect the taxpayers in the event that the two firms fail again. But that makes little sense. The taxpayers would not have to be protected if the companies were adequately capitalized and operated without government backing. Indeed, it should have been clear by now that government backing for private profit-seeking firms is a clear and present danger to the stability of the U.S. financial system. Government support enables companies to raise virtually unlimited debt while taking financial risks that the market would routinely deny to firms that operate without it. …their government support will allow them to earn significant profits in a different way — by taking on the risks of subprime and other high-cost mortgage loans. That business would make effective use of their government backing and — at least for a while — earn the profits that their shareholders will demand. …This is an open invitation to create another financial crisis. If we learned anything from the 2008 mortgage market collapse, it is that once a government-backed entity begins to accept mortgages with low down payments and high debt-to-income ratios, the entire market begins to shift in that direction. …why is the Treasury proposing this plan? There is no obvious need for a government-backed profit-making firm in today’s housing finance market. FHA could assume the important role of helping low- and moderate-income families buy their first home. …Why this hasn’t already happened in a conservative administration remains an enduring mystery.

I’ll conclude by sharing some academic research that debunks the notion that housing would suffer in the absence of Fannie and Freddie.

A working paper by two economists at the Federal Reserve finds that Fannie and Freddie have not increased homeownership.

The U.S. government guarantees a majority of mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper, we estimate the effect by using a difference-in-differences design, with detailed property-level data, that exploits changes of the conforming loan limits (CLLs) along county borders. We find a sizable effect of CLLs on government guarantees but no robust effect on homeownership. Thus, government guarantees could be considerably reduced,with very modest effects on the homeownership rate. Our finding is particularly relevant for recent housing finance reform plans that propose to gradually reduce the government’s involvement in the mortgage market by reducing the CLLs.

For those who care about the wonky details, here’s the most relevant set of charts, which led the Fed economists to conclude that, “There appears to be no positive effect of the CLL increases in 2008 and no negative effect of the CLL reductions in 2011.”

And let’s not forget that other academic research has shown that government favoritism for the housing sector harms overall economic growth by diverting capital from business investment.

The bottom line is that Fannie and Freddie are cronyist institutions that hurt the economy and create financial instability, while providing no benefit except to a handful of insiders.

As I suggested many years ago, they should be dumped in the Potomac River. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is choosing Obama-style interventionism over fairness and free markets.

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The Seen, the Unseen, and the Pitfalls of Business Subsidies

The great French economist from the 1800s, Frederic Bastiat, famously explained that good economists are aware that government policies have indirect effects (the “unseen”).

Bad economists, by contrast, only consider direct effects (the “seen”).

Let’s look at the debate over stadium subsidies. Tim Carney of the American Enterprise Institute narrates a video showing how the “unseen” costs of government favoritism are greater than the “seen” benefits.

Unfortunately, stadium subsidies are just the tip of the cronyism iceberg.

In a column for the Dallas Morning News, Dean Stansel of Southern Methodist University discussed some of his research on the topic.

While state and local economic development incentives may seem to help the local economy, the offsetting costs are usually ignored, so the overall effect is unclear. Furthermore, from the perspective of the nation as a whole, these policies are clearly a net loss. …In a new research paper, my colleague, Meg Tuszynski, and I examined whether there is any relationship between economic development incentive programs and five measures of entrepreneurial activity. Like the previous literature in this area, we found virtually no evidence of a positive relationship. In fact, we found a negative relationship with patent activity, a key measure of new innovation. …A recent study by the Mercatus Center found that 12 states could reduce their corporate income tax by more than 20 percent if incentive programs were eliminated. That includes a 24 percent cut in Texas’ business franchise tax. In six states, it could either be completely eliminated or reduced by more than 90 percent. These are big savings that would provide substantial tax relief to all businesses, both big and small, not just those with political influence. …That would provide a more level playing field in which all businesses can thrive.

And here’s a Wall Street Journal editorial from earlier the year.

Amazon left New York at the altar, turning down a dowry of $3 billion in subsidies. Foxconn’s promised new factory in Wisconsin, enticed with $4 billion in incentives, has fallen into doubt. …Now add General Electric , which announced…it will renege on its plan to build a glassy, 12-story headquarters on Boston’s waterfront. …The company reportedly…pledged to bring 800 jobs to Boston. In exchange, the city and state offered $145 million in incentives, including tax breaks and infrastructure funds. GE’s boss at the time, Jeff Immelt, said not to worry: For every public dollar spent, “you will get back one thousand fold, take my word for it.” …two CEOs later, a beleaguered GE won’t be building that fancy tower at all. There won’t even be 800 jobs. …GE will lease back enough space in two existing brick buildings for 250 employees. …what a failure of corporate welfare.

Let’s wrap this up with a look at some additional scholarly research.

Economists for the World Bank investigated government favoritism in Egypt and found that cronyism rewards politically connected companies at the expense of the overall economy.

This paper presents new evidence that cronyism reduces long-term economic growth by discouraging firms’ innovation activities. …The analysis finds that the probability that firms invest in products new to the firm increases from under 1 percent for politically connected firms to over 7 percent for unconnected firms. The results are robust across different innovation measures. Despite innovating less, politically connected firms are more capital intensive, as they face lower marginal cost of capital due to the generous policy privileges they receive, including exclusive access to input subsidies, public procurement contracts, favorable exchange rates, and financing from politically connected banks. …The findings suggest that connected firms out-rival their competitors by lobbying for privileges instead of innovating. In the aggregate, these policy privileges reduce…long-term growth potential by diverting resources away from innovation to the inefficient capital accumulation of a few large, connected firms.

For economics wonks, here’s Table 2 from the study, showing how subsidies are associated with less innovation.

The World Bank also found awful results because of cronyism in Ukraine.

But this isn’t a problem only in developing nations.

There’s some depressing research about the growing prevalence of cronyism in the United States (ethanol handouts, the Export-Import Bank, protectionism, tax favoritism, bailouts, subsidies, and green energy are just a few examples of how the friends of politicians get unearned wealth).

Cronyism is bad under Democrats and it’s bad under Republicans. Time for separation of business and state!

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Green New Deal: Cronyism on Steroids

From a macroeconomic perspective, President Obama’s so-called stimulus was a flop. The federal government borrowed and redistributed almost $1 trillion, yet the economy stagnated.

From a microeconomic perspective, the faux stimulus may have been an even bigger failure. One of the worst features was the laughable and scandal-ridden green energy program, which featured corrupt boondoggles such as Solyndra.

Well, if you liked Solyndra, you’ll love the “Green New Deal,” a proposal to dramatically expand Washington’s power over the private economy.  As I explained in an article for the American Conservative, the plan introduced by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is cronyism on steroids.

Looking at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, one is reminded of Voltaire’s comment that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But that might be slightly unfair. There is some Green in the GND, though the ideas aren’t New, and it’s definitely not a Deal. At least not for taxpayers. …budget gurus have examined the GND wish list and they calculate that the 10-year cost could reach $90 trillion. That’s trillion, not billion—a staggering amount of money. For all intents and purposes, Ocasio-Cortez wants to expand the burden of federal spending from 21 percent of economic output to about 50 percent of economic output. …The economic implications of these policies are horrifying. The GND would mean Greek-style fiscal policy in the United States, with concomitant economic stagnation.

But it’s not just bad fiscal policy.

The scheme would give politicians and bureaucrats immense powers to micro-manage the productive sector of the economy.

It’s equally important to consider how the GND would dramatically expand Washington’s power over the economy—above and beyond new taxes and higher spending. …the government would be obliged to end any and all reliance on fossil fuels and shift the nation to 100 percent renewable energy. …the government would be obliged to provide universal and unrestricted access to health care for everyone. …the government would be obliged to provide everybody with a job that includes generous benefits, including paid vacations and a comfortable retirement. …the government would be obliged to create a nationwide system that was so quick and so effective that commercial air travel could be ended. …the government would be obliged to gut and rebuild every single structure in the country so that they all met a zero-net-carbon goal.

What would this mean?

A feeding frenzy of well-connected special interests at the expense of ordinary taxpayers, which would be very unseemly.

That’s the direct cost.

But from an economic perspective, what matters is that labor and capital increasingly would be allocated by political forces (i.e., cronyism) rather than market forces (i.e., the preferences of consumers).

For all intents and purposes, the GND is a form of central planning. Not full Soviet style steering of the economy, but nonetheless a step in that direction.

And this indirect costs imposed by this approach wouldn’t be trivial.

Every single one of these costly ideas will serve as a magnet for consultants, contractors, administrators, and others who will want to profit by “helping” to implement the various pieces of the GND. For those who remember the corruption and cronyism of the Obama administration’s green energy program (part of the failed stimulus), Ocasio-Cortez wants to do the same thing. But far more extensive. …what happens if the “invisible hand” of consumer-driven competition is replaced (or substantially weakened) because politicians adopt something like the Green New Deal? …market forces will get squeezed as politicians directly allocate resources in the economy. …cronyism and regulation undermine the free market just as taxes and spending undermine the free market. The mechanism—direct versus indirect—isn’t the same, but in both cases the preferences of consumers no longer drive the economy.

The bottom line is that the GND is a corporatist scheme using the environment as a pretext.

If you don’t believe me, just look at what AOC’s top aide said about the proposal.

The chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that her signature Green New Deal was not really about saving the planet after all. In a report by the Washington Post, Saikat Chakrabarti revealed that “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” …The Green New Deal itself was fraught with complications in its February roll-out, which included confusing language and contradictions in the “Frequently Asked Question” section. …The Green New Deal, which some estimated could cost upwards of $93 trillion to enact, also promised “economic prosperity for all.”

Refreshingly honest on the part of Mr. Chakrabarti, but also a stark warning to the rest of us.

By the way, the excerpt mentions the “confusing language” in the original GND documents. I would call is terrifying language. This section is particularly crazy.

David Harsanyi highlighted 10 of the most bizarre provisions in a column for the Federalist.

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. …the plan’s authors assure us that this “massive transformation of our society” needs some “clear goals and a timeline.” The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals: …Ban affordable energy. …Eliminate nuclear energy. …Eliminate 99 percent of cars. …Gut and rebuild every building in America. …Eliminate air travel. …A government-guaranteed job. ….Free education for life. …A salubrious diet. …A house. …Free money. …Bonus insanity: Ban meat.

And remember, all these provisions are enforced by politicians and bureaucrats repressing market forces and replacing them with political pull.

Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute summarizes why this is a bad idea.

…funding allocations will undoubtedly be determined by political forces rather than market forces. …final allocation will depend on the relative clout of the lawmakers and will inefficiently differ from the allocations that consumers and producers would demand. In short, the Green New Deal would be a deficit financed expansion of federal bureaucratic power to dictate investment decisions in one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy. …further centralizing energy market decisions puts at risk the free market economy that our nation has relied on for economic growth for more than two centuries.

Exactly right, which is why the GND would translate to fewer jobs and lower living standards.

Here are two real-world examples from the Wall Street Journal showing why green cronyism is a bad idea.

The first is from the United States.

…consider the public housing projects near Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New York office. The New York City Housing Authority (Nycha)…is switching to LED lighting, which lasts longer than incandescent bulbs and consumes less energy. Sounds smart, until you see how many union workers it takes to screw in a light bulb. One recent project focused on 23 housing developments, and changing the light bulbs and fixtures there cost $33.2 million. Supplies account for a fraction of that cost. Under Nycha’s Project Labor Agreement, electricians make $81 in base pay and $54 in fringe per hour, and overtime is usually time and a half. Add administrative and contracting expenses. All in, Nycha paid an average of $1,973 per apartment to install LEDs. …In the private economy, $1,973 could go a long way toward improving a dilapidated apartment. Only in the world of green government spending is replacing light bulbs for two grand a unit a cost-saving measure.

Don’t forget, by the way, that light bulbs also are more expensive once government is part of the equation.

The second is from Australia.

The Green New Deal…calls among other things for “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States…” We’ve tried it in Australia—on a much smaller scale—and it didn’t go well. On Feb. 3, 2009, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, announced the Energy Efficient Homes Package. “To support jobs and set Australia up for a low carbon future the Rudd Government will install free ceiling insulation in around 2.7 million Australian homes…” There were only 250 registered insulation businesses in Australia when the package was announced. That number quickly blew out to 7,000 because the government was handing out free money to installers. …They received their rebates directly from the government rather than from homeowners, who therefore had little incentive to check if the work had been done well or even at all. …Almost every insulation job went right up to the $1,600 cap, regardless of size or ceiling area. …Nearly 100 houses caught fire. …In February 2010, a year after the Energy Efficient Homes Package was announced, it was abandoned.

I also recommend this column about what happened in Germany.

Let’s close with a bit of humor.

Our first example is a modification of the famous map of the Korean Peninsula showing the difference between capitalism and communism.

In this case, however, we show a “successful” low-carbon economy.

By the way, some people don’t get the joke. Jeffrey Sachs actually ranks hellholes such as Cuba ahead of the United States in part because impoverished people don’t consume much energy.

And some environmentalists put together a grotesquely misnamed “Happy Planet Index” that also ranked the grim disaster of Venezuela ahead of America.

To conclude, here’s a cartoon strip that nicely summarizes how the GND is fueled.

In other words, the middle class will pay a lot more if AOC’s scheme is ever adopted.

P.S. Donald Trump is also at least somewhat guilty of wanting to replace market forces with government intervention.

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The Continuing Battle against Cronyism at the Export-Import Bank

One of the worst examples of Washington cronyism is the Export-Import Bank, which has provided subsidies for big companies that sell to foreign buyers.

Corrupt firms such as Boeing and General Electric argue that they need help from the Ex-Im Bank in order make those sales.

Is that true?

Interestingly, we had a real-world test earlier this decade when the Ex-Im Bank was temporarily shut down and then, after re-opening, was largely unable to provide subsidies to big corporations.

So what happened? Veronique de Rugy of Mercatus explains that exporters did just fine when the Ex-Im Bank was curtailed.

Back in 2015, there was widespread agreement in Congress that the Export-Import Bank — the U.S. government’s export credit agency — was nothing but a crony bank, mostly serving the greedy interests of Boeing and other large companies. As a result, Congress let the bank’s charter expire. It was reauthorized a few months later but in a much-diminished form, operating at 15% capacity. …A thorny problem for those supporting Ex-Im’s revival is that we now have nearly a half-decade’s worth of data on what happened to U.S. exports, economic growth, jobs and beneficiaries while the institution was mostly dormant between 2015 and 2019. During that time, …its activities dropped from $21 billion in 2014 (the last year the bank functioned at full capacity) to $3.6 billion in 2018. …Back in 2014, 65% of the bank’s activities benefited 10 giant companies. Boeing alone got 40% of Ex-Im’s largesse. On the foreign side, the bank’s clients belong to a who’s who list of large, wealthy, successful and often state-owned companies. …Most of this profligacy ended between 2015 and 2018. During that time, the share of funding that benefited large firms dropped by 93%. …once Ex-Im stopped extending giant deals to giant companies, American taxpayers’ liability fell from $112 billion in 2014 to $72.5 billion in 2018. U.S. exports continued to grow without being impacted whatsoever by Ex-Im limitations, and many beneficiaries of the bank had their best year ever in 2018, demonstrating that none of these subsidies are necessary for their success.

Sadly, the Ex-Im Bank is now back in business (and President Trump deserves a big chunk of the blame).

But its charter has to be renewed this year.

There’s no chance of killing the program, but there may be an opportunity to at least curtail its power and authority.

Negotiations on Capitol Hill have produced a compromise package between the top Democrat and top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee.

But not everyone is a fan. The Washington Examiner opined that the deal should be rejected.

House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has drafted a bill that would expand the Ex-Im Bank, rename it, free it from oversight, and charge it with a handful of irrelevant liberal mandates. The committee’s top Republican, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., has unfortunately agreed to Waters’ bill. …Republicans should outright reject Waters’ proposal. It’s pitched as a compromise, but the Senate GOP has no reason to compromise. Either fix Waters’ bill or let the Ex-Im Bank’s charter expire in the fall. The “reforms” in Waters’ bill are weak tea. They don’t do anything to steer the Ex-Im Bank away from being welfare for America’s largest corporations.

So did House Republicans kill the deal, which should have been an easy decision?

Not exactly. According to a Politico report, House Democrats stopped it.

But not because they’re opposed to corporate welfare. They rebelled because they want a deal that’s even worse.

House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters on Wednesday shelved a bipartisan Export-Import Bank bill that sparked a fierce backlash from her own caucus… The delay raises questions about the fate of the beleaguered bank, which, without action by Congress, will see its operating charter lapse in September. …the original compromise she drafted with McHenry ignited criticism from a wide swath of the Democrats on the committee… They objected to new restrictions that would be imposed on the bank and big manufacturers such as Boeing, that benefit from its loan guarantees… Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.)…had been raising concerns about sections of the bill that would impose new disclosure requirements on major manufacturers and restrict the agency from providing financial support for deals with Chinese state-owned enterprises. …The restrictions turned out to be one of the biggest sticking points for Democrats. …The bank is only now returning to full operation after years of being hobbled by conservative Republican lawmakers who criticized the agency as engaging in “crony capitalism” and posing a risk to taxpayers.

The moral of the story is that big government and big business shouldn’t be in bed together.

The federal government shouldn’t redistribute money, and it’s especially offensive to have programs that give handouts to rich and powerful companies.

And it’s not just the Ex-Im Bank.

• Look at the way the major pharmaceutical companies and big insurance companies got into bed with the White House to line their pockets via Obamacare.
• And examine how big financial firms pillaged taxpayers as part of the sleazy TARP bailout.
• How about the way big agri-businesses rip off consumers with the ethanol scam.
• Don’t forget H&R Block is trying to get the IRS to drive competitors out of the market.
• Big Sugar also gets a sweet deal by investing in politicians.
• Another example is the way major electronics firms enriched themselves by getting Washington to ban incandescent light bulbs.
• Needless to say, we can’t overlook Obama’s corrupt green-energy programs that fattened the wallets of well-connected donors.
• And General Motors became Government Motors thanks to politicians fleecing ordinary Americans.

P.S. If you want to understand why export subsidies are economically harmful, I strongly recommend this video from Mercatus.

P.P.S. I have no objection to companies getting profits, but I want them to earn money by serving consumers and not steal money by fleecing taxpayers.

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The Pitfalls of Central Planning: Government-Directed Industrial Policy Will Hinder China’s Growth

During my early years in public policy, back in the late 1980s, I repeatedly crossed swords with people who argued that Washington should have more power over the economy so that the United States could compete with Japan, which supposedly was an economic juggernaut because of “industrial policy” directed by wise and far-sighted bureaucrats at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

Given Japan’s subsequent multi-decade slump, it certainly seems like I was right to warn against giving American politicians the power to pick winners and losers.

But not everybody learned from that experience. In the words of Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again,” only this time we’re supposed to be terrified because the Chinese government wants to subsidize and promote certain industries as part of “Made in China 2025”.

At the risk of understatement, I’m not scared.

Yes, China has enjoyed some impressive growth since it partially liberalized its economy in the late 1900s, but it will remain far behind the United States unless – as I recently explained on CNBC – there is a new wave of free-market reforms.

Needless to say, a government initiative to favor certain industries is hardly a step in that direction.

Some Chinese policy makers even realize that it’s counterproductive to give that kind of power to politicians and bureaucrats.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the South China Morning Post.

“Made in China 2025” has been a waste of taxpayers’ money, China’s former finance minister Lou Jiwei has said…“[Made in China] 2025 has been a lot of talking but very little was done,” Lou, chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund, said on Wednesday… “those industries are not predictable and the government should not have thought it had the ability to predict what is not foreseeable.” …“The negative effect of [the plan] is to have wasted taxpayers’ money.” He suggested the market should have played a greater role in developing the industries that MIC2025 was designed to push. “The [resources] should have been allocated by the market; the government should give the market a decisive role,” Lou said. “Why has the government pushed so hard on this strategy? [Hi-tech industry prospects] can all change in a few years, it is too unforeseeable.”

Sounds like Mr. Lou learned from Obama’s Solyndra fiasco that cronyism doesn’t work.

But some of his colleagues still need to be educated.

Made in China 2025 (MIC2025) strategy, Beijing’s blueprint for tech supremacy. …Since the plan’s launch in 2015, the government has poured money into MIC2025 to try to turn a number of domestic industries – including artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals and electric vehicles – into global leaders by 2025. …Lou said: “It [the strategy] should not have been done that way anyway. I was against it from the start, I did not agree very much with it.

I hope senior government officials change their minds about this harmful exercise in central planning.

Not because I’m afraid it will work, but rather because I like China and I want the country to prosper. The partial reforms from last century produced great results for China, including huge reductions in poverty.

Additional reforms could lead to mass prosperity. But that won’t happen if the Chinese government tries to control the allocation of resources.

Let’s close with a big-picture look at central planning and industrial policy, starting with the common-sense observation that there are degrees of intervention.

Here’s my back-of-the-envelope perspective. We have examples of nations, such as the Soviet Union, where the government had near-total control over the allocation of labor and capital. And I suppose Hong Kong would be the closest example of a laissez-faire jurisdiction. And then there’s everything in between.

I’ve already shared two great videos on government planning versus the market. I strongly recommend this Prager University video, narrated by Professor Burton Folsom, on the failure of government-dictated investment. And also this video narrated by Professor Russ Roberts, which shows how a decentralized market efficiently provides a bounty to consumers.

Here’s a third, which celebrates the work of the late Don Lavoie, one of my professors when I studied at George Mason University.

By the way, there is a terrible flaw in the video. The photo that appears at 1:38 shows select faculty and students in 1987. Why is that a flaw? For the simple reason that I was part of the photo but got cropped out in the video.

P.S. Some people worry that China’s industrial policy will have a negative spillover effect on the United States because American companies will lose market share to the subsidized Chinese companies. That’s a legitimate concern and American officials should use the World Trade Organization to counter mercantilist policies.

P.P.S. To my dismay, some people don’t want China to become a rich nation. I assume those people are hoping China follows the advice of the OECD and IMF.

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Is Trump’s Treasury Department Supporting a Cronyist Plan to Empower Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

What’s the worst thing the government does?

That’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve argued that giving U.S. tax dollars to the OECD is the worst item in the budget, on a per-dollar-spent basis.

And I’ve expressed scathing disdain for the horrid practice of civil asset forfeiture. There are also really destructive features of the tax system, such as FATCA and the death tax.

But you could make a strong case for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well.

These two government-created corporations not only reduce long-run growth by distorting the allocation of capital, they also bear considerable responsibility for last decade’s financial crisis since they played a major role in fueling the housing bubble.

The U.K.-based Economist describes America’s interventionist regime as a form of socialism.

…the mortgage system…is…largely nationalised and subject to administrative control. …America’s mortgage-finance system, with $11 trillion of debt, is probably the biggest concentration of financial risk to be found anywhere. …The supply of mortgages in America has an air of distinctly socialist command-and-control about it. …The structure of these loans, their volume and the risks they entail are controlled not by markets but by administrative fiat. …the subsidy for housing debt is running at about $150 billion a year, or roughly 1% of GDP. A crisis as bad as last time would cost taxpayers 2-4% of GDP, not far off the bail-out of the banks in 2008-12. …the securitisation of loans, most of which used to be in the private sector, is now almost entirely state-run. …There are at least 10,000 relevant pages of federal laws, regulatory orders and rule books. …In the land of the free, where home ownership is a national dream, borrowing to buy a house is a government business for which taxpayers are on the hook.

In other words, our system of housing finance is mucked up by government intervention (very much akin to the way healthcare is a mess because of government).

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that Fannie and Freddie have been in “conservatorship” every since they got a big bailout last decade. And that means the two cronyist firms are now somewhat constrained. They can’t lobby, for instance (though Republicans and Democrats still seek to expand subsidies in response to campaign cash from other housing-related lobbyists).

But the worst news is that there are people in the Trump Administration who want to go back to the bad ol’ pre-bailout days.

The Wall Street Journal opined on the issue as Trump prepared to take office. The editorial noted that the implicit government guarantee for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to an explicit bailout.

Fan and Fred’s owners feasted for decades on an implied taxpayer guarantee before the housing crisis. Since everyone knew the two government-created mortgage giants would receive federal help in a crisis, they were able to run enormous risks and still borrow cheaply as they came to own or guarantee $5 trillion of mortgage paper. When the housing market went south, taxpayers had to stage a rescue in 2008 and poured nearly $190 billion into the toxic twins.

As part of that bailout and the subsequent “conservatorship,” Fannie and Freddie still get to operate, and they still have a big implicit subsidy that allows near-automatic profits (at least until and unless there’s another big hiccup in the housing market), but the Treasury Department gets those profits.

Needless to say, this upsets the shareholders. They bought stock so they could get a slice of the undeserved profits generated by the Fannie/Freddie cronyist business model.

They claim going back to the pre-bailout days would be a form of privatization, but the WSJ editorial correctly warns that it’s not pro-free market to allow these two government-created companies to distort housing markets with their government-granted favors, preferences, and subsidies.

…the expectation that Treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin is going to revive the Beltway model of public risk and private reward. …private shareholders of these so-called government-sponsored enterprises keep pretending that something other than the government is responsible for their income streams. As if anyone would buy their guarantees—or give them cheap financing—if Uncle Sam weren’t standing behind them. …what they really want is to liberate for themselves the profits that flow from a duopoly backed by taxpayers. …We’re all for businesses getting out of government control—unless they’re playing with taxpayer money. Americans were told that Fannie and Freddie were safe for years before the last crisis. The right answer is to shut them down.

Amen. Not just shut them down, dump them in the Potomac River.

The Wall Street Journal then revisited the issue early last year, once again expressing concern that the Treasury Secretary wants to go back to the days of unchecked cronyism.

Fannie Mae is again going hat in hand to taxpayers… Washington should take this news as a kick in the keister to finally start winding down the mortgage giant and its busted brother, Freddie Mac . But the Trump Administration seems to be moving in the opposite direction. …The pair, now in “conservatorship,”…were left in limbo. Hedge funds bought up their shares, betting they could pressure Washington into bringing back the old business model of public risk and private reward. …Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Senate Banking Committee: “I think it’s critical that we have a 30-year mortgage. I don’t believe that the private markets on their own could support it.” But many countries have robust housing markets and ownership rates without a 30-year mortgage guarantee. Mr. Mnuchin sounds like his predecessor, Democrat Jack Lew. Wasn’t Donald Trump elected to eliminate crony capitalism?

This issue is now heating up, with reports indicating that the Treasury Secretary is pushing to restore the moral hazard-based system that caused so much damage last decade.

The Trump administration is at war with itself over who should take the lead in the reform of the government-backed mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… The battle centers on whether the Treasury Department should continue to advocate what it views as a plan for the future of the mortgage companies or cede control of those efforts to the incoming chief of the Federal Housing Financial Agency (FHFA), economist Mark Calabria.

The good news is that Trump has nominated a sensible person to head FHFA, which has some oversight authority over Fannie and Freddie.

And it’s also good news that some of the economic people at the White House understand the danger of loosening the current limits on Fannie and Freddie.

White House economic officials…are seeking to prevent a repeat of the risk-taking activities by the companies that contributed to the mortgage bubble, leading to its 2008 collapse and $200 billion government bailout. These officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also say any reform must have the blessing of Calabria, a long-time libertarian economist and frequent critic of the outfit’s pre-crisis business model. ..He is also wary of returning Fannie and Freddie to their previous incarnations as private companies that have shareholders, but also receive backing from the federal government if they get in trouble as they did in 2008.

But it seems that the Treasury Department has some officials who – just like their predecessors in the Obama Administration – learned nothing from the financial crisis.

They want to give Fannie and Freddie free rein, perhaps in order to help some speculator buddies.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his top house advisor Craig Phillips, have so far taken the lead… In January, acting director of the Federal Housing Agency Joseph Otting privately told employees about plans…, referring to Mnuchin’s past statements on the matter… Mnuchin also has business ties with at least one of the major investors in the GSE’s stock that has benefited amid the speculation… Paulson – who has stakes in the GSE’s preferred class of stock — has also submitted a proposal… A key feature of the framework touted by Mnuchin, Phillips, Otting and Paulson is that both Fannie and Freddie would have some backing from the federal government in times of emergency while remaining public companies, a business model similar to the one the GSEs operated with before 2008.

Given the Treasury Department’s bad performance on other issues, I’m not surprised that they’re on the wrong side on this issue as well.

Tobias Peter of the American Enterprise Institute outlines the correct approach.

The GSEs, however, do very little that cannot be done – and is not already done – by the private sector. In addition, these institutions pose a significant financial risk to U.S. taxpayers. Weighing this cost against the minimal benefits makes the case that the GSEs should be eliminated. …regulators have tilted the playing field in favor of the GSEs. …GSE borrowers can thus take on more debt to offset higher prices. With inventories lower than ever, this extra debt ends up driving prices even higher, creating a vicious cycle of more debt, higher prices, greater risk and, ironically, more demand for the GSEs. What keeps the GSEs in business are the same failed housing policies that brought us the last financial crisis. The GSEs are not needed in the housing market – and they have become detrimental to the market’s long-term health. They could be eliminated… This would create space for the re-emergence of an active private mortgage-backed securities market that ensures a safer and more stable housing finance system with access for all while letting taxpayers off the hook.

Mr. Peter is correct.

Here’s a flowchart that shows what happened and the choice we now face.

At the risk of stating the obvious, real privatization is the right approach. This would mean an end to the era of special favors and subsidies.

• No taxpayers guarantees for mortgage-backed securities
• No special exemption from complying with SEC red tape.
• No more special tax favors such as special exemptions.

Sadly, I’m not holding my breath for any of this to happen.

The real battle in DC is between conservatorship and fake privatization (which really should be called turbo-charged and lobbyist-fueled cronyism).

And if that’s the case, then the obvious choice is to retain the status quo.

P.S. This is a secondary issue, but it’s worth noting that Fannie and Freddie like to squander money. Here are some excerpts from a report published by the Washington Free Beacon.

Fannie Mae is charging taxpayers millions for upgrades to its new headquarters, including $250,000 for a chandelier. The inspector general for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which acts as a conservator for the mortgage lender, recently noted $32 million in questionable costs in an audit for Fannie Mae’s new headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. …The inspector general reported that costs for the new headquarters have “risen dramatically,” to $171 million, up from $115 million when the consolidated headquarters was announced in 2015. …After the inspector general inquired about the chandelier, officials scrapped plans for a $150,000 “hanging key sculpture,” and $985,000 for “decorative screens” in a conference room.

The bottom line is that Fannie and Freddie, at best, undermine prosperity by diverting money from productive investment, and, at worst, they saddle the nation with financial crisis.

They should be shut down, not resuscitated.

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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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Great Moments in Canadian Law

When I think of over-bearing governments with myopic enforcement of silly rules, I obviously think of the United States, especially the IRS, EEOC, FDA, and EPA.

And I also think of Germany, Japan, and other straight-laced societies.

But I don’t think of Canada. After all, that’s the home of Dudley Do-Right. Canadians are too nice to do dumb things!

However, I shouldn’t be basing my views on a cartoon from my childhood. It seems that Canadians are quite capable of bizarre behavior. At least when you look at their legal system.

• Levying a $465 fine on a motorist with a slight tear in his driver’s license.
• Grudgingly allowing two girls to operate a lemonade stand.
• Awarding extra money to a healthcare worker because alcoholism is a disability.
• Ruling that it is illegal for two kids to sell worms without a license.
• Fining a mother for giving her kids non-state-approved lunches.
• Suspending a student for rescuing a classmate from a bully.
• Telling an Italian restaurant that Italian words are against the law.

Let’s review three additional examples.

I’ve written about some of the mistakes that American states (California and Colorado, for instance) have made when legalizing marijuana. Well, there are similar mistakes in Canada according to the Washington Post.

When the government launched Canada’s official recreational-pot market on Oct. 17, it was banking on the idea that many users would prefer to buy legally and that the black market would quickly begin to fade. …things aren’t going as expected. …a month after legalization, more than a third of Canadian cannabis users said they were still buying from their regular dealers and hadn’t even tried the legal system. Five illegal sellers in Quebec told The Washington Post their sales are slightly up.

It turns out that the legal system is a mess of harsh regulation.

In 2015, when the government first committed to legalization, many of them planned to apply to open private shops. “All of us thought, ‘Okay . . . I’m going to be able to come out of the shadows and I’m going to be able to pay taxes,’ ” David said. “As time went on, it became clear that’s not what they were after.” In Quebec and several other Canadian provinces, all cannabis stores are government-run, leaving no path to legality… said Lewis Koski, former director of the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division and now a consultant on legalization. “I can’t think of a state here in the U.S. that has a government-control model similar to . . . Canada’s.” Even in provinces that do allow private shops or dispensaries, including Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, small businesses face high barriers. It costs almost $5,000 just to apply for a license, and if approved, $23,000 each year thereafter in regulatory fees, with provinces often adding their own charges.

Let’s now look at a government-enforced Canadian cartel.

The maple syrup farmers of Québec have been saddled with compulsory membership to the Federation of Québec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ, according to the native French abbreviation) since 1990. The Federation holds monopoly rights over all maple syrup produced in the province, controlling wholesale distribution and prices. Anyone who dares to sell more than five litres of their boiled tree sap on their own farm or to local grocery stores faces a prison sentence and a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars. …Angele Grenier and her husband, decades-long syrup farmers, have been smuggling their contraband syrup to the neighboring province of New Brunswick. In the dark of the night, they load barrels onto trucks and sneak across the province border to market freedom. For this terrible black market act of choosing their own customers and prices, Angele is one of Canada’s most wanted women. She has appealed the charges brought against her by the FPAQ, and her case is being taken up by the Supreme Court.

Maybe Canadian syrup smugglers can learn lessons from Norwegian butter smugglers?

Last but not least, the Toronto Star reports that Canadian law enforcement is capable of government thuggery.

At about 5 p.m. on May 13, 2009, Kosoian stepped on the down escalator at a subway station in Laval. She was heading to her history class at a university in downtown Montreal. Kosoian had used that same escalator almost every day for four years. She knew that at the front of the escalator, as well as at a spot halfway down, were yellow pictograms that said, “Caution … hold handrail.” She deemed the pictogram nothing more than a warning or recommendation. Besides, the H1N1 virus was making the rounds, and Kosoian considered the handrail a cesspool of microbes. …A police officer…stopped in front of Kosoian on the step below when the escalator had taken her about halfway down. The officer, Fabio Camacho, …ordered her to hold the handrail. Kosoian says she responded: “It’s my right to hold the handrail or not to hold it.” …when Kosoian reached the bottom of the escalator, Camacho and his partner, the officer who initially walked past Kosoian, grabbed her by the arms and took her to a nearby locked room that also contained a jail cell. …Camacho and his partner cuffed Kosoian’s hands behind her back and sat her in a chair. He searched her bag, found her driver’s licence and began writing her two tickets: a $100 fine for not holding the handrail, and a $320 fine for obstructing the work of a police officer.

It’s quite possible that Kosoian was being obnoxious and baiting the cops, but none of that changes the fact that not holding a handrail shouldn’t be a criminal offense.

Do cops in Canada bust into people’s houses to see if mattress tags are still attached (though perhaps only the U.S. is dumb enough to have such a rule)?

Interestingly, this episode from 2009 is now going to the Canadian Supreme Court.

The Laval police force and the transit agency…pressed for the fines to be paid, and Kosoian’s refusal triggered a municipal court hearing in May 2011. In March 2012, Judge Florent Bisson acquitted Kosoian of the tickets… Kosoian…launched a lawsuit against Camacho, the STM and the City of Laval. In August 2015, the Quebec Court dismissed it with a legal tongue lashing. …She appealed and, on Dec. 5, 2017, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled against her in a 2-1 decision. …Kosoian and her lawyer again appealed, this time to the Supreme Court. …the Supreme Court has only granted about 10 per cent of the 500 or so requests for appeals it receives each year. So Thomas Slade, a lawyer who is not involved in the case, says he was initially surprised when the court agreed to hear Kosoian.

I’m not overflowing with sympathy for Ms. Kosoian, but there’s not much doubt that getting rid of stupid laws is the best way of avoiding this type of mess.

I’ll close with two observations. First, Americans can’t throw stones at our Canadian friends since we live in a glass house.

Second, Canada obviously needs to change some of its silly laws, but I don’t want this to be interpreted as an indictment of the entire country (notwithstanding Prime Minister Zoolander).

In recent decades, Canada has dealt with several issues (spending restraint, welfare reform, corporate tax reform, bank bailouts, regulatory budgeting, the tax treatment of saving, school choice, and privatization of air traffic control) in a very sensible fashion.

P.S. Though a Canadian politician is eligible for the hypocrite-of-the-century award.

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How Washington Profits from “Tax Extenders”

Since I’m a proponent of tax reform, I don’t like special favors in the tax code.

Deductions, exemptions, credits, exclusions, and other preferences are back-door forms of cronyism and government intervention.

Indeed, they basically exist to lure people into making decisions that otherwise aren’t economically rational.

These distortionary provisions help to explain why we have a hopelessly convoluted and deeply corrupt tax code of more than 75,000 pages.

And they also encourage higher tax rates as greedy politicians seek alternative sources of revenue.

This current debate over “tax extenders” is a sad illustration of why the system is such a mess.

Writing for Reason, Veronique de Rugy explains how special interests work the system.

Tax extenders are temporary and narrowly targeted tax provisions for individuals and businesses. Examples include the deductibility of mortgage-insurance premiums and tax credits for coal produced from reserves owned by Native American tribes. …These tax provisions were last authorized as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which retroactively extended them through the end of 2017, after which they have thus far been left to remain expired. If Congress indeed takes up extenders during the current lame-duck session, any extended provisions are likely to once again apply retroactively through the end of 2018, or perhaps longer. There are several problems with this approach to tax policy. Frequently allowing tax provisions to expire before retroactively reauthorizing them creates uncertainty that undermines any potential benefits from incentivizing particular behaviors.

To make matters more complicated, a few of the extenders are good policy because they seek to limit double taxation (a pervasive problem in the U.S. tax system).

…not all tax extenders are a problem. Some are meant to avoid or limit the double taxation of income that’s common in our tax code. Those extenders should be preserved. Yet others are straightforward giveaways to special interests. Those should be eliminated.

Veronique suggests a sensible approach.

It’s time for a new approach under which tax extenders are evaluated and debated on their individual merits. The emphasis should be on eliminating special-interest handouts or provisions that otherwise represent bad policy. Conversely, any and all worthy provisions should be made permanent features of the tax code. …The dire need to fix the federal budget, along with the dysfunctional effects from extenders, should provide the additional motivation needed to end this practice once and for all.

Needless to say, Washington is very resistant to sensible policies.

In part, that’s for the typical “public choice” reasons (i.e., special interests getting into bed with politicians to manipulate the system).

But the debate over extenders is even sleazier than that.

As Howard Gleckman explained for Forbes, lobbyists, politicians, and other insiders relish temporary provisions because they offer more than one bite at the shakedown apple.

If you are a lobbyist, this history represents scalps on your belt (and client fees in your pocket). If you are a member of Congress, it is the gift that keeps on giving—countless Washington reps and their clients attending endless fundraisers, all filling your campaign coffers, election after election. An indelible image: It is pre-dawn in September, 1986. House and Senate tax writers have just completed their work on the Tax Reform Act.  A lobbyist friend sits forlornly in the corner of the majestic Ways & Means Committee hearing room. “What’s wrong,” I naively ask, “Did you lose some stuff?” Oh no, he replies, he got three client amendments in the bill. And that was the problem. After years of billable hours, his gravy train had abruptly derailed. The client got what it wanted. Permanently. And it no longer needed him. Few make that mistake now. Lawmakers, staffs, and lobbyists have figured out how to keep milking the cash cow. There are now five dozen temporary provisions, all of which need to be renewed every few years. To add to the drama, Congress often lets them expire so it can step in at the last minute to retroactively resurrect the seemingly lifeless subsidies.

In other words, the temporary nature of extenders is a feature, not a bug.

This is a perfect (albeit depressing) example of how the federal government is largely a racket. It enriches insiders (as I noted a few days ago) and the rest of us bear the cost.

All of which reinforces my wish that we could rip up the tax code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax. Not only would we get more growth, we would eliminate a major avenue for D.C. corruption.

P.S. I focused today on the perverse process, but I can’t help but single out the special tax break for electric vehicles, which unquestionably is one of the most egregious tax extenders.

EV tax credits…subsidize the wealthy at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Recent research by Dr. Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute shows that 79 percent of EV tax credits were claimed by households with adjusted gross incomes greater than $100,000. Asking struggling Americans to subsidize the lifestyles of America’s wealthiest is perverse… Voters also shouldn’t be fooled by the promise of large environmental benefits. Modern internal combustion engines emit very little pollution compared to older models. Electric vehicles are also only as clean as the electricity that powers them, which in the United States primarily comes from fossil fuels.

I was hoping that provisions such as the EV tax credit would get wiped out as part of tax reform. Alas, it survived.

I don’t like when politicians mistreat rich people, but I get far more upset when they do things that impose disproportionate costs on poor people. This is one of the reasons I especially dislike government flood insurance, Social Security, government-run lotteries, the Export-Import Bank, the mortgage interest deduction, or the National Endowment for the Arts. Let’s add the EV tax credit to this shameful list.

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A Thanksgiving Turkey from the Department of Agriculture

Some departments of the federal government should be shut down because of federalism. High on that list would be the Department of Education and Department of Transportation.

Other departments should be shut down because there is simply no role for any government involvement at any level.

I usually cite the Department of Housing and Urban Development as an example, but the Department of Agriculture also should be terminated.

It’s a rat’s nest of special interest favors. I’ve previously written about inane intervention to enrich Big Dairy, Big Sugar, and Big Corn.

But I confess that I was unaware of Big Cranberry.

The Wall Street Journal opines about the nonsensical nature of cranberry intervention.

As you dip into the Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, here’s a tart story that may make you want to drain the bog. This fall the U.S. Agriculture Department gave cranberry growers its approval to dump a quarter of their 2018 crop. Tons of fruit and juice—in the ballpark of 100 million pounds—will be turned into compost, used as animal feed, donated or otherwise discarded. The goal is to prop up prices.

Needless to say, there’s nothing about propping up cranberry prices in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution.

This is also a common-sense issue, as the WSJ explains.

The USDA rule caps growers’ production based on their historical output, with some exemptions. Small cranberry processors aren’t covered, and neither are those that don’t have inventory left over from last year. The trouble is that this reduces everyone’s incentive to downsize… Among the many economic perversities of agricultural policy, this is merely a vignette. Still, America is growing 100 million pounds of cranberries and then throwing them away to raise prices per government order. Wouldn’t it be better—and easier—to let the market work?

By the way, Trump’s protectionism is also part of the problem.

President Trump’s trade war hasn’t helped. About a third of production usually goes overseas. But in June the European Union put a 25% tariff on U.S. cranberry-juice concentrate in retaliation for U.S. steel tariffs. A month later, China bumped its tariff on dried cranberries to 40% from 15%. Mexico and Canada also added duties.

A typical Washington cluster-you-know-what.

Though I don’t recommend thinking about it too much, lest you get indigestion.

The solution is to copy New Zealand and get rid of all agriculture handouts.

P.S. If you like Thanksgiving-themed libertarian humor, the image at the bottom of this column augments the image to your right.

P.P.S. And if you like Thanksgiving-themed videos with libertarian messages, here’s one option and here are two others.

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