Home » Posts tagged 'foundation for economic education' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: foundation for economic education

It is the inevitable consequence of our prevailing governing philosophy.

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Henry Stimson, Secretary of State, 1929

I was upbraided recently by a dear friend for my frequent praise of outcast investor Peter Thiel over Thiel’s involvement with big data company Palantir. He forwarded me a Bloomberg article titled “Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens” adding: “Really scary. Not good for democracy; a better version of the Stasi’s filing system and way cheaper and more efficient.”

Increasingly, we live under the kind of comprehensive surveillance predicted by science fiction writers. But Palantir is just an arms merchant, not the architect of our brave new world. Like gun manufacturers, its products can be used for good or evil. I have always believed that moral responsibility lies with the wielder of weapons, not the manufacturers. (This is often expressed as “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”)

Peter Thiel’s choice to become an arms merchant rather than invest his considerable talents and fortune elsewhere is a fair question given his libertarian leanings. I have no insight into the answer. I would guess that he founded Palantir as an act of patriotism after 9/11, and it metastasized following the money, cash being the mother’s milk of the state, something the celebrated Alexander Hamilton deeply understood.

Surveillance Is Not the Problem, but It Is a Symptom

The real threat to the republic, however, lies not in the weapons available but in the unlimited and unaccountable bureaucracy in Washington that deploys them, both at home and abroad. Having broken free of constitutional constraints, America’s political class now directs an all-powerful state that naturally adopts every tool technology has to offer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Character, Not Control, Is the Antidote to Evil

April 21, 2018

Character, Not Control, Is the Antidote to Evil

Every hero is a potential villain who chose differently.

Humans are dangerous creatures capable of great evil. This inescapable truth bombards us every time we turn on the news. The weight of this knowledge bears down on every human soul, and with every tragedy, we are starkly reminded of it. We cry out for someone to save us from our inherent capacity for evil. Or perhaps we say to ourselves, “I could never do that.”

But you’re wrong, you could do that.

Humans can kill. We can harm, we can steal, we can commit grave atrocities. Why? Because we are free.

Being free means that your choices are your own. There is no government agency capable of monitoring our every action, our every violent thought, our every evil instinct. No government organization can prevent every act of violence because every act of violence is an expression of human power. There is no bureaucracy that is more powerful than the actions of individual humans who are free to choose to be evil.

With every tragedy—every school shooting, every act of terrorism, every high profile murder—we as a species ask why this is happening. How could any human choose to do harm? Yet perhaps the question isn’t why it happened. Perhaps the question is why more of us don’t commit atrocities.

We Cannot Be Good if We Cannot Do Wrong

Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson says that we can have no insight whatsoever into our capacity for good until we understand our capacity for evil. I think he’s right. Until we acknowledge that humans can be evil, we cannot choose to be good. If we did not possess the ability to do great harm, there would be nothing commendable about not doing so.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

April 15, 2018

The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

Encryption can protect personal data from government intrusion, which means the government wants the key to break it.

Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.

The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.

And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.

But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.

Encryption Is Powerful, so Naturally the Government Wants to Control It

Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.

Automatically encrypted search engines and internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.

This is the Trojan horse the NSA means to use to gain access to your private data even when it is encrypted.

But that may soon change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trade Wars Lead to Shooting Wars and Depressions

April 9, 2018

China’s ‘Social Credit System’ Sounds Pretty Dystopian, but Are We Far Behind?

April 6, 2018

China’s ‘Social Credit System’ Sounds Pretty Dystopian, but Are We Far Behind?

The ACLU declared China’s system “nightmarish,” and it’s not difficult to see why.

In its third season, the British science fiction TV series Black Mirror featured an episode called “Nosedive.”

The episode, which was co-written by The Office actress Rashida Jones and starred Bryce Howard, depicted a society of smiling people who walked around with holographic bubbles that contained their “rating.” These ratings were based on how people were scored by others. A positive interaction with someone was likely to earn a good score. Upload a picture people don’t like, and one could find his rating downgraded.

As far as television goes, “Nosedive” was an insightful bit of art, cleverly panning the fishbowl nature of social media and the timeless human obsession with status. It struck a chord with both viewers and critics, earning an 8.3 rating on IMDB as well as Emmy, BAFTA, and SAG award nominations.

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

The same month the dystopian episode premiered, China updated a policy—”Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking“—that bears a striking resemblance.

China’s “Social Credit System” literally rates its citizens. Those who score well get privileges; those who score poorly do not. A citizen with a high score is likely to enjoy various privileges—high-speed internet, the ability to travel freely, access to the best restaurants, golf courses and nightclubs—that fellow citizens do not.

China’s rating scheme is the latest and most expansive effort by central planners to use government to encourage good behavior—or, rather, behavior deemed positive by the Communist Party. The system, which relies on vast amounts of digital data, has received scant attention in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The European Union Wants to Be an Even Bigger Global Bully

March 21, 2018

The European Union Wants to Be an Even Bigger Global Bully

Europe doesn’t need another empire.

Over time, the European Union has developed into more than just an economic cooperation between nations. The EU is a big and intrusive government that constantly acquires new powers. And like all superstates, its tendency to defend freedom against control is swindling.

The “United State of Europe”

When Euroscepticism became a part of the political landscape of the European Union, fears of the creation of a “United States of Europe” were widespread among circles opposed to this political project. In those days, this fear was widely regarded as cliché. However, clichés become clichés for a reason.

Much like those skeptical of the Brussels bureaucracy predicted, the union has concentrated power within its structures. Now that the United Kingdom has become the first country to leave the EU, you might think that there would be a re-evaluation of this large centralization effort. But to the contrary, the European Union is increasingly moving towards the centralization of two key aspects: foreign policy and defense.

Foreign Policy

Ever since the EU’s last institutional reform in 2009, the European Commission, which is the executive branch, has appointed a High Commissioner for Foreign Relations. The position, currently held by the Italian politician Federica Mogherini, has been mocked for essentially being useless since the EU doesn’t have a common foreign policy. This would be similar to appointing a secretary to a department that has been granted no powers by the government whatsoever. However, this hasn’t prevented Mogherini from making policy statements in an effort to unite European member states behind a common position.

A notable example of this was when Mogherini condemned the United States for moving the embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but the Czech Republic blocked any attempt to have a common position. Czech president Miloš Zeman consecutively promised to follow the American lead and move its embassy as well.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When America’s Fiscal Crisis Hits, Be Forewarned that Tax Increases Will Make a Bad Situation Worse

March 1, 2018

When America’s Fiscal Crisis Hits, Be Forewarned that Tax Increases Will Make a Bad Situation Worse

When America’s fiscal crisis hits, remember that raising taxes will only exacerbate the problem.

At some point in the next 10 years, there will be a huge fight in the United States over fiscal policy. This battle is inevitable because politicians are violating the Golden Rule of fiscal policy by allowing government spending to grow faster than the private sector (exacerbated by the recent budget deal), leading to ever-larger budget deficits.

I’m more sanguine about red ink than most people. After all, deficits and debt are merely symptoms. The real problem is excessive government spending.

But when peacetime, non-recessionary deficits climb above $1 trillion, the political pressure to adopt some sort of “austerity” package will become enormous. What’s critical to understand, however, is that not all forms of austerity are created equal.

The crowd in Washington reflexively will assert that higher taxes are necessary and desirable. People like me will respond by explaining that the real problem is entitlements and that we need structural reform of programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. Moreover, I will point out that higher taxes most likely will simply trigger and enable additional spending. And I will warn that tax increases will undermine economic performance.

Regarding that last point, three professors, led by Alberto Alesina at Harvard, have unveiled some new research looking at the economic impact of expenditure-based austerity compared to tax-based austerity.

…we started from detailed information on the consolidations implemented by 16 OECD countries between 1978 and 2014. …we group measures in just two broad categories: spending, g, and taxes, t. …We distinguish fiscal plans between those that are expenditure based (EB) and those that are tax based (TB)… Measuring the macroeconomic impact of a plan requires modelling the relationship between plans and macroeconomic variables.

Here are their econometric results.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Can’t Keep Expecting the Federal Government to Fix Things

February 24, 2018

We Can’t Keep Expecting the Federal Government to Fix Things

Whatever your solution may be, the path to change a nation starts locally.

It’s happened again, another tragedy in America, and once more we hear the cries for systematic change echo from coast to coast. Instead of berating you with countless policy prescriptions in the aftermath, and whether or not they will deter these events in the future, I would like to offer a piece of advice to those seeking to come out of this with more than just “thoughts and prayers” that I think has been grossly overlooked and underutilized in society today. Rather than entrench ourselves in the emotional mudslinging within social media anytime an event like this occurs, we ought to turn inward, towards our own backyards and communities, and recognize that the path to political change starts locally, not nationally.

We need a new — or rather, old — approach regarding societal problems that have become deep-rooted today. Right now, the cultural norm, whether due to technological advances that put us in closer contact with one another or the process of political centralization, is to call for change on a federal level any time a problem is observed. This wasn’t always the case, and I rather believe this practice taking hold is a contributing factor in these tragedies.

Diversification and Innovation

Before social media allowed us to criticize the viewpoints of people on different continents from the comfort of our living room, and before politics became completely centered around what the federal government was doing, people aired their grievances in their local communities. If you noticed what you thought was an urgent problem within your child’s school, for example, you wouldn’t tweet at a senator in Washington, D.C., you’d go to your local school board meeting. And as it turns out, that’s still the most effective route.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bastiat Knew the Proper Limits of Government Force

February 18, 2018

Bastiat Knew the Proper Limits of Government Force

If you don’t violate the life, liberty, or property of someone else, you should not see the arm of the law.

High school students in the United States are usually required to take a course in government. They learn about the structure of government but rarely discover the appropriate role of government or the justifiable limits for the use of force in our society. If they did, one of their required readings would be Frédéric Bastiat’s treatise The Law, a seminal mid-Nineteenth-century work that describes eternal truths about life and how we pursue justice. These truths are just as valid today as they were then.

Natural Rights and the Role of Government

Bastiat states that individuals are born with the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. From this notion, the only proper function of the use of force or the law is the collective organization of the natural right to self-defense of these rights.

“Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force — which is only the organized combination of the individual forces — may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose.”

He then defines any illegitimate use of force or of the law as legal plunder. This is an all-encompassing term which includes any unjustified violation of the life, liberty, or property of others. Many examples abound today with regulations on labor (e.g. minimum wage laws), products (e.g. subsidies and tariffs), health care, education, or even the use of marijuana or any other drugs.

Legal plunder has two primary motivations:

The first is stupid greed. For example, you would never think of robbing your neighbor, but are complacent if the government uses legal plunder to rob him on your behalf.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out

February 9, 2018

How Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out

How much of our gleaming new infrastructure will fall into disrepair?

The Federal Reserve has been the main cause of business cycles in America since 1913. For several decades, it has tried to hide the consequences of its policies by enabling easy credit during each recession. As Jonathan Newman wrote yesterday, pouring trillions of dollars into the financial sector obscures the external signs of the recession such as low asset prices and high unemployment and promotes economic malinvestment.

This malinvestment creates the conditions that cause the next recession. Some of the consequences of the Fed’s policies, such as stock market and housing bubbles can be directly attributed to its policies. In other cases, the artificially low interest rates and other “easy money” policies foster an “infrastructure rot” that erodes the efficiency of the American economy, the standard of living of consumers, and eats away at American infrastructure. These effects are difficult to trace back to the Fed’s policies, so let’s concretize some examples to understand how Federal Reserve policies affect America.

At the city level, low interest rates allow cities to fund new public projects such as parks and bridges. While this may seem fine and dandy, all infrastructure projects have a maintenance cost. It’s not sufficient to build a park. One must also have the money to maintain it every year. If there is not enough revenue to pay for maintenance, the park will literally rot until the playgrounds fall apart, the lawns are overgrown, the lights fail, and the park becomes too dangerous for families to play in.

The same thing will happen to streets, bridges, and plumbing. This is one of the ways urban decay happens: easy money policies fund unsustainable urban infrastructure projects which make politicians look good, but end up crumbling a few years or decades later.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Stock Market Tumble Is the Correction We Need

February 8, 2018

A Stock Market Tumble Is the Correction We Need

The Fed put us in this predicament. Only the market can get us out of it.

Since hitting rock bottom in 2009, stock prices have consistently increased without much volatility — that is, until these first few days of February when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over 2,200 points (-8.5%) and the S&P 500 tumbled 7.9% from their late-January highs. The most popular measure of stock market volatility, VIX, also spiked dramatically to levels not seen since 2011 and 2009.

Financial analysts and writers have pointed to a few events that may be behind the big movements in the stock market:

Tax reform could have caused some extra uncertainty about the future for all businesses.
Bond markets indicate an increase in future price inflation, which means that the cost of doing business could increase.
The increase in expected inflation coupled with a new, optimistic-looking release of official data on wages across the US might be used by the Federal Reserve to justify further interest rate hikes.

But to really get to the bottom of the current stock market decline, we need to go back to the Federal Reserve’s response to the 2007-08 crisis.

Unprecedented Monetary Policy

During that financial and economic collapse, the Federal Reserve responded in unprecedented ways. We saw the biggest expansions of credit and the lowest interbank lending rates ever.

(The blue line above shows the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet expansions. The red line is the Federal Funds Rate, or the rate banks pay each other for loans. It is viewed as the basis for all other loan rates in the US. Together, these show the unprecedented expansionary monetary policy of the Fed in response to the most recent recession.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Postmodernism Pit Us Against Each Other?

February 6, 2018

Does Postmodernism Pit Us Against Each Other?

Feminist maverick Camille Paglia has called him “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan,” declaring that “his bold interdisciplinary synthesis of psychology, anthropology, science, politics and comparative religion is forming the template for the genuinely humanistic university of the future.” Meanwhile, conservative commentator David Brooks has echoed sentiments also shared by economist Tyler Cowen, referring to this moment as Jordan Peterson’s ascension to the most influential public intellectual in the West.

A clinical psychologist initially trained in political science, Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto who has risen to prominence as a firm advocate of free speech and individual responsibility. Raised as a cowboy on the Canadian plains, he toiled through various trades before entering the ivory halls of Harvard, writing Maps of Meaning, a complex but groundbreaking tome in the psychology of religion. His recently published, and more accessible book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, could not come at a more perfect time for Peterson’s career, and perhaps, for Western civilization.

His Personal Ideology

Although he’s been caricatured and mischaracterized as many things, Tim Lott most aptly captures his essence. “He is a strange mixture of theologian, psychologist, conservative, liberal, wit and lay preacher. He’s a powerful advocate of the scientific method who is not a materialist. He can go from cuddly to razor sharp in a beat. His primary concern, however, which underpins nearly everything about him, is the defense of the individual against groupthink, whether on the right or the left.” In his own words, Peterson says,

politically, I am a classic British liberal. Temperamentally, I am high in openness, which tilts me to the left, although also conscientious, which tilts me to the right. Philosophically, I am an individualist, not a collectivist, of the right or the left.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains the Growth of Government

February 1, 2018

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains the Growth of Government

Why do democracies lead to ever-growing states?

We’ve all found ourselves at least a few times in our lives listening to friends or relatives complain about voter apathy. If only voters properly researched policies and politicians, everything would be better, we hear. Unfortunately, the incentives just aren’t there.

Anthony Downs called this phenomenon “rational ignorance,” and it is especially significant with government-related decision-making, or “Public Choice.” Economic analysis shows us that the value of the time individuals spend informing themselves must exceed its opportunity cost. Take this into consideration when contemplating the ludicrous probability of a single participant swaying an entire election. There is very little individual upside to justify any significant effort to inform oneself on voting for the “right” solution.

Thus, ignorance is a perfectly reasonable alternative and should be a completely expected outcome of democracy. After all, the individual losses of inadequate voting are just too low to matter much, if at all. Proper examination simply doesn’t make nearly as much economic sense for political agents as it does for market ones.

But if people are choosing ignorantly, wouldn’t the properly-educated minority weigh the scale towards good, effective policies? And if, as I believe, good policy means a less-intrusive government, why does the opposite always seem to happen?

The Head Start of Statism

An important distinction must here be made: the issue at hand is not an admitted lack of knowledge. Otherwise, the very fact that voting is not random at all would completely debunk the theory. In this case, however, ignorance is knowing things wrong.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Was Mises’s Main Case for Peace

January 30, 2018

This Was Mises’s Main Case for Peace

War only destroys. Peace, on the other hand, creates.

War is absolutely devastating. There is no dancing around that fact. Not only is it responsible for the loss of countless human lives, it also leaves an immeasurable amount of physical and emotional destruction in its wake.

The market has taught us that incentives work.

Opponents of war may decry war until they are blue in the face, begging those in power to consider its human costs. But these cries almost always fall upon deaf ears, as history has tragically demonstrated.

When it comes to politicians and war, the ends always justify the means, even when those means are human lives. And while human life is sacred, this truth alone has never been enough to convince global leaders to seek an agenda of peace rather than one of destruction.

But the market has taught us that incentives work. So instead of relying on a method that has not done much to deter war over the centuries, why not try an argument that plays to the interests of those in power?

As Mises explains in Liberalism, the most impactful argument against war comes in the form of a basic economic principle from which we each benefit: the division of labor.

He writes:

How harmful war is to the development of human civilization becomes clearly apparent once one understands the advantages derived from the division of labor. The division of labor turns the self-sufficient individual into the ζῷον πολιτικόν (social animal) dependent on his fellow men, the social animal of which Aristotle spoke.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is “Fake News” Really Fake?

January 24, 2018

Is “Fake News” Really Fake?

The more complicated a situation, the more open to interpretation it is.

The term “fake news” has been much in the news since the 2016 election. Unfortunately, it is not usually defined in any clear fashion. The implication is that the media engages in deliberate distortion and misrepresentation of the news. Not just any media, but most of the media, commonly referred to as the “mainstream media,” have been accused of distributing “fake news.”

Recently, I read an extended critique of the media that put everything in quite a different light. It is something I believe every working journalist should read. Sixty short pages that explain that not only is there a distinct bias in the mainstream media, but why this is the case. What is of most importance to note is that this bias is not deliberate. It exists on a subconscious level and influences everything the media does. And it does not matter whether the particular media outlet has a left or a right slant.

The author, Robin Koerner, has a masters degree in the philosophy of science and physics from Cambridge. The information is in the first chapter of his book If You Can Keep It: Why We Nearly Lost It & How We Get It Back, a chapter he calls “Mediography.”

Bias Exists Within All of Us

A paradigm is a framework within which someone observes and comments on the world.

The best way to explain the points he makes is to start with an example. Here is a headline from the Drudge Report dated November 2006: “Iran Fires Missile That Can Reach Israel.” The headline is factually accurate. It is not deliberately biased. But, Koerner argues, it is misleading. It could be considered fake news (though Koerner does not use those terms)….click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: foundation for economic education

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts