Price supports; corporate welfare. It's got it all.

Take it, WSJ.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. (No, not the third edition. I got the second edition because it was cheaper. And I wanted to own a copy so I could dog-ear the pages. Pricing helps us to determine how to efficiently manage resources; did you know that?)

Sowell is a fucking God. He just is—dorky-looking quasi-afro and all.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.:

I'm sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.

You are not the aggressive type so you don't proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the repetition of the media's latest calumny against the market, such as that gas station owners are causing inflation by jacking up prices to pad their pockets at our expense, or that Wal-Mart is, of course, the worst possible thing that can ever happen to a community.

You begin to offer a corrective, pointing out the other side. Then the truth emerges in the form of a naïve if definitive announcement from one person: "Well, I suppose I'm really a socialist at heart." Others nod in agreement.

On one hand there is nothing to say, really. You are surrounded by the blessings of capitalism. The buffet table, which you and your lunch partners only had to walk into a building to find, has a greater variety of food at a cheaper price than that which was available to any living person — king, lord, duke, plutocrat, or pope — in almost all of the history of the world. Not even fifty years ago would this have been imaginable.

All of history has been defined by the struggle for food. And yet that struggle has been abolished, not just for the rich but for everyone living in developed economies. The ancients, peering into this scene, might have assumed it to be Elysium. Medieval man conjured up such scenes only in visions of Utopia. Even in the late 19th century, the most gilded palace of the richest industrialist required a vast staff and immense trouble to come anywhere near approximating it.

We owe this scene to capitalism. To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor. The savings, investments, risks, and work of hundreds of years and uncountable numbers of free people have gone into making this scene possible, thanks to the ever-remarkable capacity for a society developing under conditions of liberty to achieve the highest aspirations of the society's members.

And yet, sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world's woes is through socialism.

. . . . . . . . . .

Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won't just spell an end to opulent lunches. It will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world's six billion people, so the population would shrink dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison.

But other than that, socialism is a fine idea.

h/t: Hackbarth, who loves the idea of a buffet table as a symbol of capitalism's success. This was part of today's economics linkfest, and those are always fun: one-stop shopping for the brain.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I know I'm supposed to be even more pissed off at the Republicans than at the Democrats, here, but I'm pretty fucking pissed off at the entire House right now. There are a lot of people who are struggling to pay their bills right now, and this fucked-up farm bill is what our congresspigs come up with? Unbelievable.

The subsidy program exists far beyond its intended purpose. Like many New Deal programs, FDR didnÂ’t intend on making subsidies permanent, and he certainly didnÂ’t intend on turning them into corporate welfare programs. Today, thatÂ’s exactly what these programs are. The majority of subsidies go to commercial farms, not family farms, and the average income from a subsidy-receiving farm is $200,000—an income which Barack Obama considers “wealthy” for tax purposes.

Price supports make some sense for food security when prices are low, but thatÂ’s hardly the case now. Thanks in large part to subsidies for ethanol production, food prices have skyrocketed over the last few years. The market distortion has created hunger worldwide while robbing American taxpayers. Thanks to subsidies, Americans pay twice for foolish policy—once with the IRS, and a second time at the store with higher food prices. Small wonder, then, that the average household income for farmers has risen to almost $90,000 and that land values have doubled in the last eight years.

Do subsidies have any place at all at the federal level? IÂ’d argue no, but at the least, we should stop subsidizing commercial farms and let the marketplace dictate prices, using subsidies sparingly to support independent farmers. We have to stop using corn and other foods for ethanol. We should use food to feed people and animals and not our cars. Our inability to deal maturely with our energy requirements has created food shortages and inflation where we can least afford it.

My emphasis.

The really charming part is that unless we can transform some more legislative piggies into rational human beings, they can override Bush's veto on this nonsense.

Call your congressasshole, and tell 'em corporate welfare sucks, especially when it distorts markets in such a way as to increase hunger.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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She sure has been making all three candidates her bitches lately, particularly WRT short-term manipulations of the tax code:

It is true that the gas tax is fairly trivial. It is also theoretically true that a windfall tax could claw back the lost revenue, though I have my doubts. So why does it matter? Because when it comes to regulations, one should never arbitrarily increase the complexity or uncertainty of the law.

Complexity is bad because it ups compliance costs, often makes evasion easier, and because complexity itself increases uncertainty: as tax laws proliferate, it becomes harder to know whether you are in compliance. It also makes the government's administrative overhead multiply like those bacteria that can kill you in five minutes after first contact.

Uncertainty is bad because it reduces the ability of people and corporations to plan for the future. It's hard to estimate your ROI if the tax laws that govern your investment change every year.

Change is bad in general because every time the tax law changes, your nation experiences a sudden loss of human capital: all the understanding of how the old law becomes useless, and people have to spend valuable hours learning to understand the new law. This is often time that could have been better spent doing new deals, or regrouting the bathtub. Mold doesn't take care of itself, you know.

Obama's plan is bad because windfall taxes increase complexity and uncertainty. They also reduce the incentive for investment by lowering the return on it.

McCain's plan is bad because the gas tax holiday complicates tax administration and compliance, and because the revenue has to be made up somewhere else. That somewhere else is almost certain to be one more complicated tax of some sort.

Clinton's plan is doubly bad because it combines the uncertainty of a windfall tax with the complexity of both the Obama and McCain plans.

That's why she's Megan McArdle, and I'm not. RTWT.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:08 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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