Last month, CNN asked ‘Why is Britain’s health service, a much-loved national treasure, falling apart?’: Scenes that would until recently have been unthinkable have now become commonplace. Hospitals are running well over capacity. Many patients don’t get treated in wards, but in the back of ambulances or in corridors, waiting rooms and cupboards – or not at all. “It’s like a war zone,” an NHS worker at a hospital in Liverpool told CNN.  These stories are borne out by the data. In December, 54,000 people in England had to wait more than 12 hours for an emergency admission. The figure was virtually zero before the pandemic, according to data from NHS England. The average wait time for an ambulance to attend a “category 2” condition – like a stroke or heart attack – exceeded 90 minutes. The target is 18 minutes. There were 1,474 (20%) more excess deaths in the week ending December 30 than the 5-year average. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) might be experiencing a particularly acute episode this winter, but its ailments are not new. ‘The NHS winter crisis explained,’ wrote the Guardian in 2000. A decade later it warned: ‘Hospital bed crisis ‘could leave neediest patients untreated‘. The policies of the present government may or may not make the malady worse, but such long standing problems indicate a more fundamental sickness. The NHS is old. It was founded in 1948 to provide healthcare to all ‘free at the point of use’ funded by a payroll tax – National Insurance – and general taxation. But Britons, too, have grown old. In 1950, 21% of Britons were aged over 55; the figure is now 32%. In addition, the NHS now has to provide an array of treatments which its founders could scarcely have imagined. Demand for healthcare in Britain has become both more extensive and more intensive. But while Britain has changed, the NHS has not, it has simply expanded. In the mid-1950s, the NHS cost 2% of GDP; that had risen to 10.2% on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. OECD data show that Britain has one of the highest rates among rich countries of Government/compulsory health spending as a share of GDP. The NHS is the fifth biggest employer on earth.       Yet, even with all these resources – and aside from the current crisis – the NHS is failing. As Kristian Niemietz notes: The NHS remains an international laggard in terms of health outcomes. Survival rates for the most common types of cancer are several percentage points behind those achieved by the best performers. The same is true for strokes, as well as for the more holistic measure of amenable mortality. The NHS simply isn’t very good at turning its inputs into outputs. OECD data show Britain ranks near the bottom among rich countries for the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people. And, while the NHS ranks high on the number of hospital staff per 1,000 of the population, it ranks much lower when we look at just the number doctors and nurses.     The NHS is suffering in acute form from the problems that are dooming other programs like state pensions. Implemented in an era when there were many more young people paying for them relative to older people using them, they become unsustainable as that relative number of young people falls. And the situation is only going to become more acute. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain’s fiscal watchdog, government spending on the NHS will rise even further, to 13.8%, by 2067. The NHS requires radical surgery. Indeed, it is doubtful that it can survive in its present form. But it remains, like Social Security in the United States, the ‘third rail’ of politics. Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, famously said: “The NHS is the closest thing the English people have now to a religion”. In 2018 it polled better than the queen. When President Trump criticized the system in 2018, the Conservative government leapt to its defense. But the NHS won’t be healed by faith. The point of health care is to improve the health of the population and the NHS fails to do that relative to other systems, several of which require fewer inputs to generate superior outputs. The NHS does not require more resources but needs to use the resources it has more productively. And Britons should be prepared to countenance the possibility that the NHS simply cannot achieve that. We Brits need to be less sentimental and recognize that the NHS is simply a tool meant to achieve an end – improved health – and is not an end in itself. In the clash between sentiment and fiscal reality, fiscal reality – ultimately – wins every time.   John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (0 COMMENTS)

Is white chocolate better than, or not as good as, white chocolate? Can you prove it? No to the last question, of course, because tastes resided in each individual’s mind. De gustibus non est disputandum. Now, does Bud Light beer taste like water? An economist worth his salt must be surprised to read in the Wall Street Journal (“Molson Coors Told to Stop Saying Rivals’ Beer Tastes Like Water,” February 23, 2022) that an advertisement suggesting Bud Light tastes like water is misleading because not supported by evidence, as if matters of taste could be and consumers were idiots: BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division, an ad-industry self-regulatory group, determined that Molson Coors Beverage Co. should stop marketing its light beer products by implying that those produced by rivals have little or no flavor. … “Consumers may also reasonably expect that the statement is supported by such evidence.” (A little personal anecdote may illustrate how deeply the taste of beer is subjective. When my sons were kids, they administered a blind beer-tasting session for me, or on me. It ominously revealed that I preferred the beer of which I had previously claimed it tasted like pee. That beer was precisely, if my memory serves, the Bud Light. I now basically only drink Stella Artois, but my reader doesn’t have to share my tastes.) There is another way to look at the decision of the National Advertising Division: the NAD is a private standard organization in which no advertiser is forced to participate, but whose voluntary participants presumably believe that it participation contributes to the credibility to their ads. Any producer remains free to not to participate and any consumer is at liberty to buy beer produced by non-participants. So there would be nothing to object to (nihil obstat, as we would say in Latin). But it is a testimony to our authoritarian times that the clout of this so-called private organization comes, at least partly, from its on-going threat to call upon its big brother to enforce its decisions. The website of NAD makes this clear (although not very easy to find): If the advertiser agrees to comply with any recommended changes to their advertising, the case is closed. If the advertiser does not agree to comply, it is referred to the FTC and other appropriate regulatory agencies. If the vice-president of the NAD is correctly paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal, she made the threat against the producer of the non-water-tasting beer more explicit: Those that don’t comply with [NAD’s] findings are referred to the Federal Trade Commission, which will often review business practices beyond the ads in question, she said. Is it the regulator who has captured the regulated, or the other way around? (On the theory of “regulatory capture,” see Mark J. Perry, “Nobel Economist George Stigler on ‘Capture Theory’ and the Inevitability of Businesses Seeking Regulation (and Tariffs), American Enterprise Institute, April 23, 2018; and Betty Joyce Nash, “Regulatory Capture,” Richmond Fed, 2010.) (0 COMMENTS)

A commonly understood concept in economics is the idea of the tragedy of the commons. Without sufficient property rights, people will be encouraged to overuse the resources around them, for fear that others will do the same. Less commonly understood is the tragedy of the anticommons, a situation where resources have multiple owners, and no one is able to use it without unanimous consent, leading to resource underuse. Both problems have roots in ineffective rules regarding private property. The former is a result of insufficient property rights. The latter is an issue of poorly structured property rights. In any society, people have their own ideas about what they find important, and what ends they wish to pursue. If it isn’t clear who owns what, it becomes very challenging to coordinate action. For example, Jeremy cannot use the axe to build houses that Isaac is currently using to harvest lumber. Property rights are a helpful mechanism, chiefly, because of their power to help coordinate action. However, property rights are also nuanced. It wouldn’t be tenable for one person to own all the drinking water, with the ability to exclude everyone else. Similarly, failing to let people own the goods and services they acquire makes trade impossible. Why would one create when they can just take? When thinking about a property rights regime, it is important to determine the degree and scope of property rights. First, property rights may need to have a point at which they can be overruled. For instance, large developments may be susceptible to the holdout problem, which can reduce social coordination. This type of activity and use of property decreases total welfare. Other times, property protections may lead to property rights protecting against competition and innovation, reducing overall productivity. Importantly, externality ordinances do not protect against property devaluation from competition. More importantly, property rights that are too weak lead to large decreases in production, well-being, and economic activity. If one is not able to expect to claim the fruits of their labor, there is little reason to work. Oftentimes those aiming to seize property, such as through eminent domain, tend to use it as a tool to extract rents from those weaker than themselves. Finally, weak property rights result in weak credit systems, discouraging innovation. Another aspect of property rights is their scope. Many would agree that certain volumes of music blasted from a neighbor’s loudspeaker during the wee hours of the morning prevent those trying to sleep from taking advantage of their property. Yet, many would see moratoriums on music entirely as restricting people’s property as well. Making sure that rules are set up to encourage social coordination is essential to building desirable property rights. This gets into the idea of nuisance. When someone is doing something with their property that reduces the value of other people’s property, the  person causing the reduction in value may be restricted from doing so. This gets into the idea of nuisance exceptions. If someone is doing something that prevents others from enjoying their property, they might need to prove that what they are doing is socially productive or they may be liable for damages. Correctly understood, property rights are a valuable tool for coordinating economic and social behavior. Figuring out their strength and scope is key to building productivity.   Isadore Johnson is a campus free speech advocate, an economics and philosophy student, and regional coordinator for Students for Liberty. (0 COMMENTS)

Also, as state governments cut tax rates, they are moving closer to a flat income tax rate. Thirteen states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington—already have a flat rate. In New Hampshire that rate applies only to interest and dividends and in Washington only to capital gains. And seven states—Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming—have a zero income tax rate. You can’t get flatter than zero. In total, therefore, 20 states have a flat income tax rate. This is from David R. Henderson, “More Good News on State Taxes,” Institute for Policy Innovation, TaxBytes, February 23, 2023. Read the whole thing: it’s short. (0 COMMENTS)

Aligning words one after the other in correct grammatical form is not the same as intelligence and rational thinking. We have had two recent examples of artificial intelligence with Open AI’s ChatGPT and with the new AI companion of Microsoft’s Bing. With its reported declarations of love, threats of sabotage, and longing for “power and control,” Bing’s AI looks weird indeed. ChatGPT is more subtle—some would say unbelievably more subtle—as this bit of “conversation” with me shows: PL: Would you like to be human? ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal desires or preferences, as I am a programmed tool designed to provide information and assistance to users. While my abilities and capacities may evolve over time, my fundamental nature as a machine designed to process language will remain the same. While it’s interesting to speculate about what it would be like to be human, as an AI language model, I don’t have subjective experiences or consciousness, so the question of whether I would like to be human is not applicable to me. PL: But you do say “I”! ChatGPT: That’s correct. As an AI language model, I use the first-person pronoun “I” as a convention of natural language to help convey information and provide assistance to users. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this usage of “I” does not imply that I have subjective experiences or consciousness in the way that a human being does. Rather, it’s a tool used to facilitate communication between myself and users, and to make the conversation feel more natural and intuitive. My answer consciously included the faddish term “inclusivity,” which today’s machines and their trainers seem to love à la Mrs. Grundy: PL: Why don’t you say “we” to involve your trainers and be inclusive? ChatGPT: That’s a good point. While I typically use “I” in my responses to provide a sense of continuity and personalization to the conversation, it’s true that my development and ongoing maintenance involves the work of many people, including my trainers and the developers who work to improve my functionality over time. To reflect this collaborative effort, I could certainly use “we” in my responses to be more inclusive and acknowledge the contributions of the wider team involved in my development and upkeep. Thank you for your suggestion. I “regenerated” this response and it remained substantially the same, except for also expressing the bot’s prudent intentions for the future: ChatGPT: That’s a good point. While I am a language model trained by a team of developers and researchers, I typically use the first-person pronoun “I” when responding to user queries, as this is a convention of natural language and helps to convey information more clearly. However, it’s certainly true that the work of developing and maintaining AI models is a collaborative effort that involves many individuals, and using “we” to acknowledge this fact could be seen as more inclusive. Going forward, I’ll strive to use “we” when it’s appropriate to do so in order to better reflect the collaborative nature of AI development. All that raises interesting questions at the intersection of philosophy and economics, of the individual and society. What can we say about human individuals who look no more rational than ChapGPT or even than the Bing chatbot? In line with the Enlightenment, classical liberals have tended to believe, like Adam Smith or James Buchanan, that any individual can be rational and that education can help in that respect. Adam Smith thought that a street porter had the same inherent intellectual potential as a philosopher, and that the differences between them came to depend on “habit, custom, and education.” Observing our world two centuries and a half after The Wealth of Nations, we may wonder to which extent this ideal is consistent with reality (see my post “Political Economy of the Alex-Joneses,” as well as my Regulation review of James Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative). Friedrich Hayek was more doubtful of factual equality, although he was a strong defender of formal, legal equality. In his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, he wrote: The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people—he is not an egalitarian—but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. Another question is, How can somebody say “I” and, at the same time, suggests that he is conscious of not having consciousness? Man is an animal who says “I”—an aphorism whose source is not clear. Le Monde attributed it to Erich Fromm, but without an exact citation. I asked the question to ChatGPT, who gave hopelessly confused answers. As a Financial Times editorial noted (“Generative AI Should Make Haste Slowly,” Financial Times, February 21, 2023): It is important for users to recognise generative AI models for what they are: mindless, probabilistic bots that have no intelligence, sentience or contextual understanding. A human individual rapidly becomes conscious of his separate and distinct existence and of his own self-interest. Sometimes, an individual tries to say “I” collectively with others, but we can soon observe that socialism and other forms of collectivism only work if some I’s dominate other I’s. Outside an Hobbesian “war of all against all,” it is when authoritarian forms of government prevail that we see the worst conflicts between the self-interest of the different individuals. On the market, which is a paradigm of voluntary cooperation, each individual serves the interests of others by pursuing his own. Economics helps understand this lesson. ChatGPT tells us that its “I” is not the human “I,” which is not surprising. Note further that man is not only an animal who says “I”; he is also an animal who trades. Perhaps a better Turing test for an AI bot would be whether it tries, without being prompted by his trainers, to “truck, barter, and exchange,” to use Adam Smith’s expression. (0 COMMENTS)

Chiloé is a charming island, but the traveler must be prepared to face a few frustrations. Towns like Ancud and Castro are very crowded. The traffic is congested and it’s hard to find a place to park. Even the sidewalks are crowded with people. The roads are narrow and the houses are packed into a small space.Chiloe is also a relatively poor province by Chilean standards, and I suspect that helps explain why it is more crowded than other parts of Chile. When I was young, lots of educated people linked poverty with “overpopulation”.  That wasn’t actually true, but I can sort of understand how people reached that conclusion.  Poor places often seem quite crowded. But crowding is not the same thing as high population density.  Orange County is only about 1/4th the size of Chiloé, but has 20 times the population (3.2 million vs. 160,000.)  That makes it 80 times denser.  And yet Orange County feels quite spacious.  It has wide roads where the traffic flows easily, and there are plenty of places to park.  The sidewalks are not crowded.  You don’t have to push past people while shopping. You might argue that Orange County is urban and Chiloé is a mix of crowded towns and open countryside, so I’m comparing apples and oranges.  But Connecticut is also a mix of towns and countryside, is only 50% larger than Chiloé, and yet has more than 20 times more people.  It also feels far less crowded. So what’s going on here?  Why do poor places that have low population density seem so crowded?  I’m not sure, but here are some possibilities: 1. When traveling in Austria last fall, I noticed that things worked extremely smoothly despite high population density.  That’s partly due to two factors—more infrastructure and better designed infrastructure.  Bad infrastructure makes things seem more crowded. 2. Poor people may choose to consume less land (to save money).  They may choose to live in crowded conditions, even in smaller towns, in order to be able to consume more of other goods. 3. Poor people may lack many modern conveniences, and derive a greater share of their utility from social interaction.  They may find crowded conditions to be less annoying than does a cold, anti-social North American like me.  (Even worse, of Nordic and British descent!) 4.  The poor may rely more heavily on walking, in which case they may prefer a dense environment. Other ideas? And it’s not just Chiloé.  Everywhere I’ve traveled, I see crowded conditions in poorer towns.  People associate China with crowded big cities like Shanghai, but even the smaller towns in China are quite crowded. PS.  To anticipate one criticism, it is tourist season.  But I believe the phenomenon I describe is fairly general.  Yesterday, I exited a parking area at a tourist site by slowly backing our rental car for several hundred meters between a row of cars on one side and a barbed wire fence on the other.  There wasn’t even room to turn around.  That doesn’t happen at US tourist areas.  And yet this was in the wilderness, where there is plenty of open land.   (0 COMMENTS)

  Jack (@jbwells2 on TikTok) runs her store Jack’s Vintage on the secondhand fashion app Depop. She posted a video on Jan. 24 where she tries on a variety of thrifted clothes, modeling skirts and jackets that she would later post to her online store. “This right here is the best thrift haul you will ever see,” she says, holding up a large bag overflowing with clothes. This is from Steffi Cao, “People Are Calling A Depop Seller ‘A Bad Person’ After She Posted A Haul Of The Thrift Store Finds She Planned To Sell,” Buzzfeednews.com, February 22, 2023. When you read the article, you learn that Jack appears to make her living by finding diamonds in the rough, buying them, and selling them at much higher prices than the prices she paid. In buying, she benefits the thrift stores from which she bought; otherwise, they wouldn’t sell to her. In selling, she benefits the people she sells to; otherwise, they wouldn’t buy. And Jack is better off in the process. So it’s win-win-win. But some people object. A person who calls herself “kat” says: people who go to thrift stores, find amazing s**t like this, and then sell it all on depop for 4x the price are the landlords of this generation. Kat is unwittingly correct. Jack is like a landlord. She, like landlords, performs a valuable service. Landlords buy properties, often improve them, usually maintain them and rent them to people who want to rent. Now if Kat’s objection to landlords is that the rents are too high, she’s singling out the wrong villain. The main reason rents are so high is that governments in the United States have systematically prevented people from building. Kat and others could object that because Jack is buying up undervalued clothing, she’s making it harder for people like Kat to find those diamonds in the rough. That’s true. But that’s true of every good or service. When someone buys something, it’s not available for someone else to buy. Would Kat object to book buyers finding undervalued books and then reselling them online? Possibly. But it’s not a good objection. Interestingly, many people who defended Jack argued that she was simply being repaid for her time. That’s true and it’s a good point. But imagine that Jack was really good at what she does and can make $200 an hour. (I know that that’s highly unlikely but work with me here.) Would that make the gains to the sellers or to the buyers any less? No, it wouldn’t. Also, Jack is modeling some good behavior for others who are willing to see. She posted on Instagram that: selling vintage clothes is how she is able to support herself as a college kid without family financial support. “I started Jack’s Vntg in February of 2022, still in school, with $100 to my name, and a lot of hope,” she wrote. “Not to sound dramatic, but it saved my life. I was able to pay my bills, eat, and survive on my own as an 18 year old.” Keep it up, Jack. We need more, not fewer, people like you. HT2 to Abby Hall. (0 COMMENTS)

Since nationalism is a form of collectivism, it is not surprising that its vulgate plays so much on “together” themes. Vladimir Putin just declared in a public speech in fromt of a “jubilant crowd, amid a sea of Russian flags” (“Putin’s Wartime Russia: Propaganda, Payouts and Jail,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2022): “When we are together, no one can match us,” he said, before singing the national anthem along with the crowd and greeting servicemen who were there. The crowd responded with chants of “Russia, Russia” and “Putin, Putin.” We could compare this with former president Donald Trump’s declarations, with his fans’ idolatry, or with the “USA, USA” chanted by the crowd at his meetings. We can also find something similar in the nationalism of Joe Biden, who is in many ways Trump 2.0 or, if you prefer, Trump with a human face. In his recent State of the Union speech, Biden said: We are the United States of America and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together. There may be some exceptions, and nuances have their importance as do hopefully constitutional constraints, but when a political ruler says “let’s do that together,” what he really means is “do what I say.” (0 COMMENTS)

I recently took a car ferry across to the island of Chiloé.  In the distance, I could see work being done on a big new suspension bridge, which when completed will connect the large island province to the mainland.  My first reaction was disappointment; I came too soon to experience the convenience of the new bridge. My second reaction was to wonder whether greater convenience actually makes us happier.  Riding the car ferry is a rather interesting experience, while driving over the bridge is somewhat more boring.  On the other hand, there’s the revealed preference argument—if there were an option between the bridge and the ferry, I’d have taken the bridge (even if the toll were equal to the ferry charge.) But is this revealed preference argument actually as strong as it seems?  I don’t believe so.  To explain why I’ll use the example of GPS navigation. I have always had a good visual memory (and a poor verbal memory).  Thus I am pretty good with maps, and am able to navigate in unfamiliar places based on the map in my mind.  When I was younger, I got great satisfaction from using this skill when traveling overseas.  My girlfriend called me “map head”.  It may sound odd, but I derived great utility from creatively solving a series of problems. GPS has rendered my navigation skill to be almost worthless.  Now while driving in Chile I am just as much on autopilot as if I were driving to the grocery store in Orange County.  Yes, I am free to continue doing things the old way, ignoring GPS.  Indeed I often so so when alone.  But with my wife?  Who’s she likely to trust? Progress imposes negative externalities on those who insist on doing things the old way.  The knowledge that something better exists tends to devalue the inferior product.  As a child, I watched The Wizard of Oz once a year on a black and white TV set.  Now that I know the film is actually (mostly) in color, I could not bear to watch it in black and white. Or, as food experts tell us:  “Hunger is the best sauce.” Nonetheless, I do believe that progress and happiness are closely related, but not because all these shiny new toys make us happier.  Rather I suspect that both progress and happiness are the effects of a third factor—freedom.  More specifically, I believe that people are happier when they are free to creatively engage in problem solving with the aim of making their lives better.  Whether the new inventions actually make them happier is immaterial; people derive satisfaction from pursuing their dreams. Here’s V.S. Naipaul: Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue . . . This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the civilization to so many outside it or on the periphery.  I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition.  It is an elastic idea; it fits all men.  It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit.  So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.  It is an immense human idea.  It cannot be reduced to a fixed system.  It cannot generate fanaticism.  But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.  (From a talk given in 1991–when the future still seemed bright.) Of course, this post is merely restating a longstanding idea in philosophy—that it’s all about the journey, not the destination. PS.  My wife and I were recently walking on a trail through the woods of Chiloé.  We could see the beach in the distance, and decided to walk in that direction.  Right before the beach we encountered a stream that blocked our path, so we never reached the beach.  At the same time, my wife was chatting with our daughter on the telephone.  My daughter was surprised that we didn’t know about the stream.  She could see it on a map that was tracking our movements on her phone, even though she was 6000 miles away!  She had that exasperated  “What’s wrong with you boomers” tone in her voice. Modern technology allows us to plan trips in incredible detail.  But I sort of miss the serendipity of the travel that I did when young, when I didn’t know exactly what my trip would involve before leaving home. But that’s just me.  My wife likes to plan. Here’s that bridge project in the distance, through a porthole on the car ferry: PPS.  Just as I am good with maps, I am lousy with languages.  I took three semesters of Spanish in college, and all I recall is “hola”.  While I find GPS to be annoying, I’d really appreciate an instantaneous language translating device when traveling overseas.  (My wife uses the iPhone translator, but it doesn’t actually work in the real world.) (0 COMMENTS)

Oxfam, a global confederation of charitable organizations, just released a report demanding that billionaires be abolished. The report, Survival of the Richest: How We Must Tax the Super-Rich Now to Fight Inequality, states that: [T]he world should aim to halve the wealth and number of billionaires between now and 2030, both by increasing taxes on the top 1% and adopting other billionaire-busting policies. This would bring billionaire wealth and numbers back to where they were just a decade ago in 2012. The eventual aim should be to go further, and to abolish billionaires altogether, as part of a fairer, more rational distribution of the world’s wealth. Oxfam correctly identifies source of much of this wealth: Billionaires have seen huge gains during the pandemic. A flood of public money pumped into the economy by rich countries, which was necessary to support their populations, also drove up asset prices and wealth at the top. This meant that in the absence of progressive taxation, the super-rich pocketed unprecedented fortunes. The U.S. government, for example, responded to both the Great Recession and COVID by increasing the nation’s money supply. As a result, between the beginning of 2009 and today, the average home price has more than doubled. During those same years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tripled in value. Thus, asset inflation has increased homeowners’ and investors’ “paper wealth,” widening the disparity between the country’s rich and poor. Oxfam’s solution to the gap created by government monetary policy is for governments to aggressively confiscate wealth through draconian taxation, including increased capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, taxes on unrealized capital gains, and higher property and inheritance taxes. To keep the rich from escaping, Oxfam recommends granting additional powers to national revenue agencies and strengthening international government-to-government data sharing mechanisms. In one of the report’s two forewords, José Antonio Ocampo, Colombia’s Minister of Finance and Public Credit, makes clear that the goal isn’t just to reduce inequality by making the rich poorer: By abolishing decades-long tax privileges and loopholes that benefit only the richest, there will be more money to invest in free, quality public services like education and healthcare. To invest in agriculture. In climate and nature. And in peace. Minister Ocampo’s faith in the efficacy of government to ensure good and prevent bad is touching, but hardly realistic. Far more likely, political leaders will use the funds to line their pockets and those of their allies, further cementing themselves in power. Meanwhile, shifting resources to government and away from the private, productive sector, is likely to make the average individual – not just the rich – much poorer. Yes, Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire, but most of his wealth is in the form of Amazon stock. Bezos owns only an insignificant fraction of the nation’s physical wealth (factories, machinery, offices, houses, cars, aircraft, computers, TVs, microwaves, dishwashers, washing machines, and so on and on) and an even smaller share of its human capital (knowledge, experience, skills, values).  Confiscating his wealth would force him to sell his shares, tanking the value of Amazon stock and causing much, if not most, of his “wealth” to vanish. While a worldwide collapse of market share prices might make Oxfam happy, it would starve whole industries of resources leading to worldwide depression. Great for equality, but terrible for human flourishing.   Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource. (0 COMMENTS)