I’m sure DOGE will have a long history as the textbook definition of overpromising and underdelivering. There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical of their chances to meet their goals. But I just want to focus on simple realities DOGE didn’t – and couldn’t – alter. In 2024, federal spending was $6.8 trillion. Of that $6.8 trillion, $4.1 trillion was so-called mandatory spending – spending on programs that is baked into existing law. Over $3 trillion of that $4.1 trillion went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Now, there is no doubt fraud and abuse in each of these programs. But even if DOGE could have perfectly cut out 100% of that fraud, it wouldn’t have added up to much in the face of that $3 trillion. And the people of DOGE simply lacked the institutional knowledge needed to accurately identify a lot of what was or wasn’t fraud or waste. In any system, there will always be things that to an outsider look as though they are striking and dramatic anomalies, but actually have a perfectly mundane explanation. Much of Elon Musk’s early, dramatic statements like making claims about there being more active Social Security accounts than the total American population were just examples of him confusing himself by not understanding the basics. So their flurry of activity into mandatory spending was never a promising avenue. Interest on the debt, while not technically mandatory in the sense defined above, isn’t exactly optional either, unless policymakers are thinking the United States needs another reduction in its credit rating. That interest accounted for another $900 billion in the 2024 budget. That leaves a total of $1.8 trillion in so-called discretionary spending. The full military budget for operations, maintenance, servicemember pay, and all the rest, accounts for a little less than half of the discretionary budget. As for the remaining half of discretionary spending – you can just look at the infographic linked above and see how that half is divvied up. While discretionary spending might seem like the easiest to go after, the simple fact is that even huge cuts to this area aren’t going to do much to dent the deficit. For example, every now and then you see a news story about how millions dollars of taxpayer money was used on some comically absurd sounding study, like whether or not the mating behavior of clownfish is altered if they are shown video footage of circus clowns or whatever. (To be clear, that is an entirely imaginary study I invented for comic effect, and not something that was ever done, let alone funded with taxpayer money. (I hope.)) And this news story will become everyone’s favorite example about wasteful government spending for a while. But science, space, and technology as a combined category makes up only $41 billion in total – only about 2% of discretionary spending, and about 0.6% of the federal budget. Get rid of the funding for that clownfish study and a thousand more like it, and you still haven’t made a dent in the deficit. It’s a good move if you want to create flashy headlines and maximize your media coverage. But if you’re serious about fixing the deficit, going after the clownfish studies doesn’t even make the top 100 list of priorities. To make a serious dent in the federal deficit will require serious reductions in mandatory spending, which makes up the bulk of federal spending. Anyone who says they want to reduce federal spending but won’t talk about making serious changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and military spending is at a nonstarter from the beginning. These are all very popular programs. Silly studies about clownfish make much easier targets. Any politician who wants to seriously address federal spending should focus on the former. But a politician whose top priority is getting reelected will spend most of their time talking about the latter. (1 COMMENTS)

I’ve started reading Bryan Caplan’s excellent new book entitled Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-faire, and have covered the first 12 (short) chapters.  I had hoped to find lots of things to post about, but unfortunately I tend to agree with almost all of Bryan’s arguments.  There is one chapter on antitrust, however, which I found a bit unsatisfying.  Although even in that case I probably agree with the policy implications of his argument: Since 2007, Bill Gates has given away $28B, 48% of his net worth.  Frugal Dad estimates that he’s saved almost 6 million lives.  I haven’t double-checked his sources, but it’s a plausible estimate. Back in the nineties, Bill Gates was experiencing far less favorable publicity – and legal persecution.  The U.S. government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations.  In 2000, Alex Tabarrok estimated that the antitrust case had cost Microsoft shareholders $140B.  Yes, Microsoft ultimately reached a relatively favorable settlement.  But Gates probably would have been billions richer if antitrust laws didn’t exist. . . . If Gates’ philanthropy is as efficacious as most people think, there’s a shocking implication: The antitrust case against Microsoft had a massive body count.  Gates saves about one life for every $5000 he spends.  If the case cost him $5B, and he would have given away 48%, antitrust killed 480,000 people.  If the case cost him $5B, and he would have given away every penny, antitrust killed a million people.  Imagine how many people would be dead today if the government managed to bring Microsoft to its knees, and Gates to bankruptcy.  It staggers the imagination. I’ve made a similar argument about Bill Gates when speaking with people, but I think this goes a bit too far: You might object, “By the standard, Gates himself is killing millions by failing to give even more.”  If you’re a consequentialist, that’s exactly correctly; we’re all murderers in the eyes of Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer.  But if we stick to the common sense distinction between “killing” and “letting die,” Gates is innocent, and the government remains guilty. I don’t find any of that to be a common sense interpretation.  I am a consequentialist, and I don’t believe that refraining from charity is murder.  Nor I do believe that a “common sense distinction” would find the US government guilty of killing in this case. Antitrust involves both efficiency and equity issues.  I am skeptical as to whether the US government’s antitrust case against Microsoft made the economy more efficient, and I suspect Bryan is also skeptical.  As a result, our policy views would likely end up in roughly the same place.  But Bryan’s post implicitly focused on the impact of redistribution, not efficiency, so that’s where I’d like to address my comments. The logic of this chapter suggests that income redistribution from the rich to the middle class is bad on utilitarian grounds, because the rich have a much higher propensity to help the poorest people in the world.  In the case of Bill Gates, that is probably true.  But public policies should not be constructed on how they would impact a single individual; rather we need to consider the overall effect of any policy of redistribution.  Many rich people spend their wealth on consumption, and/or donate to causes such as wealthy universities and woke foundations. Antitrust is a weird example to use when addressing these sorts of issues.  Instead, it makes much more sense to think about the optimal design of tax and transfer programs when making consequentialist arguments based on the assumption that transferring billions of dollars to billionaires would help the poorest people in the world. If Bill Gates were typical, then it might be optimal to sharply raise taxes on middle class and upper middle class Americans, and sharply cut taxes on billionaires.  But in that case an even better policy would be a sharply progressive consumption tax regime, with the revenue going to exactly the sort of foreign aid programs that were recently slashed by the DOGE people.  You might argue that this redirecting money to poor countries is politically unrealistic, as most voters believe that charity begins at home.  That’s true, but it is also true that a policy of sharply higher taxes on the middle class is not particularly popular. So what is politically feasible?  One answer is that whatever comes out of Congress this year is the only politically feasible tax policy at the moment.  I view that sort of reasoning as excessively defeatist.  A highly progressive consumption tax on the wealthy is not an easy sell in Congress, but surely it’s less unpopular than adopting a highly regressive income tax regime.  With a highly progressive consumption tax regime, Bill Gates is not in any way discouraged from trying to help the world’s poorest people.  And yet this plan does not require us to worry about the welfare of billionaires when thinking about optimal tax policy and optimal antitrust policy. Again, I’m not certain that Bryan disagrees with these policy views.  But in a world where many people actually are consequentialist, I worry that it’s needlessly provocative to suggest that the world might be better off if our richest billionaires were even richer.  You can get to the same place with a steeply progressive consumption tax, without turning off potential fans of free markets and big business. As far as antitrust, I’d prefer it focus exclusively on efficiency issues (which means mostly attacking government barriers to entry), and leave questions of redistribution up to our tax and transfer system.  If the Microsoft case was counterproductive, it was because it made our economy less efficient. (0 COMMENTS)

  Every few years, I post on an excellent article on the American revolution by economic historian Jeff Hummel. It’s on Econlib. I asked Jeff to write it in 2018 and it has been a perennial hit. Indeed, in  a newsletter a few years ago, Liberty Fund stated: Our most popular Article ever is from Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in 2018, turning the Revolution into an externality story. He writes, “In fact, the American Revolution, despite all its obvious costs and excesses, brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe.” If you read it, you’ll see why. Jeff takes on so many of the misconceptions that apparently sophisticated people have about the revolution. Here are the first two paragraphs of “Benefits of the American Revolution: An Exploration of Positive Externalities.” It has become de rigueur, even among libertarians and classical liberals, to denigrate the benefits of the American Revolution. Thus, libertarian Bryan Caplan writes:  “Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for?… [W]hen you ask about specific libertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, it’s hard to get a decent answer. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, independence had two massive anti-libertarian consequences: It removed the last real check on American aggression against the Indians, and allowed American slavery to avoid earlier—and peaceful—abolition.”1 One can also find such challenges reflected in recent mainstream writing, both popular and scholarly. In fact, the American Revolution, despite all its obvious costs and excesses, brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe. Speculations that, without the American Revolution, the treatment of the indigenous population would have been more just or that slavery would have been abolished earlier display extreme historical naivety. Indeed, a far stronger case can be made that without the American Revolution, the condition of Native Americans would have been no better, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies would have been significantly delayed, and the condition of European colonists throughout the British empire, not just those in what became the United States, would have been worse than otherwise. There are so many great paragraphs. I’ll settle for three: As a result of the Revolution, nearly all of the former colonies adopted written state constitutions setting up republican governments with limitations on state power embodied in bills of rights. Only Rhode Island and Connecticut continued to operate under their colonial charters, with minor modifications. The new state constitutions often extended the franchise, with Vermont being again the first jurisdiction to adopt universal male suffrage with no property qualifications and explicitly without regard to color. Going along with this was a reform of penal codes throughout the former colonies, making them less severe, and eliminating such brutal physical punishments as ear-cropping and branding, all still widely practiced in Britain. Virginia reduced the number of capital crimes from twenty-seven to two: murder and treason. And: The U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility may seem trivial and quaint to modern eyes. But such titles, still prevalent throughout the Old World, always involved enormous legal privileges. This provision is, therefore, a manifestation of the extent to which the Revolution witnessed a decline in deference throughout society. No one has captured this impact better than the dean of revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, in his Pulitzer Prize winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution.  He points out that in 1760 the “two million monarchical subjects” living in the British colonies “still took it for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency.” But “by the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century.”4 One can view this transition even through subtle changes in language. White employees no longer referred to their employers as “master” or “mistress” but adopted the less servile Dutch word “boss.” Men generally began using the designation of “Mr.,” traditionally confined to the gentry. Although these are mere cultural transformations, they both reflected and reinforced the erosion of coercive supports for hierarchy, in a reinforcing cycle. In the Revolution’s aftermath, indentured servitude for immigrants withered away, and most states eliminated legal sanctions enforcing long-term labor contracts for residents, thus giving birth to the modern system of free labor, where most workers (outside of the military) can quit at will. Contrast that with Britain, where as late at 1823 Parliament passed a Master and Servant Act that prescribed criminal penalties for breach of a labor contract.5   There’s so much there. I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, especially if you want to make an informed comment. Happy July 4th in advance. I might not be posting tomorrow because I’ll be in the local July 4th parade with my group called “Monterey County Libertarians for Peace.”   Note: The picture is of the Betsy Ross flag hanging in front of my house. (0 COMMENTS)

Despite Ronald Coase’s many contributions to economics, he is most famous for the co-called Coase Theorem, which is just one small part of his paper The Problem of Social Cost.  Simply put, in a world of sufficiently low transaction costs, property rights, institutions, and the law don’t matter.  If rights are assigned randomly, the result will always tend toward an efficient outcome: deterrence of a problem will fall upon whoever is the low-cost avoider.  When transaction costs are high, however, then the assignment of rights absolutely does matter. Conflicts arise because of the interaction between two (or more) parties and thus, even if one party is “wrong,” they may not be the best to assign the duty to reform.  As Coase himself explains: The conclusions to which this kind of analysis seems to have led most economists is [sic] that it would be desirable to make the owner of the factory liable for the damage caused to those injured by the smoke, or alternatively, to place a tax on the factory owner varying with the amount of smoke produced and equivalent in money terms to the damage it would cause, or finally, to exclude the factory from residential districts (and presumably from other areas in which the emission of smoke would have harmful effects on others). It is my contention that the suggested courses of action are inappropriate, in that they lead to results which are not necessarily, or even usually, desirable. Judges seem to be aware of the fact that assignment of rights matters significantly in a high transaction cost environment, at least in a de facto sense.  Whenever a conflict arises between two parties, judges often push for a settlement: let the parties hash out among themselves what a desirable solution is.  Judges seem to little want to be placed in a position where they must force a decision.  (Of course, one could say that judges just want to reduce their workload as much as possible, and that is why they push for settlement.  That’s likely the primary reason; judges are overworked.  But the point remains: the judges are acting as if they value economic efficiency). However, sometimes transaction costs (which include negotiation costs) do not allow for a settlement to come easily.  One major way is that both parties, in a dispute, may be quite upset with one another.  As George Mason University professor John Schuler and I pointed out in our 2019 Econlib article Have Coase – Will Travel,* anger, sadness, disappointment, etc., all make negotiation difficult; they are, indeed, transaction costs.  Judges have limited means to reduce these transaction costs. One method that has arisen over the past few decades to reduce transaction costs is mediation.  Mediation is a private process, conducted under the shadow of law, to try and resolve conflict.  Judges may suggest mediation or the process may be voluntarily sought by the parties. Either way, mediators seek to create a settlement by facilitating negotiation with both parties.   Mediators differ from judges insofar as they are not necessarily legal experts.  They have no authority to bind parties.  They have no authority to impose sanctions or outcomes.  Further, they are active in the negotiation process: they can talk to the parties, try to convey the feelings of others, encourage parties to get creative in problem-solving, etc.  In a sense, they are a therapist as much as anything.   The mediation process has arisen as a means to reduce transaction costs and reach mutually beneficial solutions.  In that sense, they are very Coaseian.  Just like other middlemen, they reduce transaction costs and seek to make the legal process more efficient. Many common law scholars, from Richard Posner to modern times, argue that one of the virtues of the common law is that it tends toward economic efficiency.  The emergence of mediation as a means to reduce negotiation-related transaction costs is additional evidence of that point.   *For a discussion on how to use this in the classroom, see Have Coase – Will Travel: New Ways to Teach Coase Using Old Media by Jon Murphy, John Schuler, and Jadrian Wooten (2020).  Journal of Private Enterprise 25 (4), 71-86. (0 COMMENTS)

Question: One common argument against public assistance taking the form of direct cash handouts is that the recipients will use the money to buy things that taxpayers find objectionable, e.g., illicit drugs, gambling, etc. To avoid this outcome, the argument goes, public assistance should take the form of in-kind transfers, e.g., food, housing, medical care, etc. What does this argument assume about the income elasticities of objectionable goods? Suppose the recipients could costlessly resell the in-kind transfers. In this case, is there any difference between direct cash handouts and in-kind transfers?   Solution: A common argument against giving people cash instead of in-kind assistance—like food, housing, or medical care—is that cash might be spent on things taxpayers find objectionable: illicit drugs, gambling, or other “vices.” The idea is that if we hand out groceries or rent vouchers instead of money, we can prevent recipients from using the aid to fund consumption that we believe to be harmful or immoral. But this argument rests on an assumption that doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny. At its core, the argument assumes that the demand for objectionable goods rises with income—that is, that these goods have a positive income elasticity. If you give someone more money, they’re more likely to spend more on drugs or gambling. That may very well be true. The problem is that the argument simultaneously assumes something quite different about in-kind transfers: that giving people food, housing, or medical care will not lead to more consumption of objectionable goods. This is only possible if objectionable goods somehow become immune to income changes when the income comes in the form of in-kind support. Even if someone can’t directly sell the food or housing they receive, getting those goods for free frees up money they would have spent on them. That extra money can then be used for anything—including objectionable goods. Unless we believe people will consume more of the in-kind good and nothing else with the money they save, we should expect some of that income to be reallocated toward whatever they value at the margin. In other words, the logic of the in-kind transfer argument contradicts itself. It claims that cash causes bad behavior because income matters—but that in-kind transfers don’t because income suddenly doesn’t matter. Now, let’s suppose recipients can resell the in-kind goods. In that case, the transfer becomes equivalent to cash in every meaningful way. They can turn the food or housing voucher into money and spend it however they like. Economically speaking, resale makes the in-kind transfer function exactly like a cash transfer. But even if resale isn’t possible, the basic conclusion still holds. The key idea is fungibility: money is interchangeable, and so is the value of money saved. If a recipient was already buying food before the government gave them food, then the food transfer simply frees up their existing money to spend elsewhere. Whether objectionable goods consumption rises as a result depends on one thing: whether those goods are normal goods, i.e., goods that people consume more of as their effective income rises. If they are—and the argument assumes they are when criticizing cash handouts—then any transfer that increases effective income, whether in-kind or in cash, will have the same effect.   (0 COMMENTS)

The vocal opposition of some locals to Jeff Bezos’s marriage in Venice, in line with the reaction against tourism, illustrates a few important points in economics and political philosophy. The Financial Times reports (“Jeff Bezos’s Wedding Draws Storm of Protest in Venice,” June 24, 2025): “What is happening here is blatant arrogance,” said Marta Sottoriva, 34, a high school English teacher and activist. “He is exploiting the city in the same way that he has been exploiting workers worldwide to build his empire.” … “Bezos’ wedding is a symbol of extreme wealth, privilege and a lot of things that are going wrong currently in the world” and taking place in “one of the world most climate vulnerable cities”, said Clara Thomson, a Greenpeace campaigner. … “Venetians feel betrayed, neglected and forgotten,” said Tommaso Bortoluzzi, a municipal councillor with the opposition Democrat Party. “Many citizens feel they have lost the ability to live in their own city in a calm, serene, and traditional way, while Venice has become an open air museum.” A sensible classical-liberal philosophy suggests many objections. It is not because you are living somewhere that you thereby acquire a right to forbid somebody within a X-mile radius to do something that you don’t like. A property right gives you the right to use your own property as you wish, not the property of others. Otherwise, the concept of property right would be useless to prevent conflict over resources and lifestyles: you would intervene in your neighbor’s life when he does something that you don’t like, even on his own or rented property; your neighbor would do the same against you. Claiming a right to control a geographical place that is not yours is analogous to the claim that one has a right to one’s customers against competing suppliers. For example, domestic workers would have a right to the patronage of their domestic customers and could thus to forbid them, through tariffs or bans, to purchase from foreign (or non-local) suppliers. This sort of theory is either incoherent or authoritarian. Having a right to one’s customers implies that the latter do not have a right to choose their suppliers, just like having a right to one’s own Venice implies that other Venetians don’t have a right to their own Venice. Enforcing one’s right then implies controlling what other Venetians can import or export. (Remember that tourism is an export.) On the contrary, a coherent and non-authoritarian conception of free exchange—the right to buy from, or sell to, whomever is capable and willing to sell to you or buy from you—underlies the right of Bezos to marry in Venice on some property rented from owners who are willing to welcome his party; the same for his right to buy pastries from a local (or foreign, for that matter) baker who is willing to sell them. In a free society, neither buying nor selling is forbidden (with some very limited exceptions such as buying stolen goods or the services of a killer-for-hire). The claim of an expansive property right enforced (the “forced” says it all) by political authorities illustrates Anthony de Jasay’s argument on the adversary or discriminatory state. The state (or a related political authority) arbitrarily favors some citizens and harms others—the expansive right claimers against the local hospitality industry and other businesses. They want political authorities to discriminate against the local businesses that are happy to cater to this sort of event. The locals who want to chase tourists away also raise a question about the mob’s power in anarchy. In a 2016 EconLog column, Anthony de Jasay seems to show some sympathy for the idea that a country—and why not a sub-country like Venice?—is an extension of the home of its inhabitants. It is perhaps only a short leap from this idea to the claim that a Venetian mob could chase tourists out of town. The impossibility or, at least the difficulty, of enforcing formal rights (“liberties” as de Jasay would say, as he clearly distinguished rights and liberties) in anarchy remains an unsolved problem. Mind you, it is not a solved problem under the state either. In the case of the Bezos marriage as for tourism in general, it is interesting to note that “special interests”— commercial interests—were on the side of free exchange while a sort of mob expressed its opposition. Also on the size of Bezos was Venice’s long-time conservative mayor. Perhaps one can argue that, over the course of history, non-crony commercial interests have sided with liberty (on this, see William Salter and Andrew Young, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty; and, more generally, John Hicks’s A Theory of Economic History). I suppose that, in Venice, most residents were also happy with, or indifferent to, the Bezos party. At least, that would be true in a free society, where, in general, each individual (and private group) would mind his own business and engage in voluntary exchange that he deems to be in his interest as he defines it. This does not preclude the desirability or even the necessity of an ethical concern for the maintenance of a free society (see James Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative). ****************************** Bezos and Sanchez in Venice, Picasso-style painting by ChatGPT Bezos and Sanchez in Venice, Picasso-style drawing by ChatGPT     (0 COMMENTS)

In 2007, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an interesting article advocating for what he called “defying the data.” The idea was fairly simple – say you have some theory explaining how the world works. A new study is published with data that can’t be accounted for with your theoretical framework. How should you respond? One response is to abandon your theory in favor of the new data. Another response is to keep your theory intact and, as Yudkowsky says, “attack the experiment – accuse the researchers of dishonesty, or flawed design, or conflict of interest.” But there is a third possibility – that of simply defying the data. As Yudkowsky put it, Nonetheless I said it outright, without apology, and with deliberate insolence.  I am keeping my theory; your experiment is wrong. If an experimental result contradicts the Standard Model, this is an important fact.  It needs to be openly acknowledged.  An experiment that makes traditionalists want to discard the data – or even an experiment that makes traditionalists very skeptical of the data – should be a high priority  for replication.  An experiment worth defying should command attention! But it is not socially acceptable to say, “The hell with your experimental falsification, I’m keeping my theory.”  So the data has to be defied covertly – by character assassination of the researchers, by sly innuendos, by dire hints of controversy.  The data has to be dismissed, excused away, swept under a rug, silently into the dark, because you can’t admit you’re defying the data. This is not a good way of focusing attention on an anomalous result. This is not a good way to ensure funding for replication attempts. This makes a great deal of sense. If a theory has been well-established and upheld by multiple studies and experiments, then one really striking appearance of contrary data shouldn’t amount to much. Experiments and studies, even meticulously crafted ones, can go wrong for all manner of reasons. In 2011, some scientists seemingly found data showing neutrinos moving faster than light – a finding that contradicts well established physical theories. In this case, the perfectly sensible response is to defy the data. After all, what’s more likely? That all of established physics has been completely upended – or that the researchers at CERN had a slight measurement error? (Spoiler alert – it turned out to be the latter.) Now admittedly, my own defiance of data in this blog post will not have anything like the precision that can be found in physics experiments, either in the measures used or even the definition of the underlying phenomenon. Still, there was a specific moment years ago that instantly provoked in me a response of, “I defy the data” – and it relates to what standard of living data is purported to show. At the time, I was in college, and very much in a financially strapped period of my life. I split a small apartment with two other people, working on my economics degree while also working full time hours at Barnes and Noble to try to limp by financially. Around that time, I had heard a claim, often repeated in various forms, along the lines of, “young people in this generation actually have a lower standard of living than their parents did at the same age!” And I immediately, without hesitation, decided to defy that data. By a fine coincidence, only a short time earlier, my parents had mailed me a variety of keepsakes from my youth. One of them was a DVD onto which they had transferred the contents of a VHS tape made years earlier, when I was three and a half years old. This would have placed the footage at around 1987. My dad had recorded this video to send to his own mother, so she could see family movies of how we were getting on. One of the things that struck me most watching that video when it was sent to me was how I was now almost the same age as my mother was when it was recorded. This video gave me a glimpse into what my parent’s life looked like when they were the same age I was at that time. How did our lives compare? Was I experiencing a lower standard of living compared to them, at that time? Absolutely not! Now, I’m sure if you did a comparison of our income brackets I’d have looked like I was far down the ladder compared to them. Even though that video was recorded around 1987 and I was watching it in 2011, my nominal income was lower than theirs – and when you adjust for inflation, it would have been no contest. But not only was my standard of living not lower than theirs, you’d have had to pay me a considerable amount of money to even be willing to consider living at the standard of living they had, with the goods and services available to them in rural Oregon in 1987! (Actually, I’m not sure there is any amount of money you could pay me to make me willing to do so – because so much of what I enjoy about my living standards both in 2011 and now couldn’t have been made available to me for any amount of money in 1987.) I could spend all day and night listing all the things available to me in 2011 that my parents in 1987 couldn’t have had in their wildest dreams, but I’ll just use one comparison for now. My dad was behind the camera for almost the entire video, but occasionally you could see him reflected in a mirror. That home movie was recorded using a heavy and cumbersome camera that had to be mounted over his shoulder and produced low resolution, low quality output. They didn’t even own the camera – they just rented it for a few days to make this video, because a camera like that was far too expensive for them to actually own outright. And as I watched that video, I had a smartphone in my pocket that weighed only a few ounces and could record vastly higher quality video that could be instantly transmitted anywhere in the world. Though that phone would be considered obsolete today, just the sight of it in 1987 would have had people debating on the need to reintroduce witch burning laws! People can debate with each other until they’re blue in the face about how to best measure living standards. I don’t have a brilliant new measure to offer here. But I will say if your measure of living standards comes to the conclusion that I was at a lower standard of living in 2011 than my parents were in 1987, your measure is terrible and should be discarded. If that’s what your data say, then I defy the data. (0 COMMENTS)

I’m not a fan of left wing views on “class”. Progressives often define class in terms of income or wealth, which makes no sense to me. I’ve spent time in all 5 income quintiles, from the bottom 20% to the top 20%, and yet I have never identified my “class” with my income.The following tweet caught my eye: So the leftist that is currently running for mayor of New York views people in the 1% and the 98% percentile (of income or wealth) as occupying the same class, at least regarding “us versus them” battles with the top 1%.  A homeless person living in a back alley in the Bronx is united with an elegant lady living in a condo in New York’s Upper East Side in their battle for “economic justice”?  Sorry, I’m not buying that argument. In the old days, Marxists thought of class in terms of the capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Even that was far too simple, but at least it had a certain logic.  Lumping together the 1% and the 98% into one group makes no sense at all. Is this just harmless rhetoric?  I don’t think so.  Leftists keep assuming that various groups are part of their coalition–immigrants, blue collar workers, lower income people, and then are shocked to find them voting for a Republican candidate.  Leftists don’t realize that workers in California making minimum wage (roughly $33,000/year), don’t view themselves as being in the same class with non-workers living off of various social insurance programs, even if their effective “incomes” are not all that different.  And they certainly don’t view themselves as being in the same class as doctors and lawyers making $500,000/year. Matt Yglesias has a post that relates to this issue: An abundance agenda for normies The name comes from Ruben Gallego’s remarks to Lulu Garcia-Navarro about the importance of articulating an aspirational agenda of material prosperity as part of Democrats’ pitch to working class people: It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream. This is, pretty literally, abundance. It’s about economic growth. In a good progressive way, it’s not indifferent to questions of distribution — it’s a pitch aimed at people in the bottom half of the earnings distribution. But it’s not about inequality as such, it’s about raising absolute living standards. Whenever I hear progressives talk about the 1% and the 99%, I immediately suspect that they understand little about the role of class in America. (0 COMMENTS)

What is fascism, and what place does it occupy in political philosophy? There is more to that question than the standard identification with the extreme right, as echoed by the encyclopedia Britannica: Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation. This characterization doesn’t fit well on the conventional left-right axis of the political spectrum. For one thing, the mainstream left also entertains communitarian beliefs and favors “the good of the nation” against individual interests. Its devotion to democracy and liberalism, at least in the classical sense, is rather doubtful. Apart from its populist variant, the mainstream left does favor a hierarchy between elected officials and expert bureaucrats on the one side, and the populace on the other side. Finally, if we look at socialism à la Maduro or at communism, the practical difference with fascism wears thin. The favored political constituencies of the two regimes differ but often overlap. For example, the common people easily rally behind strongmen of either the extreme left or the extreme right, and even move from one side to the other over time. The kinship between the extreme right and the extreme left suggests that the conventional axis left-right is not a satisfactory model. The left and the right share more than is apparent. The proper simple model would be a circle where the extreme left and the extreme right meet on a common arc. Alternatively, an important dimension seems to be missing. This becomes rather obvious when we ask historical experts in fascism about the foundations of their ideology. Alfredo Rocco was a law professor and an adviser and friend of Benito Mussolini. In a 1925 speech, “The Political Doctrine of Fascism,” which Mussolini said he “endorse[d] throughout,” Rocco proclaimed (as reproduced in Carl Cohen, Ed., Communism, Fascism, and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations, 1972): For Liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends. (p. 323) Individual rights are only recognized in so far as they are implied in the rights of the state. In this preeminence of duty we find the highest ethical value of Fascism. (324) Or ask Benito Mussolini himself, the founder of fascism. In his 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana article on “The Doctrine of Fascism,” he explained (reproduced op. cit.): Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State. … It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. (330) The nation is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of its own moral unity, a will and therefore an effective existence. … The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.” (331) Fascism could be defined as an “organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.” (336) It is to be expected that this century may be that of authority, a century of the “Right,” a Fascist century. If the nineteenth was the century of the individual (Liberalism means individualism) it may be expected that this one may be the century of “collectivism” and therefore the century of the State. (337) When one says liberalism, one says the individual; when one says Fascism, one says the State. (338) In his 1936 book published by the Dante Alighieri Society of Chicago, The Philosophy of Fascism, Mario Palmieri (perhaps a pseudonym) cited a well-known fascist motto (reproduced op. cit.): All is in the State and for the State; nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. (351) A bit farther, the author evokes the vision of Italy dreaming once more dreams of glory, dreams of greatness, dreams of empire. (357) What these quotes illustrate is that fascism and communism—and, to a different extent, the right and the left—both negate individual choices as subordinated to collective choices made through the state. Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies. (0 COMMENTS)