Last week, Alex Tabarrok wrote a post at Marginal Revolution titled, “Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?” His answer is yes. That reminded me of what I wrote about Social Security in my 2001 book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey. Here’s the start of the chapter.   I say we scrap the current [Social Security] system and replace it with a system wherein you add your name to the bottom of a list, and then you send some money to the person at the top of the list, and then you . . . Oh, wait, that IS our current system. —Dave Barry, “Election could come down to who kisses most orifice,” Miami Herald, September 24, 2000 In 1991, one of my students, Stephen Banus, wrote to the Social Security Administration requesting information about the Social Security taxes he had paid and the benefits he could expect to receive. In the form letter he got back, Gwendolyn King, the commissioner of Social Security wrote: I want to assure you that Social Security is built on a sound financial foundation. Social Security benefits will be there when you need them. A prudent man and a good planner, Banus sent a similar request in 1995. This time, the message in the form letter was different. The commissioner of Social Security, Shirley Chater, wrote: The latest report of the Social Security Board of Trustees says the Social Security system can pay benefits for about 35 more years. This means there’s time for Congress to make the changes needed to safeguard the program’s financial future. In just four years, the commissioner had scaled back the blanket assurance that the benefits would be there “when you need them” to “about 35 more years.” What happened between 1991 and 1995? Actually, nothing much happened in those four years except that the Social Security Commissioner in 1995 was perhaps less dishonest than her counterpart in 1991. The fact is that Social Security was never on a “sound financial foundation.” Contrary to the Social Security Administration’s official propaganda, there is no real trust fund. Roughly 80 percent of the payroll taxes collected from current workers today are sent out to current retirees, with only a brief stayover in Washington. The government spends the rest of the money on other items. The so-called trust fund contains bonds that the government has created. These bonds are simply IOUs from one branch of government to another. Chris Jehn, an associate director of the Congressional Budget Office, compares these bonds to notes that you write every year and put in a box for your child’s college education. The note says, “I owe $5,000 to my daughter’s college fund.” After 18 years of such saving, when your child turns 18, you open the box and out comes, not $90,000, but 18 worthless pieces of paper. Those who retired in the early 1940s got huge benefits in return for paying low payroll taxes for only a few years. But as the system has “matured,” so that current retirees have been paying Social Security taxes for virtually their whole working lives, these retirees have received a much lower return. A private citizen who set up such a financial chain letter would go to prison. In fact, he did. His name was Charles Ponzi, and he was arrested in 1920 for promising investors that they could double their money in 90 days and using the proceeds from later participants to keep his commitments to earlier ones. Thus was born the term “Ponzi scheme.” There are two main differences between Ponzi’s original scam and the Social Security system. The first difference is that Social Security is run by government and, whatever its constitutionality and its questionable ethics, is legal. The second difference follows from the first: Whereas Ponzi had to rely on suckers, the government can and does use force. It’s true that the government refers to the Social Security payroll taxes—a hefty 10.6 percent (an extra 1.8 percent is for disability insurance and a further 2.9 percent, levied on all income from work, is for Medicare) of every worker’s earnings up to $80,400 in 2001—as “contributions.” But just try not “contributing.” That’s what Valentine Byler, an Amish farmer in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, did in 1961. His religion taught that its members should care for each other and he tried to act on his religious beliefs by not paying Social Security taxes. The Internal Revenue Service responded by seizing three of his horses and selling them to collect $308.96 in unpaid taxes. The Social Security Administration’s new line is that the fund is solvent until 2037. What the government officials who say that really mean is that by 2037, the last of the special federal government bonds that the Social Security Administration has bought and kept in the Social Security “Trust” Fund will be sold off to the U.S. Treasury. This “sale” of bonds is simply a transfer between the government’s left and right hands. To free up the cash to pay for these bonds, the Treasury will have to float new bonds, increase taxes, or cut other spending. The more relevant date, therefore, is when the government’s benefit payments start to exceed its income from payroll taxes and from interest on these bonds—because that’s when the bonds will first be sold and the government will have to come up with extra cash. That date, the Social Security Administration now projects, will be 2024, about two-thirds of the way through the retirement of the baby boomers. In the late 1990s, the government’s own actuaries estimated that, to maintain promised benefits, the tax rate would have to rise over the next decades from its current level of 12.4 percent to more than 18 percent. At an 18 percent rate, Social Security taxes would be about 7.5 percent of overall GDP. But total federal revenues from all sources, not just from the Social Security payroll tax, have stayed within a narrow range of 18 to 20 percent of GDP since the early 1950s. If this historical constant held, then the Social Security program alone would take about 40 percent of the total tax revenues collected by the federal government, leaving the remaining 60 percent to pay for Medicare, interest on the debt, defense, and everything else the federal government does. That doesn’t seem likely, which means that the odds of raising the Social Security tax rate substantially are, fortunately, fairly small. At some point in the future, therefore, benefits will have to be less than promised. 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The trade war between the United States and Canada—more exactly between the American government and the Canadian government(s)—helps illustrate the opposition between two regimes: free trade between individuals or private organizations, which creates mutual gains and favors peaceful relations; trade between governments or directed by them, that is, mercantilism, which generates conflicts and hatred. After US President Donald Trump had announced 10% tariffs on imports of Canadian “energy products” and 25% import tariffs on all other goods, the federal government of Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on American exports. The premier of the province of Ontario, Doug Ford, just announced a provincial tax of 25% on Ontarian exports of electricity to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota. He declared (“Ontario Hits Power Exports to US With 25% Surcharge as Trade War Accelerates,” Financial Times, March 10, 2020): If necessary, if the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” He had previously said (“Canada to Cut Off Electricity to US States: ‘Need to Feel the Pain,’” Newsweek, March 4, 2025): If they want to try to annihilate Ontario, I will do everything—including cut off their energy with a smile on my face, and I’m encouraging every other province to do the same. They rely on our energy. They need to feel the pain. Individuals and their private parties trade together with a smile on their faces. Governments intervene in trade and impose pain with a smile on their collective face, if we may use that analogy. The fact that the Ontario Government owns or directly controls a large part of the production and distribution of electricity in Ontario (“our energy”), as do to a lesser extent the governments of the importing US states, does not help depoliticize the market. Subject to weak constitutional constraints, governments can anyway impose tariffs, taxes, and prohibitions on whom they decide, and the consequence is not universal love. That Mr. Ford is himself a conservative with a populist streak, who once expressed his support for Mr. Trump, should remind us to beware of the “will of the people.” In a recent post, I quoted Henry Adams, who wrote that politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds. From a moral viewpoint as opposed to a narrow economic viewpoint, which ruler starts the conflict is not irrelevant. ****************************** Two mercantilist kings (0 COMMENTS)

During the mid-1930s, FDR pursued an aggressive set of policies including various actions intended to raise wages, as well as an undistributed profits tax.  These actions were widely seen as anti-business, a view reinforced by FDR’s frequent attacks on the “economic royalists”. In the second half of 1937, the US economy fell into a deep secondary depression, despite the fact that it had not yet recovered from the severe 1929-33 slump.  The Roosevelt administration blamed the downturn on a lack of investment in the business sector, asserting that there was a “capital strike” motivated by hatred of New Deal policies.  In fact, the slump was mostly caused by various New Deal policies, which pushed up wages at a time when monetary policy was reducing prices. I was reminded of this event when I saw the following story: After signing an executive order granting Canada and the US another temporary tariff reprieve, the US president blamed “globalist” nations and corporations for market-wide declines and shrugged off spooked markets. The Treasury secretary also chimed in: “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending,” Bessent said Friday on CNBC. “The market and the economy have just become hooked and we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.” It is possible that this sort of lagged effect might be true for the overall economy, but it is certainly not true for the financial markets, which are forward looking.  Policy initiatives that produce short-term pain and an even greater long-term benefit should be a positive for the stock market. That’s not to say that markets won’t bounce back—as stock prices are almost impossible to predict.  Think of a scenario where a policy initiative was put forward that other things equal might be expected to reduce stock prices by 10%.  Also assume that the market thought there was a 50% chance that the initiative would be quickly reversed, with no damage done.  In that case, you might expect stock prices to fall by roughly 5%.  But that would merely represent the initial reaction, as more information came in stocks would either fall further, or (if the initiative was reversed) would regain lost ground. On a related note, the Atlanta Fed has been forecasting a drop in real GDP during Q1.  The media suggests that this forecast is based on a recent surge in imports, particularly gold imports.  That may be true, but if so it is quite odd.  A $20 billion surge in gold imports to beat expected tariff increases would not be expected to have any effect on actual GDP.  The import category would move $20 billion in a negative direction while gold inventories would move $20 billion in a positive direction.  If the media reports are correct (and I have no reason to doubt them), this suggests the government does not know how to measure GDP.  It suggests that they are treating imports as a negative, but not applying an equal positive to investment (or consumption.)  Why would they do this? PS.  Greg Mankiw is of course correct, and I am almost certain that Kevin Hassett knows that.  I understand that we must all make compromises in our careers, but surely there are limits . . . (0 COMMENTS)

  I started noticing the change in Americans’ views on immigration in the early 2000s. Most people I talked to were not very upset about even illegal immigration. I saw the change in my students, who were primarily officers in the U.S. military. In any given class, the plurality of the students, and usually the majority, were in the U.S. Navy. I picked it up in little ways, in side comments about whatever issue we were discussing. I didn’t have a segment of my class on immigration per se, but I did have some readings on U.S. labor markets and so it was only natural that the issue of immigration would come up in that context. I have always believed that one should not hector students for their beliefs, that doing so violates a sacred trust. So I didn’t. But one day, towards the end of a quarter in which the students and I had got along particularly well, I felt comfortable in making a controversial statement that was not hectoring but was simply pointing out a reality. I stated, “This is the most anti-immigrant class I’ve had in my almost 20 years of teaching here.” One of the students jumped on it and said, “Anti illegal immigrants, sir.” “Touche,” I replied. “I want to point out, though, that when people say that those who want to come to this country should do so legally, they are essentially saying, even if they don’t know it, that those people can’t come to this country.” My impression was that a lot of the students didn’t know that. Many seemed to think that there was a straightforward process for people to immigrate. There isn’t. It’s not straightforward and even when some particular routes that are somewhat straightforward, most people don’t qualify. I thought of all that when reading an excellent post by David Bier of the Cato Institute. It’s titled “What Trump Has Done and Imminently Plans to Do on Immigration,” Cato at Liberty, February 3, 2025. Take a look. David, along with Alex Nowrasteh, follows immigration closely and keeps up on the rules. I thought of it further when reading that the Trump administration is trying even to strip away the green card of a permanent resident. Not just illegal immigration, but also legal immigration, is currently at risk. (0 COMMENTS)

What can the restaurant business teach us about leadership and management? Listen as Will Guidara, the former owner of Eleven Madison Park, explains to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts how his restaurant became good enough to be named the best restaurant in the world. Foodies will enjoy a look behind the scenes of a restaurant at the […] The post Will Guidara on Unreasonable Hospitality appeared first on Econlib.

Jail Time for Cheap Rides? by Jack Nicastro, Reason, March 4, 2025. Excerpt: Empower, a ride reservation service, has been hounded by Washington, D.C., regulatorssince it began its operations in 2020. CEO Joshua Sear will be arrested on Wednesday for violating the Department of For-Hire Vehicles’ (DFHV) cease and desist order if the app doesn’t shut down by then. Mayor Muriel Bowser has the power to direct the DFHV to rescind its order, which would allow Empower to continue operating in the city. Sear founded Empower in 2019, not as a transportation company but as a software company that serves independent professional drivers. Empower differs from the flagship ride-share services in multiple ways. Unlike Uber and Lyft, drivers who use Empower do not receive 1099 forms—they are not contractors, but customers, according to the company. The company also does not collect a percentage of every fare, nor does it set them; its drivers set their own rates by adjusting their minimum and base fares, per minute, per mile, and surge prices as they see fit. They then pay Empower a flat monthly fee of $349.99 for access to the D.C. Monthly Platinum plan, which “provides drivers with unlimited access to Empower’s software and support services.” Empower’s suggested rates are “set so that drivers make 20% – 25% more on average than they would if they were driving on behalf of Uber/Lyft [and] riders also save 15-20% on average.”   Dead People Aren’t Bankrupting Us by Liz Wolfe, Reason, March 5, 2025. Excerpt: “Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.”   Economic Uncertainty in the US Economy by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, March 5, 2025. Excerpt: The US uncertainty index is not official government data. It is based on a method developed by three economists, Scott R. Baker, Nick Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. I mentioned their approach here when it was first being developed back 2012. They combine three sources of data: “the frequency of newspaper articles that reference economic uncertainty and the role of policy; the number of federal tax code provisions that are set to expire in coming years; and the extent of disagreement among economic forecasters about future inflation and future government spending on goods and services.” The average value from 1985-2010 is arbitrarily set at 100. Thus, you can see spikes during the Great Recession, the pandemic, and now early in 2025.   How tariffs will make America poorer Editorial Board, Washington Post, March 4, 2025. Excerpt: All this could cost the typical U.S. household about $1,245 in lost purchasing power, according to a projection from the Budget Lab at Yale. Another model estimates that if Canada, China and Mexico retaliate symmetrically — imposing same-size tariffs on U.S. goods — American incomes would fall 0.5 percent in real terms. Real wages in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio would fall by almost 0.6 percent. To see how this works, consider the auto industry, the most integrated in North America. Thirty-eight percent of the value of cars imported from Mexico comes from parts and components made in the United States. Seventeen to 36 percent of the makeup of Cadillac models assembled in the United States is sourced in Mexico. Auto parts cross North American borders several times before ending up put together on a dealer’s lot. A 25 percent tariff would boost their price on every crossing, decimating the industry’s competitiveness. DRH note: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos recently told his editorial writers that they should write editorials in favor of free markets. This editorial is implicitly in favor of free markets. Maybe the editorial writers are paying attention?   Government versus Private Vaccine Mandates by Jeffrey Miron and Karthi Gottipati, Libertarian Land, March 5, 2025. Excerpt: Libertarians, however, distinguish between government-imposed mandates and those set by private entities, emphasizing the unintended and potentially harmful consequences of government mandates. For instance, one study suggests that such mandates eroded public trust in government institutions and, paradoxically, made vaccine-hesitant individuals even less willing to get vaccinated. That said, libertarians defend the right of private entities to require vaccinations for employees, customers, or other stakeholders. A recent study illustrates the effectiveness of this private-sector approach: Our findings reveal that employer vaccine mandates significantly increased staff vaccination rates. This had life-saving effects on the health of nursing home residents, who experienced reductions in both COVID-19 cases and mortality. For every two facilities that implemented a mandate, approximately one life was saved. Given that a typical nursing home houses only 100 residents, this impact is substantial. Note: The accompanying picture is a graph of economic uncertainty. (0 COMMENTS)

About his new tariffs, President Donald Trump said (and repeated in different forms): “So what they have to do is build their car plants frankly and other things in the United States, in which case they have no tariffs.” This is seriously misleading. Recall the standard economic result that a foreign exporter does not typically pay the tariff: it is the importer and ultimately (in our case) the U.S. buyer who pays it. The cost imposed on the foreign exporter lies in lower export sales because of a lower quantity demanded in the US. If, as is usually assumed, American buyers prefer the domestic substitute ceteris paribus, the foreign exporters’ sales will decrease; the value of their productive assets will also decrease and some capital will be reallocated to other economic sectors. To avoid these costs, the owners of foreign exporting firms may indeed decide to move their plants to the US if the total cost of moving is lower than the cost of reduced sales to America. Moving and building a new plant, and quite certainly losing money on the sales of the old facilities (the owner does not literally move his plant across the border), is costly and takes time. Moreover, production costs will certainly be higher in the US, which is the reason why the firm did not previously decide to produce here—and the owners know more about this than any politician. The cost of moving to the US will be further increased if the American government imposes tariffs on inputs such as steel or aluminum. The uncertainty of ever-changing protectionist policies is another cost component. If the total cost of moving is worth incurring, it is because it is lower than the firm’s otherwise losing markets, but it is not necessarily much lower and it is anyway a cost increase compared to the starting situation. The moving firm has to pay a cost equivalent to a tariff, even if lower. This cost is not called a “tariff” (or a tax) simply because it is not paid by the former exporter to the US Treasury. A tariff is, by definition, a special tax on imported goods. But from the point of view of the exporter who moves to the US, it amounts to the same as paying a tariff—which of course comes over and above what American buyers pay in higher prices. Mr. Trump’s apparent ignorance of these considerations confirms what the Florida owner of a construction company with 35 employees (for now) said to the Wall Street Journal (Rachel Louise Ensign, Arian Campo-Flores, and Harriet Torry, “Tariff Whiplash Spooks U.S. Consumers,” March 5, 2025): He has no idea about the economy. Or, as The Economist puts it more diplomatically, the president and reality seem to be drifting ever further apart. … Because his approach lacks any coherent logic, there is no knowing how to avert his threats. Extending the problem into its moral dimension leads to questioning the idea that the coercive imposition of a cost is not coercive if the victim can reduce his (or her) cost with avoidance measures, and suggests a few analogies. Consumers who don’t like a tax simply need to stop buying the taxed good, in which case they have no tax to pay. Kidnap victims who don’t like the ransom demanded simply need to not pay it, in which case there is no ransom. East Berliners who don’t want to be shot just have to avoid jumping the Berlin Wall, in which case there is no shooting. ****************************** Unhappy investor moving his plant from Canada to the US (0 COMMENTS)

In a recent interview, Tyler Cowen asked me why China doesn’t end its deflation by devaluing the yuan. I suggested that it might be due to pressure from the US.  A recent Bloomberg article provides support for that claim: In fact, the PBOC has been fending off depreciation pressure on the yuan since Trump won the US elections in November. It has capped the yuan’s drop at around 7.3 per dollar by setting the daily reference rate, which limits moves in the onshore yuan by 2% on either side, since late January.It has also delayed interest-rate cuts, paused bond purchases so far this year and tolerated a funding squeeze among banks to prevent further yuan declines and capital outflows.“Despite the upcoming extra 10% tariff hike, the PBOC will probably refrain from tweaking its steady yuan fixing policy, considering Trump’s warning on yuan depreciation,” said Ken Cheung, chief Asia FX strategist at Mizuho Bank in Hong Kong. “The PBOC may also be inclined to preserve currency stability during the National People Congress.” The US government did the same thing to Japan back in the 1990s and 2000s, pushing them into deflation.  It never ceases to amaze me how much harm can be done by policymakers that lack a basic understanding of  economics.In the long run, the deflation in China will restore equilibrium, as the real exchange rate will depreciate even as the nominal rate is fixed.  But recall what Keynes said about the long run. China does not need a weaker yuan in real terms, but it does need a weaker yuan in nominal terms in order to boost its NGDP growth rate.  Monetary stimulus would be unlikely to boost China’s current account surplus, as the faster economic growth would probably suck in imports at a faster rate that the weaker yuan would boost exports.  In other words, the income effect would likely dominate the terms of trade (substitution) effect. (0 COMMENTS)

One of the best decisions I made in the early 1990s was to get Herb Stein to do a piece on the balance of payments for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, which was then The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. His first two paragraphs are still beautiful: Few subjects in economics have caused so much confusion—and so much groundless fear—in the past four hundred years as the thought that a country might have a deficit in its balance of payments. This fear is groundless for two reasons: (1) there never is a deficit, and (2) it would not necessarily hurt anything if there was one. The balance-of-payments accounts of a country record the payments and receipts of the residents of the country in their transactions with residents of other countries. If all transactions are included, the payments and receipts of each country are, and must be, equal. Any apparent inequality simply leaves one country acquiring assets in the others. For example, if Americans buy automobiles from Japan, and have no other transactions with Japan, the Japanese must end up holding dollars, which they may hold in the form of bank deposits in the United States or in some other U.S. investment. The payments Americans make to Japan for automobiles are balanced by the payments Japanese make to U.S. individuals and institutions, including banks, for the acquisition of dollar assets. Put another way, Japan sold the United States automobiles, and the United States sold Japan dollars or dollar-denominated assets such as treasury bills and New York office buildings. Herb died in 1999 and so, when I did the second edition of the Encyclopedia earlier this century, I, with the help of Kevin Hoover and the late Mack Ott, updated his numbers and added the last two paragraphs: These same concerns surfaced again in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the current account went from a surplus of $4 billion in 1991 to a deficit of $666 billion in 2004. The increase in the current account deficit account, just as in the 1980s, was accompanied by an almost equal increase in the deficit in goods. Interestingly, the current account surpluses of 1981 and 1991 both occurred in the midst of a U.S. recession, and the large deficits occurred during U.S. economic expansions. This makes sense because U.S. imports are highly sensitive to U.S. economic conditions, falling more than proportionally when U.S. GDP falls and rising more than proportionally when U.S. GDP rises. Just as in the 1980s, U.S. employment expanded, with the U.S. economy adding more than twenty-one million jobs between 1991 and 2004. Also, employment as a percentage of population rose from 61.7 percent in 1991 to 64.4 percent in 2000 and, although it fell to 62.3 percent in 2004, was still modestly above its 1991 level. How about the issue of foreign ownership? By the end of 2003, Americans owned assets abroad valued at market prices of $7.86 trillion, while foreigners owned U.S. assets valued at market prices of $10.52 trillion. The net international investment position of the United States, therefore, was $2.66 trillion. This was only 8.5 percent of the U.S. capital stock.   By the way, Herb was my boss at the Council of Economic Advisers in the summer of 1973, when I was a summer intern fresh off my first year as a Ph.D. student at UCLA. He was one of the two best bosses I ever had. (The other was Bill Meckling, dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester.) (1 COMMENTS)

The mouse smiled brightly It outfoxed the cat! Then down came the claw, And that, Love, was that -Lyrics to a lullaby recited by the devil Raphael   Commenting on a recent post by Scott Sumner, Mactoul argued “Authoritarianism is useful when you are trying to downsize the federal bureaucracy.”  This sort of love affair with arbitrary power is common when the authoritarian does what you want.  It’s why authoritarianism is so seductive, even to those who abhor power.  Many days and nights I have spent dreaming of the utopia that would exist if only I, and I alone, wielded absolute power.  Even Adam Smith discusses how certain evils, like slavery, are more likely to be abolished or mitigated under an arbitrary government as opposed to a more limited government (WN, pages 586-588 of the Liberty Fund Edition.  Common citation: Book IV, Chapter 7, Part b, paragraphs 54-55). But lest we be seduced by this ability for authoritarianism to do good, we must remember that it is arbitrary.  What can be undone by an authoritarian government can once again be done.  For the past four years, the Biden Administration expanded its arbitrary power via executive order.  The Trump Administration is using that same power for its own end goals.   Those who promote arbitrary power tend to imagine they are the only ones who will wield it.  But authoritarians are human, too.  They will die.  Either they die peacefully in their bed like Stalin, at the end of a figurative rope like Robespierre or Ceaușescu, or by their own hand like Hitler.  Then the arbitrary powers pass along to someone else; someone who may very well undo everything they worked toward.   History is littered with examples of authoritarians using arbitrary power for some seemingly noble goal only for it to backfire.  A notable example is Weimar Germany.  Weimar Germany, while more liberal than its predecessor, was still quite illiberal.  Indeed, the government often brutally suppressed dissent, most notably the Nazis.  Many German officials of the 20s and 30s saw the Nazis as a unique threat and employed the full legal (and many illegal) powers of the Weimar government to suppress the movement.  When the Nazis eventually triumphed, they simply took control of an already-authoritarian state.  The Enabling Act of 1933 was not the beginning of authoritarianism in Germany.  Rather, it was the final nail in the coffin of freedom.   Authoritarianism is, ultimately, a deal with the devil; it is a Faustian bargain.  Even if the terms of the bargain are made to advance goodness, the Devil always wins.  I do not celebrate authoritarian power when it is accomplishing what I want for that simple reason.  If the law is laid low, if power becomes arbitrary rather than constrained, then what is to protect me when the reins of power fall to the Devil?  Am I truly to rely on his mercy?   All those who argue authoritarian powers can be useful ought to think very long and hard about the lyric above: are they the cat…or the mouse? (0 COMMENTS)