The Economist's Cookbook

See here is what I don't understand, if you look at the history of Marijuana and you learn WHY it was banned, there should be no problem legalizing/de-criminalizing it. My own mother has had cancer... twice. So this one is near and dear to me. She almost didn't survive her first encounter and was extremely ill due to the treatments.

Medical Cannabis is a wonder drug basically. The fact of the matter is that too many people shriek about how EVVVVVIIIILLLL it is, or how those that smoke pot are wastrels and no good people that are not worthy of relief from pain or other symptoms that Medical Cannabis can treat. I don't smoke pot, but by god, if I had severe pain issues I'd rather smoke pot than take any of the myriad of opiate derivative drugs out on the market for pain management.

These people are the same damn breed of Prohibitionists that we had running around the US in the 1920s and 30s. They should be treated with the same mockery and scorn.

There are no, repeat zero reasons for banning this for medical use as proscribed by a physician.
(Personally I think there are no reasons to to ban it period, but hey, I'm just a crazy liberty nut, what do I know?)

Many of the more "left-libertarian types" might disagree with me. In fact I know some of them will. With all of the fervor over the whole Prop 8 thing in the People's republic of California, there has been quite the outcry over this. I see this on some of the blogs I read all the time. Frankly I'm sick of seeing it. It's not that I have anything against people who bet for the other team. I just don't care about the issue. And here is why:

1.) If you take the Anarcho-Capitalist (Market Anarchist) view there shouldn't be a government so leave it up to the movements of private contract enforcement to decide what they will and won't enforce, combined with the fact that the churches/religious organizations could do as they pleased in the same field. There I gave the AnCap line. Now for the more practical one.

2.) Marriage has, for a stupidly long time had religious subtext. It was a union brought together by the gods/God. Trying to make marriage a secular institution is ... an end-run around the issue at best. SO I have a better idea. Let's separate the religious nature of marriage from the legal and "official" nature of mutual contract between two individuals. This would do several things. It would shut up the religious right about a Federal Amendment banning Gay marriage. And it would let all of this play out on a smaller level, whether that be state, locality, or individual religious institutions.

Have the governments of both states and the Feds recognize any Civil Union Contract between two voluntary people that desire the legal/official rights and responsibilities of a couple etc.

Make marriage the sole area of religious institutions. Some institutions are already willing to marry homosexuals, others are not. Why not get the government out of marriage and let it go? Let the churches etc. fight it out amongst themselves. The simple fact of the matter is that this would allow straight or gay couples to get married, legally unionized, and any combination thereof, with no Federal WARRRGARBLE over the debate about who can and can't get married.

Free up competition in the market for unions/mates/marriages and let the chips fall where they may.

There, solved that problem. I doubt that many of the Liberals or Left-libertarians will agree with me, but that's okay. I don't need their approval to be right.

While the AnCap position is a logically consistent one, it simply isn't possible to go from massive statism to rampant Market Anarchy overnight. It's a process and smaller steps toward a better, more free, world are better than standing in our respective towers of intellectual fortitude shouting heretic at one another.

There has been a lot of hubub over the so-called "Gender Gap" between the payscales of women and men in the workplace in both the US and in some countries in Western Europe. In a culture where it is anything but PC to assume that there are differences between the sexes, there are some interesting notations to be made. Ironically one of which is a rather insightful comment from someone that I completely disagree with on many issues: Peter Singer. Yeah, the guy that basically jump-started the animal liberation movement. But in writing about the differences in pay scale between men and women. He makes a very interesting observation:

While Darwinian thought has no impact on the priority we give to equality as a moral or political ideal, it gives us grounds for believing that since men and women play different roles in reproduction, they may also differ in their inclinations or temperaments, in ways that best promote the reproductive prospects of each sex. Since women are limited in the number of children they can have, they are likely to be selective in their choice of mate. Men, on the other hand, are limited in the number of children they can have only by the number of women they can have sex with. If achieving high status increases access to women, then we can expect men to have a stronger drive for status than women. This means that we cannot use the fact that there is a disproportionately large number of men in high status positions in business and politics as a reason for concluding that there has been discrimination against women. For example, the fact that there are fewer women chief executives of major corporations than men may be due to men being more willing to subordinate their personal lives and other interests to their career goals, and biological differences between men and women may be a factor in that greater readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of getting to the top.1

It would seem that Singer makes an interesting evolutionary argument for the difference between men and women. I'm not saying here's right, but it did get the wheels turning a bit. I do respect him for not falling into the typical feminist argument of "THERE ARE NO DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEXES!" line that I have heard from people and has actually been espoused by feminist philosophers. To throw a bit of libertarian economics into Singer's argument (which I'm sure would give him a stroke as the guy is a raging socialist and "social justice" advocate): It would seem that, if we accept Singer's argument that males face an evolutionary incentive given our background and genetic programming, we should expect them to have a higher drive to succeed as it increases their potential mate pool. And this isn't that far-fetched given that we know that women in general highly value the stability and ability to provide in a mate.

There is also another reason that I've seen advanced by several Economists with some interesting data to back up their statement that: Women make less during their child-bearing years because companies are discounting the value of their labor inputs because the chances are very good that these women are going to want to have children. As a result they are basically lost to the company for at least 12 months. There's not exactly a temp service for a VP of Plant Operations. I can't seem to find the study right off the top of the net, so if someone has a link to the actual paper I'd appreciate you sharing it. What they noted was that this so-called "gender gap" seems to disappear in post-menopausal women ... I found that, extremely interesting. Yes yes, Correlation is not Causation. That doesn't mean it doens't bear more investigation.

1 Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 17-18.

"When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."?

VH over at Vulcan's Hammer said something that made me wonder about the psychological nature of the legislative beast.

Shall we take a moment to look at the composition of our houses of Congress?

• 214 members (182 Representatives and 33 Senators) list their occupation as public service/politics
• 225 (168 Representatives and 57 Senators) list law [www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40086.pdf]
• 201 (175 Representatives and 27 Senators) list business
• 94 (78 Representatives and 16 Senators) list education

[via Wiki]
Now there is obviously overlap in this because we know that there are not 133 Senators. We can however conjecture that of the upper house there are at least 60-70% that are in the "politics/law" area.

I'd like to find a more in depth study of this, but this is good enough for a rough estimate.

If I may modify the famous saying at the top of the post:
"When all you've got is experience in law/politics every problem looks like it can be solved with a law."

We are all prone to do this: I tend to see economics as a primary driving force behind actions and think that markets can solve 99-100% of the worlds problems. We are all looking at things through some sort of colored tint based on what we study, learn, appreciate, and understand. Psychologists see personality types, sociologists see group dynamics and traits, economists see cost/benefit and incentives, etc. and so on; we're all guilty of it to a certain degree.

Perhaps that's the problem with Congress and politicians in general. Their view of things is that problems are to be solved with laws, coercion, and force. That is simply how they see things. Not that such a state excuses their actions, but it makes sense and would seem to fulfill Occam's Razor nicely.

I wonder who in Congress has a Masters or PhD in Economics. I know that as far as I can tell, the most economically astute person in Congress is actually an MD (Thanks Dr. Paul!).

Yes economists disagree about many things. the fight between the Neo-Classicists, Austrians, Monetarists, and Keynesians has been going on for a long long time but at least they hold some sort of understanding of the underlying principles.

These people are making policy without any understanding of the basic and underlying principles. That would be like putting me in charge of a five star restaurant's menu. I like food. I even like to dabble in the kitchen a bit, but I sure as hell don't know enough to construct the menu for a high class establishment.

Congress is meddling in things they don't understand. They are sticking wrenches in a moving engine in an unlit room. If you keep monkeying with the engine, you're gonna break it.

Do you really wanna be sticking a wrench in something like this? I don't.

Oh my... Walter Williams posts up a piece on how minimum wage hurts workers and someone in the House throws a hissy fit. Is anyone surprised?

I'll just leave this here, because it's ... kind of relevant:


I mean come on, these people in congress get to decide fiscal and economic policy!

And people wonder why we're in a financial mess in this country...
H/T to Cafe Hayek.

The argument is that:

People are flawed and imperfect and some are downright evil. So we have to put other people in charge to rule in order to keep things orderly and productive.

The fundamental problem is that those rulers are as flawed, imperfect, or as downright evil as any other "normal" person. According to Hayek's treatise on socialism in The Road to Serfdom, certain kinds of political systems even encourage power-hungry, or fundamentally immoral people to become leaders. So you haven't solved the problem.

In fact you've made it worse. You've now given very corruptible people, very very big guns to point at people they find convenient.

On the flip side ... is the idea of Anarchism and Free-Market Anarchism really a solution? Is is a practical solution?

See it's the last question there that I struggle with. Market Anarchy is essentially flawless in its defense of personal liberty. But is it practical in its application to a small cluster of people? Maybe. But as the size of that "group" of Market Anarchists grows, you will get more and more negative externalities to deal with.

Can humans function in a society like that after having a love of authority and a willingness to obey ground into them? Perhaps eventually.

Could we build that future? Probably not any time soon. Too many people have made themselves dependent on the coercive and re-distributive actions of the state.

So I've finally decided to blog about this because the Rampant ignorance is simply overpowering. Discussions I've had regarding this topic have sprung up on several forums and message boards over the net and as a result I will be using some of this snippets to make my case why not only is the AZ bill a bad idea, the entire Federal Immigration system needs to be trashed and overhauled.

So let's start The_Chef's Talley of the ways that Illegal Immigration doesn't matter.

1.) America was founded upon an idea of free choice. Tragically we've become a society of command and control. This country was built by people from every background. Nearly every group of immigrants that first came to these shores worked in jobs that were demeaning or generally undesirable to the current residents of American soil. I cite as examples the influx of Asians that were instrumental in the development of West Coast Railways, Blacks forcibly brought to America as Slaves, Latinos who helped to build the Southwest and actually helped Texas win her independence from Mexico and Santa Ana.

The majority of immigrants after the 1840s did not hop over a border or an ocean and suddenly smash their way into the upper crust of society. It took generations of work, sacrifice, and effort for all sorts of certain racial and national groups to work together. As a result our policy should be "Come, come build yourself and your family a better life." Right now we have a policy of "Get The Fuck Out! (Unless you're related to a citizen or have a PhD in a useful field)"

So what does it take to become a Legal US Citizen? Funny you should ask:
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/918/immigration764383.jpg
Yep a huge freaking flowchart about the Immigration process. Courtesy of Reason Magazine.

2.) I've heard the argument from some people that these "illegals" are putting our social programs under additional strain and are hurting the "American Taxpayer". Well congratulations, you have just made an excellent argument against re-distributive public policy. Ya see, when you promise to give free shit to people, more people will want to take advantage of such a system.

Welfare, Social-Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. are nothing more than incentive programs. We may not want to call them that, but let's quickly review:
Welfare: Provides a subsidy to be poor/below X wage bracket. When you subsidize or incentivize a certain behavior you are bound to get more of it. If you deny this premise, you clearly need to pick up Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson before trying to digest anything else I have to say.
Social-Security: Creates an incentive to spend rather than save. If the Government is going to pay you $X upon retirement, then to maintain a similar standard of living you would not save $X during your labor years. This lack of saving is actually incentivized as well by a Federal Monetary Policy of massive inflation of currency that destroys Savings and harms both the poor and the old people because the prices of goods goes up, while the limited amount of income stays either stagnant or "sticky".
Medicare/Medicaid: Oh these two fraud and promissory programs are really a debacle. With the rising costs of health care which have largely been due to the actions of the Federal Government, the AMA, and the heavy restriction of medical care and the bureaucracy surrounding it, we are literally just going to hand out cash to people for being ill.

Now I'm not saying that we should let people die, but the simple fact of the matter is that there has never to my knowledge been a federal government program that comes in under budget, shrinks with time, or creates less red tape. We have helped to incentivize the over-use of medical facilities and procedures, being poor, and not saving. People over-consume a good when the costs are defrayed and it doesn't come out of their pocket.

These programs are quite literally going to bankrupt this nation. And I do mean that literally. Our sainted Government has promised tens of trillions of dollars to fund these programs.

So if the "illegals" take advantage of our political leader's decision to put a gun in the face of the American people and take their money to hand out to others, then the problem is the collectivized redistribution of resources, NOT the illegals who are hopping the border to work and maybe get a handout. It's not their fault we've created incentives to take advantage of us. IT'S US! WE ARE AT FAULT!

3.) Many of the arguments I hear from Right Wingers amount to two things:

I.) "They took our jerb.... they teeekk errrr jerrrrrrbbb.. teeeyy tttteeekkkkk errrrrrr jerrbbbbbbbb." This assumes that the jobs "belong" to someone other than the company. They own the job, they can fill it as they please. If they want to put a goddamn giant squid in charge of their Marketing Department that is their business to do so. I don't care if they hire some Mexican to cut lawns, or someone from Nicaragua to pick lettuce, it is THE COMPANY'S job slot to fill.

II.) "But ... But ... But they are breaking a LAW!" Well in many states so are you if you're getting a blowjob, having anal sex, modifying your car illegally, not declaring your online purchases on your taxes so that you have to pay sales tax (This can be a felony by the way), if you own "prohibited" firearms in states like Illinois, Cali, or if you ever carry a firearm in a state where it is not legal to do so. LAWS do not decide whether something is morally right or wrong. They determine what politicians have determined to punish. It is "illegal" to do all sorts of things that the government has no business in. So FUCK OFF! The legality of an issue is completely irrelevant to the issue.

4.) Markets want to clear. This is very simple Micro/Intro to economics and I find that this argument goes completely over the heads of most people because the majority of people are economic morons. I'm not saying this to demean them per se, I'm saying this because the VAST majority of Americans don't get it, and they don't want to.

We know that labor markets are constantly shifting. There are not a static number of jobs. Jobs are constantly created and destroyed. A great example is the shift in labor from NE steel mills to the Dakotas for jobs in rare metal and mineral mining/processing.

5.) As part of this discussion one of the guys I was intellectually fencing with hit me with this:

So it's OK for a company to reap the rewards of existing in an economy such as the one in the US, where there is need for it's services and people can afford to pay it for it's service, all the while paying wages that would be expected in a much poorer nation? This is unethical to me, and if you can explain why it's not, I'm all ears.

Wages are a function of supply and demand. The idea of working for X wage is/should be the determination of the worker and the market for labor.

In other words:

If person X is willing to work for Y wage, and voluntarily contracts to trade labor for wage at that
rate I don't care. If person X is told "You're working for Y wage and you can't say no and you can't leave the company" by his employer then I have a problem with it. Contracting at the point of a gun is not a contract, it's coercion.

Normally when it comes to wage, you get what you pay for, the better the wage/benefits, the better the workers you can attract. (No this is not a universal, I'm making a generalization, but one that I feel can be backed up by piles of both anecdotal examples, economic principles, and mountains of data).

Even if he's right, and it IS unethical ... how do you plan on fixing the problem? Minimum wage laws? Those create unemployment in the poorest segments of society and price workers out of the market.

The way I see it is that by instituting market reforms across the board and allowing the chips to fall where they may you get better outcomes. Take the medical industry, yes it's expensive, but he majority of groundbreaking research is done in the US, as a result, in order to recoup those losses, the price has to go up a marginal amount.

6.) The biggest kicker of all:
The US has over 70 TRILLION dollars($70,000,000,000,000) in unfunded liabilities and Government Debt/Debt Interest and you are worried about some poor Latinos jumping the border?! Good GOD! You should be more worried about the US currency/economy collapsing and hyperinflation!

If you understood the implications of those debts and liabilities you should be out there calling for the lynchings of 99% of both the Executive and Legislative branches of Gov't!

But no, you're complaining about roughly 10 million people who want to stop eating dirt and give their kids a better life. Yeah you're a real American Hero...
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Keep in mind that I'm talking about very broad and very radical reforms to the status quo. But this country was founded as a series of colonies where people could basically do what they wanted. I don't see why people have to be controlled. Come to the border, bring some sort of ID, we make sure you don't walk in with a nuke or a vial of small pox, and BAM in a month or so, you're a US citizen. That's what the reform needs to be like.

So in a discussion on an automotive forum about the AZ bill that's gotten so much brouhaha someone pulled out a link to these guys: http://www.aim.org/

The article was lambasting the birth of children of "illegals" in this country.

Their "data", which is more of just rough estimates and napkin math (Not that there is anything WRONG with napkin math), suggest that the "cost to America" of all the babies born to "illegal" mothers is $6 Billion USD.

So I ran some rough napkin math of my own:
US GDP = $14,600,000,000,000 (14.6 trillion)
Illegal Babies = $6,000,000,000 (Allegedly! there are no data sets included in the article as to the actual cost. So in reality they are simply making assumptions that may or may not be supported by any sort of actual economic data. The numbers are all vague and variable.)

So aside form the fact that the data set is nonexistent, and the "cost of this is so fucking high ZOMG!" hmmmmm.
6/14,600 = 0.0004% of GDP...

Cry me a river. And THAT number assumes that their claim of data is actually RIGHT!

And while I know this is an ad hominem attack I can't help but point this out: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/hedge-...ld-revolution/

Their moron Editor Cliff Kincaid clearly has NO CLUE how Hedge Funds work. And essentially claims that they are profiting off of misery and encouraging economic collapse in Europe and America. Yeah this guy on the right. He clearly doesn't understand the signaling mechanism that Short Selling provides in the market, nor does he support a truly free market if he wants to get rid of Shorting. I bet he is willing to scream over the housing price/derivative/whatever debacle but does he know that the people that saw it coming first were the short sellers that signaled the market that prices were severely inflated? Bubbles pop and often the short sellers are the ones who see it coming.

Personally, I find this aim.org site about as intellectually relevant as Sean Hannity. That is to say: It's not. I don't know who these people are and how they got here ... but ... crawl back to your Republican supporters and leave the actual policy analysis to people that 1.) actually care about the concept of Liberty and 2.) have a clue what economics is.

These are the enemies on the Right. We have plenty of enemies on both sides of the party line. These people are just indicative of the typical chest thumping, wrap themselves in the flag, bullshit shoveling, fear mongering Right Wing stereotype.