SD Needs Real Reform, Not Con D Virtue Signaling

 A rational, Christian response to a mugging is to aid the victim while ensuring the perpetrator never repeats the crime. South Dakotans know this, which, along with Constitutional Carry, is why crime hasn’t spiked here as in so many other places across the nation. A small majority of South Dakotans, however, have voted to change the state constitution to join California and New York and allow medical mugging to continue.

I gather that supporters of Constitutional Amendment D (CAD) voted to help poor people with big medical bills, and use other Americans’ money to do it. What a deal! But Medicaid expansion really does not help the poor any more than reimbursing a mugging victim does, especially when the mugger goes unpunished, poised to strike again. It’s virtue signaling at best and at worst a capitulation to Big Sick Care.

Medicaid expansion under CAD will aid healthcare providers (HCPs), i.e., the perpetrators of the problem, the very institutions that pushed hard for expansion. Yes, HCPs should earn enough to induce them to provide healthcare services, which everyone needs to some extent or another. But do not forget that HCPs already get what a competitive market would pay them and a whole lot more besides. For a full explanation and proof, see Sean Masaki Flynn’s 2019 book, The Cure That Works.

Flynn points out that US healthcare, and unfortunately South Dakota’s too (after showing some promise before implementation of Obamacare), is much too expensive. There are no real prices, just negotiated settlements with insurers or governments. And the fee-for-service model creates a panoply of perverse incentives, including a predilection to treat symptoms but not to cure the underlying causes of illness. It’s more sick care than healthcare.

Early in 2022, my adult son was hospitalized in Sioux Falls for several days. The HCPs thankfully did not kill him, but they did not fix him either. He is still getting bills for services that may or may not have been rendered. (He is no doctor and barely remembers his emergency stay.) He was then earning a little too much to receive Medicaid yet his total cost was in the thousands. Under CAD, Medicaid would have chipped in for him but somebody else earning just over 138 percent of the federal poverty line would be in the same situation as my son, facing huge bills for “services” that may only serve the HCPs.

If South Dakotans really want to help the poor, and everyone else, with their medical bills they should compel HCPs to compete on the quality-adjusted price of their services. Then people can shop around for the best deal instead of committing themselves to pay big, convoluted, unknown bills, often for little or nothing in return.

Yes, such a radically commonsensical policy would run afoul of current federal regulations but some cities and states routinely declare themselves “sanctuaries” where federal laws do not apply. South Dakota has a long history of bucking widespread strictures on divorce, interest rate caps, residency rules, trust funds, and the like. Why not burnish that reputation for policy innovation by offering the country an example of a competitive healthcare system that, as Flynn shows, will be much cheaper and better than the one currently mandated from Washington, DC?

A Universal Basic Christmas?

 By age 4 or 5, I loathed Santa Claus because I noticed that he gave more and better toys to my poorly behaved rich playmates than to me or my little brother even though his production (slave labor?) and transportation costs (lichen for his reindeer) were de minimis and subsidized with literally tons of milk and cookies. Not long after, upon hearing Cheech and Chong’s already classic 1971 bit “Santa Claus and His Old Lady,” I unearthed the conspiracy behind the silly jolly old elf stories. Christmas gifts weren’t magical manna, they were part redistribution scheme, part potlatch, and part savings ploy. At least the consumerist vision of Christmas was, and remains, voluntary.

But now circulating is another implausible legend about economically free gifts, Universal Basic Income or UBI for short. This new legend means Christmas cash for everyone, in equal measure. (It is usually assumed to come once a month, but it could come just on Christmas, or be conceived of as a Christmas present paid in monthly installments.)

I fear that Americans are being subtly conditioned into accepting UBI through repetition of lies and half truths. As I have noted elsewhere, many in the media now label any old welfare program a “UBI pilot” and then tout how it helps its recipients, as if it were not already bloody obvious that extra cash always helps people. The stories, like this one from ABC News in San Francisco, also typically claim that recipients spend all their newfound wealth on “necessities,” as if cash isn’t fungible. The reporters are either morons, or think that their readers are.

While images of poor children having extra socks and other necessities under the Christmas tree may warm your heart as much as it does their feet, adults and even precocious children know that those resources came from somewhere. When the source is voluntary charitable donations, the real spirit of Christmas is fulfilled.

Under a real national UBI, however, the transfers become involuntary. As Aleksandra Przegalinska and I explain in Debating Universal Basic Income (Palgrave 2022), while everyone receives equal UBI payments, the money has to come from somewhere, and in most proposals that somewhere is the middle and upper classes, who end up paying more in taxes than they get from the UBI program.

Exceptions arise only when a government is blessed with something akin to magical manna, like the oil royalties that Alaska and Iran use to fund their respective UBI programs. Few governments have access to such cash cows but there is one great untapped source of revenue available to all governments – increased government efficiency.

If the U.S. government, for example, were to end its massive subsidies for the health and higher education sectors, return to systems of private instead of social security, and scale back its bloated administrative state, it could implement a UBI worth 15 percent of GDP without raising taxes any further. 

Ironically, if Uncle Sam were to bestow such a Christmas present upon the American people, instead of presenting them with more inflation and debt like Congres just did, it would unleash so much economic growth that a UBI would no longer be seen as necessary. But this frigid Christmas, most Americans would settle instead for a giant lump of coal.

"UBI Pilot" Is Another False Frame

 America’s airwaves, blogs, and podcasts are awash with praise for, and criticism of, so-called “UBI pilots.” The problem is that none of the pilot programs, which multiplied like bunnies after the Covid scare began to subside a year ago, can rightly purport to inform the debate over the likely costs and benefits of the universal basic income policy (UBI) currently pushed by proponents in the US and around the globe. Journalistic misrepresentation, whether due to economic illiteracy or incentives to promote Woke causes, threaten to pollute the policy debate over real UBI proposals.

Journalistic misrepresentation of economic policies is not entirely new but has become more prevalent in the 21st century due to declining educational standards and perverse incentives. For example, Wilma Soss (1900-1986) in Columbia University’s journalism school in the early 1920s received a solid grounding in economic and political history and theory that allowed her to forecast changes in the macroeconomy and to provide solid investment advice to millions for a quarter century (1957-1980). Her educational preparation stands in strong contrast to the weak, ideological fare spoon fed to most journalist students in the early Third Millennium AD, especially in economic matters.

Soss faced a better set of incentives, too. Her employer, NBC, did not force her to accept corporate sponsorships, which allowed her to build audience loyalty through trust. Listeners did not always agree with what Soss said on her weekly “Pocketbook News” show, but they knew that she only said what she believed. Today, by contrast, most corporate journalists have incentives to write frothy clickbait or regurgitate partisan talking points.

Soss knew, and experts today agree, that most income transfer programs are not UBI because they are not universal in the sense of being paid to everyone. San Francisco, for example, rightly calls its $1,200 monthly stipend Guaranteed Income for Transgender People, or G.I.F.T. for short, because it’s just a welfare program for low income transgenders.

Conflating UBI with welfare causes two confusions that muddle policy discussions. On the one hand, the conflation increases opposition to actual UBI proposals on false grounds. A truly universal transfer program not limited by need (or subject to gender or other tests), for example, would not necessarily entail the creation and funding of yet another huge government bureaucracy.

On the other hand, UBI “pilots,” even the few that are not means tested, provide false support for a national UBI because they are miniscule in scale, of limited duration, and funded by manna from heavenly donors. Analyses of their outcomes invariably focus on that which is seen, which is people who are better off because they have higher incomes. But that misses that a permanent largescale UBI would have to be involuntarily funded by someone.

Pilots cannot tell us how net UBI payers, those whose taxes increase more than their respective monthly stipends, would react to UBI politically or economically. They are also too short to tell us what will happen to education, employment, or birth rates. Pilot participants tend to stay employed and in school because they know the extra cash flow will soon cease but they might drop out if they believed the money was permanent.

Some pilot principal investigators have analyzed results as rigorously as the current state of social scientific inquiry allows. Others, though, clearly seek to score ideological points by claiming that recipients spend every extra dime on education and clean water. Opponents claim that the extra money just fuels alcohol, drug, and gambling addictions. In fact, money is fungible so the focus should be on how consumption patterns change as incomes increase, but economists do not need transfer pilots to study that.

Ultimately, one’s stance on UBI should not come down to the purported results of pilots, most of which come nowhere close to testing the policy that UBI proponents push. Instead, it should come down to one’s values. Should public policies support individual liberty or government collectivism? If the former, urge the government to bolster voluntary transfer programs. If the latter, why not skip UBI and go right to socialism, the results of which are well documented from long experience at scale?

Positive Quarterly Real GDP During Recessions

Three months ago, many scholars, including myself, argued that two consecutive quarters of shrinking inflation-adjusted GDP met the government’s technical definition of recession. A third negative number would have sealed the deal for sure but the estimate for the third quarter, which is weak but positive, muddies matters.

A recent study shows that the U.S., U.K., and Swedish governments produce overly optimistic GDP growth estimates in election years. Even if the numbers are not subsequently revised downwards, the slight growth should not be interpreted to mean that the American economy is in the clear. Housing prices are plummeting while core inflation remains high enough to make further interest rate hikes likely. Real wages continue to lag and most businesses warn of impending layoffs or hiring freezes.

So only something of an economic miracle will prevent the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from declaring a recession during the Biden administration. A look at the history of its semi-official pronouncements suggests that a quarter of GDP growth will not prevent it from calling the start at the beginning of 2022. In fact, the longest NBER-defined recessions since World War II had one quarter of positive growth embedded in them.

See how the blue line (real GDP) goes above the black line (zero) in the grayed area (NBER recession) during the 1949 recession in the official St. Louis Federal Reserve chart of percent change in real GDP below?

That is not unusual. It happened again in the 1960 recession:

 

And again in 1970, 1974, 1982, 2001, and 2008, i.e., in all of the nation’s longest postwar recessions:

So don’t let a positive GDP number fool you into thinking the US economy isn’t in a recession. Some call a positive quarterly reading during a recession a dead cat bounce, others a double dip. What you call it doesn’t matter: the only economic thing “strong as hell” right now, besides double dip ice cream sales in the vicinity of POTUS, is fear itself.

Peace Through Money?

The launch of Peace Coin cryptocurrency was not the first time somebody thought to equate peace with money. It might, though, be the last.

While the cost of everything seems to be going up these days and people purportedly are “watching their pennies,” Americans still hate loose change – which is one reason why so many prefer paying by card or crypto to avoid cash altogether.

In the 1950s, though, credit cards remained rare and many sellers refused personal checks. People tended to pay in cash, so lots of coins jingled in pockets and pocketbooks.

To legendary public relations pioneer Wilma Soss (1900-1986), who hosted the weekly nationally syndicated radio show “Pocketbook News,” coins meant something, practically and symbolically, and could mean more. Informed by her PR career, Soss tried to advance the cause of world peace through money.

We do not mean that Soss suggested that governments pay foreign soldiers to desert or defect, as the U.S. did during the Vietnam War with its Chieu Hoi Program, or as Ukraine did at the beginning of the Russian invasion in February of this year. Rather, Soss wanted to put the word “Peace” back on U.S. coins, many of which circulated abroad, hoping that the message would truly help in getting people around the world to realize that Americans cared deeply about peace too—albeit peace through strength. Convinced of the importance of the message, she ran a pro bono PR campaign to promote the idea.

Soss was old enough to remember (and fondly) how the U.S. Mint issued Silver Peace Coins after World War I, minting them from 1921 through 1928, and for a brief time in 1934 and 1935.  The impetus was a genuine one: to commemorate the end of the Great War, the war to end all wars. 

Fervent hopes for a lasting peace were dashed by the Second World War. As the Cold War intensified in the late 1950s, Soss thought it high time for the U.S. Mint to mint peace once again.

Accordingly, in February 1958, Soss urged her radio show listeners to send her postcards if they agreed with her that the word peace should be included on U.S. currency. “Everyone wants American dollars,” she explained, “let’s show everyone Americans want Peace.” The response from her audience, which then numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was large and heartfelt.

Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. Senator from Maine and the descendant of former treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, took notice. In March, Smith introduced a bill to put peace back on pieces of America’s metallic money.

How did Soss pull off such a coup? She had learned from the best of the best, Harry Reichenbach, one of the fathers of modern PR. She also was a skilled communicator, with a degree from Columbia’s journalism school (Class of ’25) and several years of reporting experience before she entered the PR world. By the 1950s, she had embraced a new career in shareholder activism, in addition to financial journalism. As detailed in a biography I coauthored with Bucknell’s Jan Traflet, Fearless: Wilma Soss and America’s Forgotten Investor Movement (All Seasons Press, 2022), Soss was a passionate advocate for enhanced corporate governance practices, widespread financial literacy, and many other causes, like world peace.

Impressively, Soss managed to get a peace money bill (the Chase bill) introduced into Congress. Unsurprisingly, though, it never passed.

As he left the Oval Office in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that the nation’s leaders had fallen under the sway of a military-industrial complex geared for war, not peace. Soss eventually realized that, calling on her listeners in 1968 to pray for “peace on earth” as war raged in southeast Asia despite implementation of the hush-hush Chieu Hoi Program of pacification. 

Although she believed that “world trade is better than world war,” Soss, like many Americans, believed in peace through strength. So she could not countenance disarmament even in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the gold dollar gave way to its flimsy paper simulacrum, the only message of which, she believed, was weakness. Putting peace back on money no longer made sense to her. 

With physical coins already relatively rare and possibly soon extinct, more likely due to the adoption of central bank digital currencies than the rise of cryptocurrencies like Peace Coin, Americans should look for other ways to express their desire for world peace. Mutually beneficial trade, in dollars but also financial investments, goods, and services, remains the best way to conjoin interests in favor of peace.

Plague of Plagues

 It’s a little known fact that bubonic plague killed over 100 San Franciscans between 1900 and 1902, in part because public health officials and the mayor botched the response, first by imposing a quarantine based on race, then by denying the extent of the epidemic to keep the city’s economic boom going. Several later waves took fewer lives but tarnished the Golden City’s image.

This bit of epidemiological history is of interest in its own right but also for its effect on the life of Wilma Soss, the subject of my new book Fearless (with Jan Traflet). Born in San Francisco in 1900, PR pioneer and media maven Soss later quipped that the earth shook when she was born. We found no evidence of an earthquake that day but the plague helps to explain why Soss was in Brooklyn with her maternal grandparents that fateful day in April 1906 when her birth city first shook and then burst into flame.

Harnessing Defection: The Untold History of Paying People to Stop Fighting

Unfortunately, wars are again all the rage. It’s difficult to find good political economy commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, possible incursions into Taiwan by the CCP, and the like because military history, and its buddy economic history, were casualties of university culture wars decades ago. Few people study the “sinews of war,” the connection between economic and military outcomes, anymore because it just doesn’t fit easily into Woke U curricula. That’s a shame because perspectives from military economic history could help policymakers to make better policies, ones that lead to less blood and treasure being spilt.

Anybody conversant with the writings of Frederic Bastiat knows that wars, or in other words lots of broken windows and shattered lives, hurt the economy. But sometimes wars have to be fought nonetheless. The United States used to have substantial checks against entering into hostilities without due cause. Today, not so much, which makes winning the many armed conflicts it enters as cheaply as possible more important than ever. 

Many of America’s recent military victories have been Pyrrhic in that it (arguably) successfully achieved objectives, but only at tremendous cost. One might object that the country’s “safety” or “freedom” are priceless, but if those same objectives had been achieved more cheaply by other means, resources would have been freed up to achieve additional national security objectives. Inefficiency always lurks, an unseen but substantial additional foe.

Consider, for example, the recent decision to send $40 billion in arms and ammunition to Ukraine. Maybe it will bring an end to the war by signaling to Putin that America means business. Maybe it will just prolong the conflict. Maybe prolonging the war is what some Americans want. If that is the case, $40 billion might just be the first of many installments totalling hundreds of billions and perhaps eventually trillions of dollars. If that sounds like an exaggeration, remember inflation runs rampant and that the U.S. spent over $2 trillion and over $2.3 trillion prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.

How else might the United States have spent the $40 billion it sent to Ukraine? Well, $40 billion divided by the 280,000 Russian soldiers is over $140,000 each. Could America have ended the war by offering money directly to Russian soldiers to defect to the West? 

Recent history suggests yes, though what one researcher recently called “an analytical blind spot” makes making the case more difficult than perhaps it ought to be.

In March, Ukraine offered Russian soldiers 5 million rubles to lay down their arms and additional funds, in the millions of dollars, for turning over military equipment when they surrender. The offer was not easily disseminated to Russian troops, however, and was not widely perceived as credible. Plus, it would mean living in Ukraine during and after the war. Nevertheless, the incentives worked in at least one case, when a Russian turned in his tank for $10,000.

According to one of the few studies focusing on past attempts to harness defection, promises must be communicated to enemy troops in credible ways and the total compensation, including amnesty and future region of residence, must be adequate, while remaining credible. The U.S. could make a more credible commitment than Ukraine to pay what is promised, plus provide a path to a more attractive U.S. or EU citizenship. With Ukrainian help, it might have a better chance of using fancy technology, like leaflets dropped from drones, to get the offer in front of Russian troops with the lowest morale.

History provides additional examples of harnessing the power of defection to weaken opposing armies.

During the U.S. Civil War, Union general Benjamin F. Butler offered slaves working on Confederate fortification projects military protection and paid work if they defected to the North. Hundreds of them soon fled to Fort Monroe, the strategic Union stronghold at the confluence of the James River and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia that Butler commanded. Although technically “contraband of war” owned by the Union military, the slaves knew they were better off working for the North than the South. The British had employed a similar strategy during the American Revolution.

The number of “contraband” runaways swelled during the Civil War to the point that although the vast majority of slave conscripts had been relegated to non-combat roles in the Confederate Army, their shift from working for the South to working and fighting for the North helped to speed the Union’s victory. Armies need cooks and ditch diggers as much as they need generals.

Victory might have come more quickly, and cheaply, if Lincoln had considered paying poor white Southerners not to fight rather than paying much richer plantation owners for their slaves. Many poor Confederate soldiers deserted or defected anyway. Some 6,000 of the so-called “Galvanized Yankees” joined the Union Army and were dispatched to the West to fight Indians and protect transportation routes to the Pacific states.

Defection (going over to the other side) and desertion (fleeing military service) have both influenced the course of many military conflicts, including the Russian Civil War (1918-22), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the struggle for Slovenia and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the wars for the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia, and hundreds of millions of hearts and minds worldwide during the Cold War. Various forms of military insubordination, including desertion and defection, also played major, if still somewhat murky, roles during the Arab Spring.

In many cases, no payment was needed to induce conscripts to flip, or at least stand down. In some instances, however, the United States employed seldom studied strategies designed to induce enemy defection and desertion during the American Revolution, the Philippine insurgency, and the Vietnam war, among other conflicts. The Chieu Hoi Program allegedly resulted in “the defection and neutralization of over 194,000 VC/NVA” in Vietnam between 1963 and 1971. In the Philippines, the Economic Development Program (EDCOR) promised rebels who surrendered themselves and their arms amnesty, land, and agricultural capital on the underpopulated island of Mindanao.

Other nations have also paid poor soldiers to sit out conflicts that did not directly affect their personal interests. Most famously, though vastly outnumbered, British Colonel Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey in the Bengal section of India in 1757 in part because a rich Hindu known as the Jagat Seth (“banker to the world”), paid about a third of the enemy soldiers to not join the fight. It helped that the soldiers were headed by a traitor who had been promised a leadership spot if the British prevailed and that the loyal Indian troops did not manage to keep their powder dry during a timely downpour. 

British attempts to pacify rebels in Malaya proved less successful than they might have, however, because their promises to help defectors “to regain their normal life” were too vague. That was a shame because, as one study of defection inducement strategy noted in 1971, “defection saves human lives on both sides.”

All is fair, they say, in love and war but what strategies will be most likely to work cannot be known in advance because many factors are at play, including an unknowable critical mass or tipping point at which military units dissolve via mutiny or surrender, as Iraqi units did during both Gulf wars. National histories, religious and ethnic divisions, and customs may play a role too. Some 500 U.S. soldiers of Irish birth, for example, defected to the side of their fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and took up arms against their former comrades. Apparently, switching sides is a well-accepted practice in Afghanistan but punishable by summary execution in other places, including the former Soviet Union, which employed “blocking units” to dissuade deserters.

In short, we cannot know if paying Russians not to fight in Ukraine would work without actually trying it. Perhaps Russian conscripts are not as demoralized as claimed, or, maybe, knowing what happened to the families of deserters and defectors in Chechnya (2000-2005), they fear too much for the fate of their families. Of course policy success or failure will occur at the margin but on its face a $140,000 average payment seems like it would be a sufficient trigger as, despite the recent inflation, it remains a good chunk of cash, even for most Americans.

The point here is that U.S. policymakers did not even have a discussion about defection because too many self-proclaimed experts, many beholden to interests within the military-industrial complex, pound on the save Ukraine at any expense mantra coming out of the Roosevelt Room. It’s like Covid policy censorship all over again. And that bodes ill for America’s national debt, national security, and national sanity.

 Deregulate Everything!

By Robert E. Wright for Porcfest, somewhere in New Hampshire, Community Tent, 1 pm, 23 June 2022

 

One big knock against gun control regulations is that criminals don’t obey laws. So to the extent that guns are regulated, law abiding citizens get stripped of a core constitutional right while bad guys kill people with impunity. And the cops hide behind sovereign immunity, marble columns, and parents.

Understand this: all regulations are subject to the same critique. Laws do not prevent bad behavior and regulating the means by which, or the tools used to commit, bad behavior punish only the innocent and aid only the bad guys, the bootleggers in Bruce Yandle’s parable of the Baptists and the bootleggers. 

More generally, regulations typically stem from an unholy alliance between paternalist zealots who think they know what is best for other people, policymakers eager to be seen quote unquote doing something, partisan ideologues, and the bad guys.

All those competing interests mix in a toxic stew where each party tries to get regulations tailored to match their various, often conflicting, goals, some quite distant from the putative problem to be solved. For example, if gasoline or diesel vehicles are used to run over people, as they often are, calls come out to regulate them even more than they already are. Due to their instant torque, EVs are even more efficient at running over people in crowds but they are subsidized instead of regulated because of the influence of Greens, who just want to suppress direct fossil fuel consuming vehicles and don’t really care about babies criss-crossed with tire tracks.

Because of such political dynamics, policies rarely efficiently address the problems they purport to address. Instead, they represent a hodgepodge of compromises that usually render them monstrosities that aid special interests but that rarely ameliorate the original problem. Worse, one set of regulations often gives rise to the perceived necessity of yet more regulations.

For example, speaking of actual bootleggers, consider the national prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Rum runners and organized criminal gangs supported it because it drove their legitimate competitors, the good guys, out of the market. Instead of competing on price and quality, the gangs instead competed on the basis of the number of Tommy guns – Thompson machine guns – they could summon to key locations at key times. So, the Feds passed a law making it more difficult to own machine guns. But Al Capone et al kept right at it, until they died or surrendered up to the cops.

And now the brainiacs at the FDA want to ban menthol cigarettes. They don’t believe they have the authority to ban all cigarettes but they do think they can ban specific subcategories, like menthols and flavored cigars. Supposedly the ban will prevent some young people from getting hooked on tobacco. Problem is, tobacco will still be available and menthol is made from mint, which grows naturally over most of the northern hemisphere. So people who want menthol will get kits and make them themselves and organized crime will sell them to kids anyway. And the government’s cigarette tax revenue will decline but that’s okay because all of us are an endless source of cash. Did you know that? And if we get fussy about explicit taxes, the Federal Reserve is ready to tax us via inflation. Governments suck at just about everything except causing chaos, so the inflation tax is perfect for it.

But higher inflation will mean more organized crime, which will mean more guns, even, gasp! 9 mm pistols and ARs, which does not stand for assault rifle, by the way. So one dumb regulation will lead to another, further restricting your Second Amendment rights. If, for some strange reason, you never aspired to own a machine gun, or a bump stock, you might not find their regulation terribly onerous at present, but you have surely heard of the slippery slope. Next thing you know some president will assert that BB guns decapitate and de-lung people.

 

And gun control is only one of numerous unnecessary regulations that do cost you, big time, whether you know it or not.

Old timers like myself remember when it cost a considerable amount of money to call anyone outside of your local area code. A map from 1928 that I have here shows that you could call from NYC to California for only $9! For the first three whole minutes!

As a reminder, the dollar was worth a lot more then. Nine dollars in 1928 could buy you 27 pounds of top sirloin, or 36 pounds of real buttah! Today you can’t touch a pound of top sirloin for $9 and probably soon for butter too.

Granted $9 was during business hours. Like the good monopolist it was, AT&T price discriminated by reducing its rates on nights and weekends when business call volumes subsided and most calls were between friends and family. But it was still very expensive and the phones, which Americans had to lease from AT&T, were cumbersome, ugly, and difficult to use. You could get any color, so long as it was black, and you had to dial by sticking your finger in holes corresponding to numbers, crank it, and then wait until the dial clanked its way back to starting position. All thanks to regulations that ensured AT&T’s monopoly on long distance telephone calls.

Technology eventually got us out of that expensive hole but there were many, many others. Ever take a train in France or Japan? They are like horizontal rocket ships: super-fast, modern, and smooth as the cheek of a baby crying from a lack of formula caused by useless regulations. The record speeds are over 370 mph:

 

Acela’s Amtrak isn’t even on the top ten fastest chart, even though the comparison run on the infographic I have here is NYC to Montreal. All the trains on the top ten chart could easily do that 373 mile run in less than two hours. When I recently tried to book a train from NYC to Albany, NY, I couldn’t even do it, instead receiving an error message:

One third party site says that it takes about 4 hours for the trip on Amtrak. Note that Albany is about halfway to Montreal.

Ever actually ride on Amtrak? If so, congratulations for not being killed in one of the many recent derailments. But even if you survived, you likely did not have a pleasant experience as the thing clickety clacked its way along, when it was moving at all. And if you had to eat, or go number two, during the journey, you might have been praying for a derailment, especially if you were not on one of the newer, but still painfully slow, Acela trains.

Why did America – Murica – once the world’s leading nation for intercity passenger rail service, become the laughingstock of the developed world? One word: regulation. Regulators beat on the railroads for decades, especially with price controls and labor regulations. At the same time, the government subsidized personal automobiles, buses, and, eventually, airlines. So, all the smart people and people with money moved into those industries and out of intercity passenger rail.

Funny story. With a business professor named Jan Traflet, I’ve written a biography of a lovely corporate activist and financial journalist named Wilma Soss entitled Fearless. Born in 1900, Wilma grew up crisscrossing the nation on commercial passenger trains. During World War II, she commuted between New York City and Detroit via the rails. By the mid-1960s, however, she had to chide railroad bigwigs for flying – flying! to their annual meeting in Chicago. It was a sign of the end, just like when Wilma noticed that way more than half the cars in the parking lot at the American Motor Company annual meeting were not AMC models. AMC, like private passenger rail service, was soon toast.

Auto safety regulations eventually doomed AMC, which is now part of Chrysler, because it just didn’t have sufficient scale to keep up with arbitrary demands. But thank Uncle Sam for those safety regulations, right? Or we’d all be driving around with metal spikes sticking out of our steering wheels! Or maybe not. Turns out that most people want to get to their destinations as quickly as safely possible, so they prefer safer vehicles. All the best auto safety stuff was developed to lure purchasers away from competitors, not to satisfy government regulators. Moreover, the best auto safety tests are conducted by the insurance industry, not the government.

Speaking of insurance, we don’t even need government regulation of drivers. Let insurers handle it via pricing. Government driver’s licenses allegedly ensure a minimum level of competence on the road but it’s a gross guess at best, and not at all contextual. Some people mature sooner than others but in many states you cannot even begin the learning process until you are 16. Some adults who are fine to drive on local country roads should not be allowed to drive on highways or in major cities. But they scored 1 for a binary license, so they can.

Insurers could price major variables, issuing cheap insurance for the best drivers in the safest conditions and dear insurance for the less experienced in dangerous conditions. And no insurance at all for the worst. Premiums could even vary by location and time of day. Insurers could also feed recommended speed limits based on road conditions and driver aptitude right to people’s cars. But nooooo, because of regulation of insurance premiums. The government’s sole role could be to punish people for driving without an insurer-issued license and insurance.

But would deregulation really work across the board? Well, a zero regulation environment served just fine in America’s pre-regulatory past. You think the nation’s Founding Fathers and Mothers faced numerous, onerous regulations? Only on their international commerce, and we know what that led to. There were some local regulations on the books, like the assize of bread, which fixed the weight of a pennyloaf of bread up to some minimum standard. But it isn’t clear how much local regulations were actually followed as America was not then a police state or even an administrative state. Justices of the Peace handled almost everything according to local conditions and customs. And juries of peers handled the worst situations.

Statists protest that times were simpler then, that more complex technologies require regulation, and so forth. That’s a big, steaming pile of bull … oney! More complexity suggests less regulation, not more, due to what is called the Knowledge Problem. Nobody alone can understand the complexity of goods production, especially how it might evolve over time, so nobody can know enough to make sensible rules and regulations.

Consider, for example, two of the modern marvels of the twentieth century, stock exchanges and commercial passenger air travel. Both got much better and cheaper when they were price deregulated in the 1970s. Something called competition kicked in, leading to innovations that drove brokerage commissions to close to zero and airplane travel to real low real levels, which is to say adjusted for inflation. Until the recent spate of regulatory b.s. anyway. 

And, again, if you think government inspectors have made airline travel safer, you haven’t been paying attention. Insurers and the fear of getting sued out of existence do way more to prevent crashes than guhmint does. Like automakers and railroads, fear of lost business and getting sued or suffering higher insurance premiums keeps airline passengers safer than FAA regs do.

The same goes for your food. If you think that every bite of your food has been approved by a loving bureaucrat, think again. Almost none of it is inspected. Competition, not the FDA, added to your own common sense, is your real savory savior.

That same assessment also applies to fire safety. America’s cities no longer burn to the ground, as many did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because insurers raised the premiums of businesses that did not implement fire safety best practices, like not leaving oily rags in the smoking break room.

But it isn’t just that government regulations are useless, many actually hurt Americans by raising costs, costs that get passed on to consumers and investors. Every second wasted filling out a government form or waiting for a government inspector means a higher market price and/or lower profits. 

Government building codes and zoning laws, for example, make much more costly the construction of housing and is the leading causing of the alleged housing affordability crisis. Most infamously, government officials in the city of angels proved themselves quite unangelic when they ordered the seizure of mobile housing units that cost only $300 to construct because they were not up to some building codes. Better that people live in tents or under the stars, where their possessions are easily stolen and their bodies easily violated, than in secure and fire safe barebones units. 

Because why? Only Kafka knows!

Perhaps the biggest problem with regulations is their opportunity cost. The salary of a useless food inspector could be used to pay a police officer, or a public defender. Resources thrown into the Drug War, which is simply a regulatory scheme that enriches drug dealers, the DEA, and the pharmaceutical-medical complex, and the Sex War, which is simply a regulatory scheme that enriches pimps, madames, and law enforcement officers, are not available to fight crimes with actual victims, like murder, rape, and robbery. America spent trillions failing to keep long pointy things out of the bodies of consenting adults but can’t keep schoolkids safe. What’s up with that?

Not that we need law enforcement to keep schools safe. The teachers could do that, were it not for a regulation making schools so-called gun free zones. They are gun free alright, until a bad guy with a gun shows up. School covid masking policies showed that many teachers care more about themselves than their students. We all get that, but most teachers don’t want to shoot their students and those who do, can do so anyway. But most teachers will save their own skin and, in the process, like an invisible hand, save their students, if allowed to carry.

Almost everything wrong with this country is due to regulations, many begun under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR for short. F’in Dumb Retard as some of his critics call him. I’m currently writing a book called FDR Exposed! that I hope will be out in late 2023. But if you can’t wait that long, over a decade ago I published a book called Fubarnomics that also shows how New Deal regulations messed up this country but good. It’s got a toilet paper roll of dollar bills on the cover. Should have been Benjies instead but the publisher didn’t want to be seen as too extreme.

Wanna know why healthcare costs so much? An FDR-era regulation that allows employers to take a tax deduction on health insurance. So Murica is the only country in the developed world where health insurance is linked to employment instead of to individuals. Hence all the uninsured people, the pre-existing condition problem, and the inability of insurers to rate risk. Technically, we do not have health insurance in the country at all because the rate can’t go up and down with individual risk. As a result, some people are charged too much and some too little. The people being charged too much know it and drop out. Hence the necessity of the Obamacare mandate. If we deregulated health insurance, we’d see innovations in insurance and medical care that would soon put the kibosh on out-of-control healthcare costs.

Speaking of health-related mandates, what good did mask and vax mandate regulations do? None on net. In fact, like other regulations, they not only diminished liberty, they hurt innocent people, especially those who survived Covid early on and were hence a threat to no one, but still had to wear the mask and get the shot.

Know what else keeps healthcare costs so high in this country? CONS. No, not incarcerated persons, Certificates of Need, legal barriers to entry into various healthcare services like those provided in hospitals and nursing homes. Proponents argued that regulations restricting supply would lower prices. Yeah, that’s not how prices work. Holding demand constant, decreasing supply increases prices. But policymakers and politicians went along with the healthcare bootleggers, and we all paid the price in 2020, when Covid raged through overpacked nursing homes. Somehow, it was okay for hospitals to shut down before Covid hit, so that hospitals wouldn’t have to shut down when Covid hit. And elites wonder why so many people started putting clown emojis next to world emojis.

Without CDC and state emergency regulations, and with a little common sense, the whole Covid thing would have sorted itself out. Think about it. You run a business and half your customers are too afraid of Covid to come in, but the other half think that masks and vaccines don’t work. What to do? Well, how about opening one day without any mask or vaccine requirements and the next day with them? Everybody gets served and feels safe, from Covid on the one hand and tyranny on the other. But in most states and nationally, regulators came in on the side of the Covid nuts and said no soup for you, at least no soup seated at a table in a restaurant. What’s that tell ya?

Another costly regulation to come out of the New Deal FDR era was Social Security. The government forced workers into the program, which simply earmarked a regressive payroll tax to fund a crappy life annuity and, later, an even crappier any occ disability policy with politicized claims service. It kept heading toward bankruptcy, so the government kept forcing more and more people into it, like a Ponzi scheme. And it kept raising the payroll taxes. Social Security is facing bankruptcy again and there are no more workers to add so the only question is how much payroll taxes will go up versus how much Social Security benefits will go down and how many disabled people will be turned away without getting any help.

Regulations have totally screwed up Americans’ ability to save for retirement. You pretty much have to throw it all into the stock, bond, and securitized real estate markets and if you take it out before what regulators deem to be your proper retirement age, regulators tax the bejesus out of it. What would the stock market be at today if Americans were not forced to invest in it, and stay invested in it? A lot lower, I suspect, because who would voluntarily invest in companies subject to onerous, volatile regulations on everything from carbon emissions to the employment terms of their own workers? Did you see how corporations were so quick to become Woke in 2020? They tremble in fear of regulators, especially the IRS but also the FDA, FAA, FCC, CDC, the SEC, and the other alphabet soup agencies that collectively comprise The Swamp, the swamp, the swamp.

Yeah, the stock market does go up over the long term but not because corporations become more efficient, because more money has to come into a market with only a few thousand choices. To keep gobs of money flowing into the market, regulators do something that should be unspeakable. They give tax breaks to people for the interest they pay on home mortgages instead of the equity they put into their homes. The former helps mortgage lenders, but it keeps people leveraged up instead of putting their savings into someplace they can live when retired, and maybe rent out portions for income. Buying a house and renting part of it was the normal retirement strategy of Americans before the New Deal.

But noooo, Americans interested in investing for retirement have to invest in financial securities, which are subject to inflation risk as many learned to their chagrin in the 1970s and as they are learning again today. High inflation means high nominal interest rates which means lower bond and stock prices, all else equal. High peacetime inflation is possible because FDR devalued the dollar in terms of gold, confiscated private gold holdings, and by the end of World War II took America off the classical retail gold standard. He put the once mighty nation onto a fixed gold-exchange system doomed to fail, as it did during the Nixon administration a mere quarter century later. That led directly to the floating fiat mess we have today. The US dollar’s only redeeming quality today is that it is not quite as bad as other fiat currencies. Or so most people seem to believe.

But innovators and entrepreneurs have started looking for alternative monies, like Bitcoin, not subject to political inflationary pressures. Regulators, though, are again messing everything up. Two big ones, the SEC and the FDIC, both came out of the New Deal. FEMA is also totally unnecessary but nevertheless it should swallow the Securities and Exchange Commission because the SEC is a disaster area, and always has been. I’ve been trying to write its despicable history but it uses FOIA requests and the National Archives to block me at every turn, especially after my article with Andrew Smith came out that showed how SEC regulations promulgated in the 1970s led directly to the subprime mortgage crisis that fomented the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 

That is ironic indeed because FDR and his minions ostensibly created the SEC to prevent another financial crisis like the stock market crash of 1929, which was blamed for causing the Depression when in fact it was merely the messenger of deeper economic problems. The SEC was also supposed to stop insider trading. Ask Nancy Pelosi how that is working out.

Surely, though, the FDIC is good, right? I mean there haven’t been any bank runs since its implementation … except for when there were some bank runs. But seriously, the FDIC does seem to have decreased the number of bank runs. That is a problem, though, because it achieved that goal by lulling depositors asleep. They no longer watch their banks very closely because they don’t have to. The FDIC will bail them out if their bank fails. So bankers can, and do, take on more risk without being chastised by net deposit withdrawals. At best, then, the FDIC and the spate of regulations that come along with it are a wash on net. Yay regulators!

Regulations that are downright pernicious are difficult to expunge so you can imagine what happens to innocuous ones. They linger, seemingly forever. I am sure that you have seen one of those websites with the crazy regulations from the past that are still on the books. You know, like the one in Alaska that says that you can’t awaken a sleeping bear to take its picture. You can shoot it with a gun though. Or the one in “R-Kansas” that makes it illegal to mispronounce the state’s name. Or the one in California that makes it illegal to eat a frog that has died in a frog jumping contest. Obviously, a dead frog is totally inedible, which is why the French serve frog legs still attached to living frogs. Or the regulation in Georgia that forbids people from putting an ice cream cone in their back pockets on Sunday. Any other day of the week, just stuff drumsticks back there to your butt’s content, but on the Lord’s day? Hell no. Or the one in Kentucky that forbids the sale of fewer than six ducklings dyed blue. Obviously, that was put in place to protect Big Blue Duckling from competition from new entrants that can’t afford to buy more than six ducklings, which by the way come free with chicken chicks, or fiddy cents worth of blue dye. Big Green Duckling just didn’t have the lobbying bucks to protect itself and now look at the dying duckling dying industry in Kentucky. 

Meanwhile, in Washington State it is illegal to harass a certain large, hairy biped still unrecognized by science. Best of all, though, is Utah, where it is illegal not to drink milk. Yes, you heard that right. I am not sure that it is correct, but it does point out the cause of many regulations, simple rent seeking, or somebody trying to get something for nothing by mandating the use of their product. At least in Utah the mandate is for milk and not a dangerous experimental injection. [Good, the drones aren’t out yet today.]

Rent seeking was behind another response to the Great Depression called the Smoot-Hawley tariff. American manufacturers tried to save themselves by throwing consumers under the bus with high taxes on their competitors. But, as usual, high tariffs ended up hurting everybody, including the manufacturers themselves, after foreign countries reciprocated and world trade volume plummeted. See when trade is voluntary, both the buyer and the seller benefit. Implement a tax or regulation and not as many voluntary trades take place, hurting the buyers and the sellers who would have traded were it not for the extra burden.

Economists call such unrealized gains deadweight losses because they are losses that nobody else gains. They are lost to humanity. Hence in today’s hyper-hyperbolic lingo, deadweight losses literally kill people. Literally. Ergo, regulations kill people and should be banned. Or in other words, everything should be deregulated.

Really? Everything? What about hunting and fishing regulations? Well, I have a book just out about that called The History and Evolution of the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, which might have been the best set of regulations ever devised. You can read the book for all the juicy details but basically a set of regulations that evolved a little over a century ago saved a lot of critters, including deer and moose, from going extinct. But the model was not the only solution to the root problem, which essentially was what economists call the tragedy of the commons or the common pool problem. 

Americans used to consider critters gifts from God, ya see, so they believed they could shoot ‘em whenever, and wherever, they wanted, even on your private property. As the countryside became more populated, that led to lots of hunting and, eventually, people specializing in providing wild game to urban markets and restaurants. They all competed to kill critters themselves, before the other guy shot ‘em. You can see how that could lead to the local extirpation of some species, like beaver and deer, and a series of local extirpations of course eventually lead to extinctions.

So state and national governments said we are your new god, we own these critters and we are going to charge you fees for killing them, establish tag and bag limits, seasons, methods of harvest, trespassing restrictions, and so forth. And no more selling wild game meat. The regulations worked, though too well in places now overrun with deer, wild hogs, geese, turkeys, and such. But regulators don’t want to change the regulations much, like allowing the sale of wild game meat again. Think about that when you crash your car into a deer or bear some dark night.

A different solution to the extirpation problem would also have worked and been more flexible over time. Just enforce property rights so that critters could thrive on private lands. Private property rights saved the bison and private property rights explain why exotics from Africa thrive on ranches in Texas, New Zealand, and South Africa. But the private property approach does not compute with statists.

After you’ve read all my books, check out James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. He explains how regulators want to make everything quote unquote “legible” by reducing complex realities to simple, quantifiable categories. Unfortunately, those categories obscure complex realities, leading to disasters like government-managed forests. Imagine the hubris needed to think that your puny human brain can plan a forest better than Mother Nature can. All that the government foresters managed to do was to plant a first generation forest that produced more products that humans wanted. The second generation, though, saw decreased yields and the third was an ecological disaster because it turns out that various species depend on each other in ways that humans can never fully understand, much less improve upon with a top-down plan. Now Greens have gone in the other direction and regulate in favor of biodiversity for its own sake.

Some government policies have even led to desertification. Much of North Africa and the Middle East is a government-made desert because regulations induced herders and farmers to strip topsoil, which decreased vegetation, which decreased local water mass and hence rainfall and rainfall retention, leading to rapid erosion of the remaining topsoil and hence desertification. Something similar is happening in California right now, with regulatorily induced superfires speeding the process.

To be clear, I don’t claim that life will be perfect with complete deregulation, only that it will be better than at present. Shit happens. Life’s a bitch. If something can go wrong, it will. All that. But regulators cannot fix much of anything and are likely to make matters worse. So let’s do away with regulators and regulations and unleash entrepreneurs -- commercial and social -- to find marginal improvements and, occasionally, breakthrough technologies that can improve life for billions. Unburdened by regulations and our current tax distortions, entrepreneurs would soon discover new ways of doing things. Many will prove duds, but others will work and spread.

Consider three examples related to recidivism, school shootings, and gender equity in corporate boardrooms. All seem to cry out for more regulations, but all could be ameliorated with a little ingenuity.

Many people released from prison commit crimes and go back, at great expense to the public as well as their victims. Why not pay nonprofits for each week they manage to keep the ex-cons in their charge alive and out of prison? They’ll figure out the best ways to do so or fail for lack of funds.

School shootings are horrible, but we know that banning guns in them, or in the nation overall, is no solution. Even if all guns could be confiscated, bombs and vehicles could be used instead, perhaps with more deadly effect. And although not all cops are cowards, they do not have a legal duty to protect Americans, even kiddies. But what if every school and other soft target was protected by drones controlled remotely by skilled operators? And if the drones could also double as medical first responders? 

When statists hear that women are under-represented on corporate boards, they immediately want a regulation imposing a quota, like the one recently shot down as unconstitutional in California. Why not instead randomly pick board members from a pool of qualified candidates to ensure that corporate boards represent those presently qualified? Over time, more women and members of other traditionally underrepresented groups would acquire the necessary qualifications because they would rationally compute that they would have a chance of being chosen.

Except for the drones example, where a company is actually working on the concept, such ideas do not gain traction precisely because they do not require onerous regulations and the expensive bureaucratic apparatuses that accompany them. 

A fourth innovation that will go nowhere is my Ministry of Truth proposal. Now before you storm the stage, let me explain. The government wants to regulate your Free Speech, a clear violation of your natural and Constitutional rights. What I want is a Ministry of Truth as a fourth branch of government that would only identify, stop, fine, and punish disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda spread by government officials, politicians, and candidates for office. It would have the same powers as the rest of government, including the power to own F-16s and nuclear weapons. A tip of the hat to President Biden for that tip. 

My version of the Ministry of Truth would also have the power to seize and sell any personal or government assets used to create or disseminate misinformation and to impose heavy fines and jail terms for dissembling government officials under administrative law procedures and mandatory arbitration. Finally, it would be headquartered in Wyoming or South Dakota and be utterly independent of the federal government except for its budget, which will automatically be 10 percent of the country’s combined federal, state, municipal, and special district budgets, which should of course all be capped in nominal terms immediately.

The Ministry of Truth’s first order of business will be to fine Tony Fauci one trillion dollars. If that sounds excessive, remember that inflation has not been transitory as claimed, so the Ministry’s second order of business will be to fine Federal Reserve officials, seize and sell off the Fed’s assets, and shutter it.

Gold and/or Bitcoin will soon fill the void the Fed will leave, especially when cryptocurrencies are deregulated and the states make gold and silver a legal tender, which they can do under Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 of the US Constitution, which reads, in case you forgot your pocket Constitution: “No State shall … make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

Of course, it is not at all clear that the government will ever deregulate crypto, which threatens its seigniorage profits as well as its much-vaunted anti-money laundering laws. Those are regulations that force banks and other financial service providers to spy on you on the government’s behalf, so that it can enforce other useless or downright pernicious regulations, like the aforementioned wars on consenting adults putting pointy things into their own bodies. At the rate we are going, soon only the government will be able to decide what you put into your own body. Experimental things called vaccines maybe, or tracking devices, for your own safety of course. [Exaggerated eye roll.] And the government will keep things out too, like baby formula and real beef.

Speaking of baby formula, do you know that if you happen to have a full breast of milk you can make quite a nice bit of money selling it to babies rendered hungry by government overregulation? Breast milk is one of the few unregulated markets left. You can’t lawfully sell raw cow milk in some states, but raw booby juice is aokay. Let’s keep it that way, before we end up in a life-and-death situation instead of merely suffering further annoyances, like those regarding contact and eyeglass subscriptions, which require an annual examination. The contacts I wore yesterday were fine but the same ones today are illegal until I pay a vig so someone can tell me what I already know, that my existing prescription is fine. They are my eyes, after all, and “which is better, A or B, B or C, C or B?” is not scientific or all that helpful.

But regulations keep ophthalmologists and regulators employed, so it is good, right? No! They could all be doing something else, something that consumers actually want. Regulations are like broken windows in that Frederic Bastiat’s broken window fallacy applies to them. That which is seen are the regulators and their beneficiaries, like ophthalmologists and Utah dairy farmers, getting paid. That which is not seen are the other things that people would rather have put their time, attention, and money into if the regulation didn’t exist.

Again, the whole regulatory apparatus is such a joke. Somebody else did something bad so the government has to restrict your rights. Crazy! Regulations passed on such grounds violate due process by punishing people not proven guilty of anything by a jury of their peers. If eliminating such crap sounds pie-in-the-sky to you, check out the recent federal court decision in Jarkesy vs. my friends at the SEC. The court ruled that administrative law is unconstitutional on due process grounds, especially denying Americans the right to trial by a jury of their peers. It’ll probably get overturned by statists, but many Americans are beginning to wake up to the fact that regulations, even if they appear irrelevant or innocuous, are not their friends. 

Let’s deregulate everything in New Hampshire and show the rest of America the way! Whattaya say?