Honey is not an item one thinks about very often unless you are fermenting a tasty mead or like to use the natural sweetener (gag) on your morning toast. But there are lessons to be learned from honey: the effects of tariffs and as a parallel to the drug war.
Americans apparently love their bee squeezings, consuming a yearly average of 1.3 pounds per person for nearly 400 million pounds in total. Since demand is so high, U.S beekeepers can only supply forty-eight percent of this amount, with forty-one other countries making up the rest. But honey, like so many other market products, is controlled (to some degree as we are about to find out), and foreign imports are, in theory, kept in check by tariffs. Chinese honey, in particular, has been targeted since the year 2001 with a stiff tariff, tripling the import duty to $2.63 per net kilogram. This was enacted because American producers complained that the Chinese were undercutting “fair market” prices (whatever those are!), making it difficult for domestic beekeepers to compete.
Since the tariff on Chinese honey, to no one’s surprise, the imports from other countries suddenly spiked, as Chinese producers found other means to move their product. Honey Laundering, as it is called, happens by shipping the product from China to a neutral port, changing the country of origin, and then sending the barrels onward to the United States. Recent estimates say that a third of the honey consumed here comes from such illegal sources. And because of filtration methods, the pollen – used to determine the country of origin – can be scrubbed clean, creating an untraceable product. Some Chinese producers also create fake honey – make from artificial sweeteners and mixed with other liquids to look like the real thing.
China, as to be expected, views the tariff as a protectionist measure. The domestic producers counter that Asian honey has antibiotics and the presence of lead; also the tariff not only protects American beekeepers but is an important health issue. For example, in India, honey tested for export in 2010 found lead and antibiotics in twenty-three percent of the samples. These samples were assumed to have come from Chinese sources, relabeled as Indian production.
Over the past few years, there have been indictments and arrests for honey laundering, spanning several countries. There are federal agencies at work here, too: the Department of Justice, ICE, and the FDA, busy busting illegal importers but only making a minor dent in the flow of illegal honey. Honey laundering continues, and will continue as long as there are incentives to do so.
Sources: various articles found online (take that!).
So I wanted to try the whole guest post business on this fair website, and decided to go for something with local, well… flavour, if you will. A bit on the always popular booze with a little bit of commentary on government. And here it is.
Romanians enjoy the local hooch, to the surprise of nobody, which some translate plum brandy (although brandy comes from wine, but you can have plum wine as well, I suppose), but locals call it ţuica (the diacritic t is actually a pronounced like the ending of ants) and variations thereof are fairly common round the east of Europe and variously called palinka, slivovitz, or rakia. You get the idea.
Tuica Still
Like many a Romanian, I occasionally partake of the stuff, though my taste generally goes for Islay malts. And I can assure you, fellow libertarians, that it is proper moonshine made in an unlicensed still with no business of the government in the making. Some of the more skittish western folk think this dangerous or unwise. It is not. I have yet to know people having trouble from this. More often, cheap knockoff vodka causes issue, but tuica makers often are skilled and proud of their craft. Is there no bad stuff? Of course there is, but not if you know the people making it or what to buy.
Making decent plum moonshine is surprisingly easy, in fact. My grandma used to make some on a small still on the stove in a small Bucharest apartment kitchen. My parents occasionally make some on a small still in their yard. I took part in some of that myself, and I buy it from people who make larger quantities. It’s about 5 of your American dollar per litre (yes, litre, like civilised folk measure things).
My grandfather was from the Pitesti region of Romania, one of the famous tuica producing regions. My family still has some land there with a couple hundred or so plum trees, hence the predilection of my family to make tuica. When we visit the area in autumn, we pick some of the plums and distill them, more for the sake of it really, based on the effort it would be easier just to buy.
This region produces a lower alcoholic version, which many prefer, because you can drink a higher quantity of liquid for the same drunkenness level. People spend time talking and drinking, so the glasses add up. In Transylvania or Moldova, people are partial to 40, 50, or sometimes even 60 abv. But I usually drink the 25 – 30 abv stuff from Pitesti, mostly mulled in winter (with a bit of sugar, pepper, cinnamon, and whatever else you want to throw in it).
Plums. Obviously
My grandpa’s family had a bigger plum orchard before the glorious regime of the proletariat. They also had a pub in the city of Pitesti. Those days, most common folk that drank in pubs drank tuica as their spirit of choice or country wine. Other spirits were for the fancy people with high incomes, and beer was not as common as today. My grandfather’s pub sold their own tuica and barter wine.
Many poor people these days drink cheap, counterfeit plonk called “whiskey like alcoholic beverage,” or “tequila flavour beverage,” or just grain alcohol, cheap vodka, and there are people who blame this for bad health and alcoholism. They speak of the good old days when people drank tuica and wine and were more healthy, although this has a tinge of nostalgia for Merry Old Romania and bucolic fantasy.
There was not much wine being made in the immediate region, but reasonably close were some wine regions. So every autumn, the family would load the oxcarts (trucks were more expensive and the roads not great in 30s Romania) with barrels of tuica and started slowly for the wine areas, and bartered it for wine. The wine areas themselves made a cheaper moonshine from pomace left over from wine grapes, but most preferred the plum stuff.
The reason Pitesti is a tuica area, well one of the reasons besides people drinking lots, is the fact that it is a high plain or low plateau that is fairly dry and has permeable rock strata, so the water aquifer is pretty deep. That and poor soil meant agriculture was not efficient for many crops. But plum trees, for some reason, thrived in the area. That worked from time immemorial (which is anything more than 100 years give or take) until the great planned economy of Mr. Ceausescu kicked in.
You see the area, on maps at least, is sometimes called the high plains of Pitesti. And when communist officials read a map they thought, like all reasonable people would think, plain means growing wheat. And as such, after collectivisation of the land into the fabulous agricultural cooperatives, a lot of plum trees were taken out in order to plant wheat. As the savvy reader may imagine based on the story, wheat did not exactly thrive there. But communists were nothing if not perseverant in their folly. So it went on for a while. This is one of those situations where the good ideas of communism were improperly applied, or something.
Look, if you can’t tell the difference between plum blossoms and cherry blossoms…
After regime change, communism was replaced with the faux social-democratic-kleptocracy that is characteristic of the present. The plum trees were replanted and tuica came back; although it never fully left, just decreased in quantity and quality. As you could not find much in stores, there was quite the demand for alcohol during communism. There were stories of drinking medicinal alcohol – filtered in various ways to get rid of the vivid blue colouring and eventual toxic components. A bottle of imported Whiskey was better than money. Much better.
After grandpa got the land back, he replanted plum trees. He was living in Bucharest by then, and never did much with the orchard, so I think it was more nostalgia than anything else. After he died, the orchard was less maintained by us Bucharest dwellers, we just payed a local to do some basic maintenance. But I still have a couple of hundred “family” plum trees somewhere, should I choose to ditch the day job and get in the tuica making business. I can then smuggle it in the US, and sell it to make my fortune.
There are few things in the world more frustrating than talking to average people about healthcare, but surely one of them is talking to fellow libertarians about the problems with our healthcare system. This goes beyond frustration with the typical libertarian infighting. Part of it is that there are so many things terribly wrong with our healthcare system, any libertarian can point to most any aspect of the system and find some legitimate confirmation that their favorite peeve is, in fact, a problem. However, even though there are numerous contributing factors to our healthcare woes, there is one evil to rule them all—but very few libertarians seem to understand what that is. The purpose of this analysis is to identify the ultimate cause of our problems, show why most libertarians’ favorite solution doesn’t really address it, and show why the Ryan plan is a hell of a lot better than most libertarians seem to appreciate.
What the Chart Does and Doesn’t Say
So, here is the ultimate source of the problem—Medicare and Medicaid only pay for a fraction of the cost of care. Providers are left to gouge private insurers and out of pocket patients for all the money they lose treating Medicare and Medicaid patients. According to the chart, hospitals are charging private pay patients about 150% of cost.
There are two major implications of this that people don’t generally appreciate. More charts would probably only make things more confusing, just understand two things: 1) Medicare and Medicaid patients are more expensive than private pay patients, and 2) the unfunded costs of Medicaid aren’t evenly distributed across the country.
What the hell does that mean?
Medicare and Medicaid patients tend to cost more than private pay patients. People on Medicare are older and need more in the way of expensive treatments—heart surgeries, terminal illnesses, etc. Poor people on Medicaid, likewise, tend to have more babies, more health problems, and may generally be more expensive to treat than private pay patients.
So, don’t be confused by the averages in the chart—Medicare and Medicaid are covering 85% of the costs (on average), but they’re also covering more expensive costs. In other words, if the average private pay patient goes to the hospital once a year for an MRI scan, when the insurer pays 150% of that relatively small cost, they’re reimbursing that provider for the tens of thousands of dollars the provider lost performing heart surgery on someone with Medicaid or Medicare.
The unfunded costs of Medicaid are not evenly distributed, and that points to another problem caused by Medicare and Medicaid only reimbursing providers for a fraction of the cost of care. Medicaid is for poor people, and poor people aren’t evenly distributed in your city, much less your state.
Hospitals are like retailers in that they serve a local community and that community has a particular income level. If the hospital is in an area with a disproportionate percentage of poor people, then there are few private pay patients in that community on insurance to make up for the shortfall. That means where the chart says that the average private pay patient is paying 150% of cost vs. Medicare/Medicaid’s 85%, it assumes that the patient mix is the national average.
In other words, if the hospital is an area where the local population only has 10% private pay patients and 90% Medicare and Medicaid patients, then that 150% percent of cost figure for private pay patients is going to be much, much higher–and those kinds of patient mix numbers are not uncommon in urban poor areas.
Sensitivity Analysis
The part where you all get mad at me!
Usually, a sensitivity analysis would show how taking the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rate up higher would impact the local cost of care. This sensitivity analysis is more about how the system would improve relative to various solutions. How would doing x, y, or z improve the situation?
For instance, wouldn’t the system be better if individuals and insurers formed the market instead of getting insurance through employers? I suppose it would be better, but that solution doesn’t address the real cause of the problem. Insurers would still be competing to sell you a policy that covers 150% of the cost of care (national average).
What about removing the “Cadillac” tax, getting the AMA to stop limiting class sizes of nurses and doctors, making pricing transparent, or making policies portable across state lines? Without getting into too much detail, transparency and portability are extremely complicated because of Medicaid, and even if those things were possible—what would any of them do about the fact that insurers are still paying 150% of cost (national average)?
Solutions
I suppose a lucid progressive might suggest taxing productive workers to take Medicaid’s and Medicare’s reimbursement rate up to 100%, but 1) raising people’s taxes so they can afford to buy insurance is just playing an especially stupid shell game with costs, 2) Medicare and Medicaid spending already make up almost a third of the federal budget, 3) the Medicare rolls are already set to increase as baby boomers continue to retire, and 4) that might be an extra $300 billion a year in real payouts—something like the size of our national interest payment.
The ultimate solution is to cut these programs.
Medicare is more politically sensitive, and Medicaid is especially responsible for driving up the cost of private insurance in economically distressed areas. Certainly, rolling back the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion is a necessary step before we can cut back the rest of Medicaid—and did you know there is a plan being considered in Congress, right now, that gets rid of the ACA Medicaid expansion after 2019?
Whatever else the Ryan plan isn’t, it’s one of those rare situations in which the actual cause of the problem is actually being addressed.
You might be wondering why this is relevant–it’s because fully 90% of my wardrobe is from Modcloth, including the dress I wore to our wedding. So it’s relevant to me and you all get to read about it. I can promise some delicious salty tears, but if that’s not enough, go ahead and skip down to the comments and we can discuss why there are no libertarian women.
Modcloth announced on Friday via tweet and blog post that they “are joining the Jet.com and Walmart family.” What does this mean? According to the blog:
This will give us the necessary resources and support that we need as a business to grow. Growth allows us to reach more women, grow our community, and amplify our message. Our mission to help our customers feel like the best version of themselves continues. And our commitment to inclusivity continues. Our amazing team continues. And we can open more stores — in your hometown! I hope you will continue to join us as well on this next phase of our journey together.
Brought to you by Modcloth
If you’re wondering how receptive Modcloth’s client base is, you need look no further than the replies to the tweet or the comments in the blog. There’s a lot of complaints about Walmart’s anti-union policies (oh nooooooo), their lack of respect for women (lolwut?), and how Walmart is just bad for ‘Murica (m’kay?). One person even goes so far as to say that this “marks the death of Modcloth.” Regardless of the specific complaint, the overarching message is the same–goodbye/unsubscribe/unfollow. I could not find one positive comment. I’d leave one myself, but I suspect I’d just get shouted down. At least no one found Jet.com offensive.
I highly doubt I’ll ever see a brick-and-mortar store in my town, but I love shopping at Modcloth.com. While I find a lot of their products unnecessarily trendy–I can’t stand mustaches and manatees on everything–they also tend to offer clothing that I think could be described as timeless and/or classic. I’m looking forward to seeing how this new partnership (hopefully) improves what Modcloth can offer.
Lazarus Long has sex with those girls. And probably that computer.
There is a Heinlein quote that often crops up in commentary by people around here. It comes from Time Enough For Love:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Something about it always bothered me, though for the longest time I was unable to pin it down. On the face of it, there is nothing there but a statement of a philosophical ideal. One that was given the corollary of “Self-reliance is Liberty” during a debate.
Much like the philosophical ideal of a hermit in his cave giving up physical comforts for spiritual comforts, it is one few actually attain. So why did it bother me? I finally figured it out. The issue is the last part “Specialization is for insects.” The quote itself takes the general philosophy of being well-rounded and self-reliant to the reductio ad absurdum limit and derides specialization. That was the irritant, the bombast and derision the quote taken alone carries. I think I might finally be able to articulate the key problem.
A Saxon churl was a self-reliant generalist. If there was anything that needed to be done around his farm, he was the one to do it, he had no choice. So he could do pretty much any task needed well enough to survive, albeit in a precarious state of slightly above subsistence farming. In every task, he was limited to the capability of his own two hands, and in most tasks rarely went beyond ‘good enough’ because there was other work that needed doing and he didn’t have time to waste. The one thing he had to outsource because he could not reach ‘good enough’ without devoting far too much time to the matter was blacksmithing. The skills and tools required to reach just ‘good enough’ were quite an investment in time and capital and it was not the rational choice for most churls to invest in. Especially since one smith could supply a goodly number of farms with the ironmongery they needed. Thus you had specialists. It is just one example of a pattern that repeats every societal development starting from the birth of agriculture.
There is a very simple reason specialists emerge and proliferate. The market in of itself incentivizes specialization. A specialist will always be more efficient on a marginal basis than a generalist in performing the same task. So the specialist will produce for the same effort a higher quality output, and often in less time. Thus specialization proliferates, and people drift away from churldom towards their own niche in a larger society.
This does not invalidate the ideal of being capable of handling tasks normally handed off to specialists, but it does strain the “Specialization is for insects” assertion. I know the principles and procedures on how to process an animal carcass, but I’m terribly slow, so the rational choice is to let the slaughterhouse handle that most of the time. I have enough basic woodworking skill to frame and erect a simple building, but it would never be as plumb and square as one put up by a professional carpenter. I know enough to be able to build computers from parts and design my household network. This I do because it is a very basic task within my specialization.
Now I can see a counter-argument that the quote is more about being a well-rounded person and insect specialists are incapable of even knowing the principles of other specializations. But it does not sound that way to me. Also, I can see how it might sound as if I am looking down upon those who strive for self-reliance as a principle. This is not the case. If you are able to live by your principles on such matters, I respect that. But, much like the townsfolk walking past the hermit’s cave, I could not live that way. I am a specialist because rational choices led me down that path.
Some time ago, I brought you a piece the primary function of which was to provide a free resource to understand the radical notion, largely held only in libertarian circles, that IP laws are not compatible with libertarian principles. You can find a link to that earlier piece here.
I’d like to direct you now to a piece that I perhaps should have led off with. It is still by Stephan Kinsella, a Houston, TX patent attorney*, Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers and Director, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (c4sif.org). However, it is a smaller, more condensed version of his primary argument, and is rife with excellent citations and thorough notes that any budding libertarian or anarchist theorist will find invaluable.
There aren’t many useful pictures that come up when you search “Intellectual Property Images”
In the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution of the view of self-ownership and how property rights are inherent to this concept. He then goes on to reiterate how IP laws contradict those property rights, which argument those of you who read Against Intellectual Property will already be familiar with.
The portion that I think our small army of arm-chair commenter-philosophers will find most interesting and conducive to discussion is the latter part of the article. Mr. Kinsella discusses what an IP regime might look like in a stateless society. This directly addresses those who dismiss an idea as being too radical, or unworkable, if no direct formulation is provided of how the idea might play out in a practical fashion.
When downloaded, the PDF shows a length of 44 pages, but due to the voluminous notes, there is really only about 25 or so pages of narrative text. You can read it over your lunch break! Assuming you work for a weak-kneed progressive who actually allows you to not be working for a precious few minutes in order to eat. No true libertarian master would ever permit such indulgence among his (and I do exclusively use the male pronoun when discussing both libertarians, and business owners) chattel.
*Don’t we have a commenter who is also an attorney in Houston? If you disagree with Mr. Kinsella’s positions, you should meet him for lunch and fight to the death. It’s the only way to prove which one is right.
“It has become evident that the FCC made a mistake,” Pai said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to a copy of his prepared remarks provided to CNNTech. “Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market. And uncertainty is the enemy of growth.”
Reality!
Thank God we have someone that understands market realities and how consumer choice is better facilitated when agencies get out of the way and let firms compete.
According to CNN:
The net neutrality rules, approved by the FCC in 2015 amid an outpouring of online support, let the agency regulate the Internet as a public utility, placing greater restrictions on broadband providers.
The rules prevent Internet providers like Comcast (CCV) and AT&T (T, Tech30) from deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic from specific websites and apps. In short, the rules are intended to prevent providers from playing favorites.
Bullshit!
Except there was no “outpouring of online support when people understood the issue and the uncertainties it placed on ISPs. It existed based solely on how the question was asked and what pony the respondent thought he/she’d get by supporting it. What it did, however, do was to stifle innovation, expansion, competition and relationship-building within the industry’s varying sectors that would reduce costs. It was going to retard progress that had been made, it would have imposed content restrictions and requirements and it would have increased costs for everybody downstream of the regulators.
Mark another one down in “garbage that the current admin has started the process of fixing in a way libertarians should be satisfied with”. I know it pains some people, but its the truth.
Hello libertarians, anarchists, minarchists, fellow travelers, and those who just kind of experimented in college but have been curious ever since.
Today we bring up a subject only slightly less contentious among the aforementioned ideological groups than abortion or deep-dish pizza. I am speaking, of course, of intellectual property laws.
Many commenters in the precious few articles we have seen on this issue in our previous lives expressed a desire to rein in the perceived outrages and over-application of IP, without necessarily wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
Texas Tech’s football coach looks like this. I am a huge booster of Texas Tech Football. What I’m saying is that I want to have gay sex with Kliff Kingsbury.
Linked here is a free copy of a book, Against Intellectual Property, that I hope you will take the time to read. The author, Stephan Kinsella, is a critical voice in the current milieu of libertarian, anti-state, anarchist, and minarchist thought, and even when I disagree, I always enjoy his thorough and rigorous logic.
I believe the title tells you where Mr. Kinsella stands on the topic, however, for those of you uncertain either of the practical or ideological underpinnings of IP as it currently exists and why the system should be abolished rather than merely reformed, I hope that you take the time to grapple with the presented material and hone your own thoughts and arguments.
The always-worthwhile Don Boudreaux made a post yesterday at Cafe Hayek, calling out Dr. Keith Ablow from Fox News.
It’s true that the pace of introducing new labor-saving techniques has magnificently quickened in the past two hundred years. This fast pace continues today. Yet still we encounter no evidence that labor-saving techniques permanently increase unemployment.
You’ll reply “This time is different!” Perhaps, but I doubt it. And I’m so confident in my prediction that I’ll put $10,000 of my own my money where my mouth is.
I will bet you $10,000, straight up, that in not one of the next 20 years will the annual U.S. labor-force participation rate, as measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fall below 58.1 percent – which is the lowest rate on record at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Maybe one has to have a mathematical bent to see it thus, but if one happens to do so (and I do), that was glorious. Don Boudreaux consistently hits the right notes on a free market tune. If we have the luxury of educated Millennials with a basic grasp of capitalism and markets, however tenuous, it may well be thanks to him.
BUT.*
Galileo was convinced the tides were caused by the Earth’s rotation and solar orbit. In 2011, OPERA scientists announced they had recorded neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light; this was later corrected by plugging their GPS in properly and calibrating a clock. Edwin Hubble attempted to calculate the age of the universe and faceplanted hard enough to make people wince eighty-eight years later.
Even the greats can overlook something. I propose exactly this has happened.
Innovation and automation are not causative to permanent unemployment gains and overall economic job loss. When economic models are reliant on false scarcity, they consistently fail. Imminent starvation due to human overpopulation was overturned by the green revolution. Peal Oil fell to fracking and exploration. What we “know” about production capabilities has been revised, over and over ad infinitum.
On the left, the Apollo space module. On the right, more processing power than the Apollo space module.
For an explanation of why this is so, we go to the oft-cited buggy whip industry. The advent of the automobile decimated this established industry, along with just about everything else related to horse-drawn transportation – once a major industry. Yet the lost of this sector resulted in a widespread economic gain. The automobile added enough real economic growth that the costs of industry sectors removed through obsolescence were still vastly outstripped by the generated economic output. In real ways, the former buggy whip makers were materially better off without their old jobs.
Innovation and machinery were behind the explosion in the clothing industry. We can now buy more clothing, for cheaper, than we could in the days when middle-class women owned four dresses plus a Sunday-best.
Subject put on her Sunday best to have picture taken. It’s a lovely hat.
Imagine what that did for closet-makers. Innovation and automation are the reason we have access to more, cheaper and a better variety of fresh produce than we did even twenty years ago.
This is what progress looks like; not the “progress” which regulates and strangulates the markets to put ordinary necessities such as eyeglasses, antibiotics, clothing and transportation out of the reach of the common man in the name of his own best interests, but the kind of progress which puts a TV in every middle-class home and a personal automobile in the driveway of even the common laborer. Notions that used to be astonishing in our grandparents’ day but were the reality for our parents, recall.
Boudreaux is correct about economic models dependent on a false scarcity that is not there. The math is sound, the economic theories well-explored, for all that the same are missed by more mainstream and “enlightened” economists. What Boudreaux misses, I theorize, are another kind of failed economic modeling: those dependent on ignoring a true scarcity.
Pensions which calculated annual rate of returns only truthfully deemed reasonable in the Magical Land of Not Gonna Happen and underfunded thereby. The housing bubble of the late Oughts can be condensed in layman’s terms to the battle between those who said they aren’t making any more land vs those who postulated there might be fewer available buyers if the price went high enough.
The assumption of growth will not be borne out in economic models reliant on ignoring true scarcity.
Our economy is adding people to the economy at a faster rate than it is removing obsolete jobs and retirees. The scarcity being overlooked is job creation. It isn’t happening fast enough.
This isn’t easy to see. Imagine the BLS is playing a great game of Find the Lady with job creation. One can examine charts and run the math with calculator, pencil and paper until one’s eyes cross. It doesn’t add up until one remembers how Find the Lady really works.
“…workers in the U.S. business sector worked virtually the same number of hours in 2013 as they had in 1998—approximately 194 billion labor hours.1 What this means is that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period.
…The most important thing we know about those 194 billion labor hours is that the mix of labor supplied to the US economy deteriorated drastically during that 15 year period owing to the sharp decline of the goods producing economy in the US and its replacement by the low productivity HES Complex (health, education and social services).
… Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that real GDP growth has been considerably lower than reported. That is, it has been more consistent with a stagnant economy that generated zero labor hour growth in the business sector; a pick-up in food stamps and disability dependency from 23 million to 60 million over the 15 year period; and which saw real household income fall from $57k to $52K or by 8%.
The circumstantial evidence has grown since Stockman wrote this in 2014.
Labor participation rate (Boudreaux’ own standards, of which I fully approve) is near 40-year lows.
Despite spending more on health care than any other country, American life expectancy decreased for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. This was attributable in part to a sharp increase in deaths of white men and women in their prime working years lacking higher education, and driven by suicide and drug abuse; deaths of despair in a demographic which once enjoyed higher employment numbers.
Correlation is not causation; I’m just sayin’.
The natural mathematical result of innovation and automation is an improvement in economic function which streamlines processes and frees capital to slosh about in the system until it is soaked up in ways not available previously. As computers got faster, they got smaller and lighter and cheaper. The average American now has at their fingertips for trifling sums what was once available only to the scientists and engineers of NASA.
The average American is also in economic decline; making less, with fewer opportunities and less mobility.
These two statements show something within the system is malfunctioning. Badly. America added just shy of 46 million people to the economy since 1998 and 0 labor hours for those people. The rising government dependence,
This is what full employment looks like. No, really.
the increasing deaths, credentialism, licensing schemes (25% of today’s workforce, up from just 5% in 1950), declining labor participation, entrepreneurship, incomes and mobility could not exist simultaneously in a rapidly-innovating free market such as economists claim we have.
One of these assumptions must be false. The math does not work. The natural formula of innovation is being subsumed and arrogated, and the numbers proving so only worsen as our population rises.
This points to jobs being removed from the economy at a faster rate than new job creation plus new population.
If my theory holds, Don Boudreaux will indeed lose his bet. Labor participation will reach 58.1 percent via mere attrition unless the innovation formula is allowed to resume it’s course. Further, if my theory holds, then at our current path the labor participation rate will not reach 66 percent (last seen in the ancient bygone days of 2008) in any of the coming two decades.
After grandpa got the land back, he replanted plum trees. He was living in Bucharest by then, and never did much with the orchard, so I think it was more nostalgia than anything else. After he died, the orchard was less maintained by us Bucharest dwellers, we just payed a local to do some basic maintenance. But I still have a couple of hundred “family” plum trees somewhere, should I choose to ditch the day job and get in the tuica making business. I can then smuggle it in the US, and sell it to make my fortune.
