Good morning! Only, why is it so damn dark outside at this hour? Oh, that’s right. Some dickheads changed the time on us. Well, that’s not gonna stop me from providing some sweet links for you to get your week started right. At least I hope not.
No! Fuck you, go be productive in the private sector.
The cuts Trump plans to propose this week are also expected to lead to layoffs among federal workers, changes that would be felt sharply in the Washington area. According to an economic analysis by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, the reductions outlined so far by Trump’s advisers would reduce employment in the region by 1.8 percent and personal income by 3.5 percent, and lower home prices by 1.9 percent.
“In our world, women have been important to us for a long time,” explained Selena Kalvaria, senior director for Lime-A-Rita. After all, women are statistically 51 percent of the population and according to surveys they make 85 percent of consumer purchasing decisions.
Whatever. You dicks went political and dropped Bud Bowl for Amy Schumer and some story about a legal immigrant. Besides, have you tried this stuff? It’s worse than Bartles & Jaymes.
There’s a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don’t need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.
– Milton Friedman
Believe it or not, urban economics models actually do suggest that Georgist taxation would be the right approach at least to finance city growth. But I would just say: I don’t think you can raise nearly enough money to run a modern welfare state by taxing land
– Paul Krugman
Adam Smith, ya heathens.
Ground-rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. The ordinary rent of land is, in many cases, owing partly at least to the attention and good management of the landlord. A very heavy tax might discourage too, much this attention and good management. Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign, which, by protecting the industry either of the whole people, or of the inhabitants of some particular place, enables them to pay so much more than its real value for the ground which they build their houses upon; or to make to its owner so much more than compensation for the loss which he might sustain by this use of it. Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds, towards the support of that government.
– Adam Smith
Pure land rent is in the nature of a ‘surplus’ which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called ‘the useful tax on measured land surplus’.
– Paul Samuelson
[T]axing economic rent has become the bête noir of neoliberal globalism. It is what property owners and rentiers fear most of all, as land, subsoil resources and natural monopolies far exceed industrial capital in magnitude. What appears in the statistics at first glance as “profit” turns out upon examination to be Ricardian or “economic” rent.
– Michael Hudson
Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.
– David Ricardo
________
My thoughts (such as they are) will start with part 2, but a teaser with what some economists you might have heard of think seemed like a good place to start. Let the arguments begin!
Previously: Part One – If You Can’t See the Chains, Does it Mean They Aren’t There? & Part Two – Let’s You and Him Fight!
by Suthenboy
I grew up in a home where racism was not a thing. We acknowledged that racism existed but it was only ever discussed fleetingly and in vague terms. I spent my early years in Catholic Schools where racism was essentially non-existent. My brother and I had groups of friends that looked like rainbow parties. I was completely ignorant of the language, behavior, and thought processes that were more prevalent in the wider world outside of mine. My rude introduction to that world came when our Catholic School closed down, and I began seventh grade in the wonderful world of public schooling.
Acclimating to this new world meant making friends. I was moderately successful at that. I had decent social skills and could size up candidates in short order. One of the guys I kept running into I will call Ronnie. Ronnie was a tall, lanky Black kid who seemed good-natured. We didn’t have very many Blacks in that rural school district and though they mostly kept to themselves, there wasn’t any noticeable tension between the Blacks and Whites. Ronnie and I had a few friendly conversations and interactions in passing, and it seemed like our friendship was off to a good start.
One morning while changing classes, Ronnie and I passed each other in the hall. He blindsided me with a punch to my shoulder (something that was commonly meant as a gesture of friendship). My arm cramped up and I dropped my armload of books. I laughed because I hadn’t seen it coming, he had ‘gotten me’. Just as he was laughing and turning away I caught him on the shoulder with a quick jab. He laughed. I scrambled to pick up my books and head to my classroom, pointed my finger at him and jokingly said, “Watch out boy!”
Ronnie hit me hard in the face and I was on my ass. That was not a friendly punch and he was pissed. I was confused. I asked him why he had done that. His face was twisted and angry when he said, “You called me ‘boy’”.
What? What the hell was he talking about? ‘Boy’ was a common term built into the language of the 13-year-old ‘boys’ in my circles back then. It was just a word and an accurate one. It was inconceivable to me that such a harmless word would bring about a schizophrenic change in the guy I thought I knew.
Ronnie and I never spoke again despite finishing out our schooling and graduating in the same class. I felt bad for unwittingly insulting him, and he felt bad for reacting the way he had when no slight was intended. We found ourselves at odds in a world neither of us created because of a complex stew of economic and social reasons we did not understand. We were too young and naïve to know how to bridge that gap. The divide between us was not racial, it was cultural.
A simplistic misconception in the minds of most people is that the differences they see in people of different ethnicities is due to innate differences in those ethnicities, instead of the cultural influences one is subject to during their formative years. That those innate differences do not exist is painfully obvious for anyone who cares to look. Yet solving problems related to race remains difficult primarily because that conflation is actively perpetuated by those who gain from poisoning society with identity politics.
The first place I look is a small High School in Washington D.C. that was founded in 1870 named Dunbar High School. It was the first public High School in the country devoted exclusively to educating Blacks. Its founders operated on the premise they developed after noticing the stark differences in IQ scores between northern and southern Whites. In descending order, the regional IQs in the country were northern Whites, northern Blacks, southern Whites, and lastly southern Blacks. They sought to displace the culture that southern Blacks had absorbed from their White contemporaries with that of the north.
By holding the southern Black students to the same standards, or higher, as those of northern Whites, their students achieved a remarkable result. When IQ tests were given again in 1899, the students at Dunbar, the only black school in the city, scored second highest in the city. While the average IQ for Blacks nationwide was merely 85, the average for Dunbar students was over 100 every year until 1955. The majority of Dunbar High graduates were accepted into college, making Dunbar unique in all the country. Nearly 30% of numerous Dunbar grads who attended Harvard, Amherst, Yale, Williams, Cornell, and Dartmouth graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Dunbar grads became the first Blacks to: rise from enlisted man to commissioned officer in the Army, the first Black graduate from Annapolis, the first female Black to earn a Ph.D., the first Black federal judge, the first Black general, the first black cabinet member, Dr. Charles Drew who pioneered blood plasma. During WWII, large numbers of officers from captain to general were Dunbar graduates.
It is glaringly obvious that the success Dunbar graduates achieved was due to the cultural influences they received at their school and this was met with no small amount of criticism from both the Black and White communities as identity politics sought to poison it.
Dr. Thomas Sowell on Dunbar:
“What is relevant to the issue of culture was that this was a school which, from its beginning, had a wholly different cultural orientation from that of the ghetto culture. Seven of its first ten principals were educated in a New England environment. Four had degrees from colleges located in New England and three had degrees from Oberlin, which was established by New Englanders in Ohio as a deliberate project to plant New England Culture in the Midwest. Dunbar High School issued a handbook on behavior to its students that spelled out how one should act, not only in the school but in the world at large. The values and deportment these students were taught would today be called by critics “acting white.”
Nor did the difference in Dunbar students behavior go unnoticed by the local black community. Dunbar High School became so controversial among blacks in Washington that the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist William Raspberry said that you could turn any social gathering of the city’s middle-aged blacks into warring factions by simply saying the one word “Dunbar”.
In the end, identity politics and ghetto culture won out. Dunbar was demolished and the program dismantled by the cause to banish Black elitism.
While racism in the United States is mild by comparison to other countries, it still plays a very prominent role in our politics and public discourse, kept alive by those who benefit from a divided citizenry. Conflating race and culture is a strategy used by self-appointed elites to set people with common interests against one another, dividing them along the wildly ridiculous line of race. Vast oceans of human potential have been squandered before and after Dunbar’s existence by the absurd fallacy that a person’s potential is determined by the skin color of one’s parents, and we are all poorer for it. We are all human. Potential is individual, not racial. As my Grandfather was fond of reminding me “It don’t make a shit who your Daddy is. The only thing that counts is what YOU do.”
We should be looking to build a culture that maximizes everyone’s ability to achieve their potential regardless of race. We can rebuild Dunbar. It needn’t be for Blacks. It should be for Americans.
Ah yes. Nothing better than waking up at 7:00 to that fresh smell of eggs and bacon. Except, you know, its not 7 anymore, its 8. Thanks, dickhead government.
Anyway, here we go…
I know you’re all excited for the field to be set today so you can participate in the Glibertarians NCAA Mens Basketball Bracket Challenge Contest. (Password: Podesta). There will be prizes from your hosts for the winners and some losers, so get in there and play. And speaking of contests, you need to hurry up and get your submissions in by noon on Tuesday for the Logo contest. We’ve had some really good stuff submitted. Remember: every serious entrant gets a free Glibertarians.com bumper sticker with the new logo!
UPDATE; BRUTAL ENFORCER HAS REMINDED ZARDOZ HE WAS REMISS IN PROVIDING FOR HIS CHOSEN ONES. AMUSE YOURSELVES BY SELECTING TEAMS OF BRUTALS IN SPORTS TOURNAMENT.
In attempting to punish the wealthy, the Government ended up screwing the middle class instead. This sort of backfire happens fairly frequently.
Lawmakers in Maryland, oblivious to what happened with the yacht tax, decided to put a special tax on millionaires in 2008. It was supposed to bring in an extra $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million.
Hey, only a person with the tiniest amount of common sense could have predicted that rich people would leave in order to avoid paying tens of thousands in taxes.
I’m going to write this in all caps because it needs to be:
HIGHER TAX RATES NEVER LEAD TO HIGHER REVENUES!
Never had, never will, never, ever, ever.
One would hope that such examples would illustrate the futile and counterproductive nature of luxury taxes. Alas, every leading progressive politician from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rails against the rich. Amusingly enough, the last major attempt at soaking the rich, the Foreign Tax Account Compliance Act, was introduced by Democrat Charlie Rangel, who was censured for owing tens of thousands in back taxes for income he received from rent on overseas property.
He is so clueless he sponsored a law criminalizing the very thing he had been doing. That is truly a special kind of stupid.
But even stupider than that is trying to tax people who know the law, have a lot to lose, and are able to easily evade it.
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.
There’s a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don’t need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.
[T]axing economic rent has become the bête noir of neoliberal globalism. It is what property owners and rentiers fear most of all, as land, subsoil resources and natural monopolies far exceed industrial capital in magnitude. What appears in the statistics at first glance as “profit” turns out upon examination to be Ricardian or “economic” rent.
The first place I look is a small High School in Washington D.C. that was founded in 1870 named Dunbar High School. It was the first public High School in the country devoted exclusively to educating Blacks. Its founders operated on the premise they developed after noticing the stark differences in IQ scores between northern and southern Whites. In descending order, the regional IQs in the country were northern Whites, northern Blacks, southern Whites, and lastly southern Blacks. They sought to displace the culture that southern Blacks had absorbed from their White contemporaries with that of the north.
