Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where orders emerge - Article Feed

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Some Links

Posted: 22 Jun 2020 04:23 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Ian Rowe writes beautifully, in todays Wall Street Journal, about the
arrogance and dangers of the ignorant racism that today parades as
enlightenment. A slice:

The narrative that white people “hold the power” conveys a wrongheaded
notion of white superiority and creates an illusion of black dependency on
white largess. This false assignment of responsibility, while coming from
an authentic desire to produce change, can create a new kind of mental
enslavement.

Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, exposed this concern at a 2019
event sponsored by the Manhattan Institute titled “Barriers to Black
Progress: Structural, Cultural or Both?” Mr. Loury was challenged with the
proposition that before black people address factors within their locus of
control—such as high levels of single parenthood, which create a greater
likelihood of child poverty—white people’s racist attitudes and actions
need to be resolved. “You just made white people, the ones who we say are
the implacable, racist, indifferent, don’t-care oppressors, into the sole
agents of your own delivery,” Mr. Loury said. “Really?”

David Henderson insists, correctly and rightly, that black livelihoods
matter. A slice:

Economists often discuss the harmful effects of the minimum wage as an
“unintended consequence.” In fact the effects were intended. Even as late
as 1957, when U.S. Senators could get away with being openly racist,
Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), at a hearing on the minimum wage, argued
for increasing the minimum wage to protect white workers in the North from
competition with black workers in the South.

Jeffrey Tucker rightly angered by the stupidity of the coronavirus
lockdowns is not surprised that a free society is much smarter than are
any of the individuals whose choices and actions give rise to social order.
A slice:

The trouble is that a well functioning society can create an illusion that
it all happens not because of the process but rather because we are so damn
smart or maybe we have wise leaders with a good plan. It seems like it must
be so, else how could we have become so good at what we do? Hayek’s main
point is that it is a mistake to credit individual intelligence or
knowledge, much less good governments with brainy leaders, with
civilizational achievements; rather, the real credit belongs to
institutions and processes that no one in particular controls.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Tierney reviews Michael Shellenbergers
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. A slice:

While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in
the long term it’s beneficial to the environment as people move to cities,
allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to
switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy. Carbon emissions
decline as people move from wood to coal to natural gas, and then
ultimately to what Mr. Shellenberger calls the safest and cleanest source:
nuclear energy, the only practical technology for drastically curtailing
carbon emissions, if only green activists would stop trying to shut down
nuclear plants.

Richard McKenzie separates the myths from the realities about Adam Smith.

Juliette Sellgrens discussion with food-policy expert Baylen Linnekin is
excellent.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 22 Jun 2020 03:20 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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… is from page v of the 1969 Arlington House edition of Ludwig von Mises’s
1944 Yale University Press book, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the
Total State and Total War (available free-of-charge on-line here):

At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that the rulers
are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know
better what benefits those ruled than they themselves.

DBx: Indeed. And it’s therefore reasonable to argue that the greater are
the numbers of decisions removed from the hands of individuals choosing and
acting in the private sphere, the more closely does society take on
characteristics of totalitarianism.

The state of society in general, and of the economy in particular, is not a
toggle. Society and the economy are never, in practice, fully free or
completely totalitarian. Within the freest real-world societies there loom
some ideas and policies that make that society less free than it would
otherwise be. Within the most totalitarian real-world societies,
individuals manage to find some spheres, however small, in which they are
free to act against the wishes of state officials. And it’s a matter of
judgment, not science, when a society’s suppression of freedom by the state
has become so expansive and determined that that society has earned the
awful title totalitarian.

But a society need not be totalitarian, or even close to being
totalitarian, in order to be infected with interventions that move it along
the spectrum from free toward totalitarian. No interventions motor such a
move more than do efforts of state officials to direct’ the economy by
suppressing people’s voluntary commercial choices and replacing these with
resource-allocation decisions made by political authorities.

Protective tariffs alone might be insufficient to render a society
totalitarian. But the use of protective tariffs moves a society in a
totalitarian direction. By using such tariffs, a relatively small number of
state officials deny to millions of persons the right to peacefully spend
their incomes as these persons see fit. Resources in that society come to
be more under the control, not of their owners, but of the state. Even if
(contrary to all reality) these state officials are all earthly saints, and
even if (contrary to all reality) their protectionist schemes work’
economically exactly as protectionists promise, this protectionism
nevertheless is a totalitarian virus within a society that is perhaps
otherwise healthy and free.

Whenever some pundit, professor, or politician clamors for protective
tariffs or for export subsidies, that person clamors for use of
totalitarian methods, even though he or she is not clamoring for
totalitarianism and would be horrified to realize the totalitarian nature
of the policy tools’ he or she proposes. And when this pundit, professor,
or politician expands his or her call from tariffs and subsidies into more
comprehensive industrial policy, that person calls for society to move even
further along the spectrum from free to totalitarian.

The fact that even rather comprehensive industrial policy in some
particular place and time might be insufficiently repressive to convince
some reasonable people to label that society totalitarian does not mean
that that society is not more infected with the totalitarian virus than it
would be without industrial policy. Do not forget that all persons who
advocate industrial policy believe that individuals spending and investing
their own incomes do not do so as well as would state officials.




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From a Cafe Patron

Posted: 21 Jun 2020 07:45 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Cafe Hayek patron Felix Finch, in agreeable response to this post, sent to
me the following e-mail, which I share here with his kind permission:

I had a friend who was an astrologer, and from talking about it, I believe
it was a substitute for being an engineer it has calculations, tables,
formulas, esoteric data (double war time daylight savings adjustments) all
the trappings of being an engineer, without needing four years of college.
Ive often thought the same thing applies to politicians they see
caricatures of business people in movies and TV shows, all the shouting,
the commands, the abrupt genius decisions Where is that Jones report? Tell
Jones hes fired! Well build that plant anyway! and that is what politics
provides, all the trappings of Hollywood business people, without the need
for the long years of experience and hard work.




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