Bastiat Meeting

November 4th

Please join us this Wednesday for our November Bastiat Society Meeting. Our guest speaker for this month is George Leef from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. His talk is entitled:

"The conventional Wisdom on Higher Education: Not Just Wrong, but Harmful"

Please RSVP by emailing us: BastiatSociety@gmail.com

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Time:
5pm - Reception
6pm - Speaker

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Place:
The Harbor Club
35 Prioleau St
Charleston, SC 29403

map

Monopoly Money

Would currency competition lead to a sounder U.S. dollar?


By Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX)
Submitted to CNN

"The prospect of American citizens also turning away from the dollar toward alternate currencies should provide an impetus to the U.S. government to regain control of the dollar and halt its downward spiral. Restoring soundness to the dollar will remove the government's ability and incentive to inflate the currency, and provide stability to the financial system. With a sound currency, everyone is better off, not just those who control the monetary system."

Read the entire op-ed here

We'll Be Broke

Another "successful" government program like cash for clunkers, and we'll all be broke...

Edmunds.com, the premier resource for online automotive information, has determined that Cash for Clunkers cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

Nearly 690,000 vehicles were sold during the Cash for Clunkers program, officially known as CARS, but Edmunds.com analysts calculated that only 125,000 of the sales were incremental. The rest of the sales would have happened anyway, regardless of the existence of the program.

Read the rest here.

Maximum Confusion over Minimum Wages

by D.W. MacKenzie, Mises Daily

"Common sense and a few basic concepts can guide most people through economic issues — provided that our thoughts overshadow our emotions. One small step of reason on the minimum-wage issue could be a giant leap for all mankind."

Read the entire article here



Special thanks to the Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Case for Freedom and Wealth Creation

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Dr. Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world." He makes his point very clear - wealth and freedom creates better societies.

Click on Hans to watch the video

So Bad, It's Not Even Wrong

Michael Shermer on Michael Moore's documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story:

"In this latest installment in his continuing series of what’s wrong with America, Michael Moore takes aim at his biggest target to date, and the result is a disaster. The documentary is not nearly as funny as his previous films, the music selections seem contrived and flat, and the edits and transitions are clumsy, wooden, and not nearly as effective as what we’ve come to expect from the premiere documentarian (Ken Burns notwithstanding) of our time. And, most importantly, the film’s central thesis is so bad that it’s not even wrong."

Read the rest here.

No Dissent Allowed

The Reasons for Meetings

"What makes the sheer volume of office meetings even more remarkable is that there are only two possible reasons for any meeting: 1) Come listen to me talk, and 2) Come listen to me talk and then share the blame when this horrible idea explodes in my face. That's it. That is every meeting."

Charlie Grandy, a writer for "The Office" Forbes

A Prison for the Human Soul

Dan Mitchell delivers a short, on-the-target plea for smaller government.

Takings Versus Regulation

The Initiative for Public Choice & Market Process at the College of Charleston will present a lecture from University of Chicago Law professor Richard Epstein entitled "Takings versus Regulation: Where in Lies the Difference?" The lecture will be held on October 8 in the Beatty Center's Wachovia Auditorium begin at 7 p.m.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. He is also the Faculty Director for Curriculum, and the Director of the Law and Economics Program. Epstein is author of the book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.

This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored in part by the Bastiat Society and the College of Charleston Pre-Law Club.

Help for the Overpaid

If Bastiat Could Do It...

If Bastiat could make economics intuitive, so can we. So says economist Bryan Caplan.

He offers a few examples of intuitive logic designed to overcome counterintuitive arguments:

1.Counterintuitive claim: Free trade makes countries richer, even if the other countries have big advantages like cheaper labor or more advanced technology.

Intuitive version: We'd be better off if other countries gave us stuff for free. Isn't "really cheap" the next-best thing?

2.Counterintuitive claim: Strict labor market regulation is bad for workers.

Intuitive version: Employers don't like hiring people if it's hard to get rid of them. Suppose you had to marry anyone you asked out on a date!

3. Counterintuitive claim: Egalitarian socialism creates poverty... even starvation.

Intuitive version: If everyone gets the same share whether or not they work, you're asking people to work for free. People don't like working for free, especially when the work isn't very fun. (This is my response to Sumner's Great Leap Forward Challenge: "But how do we explain to school children that millions had to starve because of a policy that encouraged people to share?")

4. Counterintuitive claim: Prices are determined by supply and demand.

Intuitive version: If the good were free, consumers would want a lot, but producers wouldn't feel like making much. If the good cost trillions of dollars, producers would want to make a lot, but consumers wouldn't want to buy any. In between there's got to be a price where consumers want to buy as much as producers want to make.

Read the rest, and Caplan's challenge to his readers, here.

Seeing Business Straight

The Economist has launched a new column on business and management. It's called "Schumpeter," named after the great economist Joseph Schumpeter.

An extract:

"Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.” But Schumpeter knew far too much about the history of business to be a cheerleader. He recognised that business people are often ruthless monomaniacs, obsessed by their dreams of building “private kingdoms” and willing to do anything to crush their rivals."

Read the whole thing here.

The Quotable Bastiat

Lorsque la Spoliation est devenue le moyen d'existence d'une agglomération d'hommes unis entre eux par le lien social, ils se font bientôt une loi qui la sanctionne, une morale qui la glorifie.

Chapitre I de la seconde série des Sophismes Économiques

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Economic Sophisms, Second Series, Chapter I

The Last Refuge

In 1775, the Englishman Samuel Johnson made the famous pronouncement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Today, scoundrels can't rely on patriotism. It is too out of favor to provide much of a refuge.

Were the good Dr. Johnson alive today, he would most likely say "A charge of racism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Hiding Behind Racism

I just watched a network news report that made the astounding claim that any opposition to the agenda of President Obama is motivated by racism.

No less an authority than former President Carter confirmed the claim.

Nothing gets people on the defensive faster than the charge of racism. But the charge of racism doesn't stick this time around. People who oppose President Obama's agenda are not upset about his race. They are upset about his ideas.

Ideas deserve a full and serious debate. Bad ideas deserve the criticism heaped upon them. Really bad ideas try to hide behind something else.

The Lofty Legislature

"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force." George Washington

And, as this video of lofty legislative deliberation in Taiwan reveals, sometimes force doesn't have the patience to wait for reason or eloquence to finish.



Taken from a delightful tour of lofty legislative bodies around the world, found at "Hit and Run."

Tire Threat

Pardon my ignorance, but I didn't go to Harvard.

Then again, you probably didn't, either.

So let's ask this question together: "What, exactly, is the threat to the country presented by Joe Sixpack buying cheap tires from China?"

Are we trying to make the United States tire-independent? Do we rely on too many foreign tires? Are we trying to close a tire-gap vital to national security?

The answers all point to one conclusion. The United States is imposing a 35% tax on Chinese tires for one reason and one reason only: to discourage Americans from buying cheap Chinese tires.

The Chinese are understandably miffed. They complain. So once again, we must witness the absurd comedy of Chinese communists lecturing the government of the United States on the importance of free trade.

Critics of the Chinese will no doubt argue that the Chinese aren't true believers in free trade, just political opportunists who want to use the rhetoric of free trade to sell their cheap products in our market.

To these critics any thinking man must respond, "Of course." Or, less politely, "Duh!" The beauty of free trade is that it turns self-interested human beings into other-interested human beings by appealing to their nearly ineradicable self-interest. How else could you possibly convince all those Chinese to make cheap tires for Joe Sixpack, a guy they will never meet and who lives in a place they will never visit?

The world only works as well as it does because so many people aim to satisfy themselves by satisfying the needs of others. When governments start trying to dam up and redirect the flow of mutually satisfying trade, they inject politics into private transactions, making trade policy a department of government located dangerously close to the department of defense.

Let's laugh about protecting America from cheap tires, and use ridicule to expose the nonsense of protectionism. We should also pray that this comedy does not turn into a tragedy. Trade wars have been known to start real ones.

Serving the Needs of Others

You won't find the best video on your television anymore. It's on the web now, and among the best of the best is reason.tv.

Check out this video with Paul Zack of Claremont University. He says that trading is a fundamental human activity, and the act of trading is inherently social and inherently virtuous. Markets serve the needs of others.

Provincial Amateurism

"An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?"

Camille Paglia writing in Salon