TGIF: The Great Carl Menger

There can be no doubt among competent historians that if ... the Austrian School has occupied an almost unique position in the development of economic science, this is entirely due to the foundations laid by this one man.... [I]ts fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to [?].... [W]hat is common to the members of the Austrian School, what constitutes their peculiarity and provided the foundations for their later contributions is their acceptance of the teaching of [?]. —F. A. Hayek

Who was Hayek writing about?

Carl Menger, of course. Menger (1840-1921), a professor at the University of Vienna, launched the Austrian school of economics with his trailblazing Principles of Economics, published in 1871. (It was not translated into English until 1950.) He is famous for being one of three economists who independently and nearly simultaneously shifted economics onto a radically different track: marginal utility. Hence, the term marginal revolution in economics.

This was a radical recasting of value and price theory. "The value of goods arises from their relationship to our needs, and is not inherent in the goods themselves. With changes in this relationship, value arises and disappears...," Menger wrote. "It is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being." Menger was not a moral philosopher but an economist, explaining how human action generates market phenomena such as prices.

While the classical economists thought in terms of entire classes of goods and subscribed to the labor, or cost-of-production, theory of value and price, the marginal-utility theorists focused on how individuals act to satisfy their wants. A person chooses and necessarily makes tradeoffs among discrete units of goods—a quart of milk, a dozen eggs, a pound of ground beef—according to his unique personal circumstances: his preferences, purposes, aspirations, likes, and dislikes. He doesn't care how much labor or material went toward making a product. He cares about how useful a product is to his prioritized purposes. The more units he has of a given good, the less valuable any one unit is because he would abandon his lowest ranked purpose if a unit were lost. That's the law of diminishing marginal utility. Overall, that consumers value particular goods imparts value to the factors of production—not vice versa. Means are valued for their contribution to ends. Menger emphasized this change in direction in the flow of value.

In this sense, value is subjective; it's a relationship between a valuer (the subject, or actor) and something he believes will increase his well-being. A person can err about whether a good will affect his well-being, but so long as he expects to benefit, he will value and pursue it. That will influence the market somewhat. (Hence, the commitment to subjectivism in economic analysis does not commit one to subjectivism in philosophy.)

Since personal circumstances vary widely, so do individuals' relative valuation of goods, creating potential mutual gains from trade. In other words, people exchange unequal values from their points of view, contrary to what the classical economists thought. 

Menger took economic subjectivism and marginalism further than his co-revolutionists, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. For instance, he realized that value scales rank rather than measure preferences. There are no utils.

Despite his plan, Menger did not develop his new approach all the way, but he got the ball rolling. That ball was moved further along by his intellectual heirs, including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk; Ludwig von Mises: F. A. Hayek, who won a Nobel Prize in 1974; Murray Rothbard; Israel Kirzner; and far too many next-generation economists to name. (For more on Menger's achievements, see David Henderson's article "Carl Menger" and Steven Rhoads's "Marginalism." Also see Peter Klein's foreword to the Menger book linked above.)

What I find interesting about Menger lately is his commentary on Adam Smith and the issue Smith is so famous for, the division of labor. I quote from Menger's Principles:

“The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour,” says Adam Smith, “and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.” And: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”

In such a manner Adam Smith has made the progressive division of labor the central factor in the economic progress of mankind—in harmony with the overwhelming importance he attributes to labor as an element in human economy. I believe, however, that the distinguished author I have just quoted has cast light, in his chapter on the division of labor, on but a single cause of progress in human welfare while other, no less efficient, causes have escaped his attention.

What escaped Smith's attention? you ask. In reply, Menger described a primitive economy that enjoyed the advantages of dividing up and specializing in the various laborious tasks. To be sure, the people in that economy would be better off than otherwise. But:

Let us now ask whether a division of labor carried so far, would have such an effect on the increase of the quantity of consumable goods available to the members of the tribe as that regarded by Adam Smith as being the consequence of the progressive division of labor. Evidently, as the result of such a change, this tribe (or any other people) will achieve either the same result from their labor with less effort or, with the same effort, a greater result than before. It will thus improve its condition, insofar as this is at all possible, by means of a more appropriate and efficient allocation of occupational tasks. But this improvement is very different from that which we can observe in actual cases of economically progressive
peoples. [Emphasis added.]

Menger here says that the mere division of labor will take a group only so far, but its progress must fall short of what we see in the world. What does he mean?

Let us compare this last case with another. Assume a people which extends its attention to goods of third, fourth, and higher orders, instead of confining its activity merely to the tasks of a primitive collecting economy—that is, to the acquisition of naturally available goods of lowest order (ordinarily goods of first, and possibly second, order). If such a people progressively directs goods of ever higher orders to the satisfaction of its needs, and especially if each step in this direction is accompanied by an appropriate division of labor, we shall doubtless observe that progress in welfare which Adam Smith was disposed to attribute exclusively to the latter factor. We shall see the hunter, who initially pursues game with a club, turning to hunting with bow and hunting net, to stock farming of the simplest kind, and in sequence, to ever more intensive forms of stock farming. We shall see men, living initially on wild plants, turning to ever more intensive forms of agriculture. We shall see the rise of manufactures, and their improvement by means of tools and machines. And in the closest connection with these developments, we shall see the welfare of this people increase.

By "goods of third, fourth, and higher orders," Menger of course meant producer, or capital, goods, that is, intermediate manmade products intended to produce goods for or closer to the consumer level.  Tools, equipment, and machines magnify the productivity of labor many times. Without them, human output is meager, even with a division of labor. This is Menger's complex structure of production, the stages of which are classified according to how close or far in time they are from the retail level.

Time (which implies risk) is revealed as critical. The higher the order, the longer the period until the final good is ready for sale to consumers. "Thus," Menger wrote, "in the process of change by which goods of higher order are gradually transformed into goods of first order, until the latter finally bring about the state called the satisfaction of human needs, time is an essential feature of our observations." Radical.

The further mankind progresses in this direction, the more varied become the kinds of goods, the more varied consequently the occupations, and the more necessary and economic also the progressive division of labor. But it is evident that the increase in the consumption goods at human disposal is not the exclusive effect of the division of labor. Indeed, the division of labor cannot even be designated as the most important cause of the economic progress of mankind. Correctly, it should be regarded only as one factor among the great influences that lead mankind from barbarism and misery to civilization and wealth....

The Austrian school thus started with Menger's observation that Adam Smith, widely held to be the father of economics, overlooked "the most important cause of the economic progress of mankind." That took some confidence.

In its most primitive form, a collecting economy is confined to gathering those goods of lowest order that happen to be offered by nature. Since economizing individuals exert no influence on the production of these goods, their origin is independent of the wishes and needs of men, and hence, so far as they are concerned, accidental.

People in such a condition are fundamentally passive concerning their environment. A low standard of living should surprise no one.

But if men abandon this most primitive form of economy, investigate the ways in which things may be combined in a causal process for the production of consumption goods, take possession of things capable of being so combined, and treat them as goods of higher order, they will obtain consumption goods that are as truly the results of natural processes as the consumption goods of a primitive collecting economy, but the available quantities of these goods will no longer be independent of the wishes and needs of men. Instead, the quantities of consumption goods will be determined by a process that is in the power of men and is regulated by human purposes within the limits set by natural laws. Consumption goods, which before were the product of an accidental concurrence of the circumstances of their origin, become products of human will, within the limits set by natural laws, as soon as men have recognized these circumstances and have achieved control of them.

Human beings moved from passive to active in satisfying their wants. That was a turning point in history.

The quantities of consumption goods at human disposal are limited only by the extent of human knowledge of the causal connections between things, and by the extent of human control over these things. Increasing understanding of the causal connections between things and human welfare, and increasing control of the less proximate conditions responsible for human welfare, have led mankind, therefore, from a state of barbarism and the deepest misery to its present stage of civilization and well-being, and have changed vast regions inhabited by a few miserable, excessively poor, men into densely populated civilized countries. Nothing is more certain than that the degree of economic progress of mankind will still, in future epochs, be commensurate with the degree of progress of human knowledge. [Emphasis added.]

If only he could see what reason, capital accumulation, division of labor, and trade have wrought! The lesson we should take from Menger is that all government actions that obstruct the formation of capital and free exchange—such as tariffs, to pick a random example—torpedo human welfare.

TGIF: "Liberalism and Capitalism"

Ludwig von Mises's 1927 path-breaking work in political theory speaks to the current generations. In section 5 of his introduction to Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Mises sounds impeccably relevant in describing how the opponents of liberalism and the market economy twist facts that are plainly before our eyes. You'll see how he refuted the absurd claim that capitalism serves only a tiny privileged and exploitative group. The work of most thinkers passes away soon after they do. Not so with Ludwig von Mises.

He began the section by acknowledging what should be obvious. Governments have always interfered with individual freedom, free enterprise, and free markets—in a word, capitalism—in substantial ways. Laissez faire has never been allowed. That does not prove it is impossible, only that people either did not understand the system or did not want its success demonstrated. Mises wrote:

A society in which liberal principles are put into effect is usually called a capitalist society, and the condition of that society, capitalism. Since the economic policy of liberalism has everywhere been only more or less closely approximated in practice, conditions as they are in the world today provide us with but an imperfect idea of the meaning and possible accomplishments of capitalism in full flower. Nevertheless, one is altogether justified in calling our age the age of capitalism, because all that has created the wealth of our time can be traced back to capitalist institutions. It is thanks to those liberal ideas that still remain alive in our society, to what yet survives in it of the capitalist system, that the great mass of our contemporaries can enjoy a standard of living far above that which just a few generations ago was possible only to the rich and especially privileged.

This could have been written yesterday. The fabulous wealth that Americans and the inhabitants of other semi-capitalist countries enjoy would have been unfathomable just a short time ago. Previous generations would laugh at how we use the word poor today. That's what even partial freedom has accomplished. Those lagging behind have been compelled to live without the market economy, to their misfortune. We would all be richer with complete freedom.

To be sure, in the customary rhetoric of the demagogues these facts are represented quite differently. To listen to them, one would think that all progress in the techniques of production redounds to the exclusive benefit of a favored few, while the masses sink ever more deeply into misery. However, it requires only a moment’s reflection to realize that the fruits of all technological and industrial innovations make for an improvement in the satisfaction of the wants of the great masses. All big industries that produce consumers’ goods work directly for their benefit; all industries that produce machines and half-finished products work for them indirectly. The great industrial developments of the last decades, like those of the eighteenth century that are designated by the not altogether happily chosen phrase, “the Industrial Revolution,” have resulted, above all, in a better satisfaction of the needs of the masses. The development of the clothing industry, the mechanization of shoe production, and improvements in the processing and distribution of foodstuffs have, by their very nature, benefited the widest public. It is thanks to these industries that the masses today are far better clothed and fed than ever before. However, mass production provides not only for food, shelter, and clothing, but also for other requirements of the multitude. The press serves the masses quite as much as the motion picture industry, and even the theater and similar strongholds of the arts are daily becoming more and more places of mass entertainment.

As economist Bryan Caplan says, mass consumption requires mass production, and nowhere in history has mass production benefited only a small segment of society. Mises continued:

Nevertheless, as a result of the zealous propaganda of the antiliberal parties, which twists the facts the other way round, people today have come to associate the ideas of liberalism and capitalism with the image of a world plunged into ever increasing misery and poverty. To be sure, no amount of depreciatory propaganda could ever succeed, as the demagogues had hoped, in giving the words “liberal” and “liberalism” a completely pejorative connotation. In the last analysis, it is not possible to brush aside the fact that, in spite of all the efforts of antiliberal propaganda, there is something in these expressions that suggests what every normal person feels when he hears the word “freedom.” Antiliberal propaganda, therefore, avoids mentioning the word “liberalism” too often and prefers the infamies that it attributes to the liberal system to be associated with the term “capitalism.” That word brings to mind a flint-hearted capitalist, who thinks of nothing but his own enrichment, even if that is possible only through the exploitation of his fellow men.

Here, things in some ways have changed for the worse. The illiberals of the so-called left and right tribes have indeed made the word liberal a pejorative. It's become almost as pejorative as capitalism. But as Mises pointed out, one simple and undeniable fact about the market economy is overlooked:

It hardly occurs to anyone, when he forms his notion of a capitalist, that a social order organized on genuinely liberal principles is so constituted as to leave the entrepreneurs and the capitalists only one way to wealth, viz., by better providing their fellow men with what they themselves think they need. Instead of speaking of capitalism in connection with the prodigious improvement in the standard of living of the masses, antiliberal propaganda mentions capitalism only in referring to those phenomena whose emergence was made possible solely because of the restraints that were imposed upon liberalism. No reference is made to the fact that capitalism has placed a delectable luxury as well as a food, in the form of sugar, at the disposal of the great masses. Capitalism is mentioned in connection with sugar only when the price of sugar in a country is raised above the world market price by a cartel. As if such a development were even conceivable in a social order in which liberal principles were put into effect! In a country with a liberal regime, in which there are no tariffs, cartels capable of driving the price of a commodity above the world market price would be quite unthinkable.

In other words, the illiberal pins on the market economy the failings that come from the government's subversion of the market economy.

The links in the chain of reasoning by which antiliberal demagogy succeeds in laying upon liberalism and capitalism the blame for all the excesses and evil consequences of antiliberal policies are as follows: One starts from the assumption that liberal principles aim at promoting the interests of the capitalists and entrepreneurs at the expense of the interests of the rest of the population and that liberalism is a policy that favors the rich over the poor. Then one observes that many entrepreneurs and capitalists, under certain conditions, advocate protective tariffs, and still others—the armaments manufacturers—support a policy of “national preparedness”; and, out of hand, one jumps to the conclusion that these must be “capitalistic” policies.

Note his reference to the military-industrial complex as anti-capitalist. In the Trump-tariff age, Mises's next segment is particularly apt.

In fact, however, the case is quite otherwise. Liberalism is not a policy in the interest of any particular group, but a policy in the interest of all mankind. It is, therefore, incorrect to assert that the entrepreneurs and capitalists have any special interest in supporting liberalism. Their interest in championing the liberal program is exactly the same as that of everyone else. There may be individual cases in which some entrepreneurs or capitalists cloak their special interests in the program of liberalism; but opposed to these are always the special interests of other entrepreneurs or capitalists. The matter is not quite so simple as those who everywhere scent “interests” and “interested parties” imagine. That a nation imposes a tariff on iron, for example, cannot “simply” be explained by the fact that this benefits the iron magnates. There are also persons with opposing interests in the country, even among the entrepreneurs; and, in any case, the beneficiaries of the tariff on iron are a steadily diminishing minority. Nor can bribery be the explanation, for the people bribed can likewise be only a minority; and, besides, why does only one group, the protectionists, do the bribing, and not their opponents, the freetraders?

Mises here rebuts the notion that business is a monolithic class that calls all the shots. In fact, diverse interests vie for favors from the state. One industry's subsidy is many other industries' expense. Beware simple models. They will lead you astray. Mises went on:

The fact is that the ideology that makes the protective tariff possible is created neither by the “interested parties” nor by those bribed by them, but by the ideologists, who give the world the ideas that direct the course of all human affairs. In our age, in which antiliberal ideas prevail, virtually everyone thinks accordingly, just as, a hundred years ago, most people thought in terms of the then prevailing liberal ideology. If many entrepreneurs today advocate protective tariffs, this is nothing more than the form that antiliberalism takes in their case. It has nothing to do with liberalism.

Ideas, not interests, rule the world? We need to pay more attention to this guy.

TGIF: The Income Stagnation Myth

Many people, including some free-market advocates, think Americans are materially worse off today than they were in the 1970s. Some subscribers to that view blame globalization, that is, free trade in goods, which means in labor services.

By any reasonable measure, those people are wrong. Stagnation is a myth. Living standards have never been higher. That goes for an increasing portion of the rest of the world too. After thousands of years, extreme poverty has plummeted to under 10 percent in just a few decades.

This is all well documented. Trade specialist Daniel Griswold writes,

This “nostalgianomics” is misplaced. The American economy is certainly more globalized today than it was decades ago, and just as certainly, most Americans are better off today by any real measure of economic well-being than their counterparts were a half century ago. Increased globalization is one of the main reasons why Americans today have higher living standards than they did in the over-idealized past.

Griswold, whose work at the Cato Institute and George Mason University's Mercatus Center has focused on this demonstrable human progress, lays out the case in his 2023 paper "The Misplaced Nostalgia for a Less Globalized Past." (Chelsea Follett interviewed him recently at HumanProgress.org, a Cato project.)

America and the world differ dramatically from the world of a half-century ago. That in itself is not saying much. Since the Industrial Revolution, which was more gradual than we think, change has been the rule. It takes a state to stifle change, and its efforts usually fail, although it can wreak havoc in the attempt. To favor liberty is to favor change, and even though change disrupts patterns and requires adjustments, most people benefit, especially the next generations. Griswold writes:

Along with technological and scientific advancements, the U.S. economy has become far more deeply integrated with the rest of the world. This integration has been driven both by new technologies that have facilitated the movement of goods, services, and people around the world—such as containerization and the internet—and by major trading nations’ concerted efforts to reduce tariffs and other legal restrictions on those same movements.

Unfortunately, trade restrictions are often popular because many people blame the global division of labor for so many ills. Innovation and changing consumer tastes, however, have been more powerful reasons for change. If people are serious about controlling change, they'd have to call on the government to do much more than impose tariffs. Who wants politicians and bureaucrats to regulate science, technology, and consumer choice? Anyone?

Contrary to popular belief, globalization did not "hollow out" the U.S. economy. U.S. manufacturing output has continued to grow. It's not true that "America makes nothing anymore." But as Griswold writes, technology enables producers to create more and better goods with fewer people. Robots now perform the drudgery that human beings used to endure. That trend began in the 1950s, not the 1970s. New jobs have replaced the old jobs because consumer wants are unlimited and businesses profit by satisfying them. That governments have often led the way in opening global markets is not an argument against globalization. It's an argument against government intervention. Politics should steer clear of economics.

What about the alleged wage stagnation? Griswold writes:

Nostalgianomics’ depiction of American “wage stagnation” since the 1970s is fundamentally flawed in several key ways. First, the most typical indicator of such stagnation—U.S. production and nonsupervisory workers’ average inflation-adjusted hourly earnings—relies on an overstated measure of U.S. inflation that makes Americans’ real-wage gains seem smaller over time.

Second, examining only wages excludes nonwage benefits—bonus pay, health insurance, paid leave, contributions to retirement savings, etc.—that have made up an increasing share of total compensation in recent decades.

But hasn't the middle class been shrinking? Actually, it has—but not to worry:

[T]he share of U.S. households earning a middle-class annual income of $35,000 to $100,000 (in 2021 dollars) did indeed shrink since 1979, from 49.1 percent to 39 percent, but so did the share of households earning below $35,000 (from 30.3 percent to 25.2 percent). By contrast, the share of households annually earning more than $100,000 increased from 20.6 percent to 35.8 percent. Thus, the American middle class has shrunk in recent decades—but only due to households getting richer. 

Griswold gives us another way to look at this story.

Even these adjusted income data understate the gains enjoyed by American workers in our more globalized era. In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Cato scholars Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley compare time prices (i.e., how many hours people must work on average to acquire various goods and services) across decades and find that American workers have experienced dramatic gains since the 1970s. In particular, they calculate that the number of hours an average U.S. blue-collar worker would have to work to afford a basket of 35 consumer goods fell by 72.3 percent between 1979 and 2019. [Emphasis added.]

That's a huge increase in real wages.

It doesn't sound like stagnation, does it? And we haven't even talked about the quality improvements of products. Americans who aren't typically thought of as wealthy are richer than the middle and upper classes were in the 1970s. "American workers are better off than in decades past," Griswold writes, "not only because familiar goods have become more affordable but also because new types of products have come on the market and spread rapidly." In the 1970s the chairman of General Motors did not have a powerful computer-cum-phone in his pocket. Griswold:

Those who are nostalgic about life in the 1970s would likely have lived without microwaves, personal computers, and the internet. Those looking back to the 1950s forget or ignore the fact that most homes not only lacked air conditioning and color TV but also lacked dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers.

More could be said, but that ought to be enough to dispel the myth of stagnation. (For more, see Griswold's data-rich paper.) The myth may be oddly appealing to certain free-market advocates because it seems to allow them to say to America's rulers, "Statism harms the middle class and poor while benefitting the rich!" But whether or not stagnation has occurred is an empirical, not an ideological matter. If market advocates ignore the facts, they sacrifice their credibility.

The fact is that despite government interference and favoritism (such as central banking, regulation, taxes, subsidies, tariffs, etc.), profit-driven, consumer-serving market forces will increase, within limits, general well-being. Sure, we would have been richer without the intervention, but markets, like Timex watches, can "take a licking and keep on ticking." Acknowledging that we'd have been even better off is not equivalent to saying that incomes have stagnated for the last half-century. That's nonsense. So is the claim that wages have not kept pace with productivity growth or that labor's "share of national output" has shrunk. (See Gene Epstein's lecture at the Mises Institute on these points.)

It's self-defeating to deny what's right before our eyes.

The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration's abduction and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old green-card holder and permanent legal resident of the United States, is horrifying not just for him and his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, but as a sign of things to come. Khalil, who is a Syrian-born Algerian of Palestinian descent, has been detained pending deportation without being charged with any crime against persons or property, but because he engaged in speech and other peaceful activities on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. He was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time.

The government says Khalil's "presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." That's absurd. It also says Khalil supports Hamas but provides no evidence. That is all outrageously vague, which is how authoritarian governments always operate. Even speech supporting Hamas is protected under the Supreme Court's 1969 Brandenburg decision (not to mention natural law). If he's suspected of committing a specific crime, the government should charge him and give him his day in court. Instead, Khalil was handcuffed and seized at his New York City home and taken to Louisiana where he is to appear before an immigration judge.

However, the system of checks and balances is not dead yet. According to Reuters, "U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman had temporarily blocked Mahmoud Khalil's deportation [last] week, and extended the prohibition on Wednesday in a written order following a hearing in Manhattan federal court to allow himself more time to consider whether the arrest was unconstitutional."

It should be noted that the Trump action is a predictable result of the premises that free-immigration opponents subscribe to. Defenders of the action like Secretary of State Marco Rubio hold that Khalil never had a right to be in the United States but was merely permitted initial entry as a guest. Therefore, Rubio and others argue, the government can revoke that permission retroactively, notwithstanding his change in status from student-visa holder to green-card holder.

That's where bad premises take you.

TGIF: Say No to a Sovereign Wealth Fund

Donald Trump wants to create a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). It's a bad idea if your standard is freedom, free enterprise, and free markets. That's not Trump's standard, but we already knew that.

A sovereign wealth fund is a government-run investment program. Where does the money come from? In the private sector, people save money (defer consumption) and let entrepreneurs and capital owners (perhaps including themselves) use it to produce goods and services that serve consumers sooner or later. They do so because they anticipate a worthwhile future return (interest, dividends, capital gains) that will enable them to consume more than they could have otherwise.

What about the government? Governments with SWFs typically used budget surpluses to get them going. We might ask why those governments didn't cut taxes and spending instead. After all, the government had taken in more money than it required to cover its spending. If you look at this from the politicians' and bureaucrats' point of view, the answer is obvious. They like using other people's coerced money for social engineering.

As for the U.S. government, it has not had a budget surplus in ages. It doesn't have money sitting around with nothing to do. Its formal debt is larger than the GDP, and its unfunded future liabilities from the entitlement programs are humongous. It faces daunting annual budget deficits way into the future, with interest on the debt a rising budget item. Is Trump proposing to borrow money to stock the SWF?

To put it mildly, it's a bad time to set up a SWF, which is not to say there is a good time. Instead, it's the right time to massively cut spending, shrink the government, let the taxpayers spend their money as they prefer, and retire the debt. (A good case can be made for repudiating the debt. People who chose to lend money to the government relied on its power to tax, that is, to aggress. They voluntarily took a risk. With no debt to repay, the government would have less of an excuse to tax us. That would be a boon. I don't expect Trump to repudiate the debt, well not directly, though monetary inflation would bring a partial and implicit repudiation since it would be repaid in dollars that buy less than when the money was borrowed. This has happened before.)

"The idea that Washington should set up an investment fund when it can’t even manage its own budget is laughable at best and dangerous at worst," writes  the Cato Institue's Romina Bocci in "The Fool’s Gold of a US Sovereign Wealth Fund."

Some people say that the government could finance a SWF by selling assets such as land, raw materials, and buildings. But that answer raises other issues. If the government sells off assets, it could do other things with the money: namely, pay off debt or cut taxes and spending. One might also ask if selling assets is appropriate. Shouldn't government land be opened to homesteading as it should have been long ago?

Any dollars the government invests, however it procures them, could have been invested by private individuals. For example, when the government pays off a Treasury bill, the holder has cash to invest privately. As everyone should realize, the government ultimately obtains money and resources only by taking it from producers. The government is a transfer machine.

Here's another question: do we want the government to be a player in the capital markets? Emphatically not! That's why Cato's Romina Boccia describes an SWF as not just laughable but dangerous. "[W]hy should the government be in the business of managing investment portfolios when private capital markets already allocate resources far more efficiently?"

Any presidential administration will bring its political agenda to its investment program. A Harris administration would have "invested" in so-called green enterprises. (This has been a fiasco in the past. See the Solyndra case.) Trump's program would undoubtedly embody his belligerent nationalist, industrial-policy program. We can only shudder.

More generally, a government fund administrator would be different from a private investor. Anyone who has read Ludwig von Mises's, classic Bureaucracy will know that. Apart from the president's political agenda, a bureaucrat would only be playing entrepreneur. Since he would not be risking his own capital and would not personally profit or lose from his decisions, he would face different incentives from his private counterpart, who would face bankruptcy. Mises and F. A. Hayek also made this point when they refuted the socialist economists who argued that government planners could mimic the market.

As Boccia writes, an SWF "would invite political interference in capital markets, opening the door to cronyism, favoritism and inefficiency. Given Washington’s track record, does anyone believe that a government-run investment fund would be free from political meddling?" Her example of such political meddling is the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research gives another example in "Scrapped Ventilators and Sovereign Wealth: Why Central Planners Shouldn’t Invest."

Back to the drawing board, Mr. Trump.

TGIF: A New Washington Post?

If Jeff Bezos is as good as his word, the advocates of full liberty will owe him a standing ovation. As everyone knows by now, Amazon.com founder Bezos, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time—a man whose profit-making activities have benefitted mankind worldwide—has announced that the editorial page of his newspaper, the Washington Post, will be devoted to promoting the free market and personal liberty. Before Bezos bought the Post in 2013, it was a leading champion of government intervention throughout the economy, which means throughout our lives. If he consistently follows through, this will be quite a change.

As he put it in a memo to the staff, which was posted on X:

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

I'll get one of my pet peeves out of the way. Bezos's two pillars are one: individual liberty. Nothing is more personal than how we make and spend our money. My decision to earn my living as a plumber is a personal decision. When the government forbids me to do that without a license, that violates my personal liberty. An individual is an integrated whole.

Bezos continued:

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

He's got a point. Some people will be bothered that Bezos says "viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others." That sounds like he won't let his op-ed editor publish regular or guest columnists who oppose freedom and free markets. (No columnist has resigned to my knowledge.) It's not just the unsigned editorials that will take up the cause. Isn't that narrow and intolerant? Bezos reasonably points out that through the internet, the full range of views is at everyone's fingertips. So why is every newspaper obliged to present a smorgasbord of opinion?

His next paragraph is excellent:

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.

How often do you hear it said that ethical ideals, particularly freedom, are practical? Not very. Libertarians have been saying that for a long time, but it hasn't sunk in. Many people believe that freedom is impractical and that the government must routinely override it to maintain order or other values. That's balderdash, but many people have been taken in by the self-serving line.

Bezos wrapped up:

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

A couple of points: Bezos is accused of sucking up to Trump. But freedom and free enterprise—which means, among other things, unobstructed global trade and the free movement of people—are not pillars of Trumpism. Trumpism is the rule of Trump's autonomous whims, which may face few checks from other power centers. The ability of producers and consumers to plan long-term is at the mercy of his mood. (He might give company X an exemption from a tariff, but he might not.) It's what historian Robert Higgs calls "regime uncertainty," a highly destructive thing. It's not the free market. It's the opposite! We'll have to watch the Post's editorial page closely, but this announcement would be a funny way to win over the MAGA crowd.

I'm left wondering what the page will say about foreign policy. Contrary to popular impression, an interventionist foreign policy must violate freedom and free enterprise. How could it not? If Bezos's Post opposes Trumpian interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East, that will be significant. Full disengagement from those conflicts is imperative in the name of liberty. Trump's plan to build up the military is wrongheaded. As classical liberals (libertarians) have long understood, the warfare state is inimical to liberty.

Abolish Draft Registration, Mr. Trump

During Friday's famous White House meeting, VP Vance criticized Ukrainian President Zelensky for his government's abduction of men from the streets to fight against Russia. Good for Vance. Conscription is one of the worst things a government can do, especially during a war. As a form of slavery, it goes against every libertarian, or classical liberal, principle. It's indecent.

Presumably, President Trump shares Vance's horror. So this is a good time to abolish draft registration here. The penalty for not registering is a maximum five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. President Carter should never have imposed it, and presidents from Reagan onward should have scrapped it. Shame on them for not doing so.

Well, Mr. Trump?

Let's Not "Run after a Share in the Trouble"

Of course “principles,” phrases, and catch-words are always invented to bolster up any policy which anybody wants to recommend. So in this case. The people who have led us on to shut ourselves in, and who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of “isolation.” Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world. When the others are all over ears in trouble, who would not be isolated in freedom from care? When the others are crushed under the burden of militarism, who would not be isolated in peace and industry? When the others are all struggling under debt and taxes, who would not be isolated in the enjoyment of his own earnings for the benefit of his own family? When the rest are all in a quiver of anxiety, lest at a day's notice they may be involved in a social cataclysm, who would not be isolated out of reach of the disaster? What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.

—William Graham Sumner, "The Conquest of the United States by Spain" (1898)

TGIF: The Aim of Classical Liberalism

These are dark days for liberalism. I mean full, across-the-board, laissez-faire free-market, classical liberalism, otherwise known as libertarianism. While some budget-cutting and bureaucracy slimming will probably go through, those steps, though necessary to advance toward liberalism, are not sufficient.

What's conspicuously missing from the regime's activities is a ringing and unmistakable endorsement of full individual liberty, which requires a free-market economy. The imagined dichotomy between economic liberty and personal liberty is a snare and a delusion. What's more personal than how one makes and spends his money? Ominously, we've heard no such endorsement of liberty from the regime.

The cuts in government now being touted might increase liberty, even if unintended; then again, it might not. It depends on how the regime deploys the power and personnel left in place. All signs point to a regime run by a man who sees the theoretically private sector as merely an extension of his domain. A truly liberal program would combine the dramatic shrinking of government with comprehensive deregulation and other market-freeing measures so that private firms could provide the legitimate services that the government ostensibly provides now. For example, eliminating Medicaid would be paired with a radical freeing of the medical market, which would expand services and lower prices. (Admittedly, much deregulation, such as abolishing licensing, would have to occur at the state level.)

Dark days for liberalism are nothing new. That's been the norm for many decades. The economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), one of the greatest liberal champions, lived through them. Throughout his long life he never stopped fighting for freedom and free enterprise, no matter how bleak the outlook. I look to him for encouragement.

Mises was born in what is now Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was educated at the University of Vienna, where he discovered the Austrian school of economics (a line of thought having nothing to do with Austria per se). He left Europe for America in 1940, a wanted man by the Nazis. It seems that being a liberal economist, a prominent anti-socialist, and a descendant of a Jewish family was hazardous to one's health in those days.

In 1927, after living through the catastrophe known as the Great War (later World War I), Mises published his political manifesto, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. He had already published his pathbreaking book The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), which not only integrated money into general economic analysis but also showed that government creation of credit and fiat currency caused the boom-and-bust cycle. Next came Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), which showed once and for all that socialism could never create or sustain a modern large-scale society in which everyone could prosper because private property in the means of production, which socialism forbade, was indispensable for market-price formation and thus economic calculation, without which no one (including bureaucrats) could make rational economizing plans in a world of scarcity. Had Mises retired at that point, our debt to him would have been limitless. Thankfully, he kept working despite the odds. His magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, was published in 1949.

In his introduction to Liberalism, section 4, Mises set out how he saw "the aim of liberalism." Let's look at what he wrote.

There is a widespread opinion that liberalism is distinguished from other political movements by the fact that it places the interests of a part of society—the propertied classes, the capitalists, the entrepreneurs—above the interests of the other classes. This assertion is completely mistaken. Liberalism has always had in view the good of the whole, not that of any special group. It was this that the English utilitarians meant to express—although, it is true, not very aptly—in their famous formula, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Historically, liberalism was the first political movement that aimed at promoting the welfare of all, not that of special groups. Liberalism is distinguished from socialism, which likewise professes to strive for the good of all, not by the goal at which it aims, but by the means that it chooses to attain that goal.

Mises here was identifying a central part of what Adam Smith called the "system of natural liberty." It favored no particular group. Rather, it held out the promise of freedom and hence opportunity for all. (Obviously, it was inconsistently implemented, most horribly through slavery, though slavery had been practiced by virtually all people in virtually all places from time immemorial.) It is liberalism that ushered in the first mass production of all kinds of goods, that is, production for the entire population and not just for the aristocracy. That was revolutionary. The world was never the same afterward.

As for socialism striving for the same goal as liberalism. That was true, at least in theory, until the mid-20th century, when the New Left arose, jettisoned the goal of mass affluence, and substituted the "age of limits," that is, environmentalism.

Mises had in mind, not any good-faith critics, but "those critics of liberalism who reproach it for wanting to promote, not the general welfare, but only the special interests of certain classes." He thought they were "unfair and ignorant" because by "choosing this mode of attack, they show that they are inwardly well aware of the weakness of their own case. They snatch at poisoned weapons because they cannot otherwise hope for success."

For example, those critics accuse liberals of callousness because they oppose government interference with production. Mises showed that criticism to be baseless.

If a doctor shows a patient who craves food detrimental to his health the perversity of his desire, no one will be so foolish as to say: “The doctor does not care for the good of the patient; whoever wishes the patient well must not grudge him the enjoyment of relishing such delicious food.” Everyone will understand that the doctor advises the patient to forgo the pleasure that the enjoyment of the harmful food affords solely in order to avoid injuring his health.

Who would disagree?

But as soon as the matter concerns social policy, one is prone to consider it quite differently. When the liberal advises against certain popular measures because he expects harmful consequences from them, he is censured as an enemy of the people, and praise is heaped on the demagogues who, without consideration of the harm that will follow, recommend what seems to be expedient for the moment.

Continuing his medical metaphor:

Reasonable action is distinguished from unreasonable action by the fact that it involves provisional sacrifices. The latter are only apparent sacrifices, since they are outweighed by the favorable consequences that later ensue. The person who avoids tasty but unwholesome food makes merely a provisional, a seeming sacrifice. The outcome—the nonoccurrence of injury to his health—shows that he has not lost, but gained. To act in this way, however, requires insight into the consequences of one’s action. The demagogue takes advantage of this fact. He opposes the liberal, who calls for provisional and merely apparent sacrifices, and denounces him as a hard-hearted enemy of the people, meanwhile setting himself up as a friend of humanity. In supporting the measures he advocates, he knows well how to touch the hearts of his hearers and to move them to tears with allusions to want and misery.

Mises is right in describing the demagogue, who makes promises to the economically illiterate votes—prescribing measures that will bring general misery later. With the government's debt at over 100 percent of GDP and looming budget deficits of $2 trillion or more for the future, who would argue with him?

Antiliberal policy is a policy of capital consumption. It recommends that the present be more abundantly provided for at the expense of the future. It is in exactly the same case as the patient of whom we have spoken. In both instances a relatively grievous disadvantage in the future stands in opposition to a relatively abundant momentary gratification. To talk, in such a case, as if the question were one of hard-heartedness versus philanthropy is downright dishonest and untruthful. It is not only the common run of politicians and the press of the antiliberal parties that are open to such a reproach. Almost all the writers of the school of Sozialpolitik [interventionist social policy] have made use of this underhanded mode of combat.

The interventionists and socialists heap this abuse on liberals as a way to distract the public from the fact that the statists seek power over people's freedom in the market and society at large. The statists want to give orders for the people's own good. Really?

That there is want and misery in the world is not, as the average newspaper reader, in his dullness, is only too prone to believe, an argument against liberalism. It is precisely want and misery that liberalism seeks to abolish, and it considers the means that it proposes the only suitable ones for the achievement of this end. Let whoever thinks that he knows a better, or even a different, means to this end adduce the proof. The assertion that the liberals do not strive for the good of all members of society, but only for that of special groups, is in no way a substitute for this proof.

We must add that it is liberalization and globalization—liberty—that have nearly eradicated extreme poverty in the world. You can look it up. Mises would not be surprised. But remember, he was writing in the 1920s.

The fact that there is want and misery would not constitute an argument against liberalism even if the world today followed a liberal policy. It would always be an open question whether still more want and misery might not prevail if other policies had been followed. In view of all the ways in which the functioning of the institution of private property is curbed and hindered in every quarter today by antiliberal policies, it is manifestly quite absurd to seek to infer anything against the correctness of liberal principles from the fact that economic conditions are not, at present, all that one could wish. In order to appreciate what liberalism and capitalism have accomplished, one should compare conditions as they are at present with those of the Middle Ages or of the first centuries of the modern era. What liberalism and capitalism could have accomplished had they been allowed free rein can be inferred only from theoretical considerations.

In 2025, in light of the dramatic fall in poverty and the improvement in the other markers of well-being, we can readily see, if we look, what Mises was writing about: social cooperation founded on individual freedom, private property, the division of labor, voluntary exchange, and human creativity would empower people to live the kind of lives they want to live—unless they want to live as predators, which most people don't.

TGIF: Free the Housing Market!

Economist Bryan Caplan has done it again. His latest graphic nonfiction book is Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, illustrated by Ady Branzei and published by the Cato Institute. (His first was Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.)

Caplan's target is a worthy one: zoning and other (anti-)housing regulations, which damage many people in various ways, some that will surprise you. While he could have written a conventional book, it almost certainly would have been dreadfully dull and accessible to only a few academics and policy wonks. That is no reflection on Caplan, an excellent writer. It's in the nature of the subject. I probably don't need to persuade many people of that statement.

So what's the problem? All state and local governments suppress the supply of houses and apartments throughout the country—and the problem has gotten worse for most of the country. Let's be clear: many more dwellings of all types, including high-rise apartments, would exist and be much cheaper were it not for government prohibitions, requirements, and other cost-boosting impediments.

The housing shortage, then, is not caused by greedy construction executives trying to squeeze buyers and renters into poverty or by immigrants. It's caused by do-gooder politicians and bureaucrats along with members of the public who just don't get it. Construction companies would love to build, sell, and, rent more units, which would drive down the price. Governments won't let them. That's criminal.

Basic economics teaches that market prices result from supply and demand. If government restricts the supply of something people want, whether or not by design, prices will rise. For housing, this is most aggravated in the most desirable parts of the country, where the demand for homes is high because of the many amenities, including high-paying jobs. In a free market, high prices beckon new competitors and increase supply, thereby lowering prices. It's a beautiful process when allowed to work.

Few things are more certain than the relationship between supply and demand on the one hand and price on the other. Yet many people don't get it.

According to Caplan, "Americans spend about 20% of their budget on housing." If builders were free to build, the average price of housing would fall to half of what it is today, he writes. This would raise living standards appreciably for nearly everyone. The effect on lower-income people would be stunning. Many aspects of life would dramatically improve: "the labor market, poverty, social mobility, family formation, long commutes, the environment, and the American dream." (See the book for details.)

The benefits would be so immense that Caplan calls housing deregulation a "panacea": so many problems would be alleviated. This includes not just obvious ones, such as the barrier to job mobility. Under current conditions the higher wage in the big coastal cities is not enough to offset the exorbitant price of houses and apartments. Why would a person relocate if he wouldn't be able to afford a home near his workplace? But it's not only that frustrated person who loses. Locations with higher pay are that way because worker productivity is higher. If regulation locks people out of high-productivity locations, everyone loses because fewer goods will be produced.

Housing deregulation would also relieve problems less obviously connected to housing. For example, with freedom the number of construction jobs would explode all over the country. That would primarily benefit young men without college diplomas, who now have a tough time getting good-paying jobs. Such unemployment or underemployment creates all kinds of problems. Caplan supplies more examples to justify his use of the descriptor panacea.

So who's against housing deregulation? For one, bureaucrats corrupted by the social-engineering mentality. They think they know better than market participants how cities and suburbs ought to look. Many regular people also oppose new housing developments. We usually think that the NIMBY crowd is trying to protect the value of their houses. However, Caplan doesn't believe that narrow economic interest is the best answer. For one thing, renters tend to oppose development too. As he puts it, "Political scientists have long known that objective self-interest poorly predicts voting. Self-interest poorly predicts partisanship. Self-interest poorly predicts issue views."

Then why do so many people oppose housing deregulation? Caplan has three explanations: economic ignorance, innumeracy, and status-quo bias. This adds up to an attitude that minimizes or overlooks the benefits of more housing and exaggerates the downside. Caplan presents reasons why housing-deregulation foes ought to change their mind: namely, they have much to gain that they never thought. For instance, cheaper housing would mean that many people's grown children could move out of their basements, start families, and afford housing close by. Deregulation would also mean that people could enjoy windfalls from the new freedom to subdivide their single-family-home lots for multifamily dwellings. How many people would rank those things over preserving the status quo?

This does not mean new building would have no downside, such as parking problems and road congestion. Caplan responds that these problems can and should be addressed in ways other than suppressing the supply of housing. What other ways? By letting the price system work. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there's no such thing as truly free roads and parking. Congestion and aggravation are costs. Peak market pricing is a better answer than suppressing housing supply. Caplan discusses targeted "keyhole policies" that might be politically necessary to win adherents to the cause of house-building freedom.

In sum, he shows why people who embrace different approaches to social questions—utilitarians, egalitarians, cost-benefit trackers, and libertarians—can unite over housing deregulation.

Caplan is onto something. He demonstrates—graphically—that freedom really works.

 

National Greatness

“A nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom. But though history, experience and reasoning confirm these ideas; yet all- powerful delusion has been able to make the people of every nation lend a helping hand in putting on their own fetters and rivetting their own chains, and in this service delusion always employs men too great to speak the truth, and yet too powerful to be doubted. Their statements are believed—their projects adopted—their ends answered and the deluded subjects of all this artifice are left to passive obedience through life, and to entail a condition of unqualified non-resistance to a ruined posterity.”

—Abraham Bishop (1800)

TGIF: Emergency! Emergency?

Look, as a libertarian I think the list of federal entities to be abolished soon should include the:

Consumer Financial Protection Board, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve System, Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Agriculture, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Agency for International Development, Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the "community," Consumer Product Safety Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Drug Enforcement Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Environmental Protection, Agency, Federal Emergency Management, Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Treasury, Department of Energy, Library of Congress, Department of the Interior, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and all so-called government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.).

That's a hastily compiled shortlist. You'll find more here. The absence of an agency is not to be construed as approval. I apologize if your favorite candidate for deletion is not there. No malice was intended. Perhaps some parts of the departments of Defense and Justice will need to be retained pending the full liberation of the free market. I'll leave that for another time.

Moreover, the national government should cease sending taxpayer money to "private" organizations around the world whether they do mischief—which I imagine dFescribes most of them—or not. In fact, it should stop taking the taxpayers' money and sending it anywhere. Government contracts should be viewed with suspicion.

While I want these agencies and departments zeroed out and their employees freed for productive work, as a libertarian I am also concerned with how this should be done. My worry is not over the government employees being retired. The government should not be a jobs program. Every government employee, who is paid through the theft known as taxation, could be producing goods in the market economy, where consumers rule through consent and exchange. Consumers have more agency than taxpayers do and will be able to let former government employees know whether they are productive or not. If the privatized workers are unproductive in some endeavors, they will have to find others. That's how the free market works.

In judging Trump's frenzy of activity, we should remember that he has not enunciated a coherent vision of the relationship between the individual and government. We can tell that he's a nationalist social engineer who sees the theoretically private sector as his to manipulate as he thinks necessary. Look at his use of tariffs, which interfere with private trade. Even using the tariff threat as a bargaining tool is objectionable, however. How, for example, are entrepreneurs to plan their businesses if any plan could be upset tomorrow by a presidential tariff threat that may or may not be carried out for who-knows-how-long? When Javier Milei slashed the government in Argentina, he had already set out a free-market vision, which allowed reasonable expectations to form. Compare that to Trump, whose mind must resemble an unmade bed.

Although we can enjoy the panic experienced by the advocates of big government, who fear losing power and access to our wealth, process does matter. Even the seeming chaos might be satisfying. But it's short-sighted. If someone were to seize control of the national government in a coup and abolish Congress and the courts along with the federal agencies, I'd be concerned. The reason is not that I like those branches; it's that as long as political power exists, we're better off if it is divided at the federal level and between the federal and state levels. Concentrated power is dangerous. No novel insight there.

Congress long ago began to create independent agencies—the so-called alphabet agencies—with the power to regulate our peaceful pursuits. As many people have long pointed out, Congress has in effect illegally created a fourth branch of government by fiat, not by constitutional amendment, which seems to be required. That needs to be reversed—but not autocratically, unless a specific statute permits it.

The new president has been signing executive orders apace. Some of them are to be applauded (for instance, the end of DEI, the ban on censorship); but some not so much (the attempted abolition of constitutionally acknowledged birthright citizenship). He's done some of this by declaring national emergencies, which is doubly worrying. The record of governments abusing people after declaring emergencies is horrible.

Over many years Congress has given the executive branch the unchecked power to declare emergencies, authorizing the exercise of extraordinary powers. Invoking an emergency is not new with Trump. (See the recent pandemic.) People who liked that power when other presidents exercised it now object. That's politics for you.

Trump indeed has declared emergencies related to immigration, energy, and trade. Where are these emergencies? They are invented. The immigrants are not a hostile foreign army; they are workers looking for better lives. The unsightly border mess could be fixed by legalizing immigration. On energy, U.S. oil and gas production is high, which is reflected in its prices. He doesn't need an emergency to get Congress to free the energy market. World trade delivers to consumers a cornucopia of affordable goods. That's no emergency requiring new taxes. Trump's emergencies are bogus excuses.

Jacob Sullum of Reason reports that libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin demonstrates justifiable concern over Trump's emergency-mongering:

As George Mason law professor Ilya Somin notes, "an emergency is a sudden, unexpected crisis, not an ongoing policy issue on which the president wants to redirect resources in ways not authorized by Congress." The situation at the southern border "doesn't even come close to qualifying" as an emergency, Somin argues, especially since "illegal entries are down to their lowest level since August 2020, when the rate was unusually low due to the Covid pandemic." If the president "can declare an emergency and tap a vast range of special emergency powers anytime he wants for any reason he wants," Somin warns, "that makes a hash of the whole concept of an emergency, raises serious constitutional problems, and creates a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a single person."

Sullum and Somin rightly point out that Trump's invocation of the notorious 1798 Alien Enemies Act and his labeling of drug cartels as terrorist organizations is ominous. Drug cartels are the products of U.S. drug prohibition and its inevitable black market.

For more insight let's turn to one of the great presidency watchers: Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, author of The Cult of the Presidency. In a blog post the other day Healy identified good, bad, and ominous actions in Trump's conduct. Lots of things Joe Biden did by executive order surely needed undoing. Unfortunately, that's not all Trump has done.

"[A]t some point," Healy writes, "you have to ask yourself, is this any way to run a country?" He goes on:

In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton insisted that “energy in the executive” would foster “steady administration of the laws.” But living with the turbocharged modern presidency means whipsawing between extremes as the law changes radically whenever the office changes hands. That system isn’t just stupid, it’s dangerous: By raising the stakes of the transfer of power, it risks making every presidential election a “Flight 93 election.”

He goes on to say how this threat might be addressed:

There’s no shortage of smart legislative proposals for reining in presidential power. If we don’t want the president to be able to unlock new statutory powers by saying the magic words “national emergency,” Congress could amend the National Emergencies Act so those powers quickly expire unless Congress votes to approve the national emergency declaration.

Sen. Rand Paul’s REPUBLIC Act aimed to do just that—while also blocking the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as a trade-war weapon. Other bills from Senator Paul and Sen. Mike Lee would require congressional approval for presidentially imposed trade restrictions. But while the REPUBLIC Act cleared committee last September, none of these proposals even made it to the floor—let alone the president’s desk.

That would be a good—if modest—start. But we have to start somehow and somewhere. Those of us who want (at least) a radical downsizing of federal domestic and foreign powers should not get so caught up in current events that we ignore the long-term dangers and precedents of an autocratic presidency.

Abolish Antitrust!

"That there is inequality of ability or monetary income on the free market should surprise no one. As we have seen above, men are not “equal” in their tastes, interests, abilities, or locations. Resources are not distributed “equally” over the earth.16 This inequality or diversity in abilities and distribution of resources insures inequality of income on the free market. And, since a man’s monetary assets are derived from his and his ancestors’ abilities in serving consumers on the market, it is not surprising that there is inequality of monetary wealth as well.

"The term 'free competition,' then, will prove misleading unless it is interpreted to mean free action, i.e., freedom to compete or not to compete as the individual wills.

"It should be clear from the foregoing discussion that there is nothing particularly reprehensible or destructive of consumer freedom in the establishment of a 'monopoly price' or in a cartel action. A cartel action, if it is a voluntary one, cannot injure freedom of competition and, if it proves profitable, benefits rather than injures the consumers. It is perfectly consonant with a free society, with individual self-sovereignty, and with the earning of money through serving consumers.

As Benjamin R. Tucker brilliantly concluded in dealing with the problem of cartels and competition:

'That the right to cooperate is as unquestionable as the right to compete; the right to compete involves the right to refrain from competition; cooperation is often a method of competition, and competition is always, in the larger view, a method of cooperation ... each is a legitimate, orderly, non-invasive exercise of the individual will under the social law of equal liberty....

'Viewed in the light of these irrefutable propositions, the trust, then, like every other industrial combination endeavoring to do collectively nothing but what each member of the combination might fully endeavor to do individually, is, per se, an unimpeachable institution. To assail or control or deny this form of cooperation on the ground that it is itself a denial of competition is an absurdity. It is an absurdity, because it proves too much. The trust is a denial of competition in no other sense than that in which competition itself is a denial of competition. (Italics ours.) The trust denies competition only by producing and selling more cheaply than those outside of the trust can produce and sell; but in that sense every successful individual competitor also denies competition.... The fact is that there is one denial of competition which is the right of all, and that there is another denial of competition which is the right of none. All of us, whether out of a trust or in it, have a right to deny competition by competing, but none of us, whether in a trust or out of it, have a right to deny competition by arbitrary decree, by interference with voluntary effort, by forcible suppression of initiative.'

"This is not to say, of course, that joint co-operation or combination is necessarily 'better than' competition among firms. We simply conclude that the relative extent of areas within or between firms on the free market will be precisely that proportion most conducive to the well-being of consumers and producers alike. This is the same as our previous conclusion that the size of a firm will tend to be established at the level most serviceable to the consumers."

—Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State

TGIF: Free Speech Restored?

Don't get accustomed to me praising Donald Trump, but exceptions will occur now and then. Trump is no principled friend of liberty, not by a long shot. Judging by most of his actions and words, he recognizes no impenetrable boundary between the government and the private sector, the market economy. We may infer that he sees the central government and the country itself as a company that he runs with few restraints. He seems to imagine himself as the chairman and CEO of the United States, with only a toothlessly subservient board of directors. I need only point to his trade and immigration policies to support this inference. It shows itself in many other ways.

Trump is a collectivist of the nationalist variety. He's a devotee of industrial policy, in which the central government aspires to guide the free-enterprise economy in lots of ways. For him, free-ish enterprise may be permitted when it doesn't conflict with his preferences—but only then. He decides. Put another way, he is an advocate of the corporate state in an earlier sense of the term. It doesn't mean that government does the bidding of large corporations. Rather, it means the nation-state is seen as a single organism with one set of interests. Society is the body (Latin: corpus), and the ruler—Trump—is the head.

But (cautious) credit should be given where it is due. Before that, however, something must be said about how even good things are done. Government by executive order and emergency declaration is ominous. The division of powers and the checks and balances among the three branches have at least the potential to stave off government threats to liberty. Those checks should be strengthened. The Department of Education and USAID, to name just two federal entities, should unquestionably be abolished! But is autocratic decree a good thing? It's certainly satisfying to see employees and supporters of those agencies panic over their closing, but the issue is bigger than that. The next president may undo any pro-liberty decrees and issue new ones inimical to liberty. Precedents matter.  An imperial presidency, one that can amend the Constitution unilaterally, does not serve freedom and the market economy.

Now for the credit. On Jan. 20, 2025, shortly after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" in response to one of the worst things Joe Biden and his administration did. They had effectively suppressed the speech of Americans by threatening—at least implicitly but in no uncertain terms—private social-media companies if they did not suppress lawful posts about the Covid pandemic and the Hunter Biden laptop. In other words, as a judge put it, Biden set up an Orwellian ministry of truth to crack down on dissent and inconvenient facts. Lawful speech was smeared as disinformation and misinformation, perhaps of foreign origin. Even true statements were to be suppressed, however subtly, if they undermined confidence in the government's objectives. Individuals were maligned.

That is not supposed to happen in a free society, where freedom of speech and press are enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which theoretically, if not actually, restrains the exercise of government power. The government may not censor; therefore it may not use private firms to do what it may not do. The government's bad conduct was challenged in court, initially successfully, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the free-speech advocates, claiming they had no standing. (See Murthy v. Missouri.)

So kudos to Trump for issuing an executive order to prevent such misconduct from happening again. The executive order spoke the truth with its opening words:

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.  Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.  Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.  Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

The order goes on to declare that it is now the policy to

ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;

ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; and

identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.

It then declares that "no Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to ... this order."

It also directs that the "Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of executive departments and agencies, shall investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order and prepare a report ... with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken based on the findings of the report."

Why did I give only cautious credit? Here's why: "Media outlets must not cave to Trump’s lawfare." As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), put it. "What happens to freedom of the press when the president can bully media outlets he doesn’t like into paying big money to end his meritless lawsuits against them? Buckle up. We’re about to find out." FIRE points with alarm to "Trump’s dictatorial appetite to use lawfare to silence or punish outlets that publish content he doesn’t like." 

This is ominous. With Trump, there will be no rest.

Back on the Bob Murphy Show!

TGIF: Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States....

—U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV

Donald Trump says he wants a "revolution of common sense." If he means it, he will abandon his unilateral attempt to cancel birthright citizenship, which the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, expressly acknowledges. The opening words of that amendment have a common-sense meaning that requires grotesque mental contortions to evade.

Opponents of birthright citizenship will seek refuge in the amendment's legislative history and case law, but I don't see how that trumps the plain meaning of words. The amendment says that if you were born in the United States, you are a citizen unless a parent was a foreign diplomat. It's worth remembering that the debate over birthright citizenship is merely one part of the all-out assault on the freedom to move and work that Trump is spearheading. Since violations of this freedom affect foreigners as well as Americans, the controversy is worth paying attention to.

The Constitution does not instruct its readers on how to interpret its clauses. Common sense is called for, and no one applied common sense to the law more clearly than the 19th-century libertarian and constitutional scholar Lysander Spooner. Spooner was also an abolitionist during the slave era. He insisted, contrary to his fellow abolitionists, that the constitutional text did not sanction slavery. He spelled this out in The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.

Spooner insisted that the language of a constitution must not be interpreted contrary to the very purpose of the document itself unless the language was so unambiguous as to preclude any other interpretation. In the American case, a pro-liberty reading is required if it is not expressly ruled out. He proceeded to show that the purportedly pro-slave language of the Constitution had to be construed in a way that was consistent with individual natural rights and natural law because the purported aim of the Constitution was to protect natural rights. Nowhere in the original Constitution were the words slave or slavery used. He wasn't arguing that the framers did not intend to protect slavery. Rather, his point was that no one was bound by what the framers meant but did not say. That makes perfect sense. If those men wanted to say something, they should have said it. What stopped them? We have no obligation to perpetuate injustice.

"[I]n the interpretation of all statutes and constitutions," Spooner wrote, "the ordinary legal rules of interpretation be observed. The most important of these rules, and the one to which it will be necessary constantly to refer, is the one that all language must be construed 'strictly' in favor of natural right." (Spooner's emphasis.)

Also: "The legal rules of interpretation, heretofore laid down, imperatively require this preference of the right, over the wrong, in all cases where a word is susceptible of different meanings."

And "[A]n innocent meaning must be given to all words that are susceptible of it."

Surely, Spooner would have applied this principle to the opening words of the 14th Amendment. It's unclear what meaning, other than the natural-right meaning, could possibly be given to those words. Some will argue that the post-Civil War amendment was only meant to recognize the citizenship of the freed slaves. So why didn't they say that? We are not bound by a meaning that contradicts natural law if the text can be read otherwise. .

How do we know the plain meaning is consistent with natural rights and natural law? We know because only under the plain meaning will the state leave people alone who have violated no one's rights. That was the original American way. If you did not aggress against persons or property, you were unlikely to come into contact with government officers.

If Trump has his way, people who have harmed no innocent persons or property could be rounded up by armed government agents and exiled. That would violate those people's rights. Therefore, the pro-liberty meaning is the common-sense meaning and must prevail if the Constitution is to fulfill what we are told is its purpose: "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"

As Spooner put it, "[I]n order that the contract of government may be valid and lawful, it must purport to authorize nothing inconsistent with natural justice, and men’s natural rights. It cannot lawfully authorize government to destroy or take from men their natural rights: for natural rights are inalienable, and can no more be surrendered to government—which is but an association of individuals—than to a single individual."

The case presented here might seem to justify no more than legal residency. What about citizenship? To take that step, one need only consider that a legal resident is subject to the government's power to tax and regulate. Since his bid for exemption from U.S. government impositions would not be recognized, we are forced to the second-best disposition, namely, that the legal resident ought to have a say—as small as it is—over government policy, that is, the privileges and immunities of citizens. Those who are concerned that this could bring growth in an already overgrown government should turn their attention directly to the size and scope of the state, rather than seeking to limit individual rights. Besides, the offspring of American citizens have not exactly been genetically or culturally predisposed against big government, have they? Immigrants are not responsible for America's falling score on the world indices of freedom.

Ironically, anti-immigration action is what would make the government bigger and more intrusive. If you ask the state to "protect" the culture from foreigners, don't be surprised when you wake up in bed with a monster.

The Constitution has serious basic flaws, as Spooner himself would later elaborate in "The Constitution of No Authority," but as long as it's the supreme law of the land, liberty's advocates are obliged to push the interpretation that most constrains the state and expands freedom.

TGIF: Why McKinley?

Now what will hasten the day when our present advantages will wear out and when we shall come down to the conditions of the older and densely populated nations? The answer is: war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery—in a word, imperialism. —William Graham Sumner

In his inaugural address on Monday, Donald Trump paid tribute to only one former president, William McKinley, No. 25, who Trump said "made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent." He praised the Republican McKinley in touting his plan to take control, militarily if necessary, of the Panama Canal. McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901 and succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, began the expansionist process that led to the canal's construction. (No doubt Greenland was on Trump's mind too.)

Perhaps Trump's choice of a president to honor was revealing for another reason. McKinley took America to war against Spain in 1898. As the late historian Ralph Raico wrote, the war against Spain was "our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since." It was the war that inaugurated the American empire and made the United States a Pacific power. The U.S. government took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, where it savagely repressed an independence movement from 1899 to 1902. It established influence over but did not annex Cuba.

The country burst with pride over America's new world-power status. Well, not everyone. Some advocates of the old republicanism, with its pillars of individual liberty, free enterprise, and barely noticeable government objected. One of the best-known among them was William Graham Sumner, the Yale professor of sociology and laissez-faire liberal. In 1898 Sumner delivered a lecture at Yale with the shocking title "The Conquest of the United States by Spain." After the stunning and quick military victory over the old Spanish empire, what could Sumner have meant?

He started by giving a preview:

Spain was the first, for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialistic states. The United States, by its historical origin, its traditions, and its principles, is the chief representative of the revolt and reaction against that kind of a state. I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol. We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies.

Sumner was asking: for what shall it profit a nation if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul?

Sumner drew the stark contrast between Spain, "the first, for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialistic states," and the United States, "the chief representative of the revolt and reaction against that kind of a state." Empire versus Republic. Which way, America?

I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol. We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies.

Sumner was a secular prophet who respected the law of identity. A republic can not take on the features of an empire and remain unchanged in other ways.

Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity which have brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. They are seductive, especially upon the first view and the most superficial judgment, and therefore it cannot be denied that they are very strong for popular effect. They are delusions, and they will lead us to ruin unless we are hard-headed enough to resist them.

He warned of the perils to liberty from the unintended consequences of foreign adventurism.

We talk about “liberty” all the time in a big and easy way, as if liberty was a thing that men could have if they want it, and to any extent to which they want it. It is certain that a very large part of human liberty consists simply in the choice either to do a thing or to let it alone. If we decide to do it, a whole series of consequences is entailed upon us in regard to which it is exceedingly difficult, or impossible, for us to exercise any liberty at all. The proof of this from the case before us is so clear and easy that I need spend no words upon it. Here, then, you have the reason why it is a rule of sound statesmanship not to embark on an adventurous policy. A statesman could not be expected to know in advance that we should come out of the war with the Philippines on our hands, but it belongs to his education to warn him that a policy of adventure and of gratuitous enterprise would be sure to entail embarrassments of some kind. What comes to us in the evolution of our own life and interests, that we must meet; what we go to seek which lies beyond that domain is a waste of our energy and a compromise of our liberty and welfare. If this is not sound doctrine, then the historical and social sciences have nothing to teach us which is worth any trouble.

But that was not all.

There is another observation, however, about the war which is of far greater importance: that is, that it was a gross violation of self-government. We boast that we are a self-governing people, and in this respect, particularly, we compare ourselves with pride with older nations. What is the difference after all? The Russians, whom we always think of as standing at the opposite pole of political institutions, have self-government, if you mean by it acquiescence in what a little group of people at the head of the government agree to do. The war with Spain was precipitated upon us headlong, without reflection or deliberation, and without any due formulation of public opinion. Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant. Everything was done to make us throw away sobriety of thought and calmness of judgment and to inflate all expressions with sensational epithets and turgid phrases. It cannot be denied that everything in regard to the war has been treated in an exalted strain of sentiment and rhetoric very unfavorable to the truth.

Sumner was pointing out that the war had not been a policy freely chosen by the American people. They were stampeded into it by glory-seeking, even if well-intended rulers supported by romantic newspapermen with their tales of horror, who do their best to manipulate public opinion and suppress dissent. Sound familiar?

At present the whole periodical press of the country seems to be occupied in tickling the national vanity to the utmost by representations about the war which are extravagant and fantastic. There will be a penalty to be paid for all this. Nervous and sensational newspapers are just as corrupting, especially to young people, as nervous and sensational novels. The habit of expecting that all mental pabulum shall be highly spiced, and the corresponding loathing for whatever is soberly truthful, undermines character as much as any other vice. Patriotism is being prostituted into a nervous intoxication which is fatal to an apprehension of truth. It builds around us a fool's paradise, and it will lead us into errors about our position and relations just like those which we have been ridiculing in the case of Spain.

So what do Americans, who prosper through freedom, get out of the gore and glory?

Let us be well assured that self-government is not a matter of flags and Fourth of July orations, nor yet of strife to get offices. Eternal vigilance is the price of that as of every other political good. The perpetuity of self-government depends on the sound political sense of the people, and sound political sense is a matter of habit and practice. We can give it up and we can take instead pomp and glory. That is what Spain did.... She lost self-government and saw her resources spent on interests which were foreign to her, but she could talk about an empire on which the sun never set and boast of her colonies, her gold-mines, her fleets and armies and debts. She had glory and pride, mixed, of course, with defeat and disaster, such as must be experienced by any nation on that course of policy; and she grew weaker in her industry and commerce and poorer in the status of the population all the time. She has never been able to recover real self-government yet. If we Americans believe in self-government, why do we let it slip away from us? Why do we barter it away for military glory as Spain did?

Unless the nation changed course, the future would be bleak, despite the promise of glory.

The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions. If the United States takes out of the hands of Spain her mission, on the ground that Spain is not executing it well, and if this nation in its turn attempts to be school-mistress to others, it will shrivel up into the same vanity and self-conceit of which Spain now presents an example. To read our current literature one would think that we were already well on the way to it. Now, the great reason why all these enterprises which begin by saying to somebody else, We know what is good for you better than you know yourself and we are going to make you do it, are false and wrong is that they violate liberty; or, to turn the same statement into other words, the reason why liberty, of which we Americans talk so much, is a good thing is that it means leaving people to live out their own lives in their own way, while we do the same. If we believe in liberty, as an American principle, why do we not stand by it? Why are we going to throw it away to enter upon a Spanish policy of dominion and regulation?

He concluded:

My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative.

Sumner insisted that America could not be made into a great empire—with all the brutality and presumptuousness that implied—without killing what was best in America politically. The figure who signed the death warrant was President William McKinley—the man Trump would presumably nominate to the next vacancy on Mount Rushmore.