Following the murder of four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy sailor by a terrorist in Chattanooga, presidential candidates, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R), businessman Donald Trump, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (R), and former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), have called for a change in federal law to allow stateside military personnel to carry firearms for protection. In addition, the governors of Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas have directed the adjutants general of their National Guards to authorize Guardsmen to be armed in their states.
Before the attack in Chattanooga, congressional Armed Services Committee Chairmen Sen. John McCain and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) had been planning to include legislation in the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act to clarify an Army post commander’s authority to allow the carrying of personal firearms for protection. Now, numerous other senators and representatives have stated their support for legislation to allow military personnel to be armed for protection of themselves and their fellow troops here at home.
The outpouring of support for allowing military personnel to protect themselves is more than justified by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which included an attack upon the Pentagon, and events related to other military facilities thereafter.In 2009, a terrorist killed 12 military personnel and one civilian, and wounded 30 others on Fort Hood, Texas. That same year, another attack occurred upon a military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, resulting in the death of one soldier and the wounding of another. Over the next two years, law enforcement authorities foiled planned attacks upon military facilities in Baltimore and Seattle. In 2013, 12 people were killed and four were wounded in an attack upon the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard. And only eight months ago, the FBI issued a warning that ISIS was recruiting extremists to attack our military personnel here at home.
Military personnel are effectively prohibited from carrying personal firearms for protection by a Department of Defense Directive of 2011, which states:
Arming DoD personnel with firearms shall be limited and controlled. Qualified personnel shall be armed when required for assigned duties and there is reasonable expectation that DoD installations, property, or personnel lives or DoD assets will be jeopardized if personnel are not armed…
That directive traces back to another Directive from the early 1990s, which contains similar language.
EDITORS NOTE: We encourage readers to contact their U.S. senators and representatives, to voice their strong support for legislation to allow our military personnel to carry firearms for their protection.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/soldier-with-pistol-e1437936154229.jpg356640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-26 14:45:042015-07-26 14:45:04Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and Governors Call for Military Right-to-Carry
“I’m tired of hearing that ‘liberty’ will take care of it!”
My young friend was explaining to me why she’s become less enthusiastic about libertarianism than she was a few years ago. I suspect she speaks for many smart young people who are just learning about libertarianism and getting a lot of bumper sticker ideas. Our belief in human freedom can strike them more as religious doctrine than as reason.
“Liberty Will Take Care of It!”
I had been pointing out a building going up in my neighborhood that blocked a significant part of the public’s view of the Brooklyn Bridge. I said something to the effect that, if it were up to me, I’d lop off the top three floors of that thing because many, including myself, feel it exceeds the limit agreed to with local community organizations, and I thought there was probably some misrepresentation going on.
That’s when she told me how tired she is of the standard libertarian refrain: every time some social issue comes up in her discussions with libertarians — spillovers, poverty, inequality, health care, racial discrimination, the environment — their response is that the free market will solve the problem.
My faith in freedom isn’t blind. It’s not really a form of faith, either — more of a shorthand for my understanding of theory and history.
Suppose, for example, that 50 years ago, when AT&T still had a government-granted telephone monopoly in the United States, someone asked how phone service could be provided by private companies that didn’t have that legal privilege. How, without eminent domain to take private property for those essential telephone lines and exchanges, would people be able to make and receive calls from their homes and businesses?
Fast-forward to today and we see practically every person over the age of 13 (and quite a few much younger) in the developed world carrying a cell phone or a smartphone small enough to fit in their pocket that combines telephone, Internet service, and a video camera. There are no cumbersome telephone poles, cables, or exchanges, and there’s not much eminent domain. The 1960s question was, “Who will build the heavy telephone infrastructure?” Today, who needs a heavy telephone infrastructure?
To say that liberty will take care of a problem need not be a shut-up argument, and it shouldn’t be used that way. But a free market operates on the principle that as long as people don’t initiate physical violence or fraud against anyone, anything else is okay.
That’s “okay” in the sense that, although you may not approve of what goes on, you are willing to tolerate it because it doesn’t infringe on your rights to your person or property. In that sort of social and psychological space, almost anything can happen. Smartphones can be invented. Medical centers can open in Walmarts, and urgent care facilities can pop up in city storefronts. Facebook and Google can emerge. Thousands of craft breweries and coffeehouses, serving beverages immeasurably superior to anything you could find even 25 years ago, can open their doors. We could each name countless other examples.
In that sense, the free market not only takes care of the problems we’re aware of; it also reveals flaws and gaps that we would otherwise never know existed.
The Seen and the Unseen
We who support the freedom philosophy are always at a disadvantage when arguing against interventionist proposals to provide nationalized health care, to impose regulations to address climate change, and the like precisely because appreciating and understanding the open-endedness and unpredictability of the social order are central to our political philosophy.
It’s easy to see an individual’s hourly pay go up from $7.25 to $15.00 after new legislation raises the minimum wage. It’s harder to see that she no longer gets tips, or that her benefits are lower — or that someone else, someone who is less skilled, is now going have an even harder time finding a job.
If AT&T had retained its legal monopoly until today — as the US Postal Service has — we might see every home with a handset in every room and in every car, but what we wouldn’t see are smartphones. We probably wouldn’t see broadband Internet access in so many homes, either — or wireless hotspots in so many public places.
Unlike many on the left, most libertarians take the limits of human knowledge and reason seriously, so we also take seriously the open-endedness of a liberal social order. Markets can be creative and spontaneous to the extent that billions of resourceful minds at every moment are free to use local, contextual knowledge to discover and address myriad problems large and small, simple and complex. With the right rules of the game — including private property, free association, and the rule of law — the creativity at the heart of that open-endedness will tend to promote social cooperation and well-being. That’s not faith. That’s an understanding of cause and effect in the social world.
But the temptation to substitute planning for spontaneity and coercion for liberty remains ever present because, as Henry Hazlitt argued in Economics in One Lesson, the short-term and local are usually more obvious than the long-term and global. It takes practice to see the unseen.
Quite apart from the morality of taking what belongs to someone else so you can use it for ends you happen to think are more important than theirs, or from banning someone else’s nonviolent actions because you don’t like them — and quite apart from the problems of corruption and cronyism that always accompany even the most well-meaning interventions — to the extent that you accept the practicability of central planning (even limited examples such as minimum guaranteed incomes or the minimum wage), you’re assuming that unpredictable human choices won’t find a way to mess up what you’re trying to do.
That assumption is demonstrably false. And because it’s false, you’ll find yourself encroaching further and further into the lives of ordinary people and constraining and directing their choices more and more in a futile effort to fix the problems caused by past interventions.
It is not a knee-jerk position to defend freedom when coercion’s track record is so bad.
Worshipping the Market versus Worshipping the State
I’m not defending all libertarians. I’ve often heard our critics charge, “You free-market types treat the market like some kind of god that will solve all our ills.” They’re right. Some market advocates do place a blind faith in freedom. Some may even worship the free market as a sort of deus ex mercatum (“god from the market”) that magically and inexplicably solves social problems. That’s perhaps because their commitment to economic freedom is in fact a part of their religious beliefs.
Others, like me, don’t see the need or the wisdom in linking political economy to a religious tradition, even if we do practice one of the traditional world religions. We already have a religion and we don’t need to worship the free market or the state.
Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/WORSHIP-DOLLAR-e1437761581116.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-24 14:14:252015-07-24 14:14:25Don’t Worship the Free Market: Faith in Freedom Need Not Be Blind by Sandy Ikeda
Great movements are marked by the dedication and accomplishments of steadfast individuals who make the most of every moment, every opportunity, and every available resource. When those great men and women pass from the scene, they leave behind untold numbers of friends and followers who derive comfort from their memory and inspiration from their deeds.
Such a man was James U. Blanchard III, who died on March 20, 1999, at the age of 56.
The causes to which he devoted ceaseless energy and with which his name will always be associated are liberty and sound money. Jim knew that neither is long safe without the other. Few American entrepreneurs in the second half of the 20th century did as much as he did to promote them both. The opening sentence of his family’s formal notice of his passing summed him up well: “James U. Blanchard III was a man who accomplished much against great odds and changed more people’s lives than he ever knew.”
I was privileged to know Jim Blanchard for the last 15 years of his life. For two years, I served as chief economist for his firm. I spoke at many of his conferences. I traveled with him to Brazil, Nicaragua, and Kenya. Though many others knew him better, it didn’t take much acquaintance with him for anyone to marvel at what a man in a wheelchair can get done if he puts his mind to it.
Jim was nearly killed in a tragic automobile accident at the age of 17 and was unable thereafter to walk. But if anything, his handicap only spurred him on.
Not once did I hear Jim bemoan his physical plight. If he talked about it at all, it was to relate how sitting in a wheelchair gave him time to read. In his 20s, he read voraciously. Introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand by a medical student friend, he became an unabashed defender of laissez-faire capitalism. Rand’s influence on Jim is perhaps best exemplified by the name he gave his oldest son: Anthem. Jim also became a devoted reader of the Freeman and of books by FEE’s founder, Leonard Read.
In 1974, Gerald Ford signed a bill that restored the right of Americans to own gold. The real hero of that moment was Jim Blanchard, who had formed the National Committee to Legalize Gold in 1971 and spearheaded a nationwide grassroots campaign. He knew that governments don’t like gold because they can’t print it. He saw gold ownership as a fundamental human right, a hedge against government mismanagement of money, and a first essential step down the long road to monetary integrity.
True to his spirit, some of Jim’s efforts were dramatic and unconventional. He arranged for a biplane to tow a “Legalize Gold” banner over President Nixon’s 1973 inauguration. He also held press conferences around the country at which he would brandish illegal bars of gold and publicly challenge federal officials to throw him in jail. These and many other stories about Jim’s colorful career can be found in his 1990 autobiography, Confessions of a Gold Bug.
Once gold became legal, Jim held his first annual investment conference in New Orleans. Expecting 250 attendees, he was stunned to see 750 show up. More than 40 years later, Blanchard’s New Orleans Investment Conference carries on and has drawn tens of thousands of individuals from all 50 states and dozens of nations. Investment advice comprised most of the 25 programs Jim assembled, but he always made sure that attendees were provided a hefty dose of sound-money and free-market ideas. His speakers included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Robert Bleiberg, Walter Williams, and many other great economists. Ayn Rand’s last public appearance was at a Blanchard conference. (In October 2015, I’ll be speaking again at the conference myself.)
In the meantime, Jim’s original $50 investment to begin a coin business in the 1970s grew into a giant within the industry. When he sold the business 15 years later, it was a $115-million-a-year precious-metals and rare-coin company. He cofounded the Industry Council for Tangible Assets to combat unscrupulous business practices in the coin and bullion industry, and he helped to reverse several burdensome laws and regulations that afflicted American investors.
Jim’s adventurous instincts and love of liberty combined to put him on the front lines of important struggles around the world. On my return in 1986 from visiting with activists in the anti-communist underground in Poland, I went to Jim with a request. I advised him that for $5,000, pro-freedom forces in Warsaw could translate Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose into Polish and then print and distribute hundreds of copies throughout the country. He wrote that check on the spot, and many others for similar causes behind the Iron Curtain. Not content only to fund these worthy endeavors, he often transported illicit, pro-freedom literature himself when he visited communist countries.
One of Jim’s favorite foreign projects was assisting anti-communist rebel forces inside war-torn Mozambique in the 1980s and early 1990s. He once sent a colleague and me on a clandestine journey inside the country to live for two weeks with the rebels in the bush and help to spread a pro-freedom message. Once the war was over and Mozambique adopted policies friendly to private property and free markets, Jim pitched in to assist in reconstruction.
“I remember my father as the bravest and most adventurous person that I have ever known to this day,” Anthem recently told me.
He never let anyone tell him no. He was fearless in his belief in the goodness of the human spirit. He understood that the path to personal betterment is best shepherded by free enterprise, and [he understood] the importance of balance between natural rights and property rights protected by a responsible, accountable, made-as-limited-as-possible government.
If Jim were alive today, he would beam with pride in his son, who carries three famous names: Anthem Hayek Blanchard is founder and president of Anthem Vault, a Nevada-based company pioneering a gold-backed cryptocurrency called HayekGold after Nobel laureate and Austrian economist F.A. Hayek. (Browse through the news items on the company’s web page and you’ll learn more about the currency that wouldn’t even be legal today had it not been for the work of Anthem’s father.)
Anthem says his father taught him “above all else” that true freedom can only be achieved once the world experiences a Hayekian choice in currency that technologies like bitcoin, HayekGold, and other virtual assets are wonderfully making a rapidly growing reality. I know Pop would be the most excited person in the world about all of these new technology developments enabling Austrian economics to flourish in a modern digital society.
Jim Blanchard overcame personal tragedy to become a powerful figure for liberty and sound money. His indomitable spirit lives on in all those who know that the noble causes to which he devoted his life require both hard work and eternal vigilance.
Video from FreedomFest: Remembering James U. Blanchard III with Lawrence Reed
Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.
EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/james-blanchard-e1437760999706.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-24 14:05:262015-07-24 14:16:50Real Hero James U. Blanchard: You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down by Lawrence W. Reed
The hypocrisy of government “planners” is astounding. Government planners are experts at planning destruction, distancing themselves from the results, and then recommending additional planning to fix what they have destroyed. They have been rearranging society according to their social engineering agenda, redistributive economic theories, cynical “division politics” strategies, and racial quotas for decades and the more planning they do, the more chaos we get.
I have been closely following the Obama Administration’s recently announced plan to racially diversify upper middle income neighborhoods through their recent HUD directive titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” for some time now, and continue to wonder when the media and curious Americans are going to start asking the hard questions about this incessant drive to socially engineer our lives, and the devastating outcomes they have produced.
Sadly, I doubt the media will delve into the complicated but overwhelmingly negative externalities generated by years of adherence to the liberal social planners’ agenda, and their societal reorganization goals. So it’s our turn to bypass them and ask the hard questions ourselves.
Here’s the critical question for the government planners: Who is in charge of the neighborhoods and cities with significant minority populations, and why are many of these areas struggling?
Of course, the answers are extremely inconvenient for the liberal social planners among us because the correlation between liberal governance and their symbiotic “planning” agenda in inner cities, and economic hardship for its citizens, is high. If the government planners who engineered the negative economic outcomes, housing outcomes, and education outcomes in the inner cities they dominate failed to generate even average outcomes for their citizens, then why would middle-class America be remotely open to the idea of these destructive planners engineering outcomes in their neighborhoods?
The planners, in conjunction with the liberal political and activist class, will, of course, blame the inevitable backlash against this attempt to place government sponsored housing in upper middle income neighborhoods on racism, but Americans are tiring of this old trick. Americans of all races, creeds, and countries of origin want to live in neighborhoods of their own choice and choose these neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. Some choose the convenience of city-living because they dislike long commutes. Others choose the suburbs because they want a yard for their children to play in. And some choose the country because they like the relaxing symphony of the Lord’s sounds of nature at night. Pretending these decisions are the twisted result of a devoutly racist country is an insult to every American who bought their home because it was their piece of the American Dream, not a bullet point in a government master-planning document.
The rank hypocrisy here, which escapes the media spin doctors who are avoiding this story because of its potentially explosive impact on electoral politics, is that it’s the planner’s adherence to the tax-and-spend ideology and zoning regulations which are primary drivers of generational poverty in the very areas many struggling Americans are looking to escape from, and the low income housing crisis in America, respectively. Restrictive zoning and “rent control” policies have long been pointed to as drivers of housing shortages and any Econ 101 student understands that when you restrict the supply of any good or service, the price will rise.
Magnifying the problem is that restrictive zoning requirements add layers of fixed costs to housing construction projects which make the business of building homes profitable and sustainable only if you build high income housing to defray the fixed costs. The Left employs this same hat trick often; first they create a problem, and then they propose more of the poison as an antidote. They created the low income housing crisis through their adherence to heavy zoning, planning, and housing regulation, then they ruined the many inner cities, where they govern unchallenged, forcing people out of those cities to the suburbs, and now they chase those same people to the suburbs following them with legislative and regulatory threats to impose their big government agenda on them, regardless of how far away they move or how desperate they are to escape their grasp.
I know many of you are overwhelmed right now with the avalanche of bad news emanating from the Obama Administration on both the foreign policy and domestic fronts. It’s a challenge to keep up with it all. But, the Obama Administration’s war on the suburbs is an attack on that portion of the unique American Dream which every American cherishes, a small piece of land which we can look at and call “home.”
Conservatives should fight this HUD rule and defund this attack on their constituents’ front door.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is of an abandoned home in Detroit, MI.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Detroit-1-e1437657281812.jpg323640Dan Bonginohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDan Bongino2015-07-23 09:16:022015-07-23 09:16:02Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs is an Attack on the American Dream
One of the more curious developments in the last couple of years has been left-wing nostalgia for the economy of the 1950s.
Don’t political progressives usually portray themselves as being on “the right side of history” — representing, as the term suggests, the march of “progress”?
Not when it comes to the economy.
Paul Krugman has written a number of columns over the last decade about how much better things were in the middle of the 20th century. More recently, we have presidential candidate Hillary Clinton making a major economic policy statement in which she longs for a time like the 1950s when workers had the structure of the corporate world and unions through which to lobby and negotiate for pay and benefits, rather than the so-called “gig” economy of so many modern freelance employees, such as Uber drivers. “This on-demand or so-called gig economy is creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation,” Clinton said, “but it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protection and what a good job will look like in the future.”
To protect Americans from the uncertain future, Clinton promised she would “crack down on bosses that exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors or even steal their wages.”
In an economy where technology has enabled people to have a great deal more flexibility with their workdays and independence with their work choices, it’s now the “progressives” who are complaining about the economic organizations that have been agents of more efficient resource use, expanded choice for workers, and cheaper goods for consumers.
In short, the progressives are complaining about what would otherwise be called progress.
And let’s not let the conservatives off the hook here either, as they demonstrate their own nostalgia for an economy of the past, with cheers for Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-trade tirades and for his general love of dirigiste policies. Immigration and trade have also expanded the range of work available, lifted millions out of poverty through better-paying jobs in the United States, and enriched the rest of us through more affordable goods and services.
What’s particularly amusing about both sides, but especially the progressives, is how wrong they are about life for the average American being better back in the 1950s, including how much more secure they were. In a terrific paper for the Cato Institute, Brink Lindsey effectively demolished Krugman’s nostalgia with some actual data about the economy of the 1950s. He pointed out that the increase in income inequality since then noted by so many progressives is largely overstated, and that the economy they are nostalgic for is one that restricted competition in a variety of ways, mostly to the benefit of the politically influential. Limits on immigration and trade, in particular, prevented the 1950s economy from achieving the reductions in cost and increase in variety that we associate with our economy today.
Does anyone really want to go back to the stagnant, conformist, more poverty-stricken world of the 1950s?
It is more than a little ironic that modern progressives are nostalgic for the very economy that GOP front-runner Donald Trump would appear to want to create.
As I argued in a recent paper, when we look at the cost of living in terms of the work hours required to purchase basic household items, most goods and services are far cheaper today than in the 1950s. The equivalents of those items today are also of higher quality: think about the typical household TV or refrigerator in 1955 versus 2015. These substantial decreases in cost have had another effect. They have made these goods increasingly accessible to the poorest of Americans. American households below the poverty line are far more likely to have a whole variety of items in their homes than did poor families in the 1950s. In fact, they are more likely to have those things in their houses than was a middle-class American family in the 1970s.
When you also consider the number of goods that weren’t even available in the 1970s or 1950s, from technology like computers and smartphones, to innovative medicines and medical procedures, to various forms of entertainment, to a whole number of inventions that have made us safer, healthier, and longer-lived, it’s difficult to argue that things were better “back then.”
The effect of all of this change driven by increased competition is that our world is one in which the middle class and poor are better off, and the gap between poor and rich as measured by what they consume has narrowed substantially. Does anyone really want to go back to the stagnant, conformist, more poverty-stricken world of the 1950s?
Politicians do. And here’s one reason why: back then, it was easier to influence and control people’s economic lives. Progressives with a desire to shape their ideal economy aren’t happy with the world of freelancers, Uber, and independent contractors.
The economy of the 1950s and 1970s had organizational focal points where politicians could exercise leverage and thereby influence the lives of large numbers of citizens.
I’m thinking here of the auto companies in the 1950s, the oil companies in the 1970s, and any number of industries where large firms were created by restrictions on domestic and foreign competition, which were easy points of contact for politicians with a desire to control, and which had corporate leaders who were happy to reap the benefits of corporatism.
In a world of Uber, Airbnb, and all the rest, there are no central points of leverage. Facebook produces no content, Uber owns no cars, Alibaba owns no inventory. More important: Uber has no employees, only contractors. If you are Clinton or Trump, or even Krugman, there’s nowhere to go to exercise your power or to drum up support from workers in one place. There’s nothing to grab hold of. There are just people trading peacefully with each other, enriching everyone in the process.
The real irony, once again, is that what this decentralized economy has produced is more freedom and more flexibility for more workers. The same progressives who railed against the conformism of the 1950s a decade later are now nostalgic for what their predecessors rejected and are rejecting exactly the “do your own thing” ethos their 1960s heroes fought for.
The “gig” economy works for people who want options and who want flexible hours so they can pursue a calling the rest of the day. Or perhaps they want to spend a few hours a week driving an Uber because Obamacare caused their employers to cut their hours at their other job.
Whatever the reason, this economy offers the freedom and flexibility for workers, and the benefits for consumers, that represent the progress progressives should love. That progressives (and conservatives) with power are fighting against it tells you that they are much more concerned with power than with progress.
Nostalgia is a dangerous basis for making policy, whether left or right.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/1960s-woman-in-kitchen-e1437599275112.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-22 17:09:522015-07-22 17:09:52The Politics of Nostalgia: Why Does the Left Want to Take Us Backwards? by Steven Horwitz
Socialists are people who either 1) are badly misinformed about social scientific matters, or 2) make a common philosophical mistake that I’ve dubbed the “Cohen Fallacy,” in honor of G.A. Cohen.
Regarding 1: Here is a ranking of all countries by how capitalist they are as of 2011. Where are the starving people generally located? Is it in the most capitalist countries?
By the way, here’s the trendline in absolute poverty around the world, thanks to globalization:
Regarding 2: I suspect what most socialists have in mind is an argument like this:
Sure, in realistic cases of socialism, such as the forms of socialism practiced in the 20th century, we had mass famine and forced starvation.
But in ideal socialism, the form of socialism I endorse, people would all love each other, share, and care! And so no one would starve. Idealsocialism is superior from a moral point of view to capitalism as we actually find it.
The problem with this argument, as I explained in Why Not Capitalism?, is that this is a bad argument:
Socialism with perfect, morally flawless people who always do the right thing is better than capitalism with real people, who are imperfect, morally flawed, and often act badly.
Therefore, socialism is better than capitalism.
The problem is that this argument leaves open whether capitalism with perfect, morally flawless people is better than, on par with, or worse than socialism with perfect, morally flawless people. It also leaves open whether capitalism with realistic people is better than socialism with realistic people.
As I argue in Why Not Capitalism?, ideal capitalism is morally superior (from a hard left-wing point of view) to ideal socialism. And I don’t see it even as debatable at this point that realistic capitalism, for all its flaws, is superior to realistic socialism.
Socialists might retort that capitalism makes us worse people while socialism encourages virtue and kindness. However, that’s a testable empirical claim. People like Herbert Gintis and Joseph Henrich, among others, have tested it, and it turns out to be the opposite of the truth.
Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He blogs regularly at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/chess-board.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-22 16:39:162015-07-22 16:40:33Checkmate, Capitalists! by Jason Brennan
Continuing its national battle against the federal government’s attempted takeover of public education, the Thomas More Law Center, last week, filed a friend of the court brief in the Missouri Court of Appeals supporting a lower court decision that held the State’s participation and membership in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (“SBAC”) is illegal and SBAC itself is an “unlawful interstate compact … whose existence and operation violate[s] the Compact Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The lower court ruling which stopped Missouri from paying over $4 million in membership fees to SBAC, is being appealed by Missouri state officials, including Governor Jay Nixon.
The original lawsuit was filed by D. John Sauer of the St. Louis, Missouri, firm Clark & Sauer, LLC in September 2014 on behalf of concerned Missouri residents and taxpayers.
The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, joined with Mr. Sauer in filing a similar lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of SBAC in North Dakota. A North Dakota District Judge will hear arguments next week on whether he should stop North Dakota from participating in SBAC.
The TMLC first became involved in the fight to stop Common Core in response to concerns of parents and teachers over the federal government’s control of curriculum nationwide and the standards themselves. As a result, the TMLC previously developed a Test Refusal and Student Privacy Protection Form and a Common Core Resource Page as a general reference and guide for concerned parents and individuals.
Both SBAC and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (“PARCC”) were created in response to a federal Department of Education grant program designed to create academic assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The assessments leave local schools little choice but to align their curriculum to the standards and assessment, allowing the federal Department of Education to effectively control public education.
SBAC’s state membership agreements, executed by officials in Missouri, North Dakota, and several other states, have raised concerns that state officials are handing over local educational decisions to SBAC, and by extension the federal government which violates federal statutes prohibiting the federal government—and, in particular, the federal Department of Education—from controlling educational policy, including curriculum decisions and educational-assessment programs in elementary and secondary education.
The new wave of testing ushered in by SBAC and PARCC sparked a national opt-out movement as students, teachers and administrators grapple with the heavy burden created by these assessments. The looming threat from the Department of Education of the loss of federal funding helped drive the controversy between parents and school administrators over parental opt-outs and test refusal. As a result of these parental opt outs, students across the country were formally disciplines and subjected to “sit-and-stare” policies; refused admittance to the classroom; lost honors, class trips, and athletic participation; and were even suspended.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/rotten-to-the-common-core-e1437571742230.png400640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-22 09:30:482015-07-22 16:42:15Thomas More Law Center Continues To Fight Against Common Core
With the release of a second video showing yet another Planned Parenthood doctor talking about the harvesting and selling of aborted baby body parts, a new allegation has surfaced.
We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.
We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Following allegations that Planned Parenthood is selling aborted fetal body parts for profit, black pro-life leaders are calling to defund the organization and address what they call “targeting” of their community.
“It’s an open secret that they are targeting the black community, that they have located their facilities within a two-mile walking radius of a black or Latino neighborhood…and they are coming after black women,” Catherine Davis of the National Black Pro-Life Coalition told The Daily Signal while gathering with other pro-life leaders in Alexandria, Va.
To hear that this organization is allowed by our government to do that kind of targeting is very disturbing to me. I call it today’s 21st Century Jim Crow.
Davis, a longtime critic of Planned Parenthood, said the only difference between Planned Parenthood and Jim Crow is that “we can’t see” the targeting because it occurs inside abortion clinics.
In 1926 Margaret Sanger was a guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey. Sanger wrote in her biography:
Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak.
Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.
In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.
RELATED VIDEO: Brit Hume Commentary on Planned Parenthood selling baby body parts:
EDITORS NOTE:Kate Scanlon from The Daily Signal compiled these 13 things Sanger said during her lifetime.
1) She proposed allowing Congress to solve “population problems” by appointing a “Parliament of Population.”
“Directors representing the various branches of science [in the Parliament would] … direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108
2) Sanger called the various methods of population control, including abortion, “defending the unborn against their own disabilities.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108
3) Sanger believed that the United States should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, Insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108
4) Sanger advocated “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108
5) People whom Sanger considered unfit, she wrote, should be sent to “farm lands and homesteads” where “they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108
“The results desired are obviously selective births,” she wrote.
According to Sanger, the code would “protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.” —“America Needs a Code for Babies,” March 27, 1934, Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, 128:0312B
7) While advocating for the American Baby Code, she argued that marriage licenses should provide couples with the right to only “a common household” but not parenthood. In fact, couples should have to obtain a permit to become parents:
Article 3. A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood.
Article 5. Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples, providing they are financially able to support the expected child, have the qualifications needed for proper rearing of the child, have no transmissible diseases, and, on the woman’s part, no medical indication that maternity is likely to result in death or permanent injury to health.
Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.
“All that sounds highly revolutionary, and it might be impossible to put the scheme into practice,” Sanger wrote.
She added: “What is social planning without a quota?” —“America Needs a Code for Babies,” March 27, 1934, Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, 128:0312B
8) She believed that large families were detrimental to society.
“The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children,” she wrote.
9) She argued that motherhood must be “efficient.”
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives,” Sanger wrote. —“Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 18:The Goal
10) Population control, she wrote, would bring about the “materials of a new race.”
“If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy,” Sanger wrote. —“Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 3:The Materials of the New Race
11) Sanger wrote that an excess in population must be reduced.
“War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap,” she wrote.
12) “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger wrote. —Letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on Dec., 10, 1939
13) In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1957, Sanger said, “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world, that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically.”
“Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin—that people can—can commit,” she said.
RELATED VIDEO: Mike Wallace interview with Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood:
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/pregnant-black-woman-ultrasound-e1437567580764.jpg388640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-22 08:20:092015-08-06 16:19:49Planned Parenthood Openly ‘Targets’ Black Community
The Spring home buying season continues to show strength, buoyed by strong first-time buyer volume and share. Historically low mortgage rates, an improving labor market, and loose credit standards, combined with a 32-month-long seller’s market for existing homes, continue to drive up home prices faster than income.
The continued loosening of lending standards during a strong seller’s market is moving the goalpost further away for many lower income and minority renters desiring to become homeowners.
In June* first-time buyers accounted for 58.8 percent of primary owner-occupied home purchase mortgages with a government guarantee, up from 57.2 percent the prior June.
Increasing first-time buyer volume and share is being driven by increasing leverage and a strengthening job market.
The number of primary owner-occupied purchase mortgages going to first-time buyers in June totaled an estimated 128,000, up 20 percent from the 107,000 mortgages in June 2014
The Agency FBMRI stood at a series record of 15.83 percent, up 0.5 percentage point from the average over the prior three months and up 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier.
The Agency FBMRI is 6¾ percentage points higher than the mortgage risk index for repeat home-buyers, and the gap has been widening.
Nearly 55 percent of agency first-time buyer loans were high risk (an MRI above 12%) in June, up from 51 percent a year earlier.
As demonstrated below, the extremely small sample size of the NAR’s realtor survey generates monthly noise that tends to mask both seasonal and underlying trends in first-time buyer share, trends readily apparent in the AEI combined first-time buyer share index.
The First-Time Buyer Mortgage Share and Mortgage Risk Indexes (FBMSI and FBMRI) are key housing market indicators based on monthly data for nearly all government-guaranteed home purchase loans, which greatly reduces the risk of sample error. By relying on millions of loans, this approach stands in contrast to traditional first-time buyer surveys based on small samples of home-buyers or real estate agents.
In June 2015, first-time buyers accounted for 58.8 percent of primary owner-occupied home purchase mortgages with a government guarantee, according to the Agency First-Time Buyer Mortgage Share Index (FBMSI). As shown in the chart below, the June share was 0.2 percentage point above the revised share of 58.6 percent for May and 1.6 percentage points above the June 2014 share of 57.2 percent. Through March of this year, the first-time buyer share had displayed no clear trend apart from seasonal variation. But the increases in April, May, and June pushed the share to successive new highs, supported by improvements in the labor market, riskier mortgage lending, and continuing low mortgage rates. These factors, combined with a 33-month-long seller’s market for existing homes as reported by the National Association of Realtors (NAR)[1], are driving up home prices faster than income.
“The housing lobby, led by the NAR and the Urban Institute, has successfully pushed for looser lending standards for first-time buyers,” noted Edward Pinto, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI’s) International Center on Housing Risk. “Rather than increasing accessibility, the loosening of lending standards during a strong seller’s market is moving the goalpost further away for many lower income and minority renters desiring to become homeowners.”
The chart below displays the monthly first-time home-buyer percentage by agency. As shown, the share varies widely across agencies. FHA is at the high end with a share at or above 80 percent, while Freddie Mac is at the low end with a share of about 40 percent. Fannie Mae’s share has consistently tracked somewhat above Freddie’s and stood at 46.7 percent in June. Fannie’s share is higher because of its much greater volume of 97 percent LTV loans for first-time buyers relative to Freddie. These loans carry substantial risk and account for most of the gap between Fannie’s MRI for first-time buyers (8.18 percent in June) and Freddie’s (6.72 percent).
As shown by the blue line in the chart below, the Combined FBMSI (which measures the share of first-time buyers for both government-guaranteed and private-sector mortgages) stood at an estimated 52.9 percent in June 2015. Consistent with the agency series, the broader combined share moved to successive highs in April, May, and June, after having varied seasonally with no trend over the prior two years. The first-time buyer share published monthly by the NAR, the dotted red line, also has risen to the highest level over the period shown. Although the two series are currently sending the same message, the NAR series provides a much noisier signal month to month because of its small sample size.[2]
The first-time buyer share shown by the combined FBMSI is much higher than that estimated by the NAR survey of realtors and the separate NAR survey of homebuyers and sellers. This gap largely appears to reflect a difference in the definition of first-time buyers. In the federal agency data that we use, first-time buyers include purchasers who owned a home more than three years ago but not in the past three years. The NAR surveys ask whether the purchaser is a first-time buyer, without further instruction. Survey respondents likely apply a literal definition of first-time buyers, which would exclude purchasers who owned a home more than three years ago.[3] The broader definition in the federal agency data captures the full set of households transitioning from renter to homeowner status and thus provides a more complete measure of changes in demand for owner-occupied housing. The rising first-time buyer share and the strong increase in first-time buyer sales volume shown by our broad definition help explain the tightening inventory conditions in the long running seller’s market. The unsold inventory of existing single-family homes stood at 5.2 months in May, down from 5.6 months a year earlier; for new single-family homes, the unsold inventory was 4.5 months in May, down from 5.1 months a year earlier.[4]
The monthly count of agency first-time buyer mortgages (theAgency FTB Loan Count) is presented in the chart below. The number of primary owner-occupied purchase mortgages going to first-time buyers in June totaled an estimated 128,000, up 20 percent from the level in June 2014. This increase in the Agency FTB Loan Count outpaced the 15½ percent rise in total agency purchase loan volume over the same period.
The Agency FTB Loan Count and the Agency FBMSI are calculated, as noted above, from a nearly complete dataset of government-guaranteed home purchase loans, which greatly reduces the risk of sample error. Data on the importance of first-time homebuyers for non-agency loans are not available to our knowledge from any source. The Combined FBMSI is calculated from the agency loan data, along with assumptions for non-agency loans that we believe to be reasonable.
“While the strength of this Spring’s homebuying season is noteworthy, it is being unsustainably fueled by increasing leverage,” said Pinto. “This leaves first-time buyers and neighborhoods vulnerable to excessive defaults.”
“We paint an accurate picture of changes in the first-time buyer share by using a nearly complete census of agency loans,” said Stephen Oliner, co-director of AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk. “In contrast, the monthly changes in the first-time buyer share from the NAR survey are often just noise.”
AEI’s Agency First-Time Buyer Mortgage Risk Index (FBMRI) estimates the share of first-time buyer mortgages that would default in a stress event comparable to the 2007-08 financial crisis based on the actual performance of loans originated in 2007. The Agency FBMRI stood at 15.83 percent in June, up 0.5 percentage point from the average over the prior three months and up 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier. As indicated in the chart below, the Agency FBMRI is 6¾ percentage points higher than the mortgage risk index for repeat home-buyers, and the gap between the two series has been growing.
The higher risk for the mortgages taken out by first-time buyers is largely due to risk layering. As shown in the table below, in June 2015, 71 percent of first-time buyer mortgages had a combined loan-to-value ratio (CLTV) of 95 percent or higher, and 97 percent had a 30-year term. Given the combination of little money down and slow amortization, these buyers will have very little home equity for a number of years unless their house appreciates substantially. In addition, more than one-fifth of first-time buyers taking out mortgages had a FICO score below 660, the traditional definition of subprime mortgages, and one-quarter had total debt-to-income ratios above 43 percent, the limit set by the Qualified Mortgage rule. The mortgages taken out by repeat buyers are less risky along two dimensions in particular: a much smaller share had a CLTV of 95 percent or higher and a smaller share had a FICO score below 660.
Characteristics of Mortgages Taken Out by First-Time and Repeat Home-buyers:
This risk profile for first-time buyers implies that the supply of mortgage credit to this group is not tight. In June 2015, the median first-time buyer with an agency mortgage made a downpayment of only 3 percent, or $6900 in dollar terms. Moreover, the median FICO score in June for first-time buyers with agency mortgages was 706, slightly below the median of 713 for all individuals in the United States with a score.[5] For first-time buyers with FHA-insured loans, the median FICO score in June was only 674, well below the middle of the distribution for the U.S. as a whole. These data are a strong counterpoint to the frequent claims that first-time buyers face difficulties in obtaining mortgages.
“Our data refute the conventional wisdom that first-time buyers face tight credit,” said Oliner. “Many first-time buyers with ordinary credit scores are purchasing homes every month with little money down.”
ABOUT THE FBMSI AND FBMRI
The FBMSI and FBMRI are objective and transparent measures of the first-time buyer share and the riskiness of first-time buyer mortgages, respectively, based on the millions of loans contained in the National Mortgage Risk Index (NMRI) database developed by AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk. The FBMSI, FBMRI, and NMRI are updated monthly. For more information about these indexes and the work of the center, please visit HousingRisk.org or contact Edward.Pinto@AEI.org or Stephen.Oliner@AEI.org.
[2] The NAR’s monthly survey (http://www.realtor.org/reports/realtors-confidence-index) is sent to more than 50,000 realtors (out of a total of 1.1 million members), but has a low response rate; only 3,805 responses were received for the May 2015 survey and of these, only 2,247 realtors provided information based on the last sale they had closed in May. The NAR’s separate annual survey of homebuyers and sellers also suffers from small sample problems. For the 2014 survey, responses were received from only 9 percent of those mailed the survey, and these responses constituted only 0.2 percent of all purchase loans originated during the 12-month period covered by the survey.
[4] See footnote 2 above for the links to the NAR and Census data.
[5] The national median score is from FICO; the other FICO scores cited here are from AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/home-owner.jpg360640Edward Pintohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngEdward Pinto2015-07-21 06:46:362015-07-21 06:49:13Loosening of Lending Standards Harms Low Income and Minority Americans
As the L.A. Times reported this morning, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is currently developing a program to strip the Second Amendment Rights of over four million Americans currently receiving SSA benefits through a “representative payee.” Not only would this amount to the largest gun grab in American history, but according to the published report, would take place without any due process protections for recipients, amounting to a nullification of Second Amendment rights for millions of Americans who don’t pose a threat to themselves or anyone else.
This new program appears to have been instigated by the SSA in response to a memorandum issued by Obama in January of 2013 which directed all federal agency executives to “improve the availability of records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).” This memorandum required all agency heads to submit to the Department of Justice (DOJ) a plan for “sharing all relevant Federal records” for submission to the NICS.
Evidently, Obama’s SSA bureaucrats read “all relevant Federal records” to mean all Social Security recipients who have a “representative payee” assigned to their accounts to help them manage their payments and receipts. Obviously, many individuals swept up in this egregious case of bureaucratic over-reach would not otherwise be prohibited from owning, possessing, or acquiring firearms under federal law.
The federal prohibitions against acquiring or possessing firearms apply to those “adjudicated as a mental defective,” among others. The term “adjudication,” however, refers to a determination made after a judicial-type process that includes various due process protections. In no case does the federal law describe or contemplate the type of prohibition by bureaucratic fiat exercised by the SSA in developing its guidelines for those with “representative payees” assigned to their accounts.
But SSA is not alone in this directive. The memorandum names several agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, and “such other agencies or offices as the Chair may designate.” Potentially, bureaucrats in all these agencies could be working hard to identify and forward “all relevant Federal records,” to the NICS pursuant to the Obama mandate.
In total, this program could easily grow to include many more millions of Americans who have any connection to the Federal government through the various agencies named in the memorandum.
Unfortunately, this fits a pattern of abuse within the Obama Administration which is clearly hell-bent on destroying the Second Amendment in any way possible. As we reported previously (here and here), the Veterans Administration (VA) has already implemented a similar program to designate veterans as “prohibited persons” when they have a fiduciary assigned to administer their VA benefits. Like the SSA program described above, the VA procedures are also devoid of significant due process protections or any requirement that the beneficiary be found a danger to self or others. According to the L.A Times article, 177,000 vets have been swept into NICS with the bureaucratic short-cut.
The implications of this policy are too far reaching to fathom at present. Social Security is one of the more prolific and relied upon Federal programs in American history. That Obama’s directive could so easily be implemented within the SSA suggests that bureaucrats could effectively cloak such a program in any agency within the growing leviathan that is the federal government.
EDITORS NOTE: Readers who may wish to call or write their members of congress may do so using the Congressional switchboard at 202-225-3121 or send an email to their lawmaker by using the NRA-ILA “Write Your Representatives” tool.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/automatic-pistols-display.jpg338600Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-21 06:15:282015-07-21 06:17:26Social Security Administration Stripping Gun Rights of Millions of Seniors
Khalid “Ken” Quran moved to America in 1997, leaving behind a life as a fireman in a town ten miles north of Jerusalem, near Ramallah. Ken now lives in Greenville, N.C., with his wife, Dina, and their four kids.
Shortly after moving to this country, Ken purchased a small convenience store in Greenville, located on a dusty patch of land near the airport. Ken worked days and nights for years, often opening and closing the store, in order to build his business. He made a living selling goods at razor-thin margins and hardly ever taking a vacation.
Then, in June 2014, the government seized his entire bank account — more than $150,000. This was money that Ken worked for years to earn, and that he was counting on for his retirement. Ken had no prior warning before the government seized the account. The government told him they were taking the money because he withdrew cash from the bank in amounts under $10,000.
But the truly shocking thing is what happened next. A group of government agents — both from the IRS and local police — came to Ken’s store with an agreement already written up, under which Ken would agree to forever forfeit the money to the federal government.
The agents searched his store with dogs, barred the entrance to keep out customers, and then demanded that he sign the paper. Ken initially refused, explaining that he did not read English well and did not want to sign an agreement he could not understand.
Then, under compulsion — after one of the local police yelled and demanded that he sign, and after one of the IRS agents made clear that, otherwise, their next stop would be to talk to Ken’s wife to pressure her — Ken agreed to sign.
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https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/irs-robs-convenience-store.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-21 05:48:442015-07-21 05:50:41Watch the IRS Rob and Extort a Convenience Store Owner
Demonstrating why he’s rated an “F” by the NRA, anti-gun Representative James Clyburn (D-S.C.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would in effect vastly expand federal prohibited person categories. Worse, he is exploiting a recent tragedy and misinformation reported in the media to do so.
The bill, H.R. 3051, seeks to repeal a critical safety valve in federal law that allows for a firearm transfer to proceed three business days after a NICS check is initiated, provided “the system has not notified the [FFL] that the receipt of a firearm by [the buyer or transferee] would [violate federal law.]” This provision ensures that Americans’ rights to acquire firearms are not arbitrarily denied because of bureaucratic delays, inefficiencies, or mistakes in identity.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was designed to be just that: instant. Recognizing, however, that some determinations might require additional research to resolve authoritatively, the law states that if an immediate answer is not available, the transfer must be put on hold for three business days to give the FBI more time to research the matter.
After the three days, the FFL has the option to release the firearm to the buyer or transferee, so long as the FFL has no other reason to believe the person is prohibited from possessing it. The FBI will then continue trying to resolve the case for up to 90 days. If it turns out the recipient is determined to be prohibited, the FBI queries the dealer to see if the firearm was transferred. If so, the FBI notifies the BATFE, so appropriate action can be taken (for example, confiscation of the firearm and prosecution of the illegal possessor, if appropriate).
The safety valve provided by the three-day provision is necessary for several reasons. First, and most obviously, mistakes happen. Identities can be confused or records can be incomplete (for example, an arrest record could have been followed by dismissal of the charges or an acquittal at trial). Second, it encourages the FBI to administer the system quickly and efficiently. Third, it preserves a critical aspect of America’s constitutional system, the due process principle that the government cannot arbitrarily deprive a person of his or her rights without making its case against that person.
According the FBI’s most recent NICS operations report, 9% of FBI NICS checks in 2014 were delayed “for additional review.” The report does not go on to detail how many of those delays extended beyond three days. Nevertheless, based on the total number of NICS check the FBI ran in 2014, these delays affected some 743,102 people.
Meanwhile, the delays resulted in only 2,511 actions for firearm retrievals (or three-tenths of one percent of total delays). Thus, in over 99.6% of delayed cases, the delay was less than three days, the FBI could not substantiate the person was prohibited, or the FFL did not transfer the firearm. That hardly seems to indicate a public safety crisis demanding congressional intervention. This is especially so, because where prohibitions are substantiated after firearms are transferred following the three day window, law enforcement authorities already have the tools to act under current law.
None of this matters to Rep. Clyburn, of course, who is hoping the recent tragedy in South Carolina will give his legislation the momentum it needs to succeed. Clyburn claimed in his press release announcing the bill that “[u]nder current law, the Charleston shooter should have been barred from purchasing a firearm from a licensed dealer.” That assertion is by no means clear, with media outlets now reporting that the suspect was arrested for a misdemeanor, not a felony, as originally reported. A single misdemeanor arrest, without more, is not cause for a denial under federal law (on the other hand, if the suspect had been formally charged with a felony, he would have been federally prohibited from buying a gun).
Should Clyburn’s bill become law, people who are unjustly subjected to NICS delays for reasons beyond their control would, in effect, be prohibited from exercising their rights to obtain firearms from dealers. In essence, every extended delay would become an extra-legal firearm prohibition. The FBI could affect denials without having to substantiate them, as they must under current law. Meanwhile, determined criminals can always obtain firearms illegally to carry out their plans.
Piling on the bandwagon, as usual, is Bloomberg’s front group, Moms Demand Action, who are now demanding that large firearm retailers like Cabela’s “voluntarily” adopt the restrictions Clyburn hopes to make law. As with Clyburn, they are insisting that the Charleston suspect was a prohibited purchaser at the time he obtained his firearm, although they have no legal basis for this claim. As with Clyburn, they also believe Americans should be presumed legally ineligible to possess firearms, even where the government lacks substantiation.
All of this just goes to show what we all already know. Gun control advocates are shameless in their willingness to exploit tragedy to achieve their agenda. We urge you to contact your Congressional representative and urge him or her to oppose H.R. 3051.
EDITORS NOTE: Readers may contact your U.S. Representative at 202-224-3121 or use the “Write Your Lawmakers“ tool.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/remote-e1437236838461.jpg360640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-18 12:28:292015-07-18 12:28:29Background Check Bill Seeks to Create Backdoor Gun Prohibition
Now more than ever, every time it rains, one Indiana farmer fears his land will be declared a federally-regulated body of water:
After a recent rainfall, Charlie Houin looked out over one of his cornfields in Marshall County as a clear stream of water flowed beneath him. With the summer’s high rain levels flooding fields, drainage systems and the streams that carry excess water away are crucial for farmers to maintain healthy crops.
But Houin, and farmers across the country, are now in a fight for control over these small waterways — battling a new rule in the Clean Water Act opponents say will be overly burdensome and costly to the agriculture industry.
[ … ]
Houin said he not only sees this as one of the EPA’s biggest land grabs in history, but he’s worried the permit process is going to be crippling when he needs to repair ditches, waterways and drainage systems for his farm. When you have only one chance a year at the planting season, he said, having farmland and waterways tied up in an approval process will be costly.
Worry about federal overreach isn’t limited to farmers and ranchers. Many other businesses also oppose the agencies’ regulatory overreach.
This has driven business groups to take EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to federal court.
The U.S. Chamber, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Portland Cement Association, the Tulsa Regional Chamber, and the State Chamber of Oklahoma filed suit to stop the new Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) which dramatically expands the definition of federally-regulated “navigable waters” covered by the Clean Water Act.
They make the case that the water rule gives the federal government unprecedented and unconstitutional regulatory authority over nearly every body of water in the United States and undercuts state and local government sovereignty.
The plaintiff’s argue that the new waters definition goes beyond its authority under the Constitution and the Clean Water Act, because it “confers jurisdiction to the Agencies over waters that are not ‘navigable waters.'”
Under the Clean Water Act the federal government has jurisdiction over only “navigable waters.”
Initially that was defined as bodies of water where interstate transportation or commerce could take place. However, over the decades, the regulatory creep set in and that definition broadened from lakes and rivers bordering states (literally interstate waters) to include tributaries and wetlands that abut regulated water bodies. WOTUS is the latest expansion.
Through the water rule, “thousands of miles of intrastate waters that have no substantial effect on interstate commerce” are now under federal regulation, the plaintiffs note. This includes wetlands, streams, ditches, ponds, and bodies that only occasionally hold water.
This broad federal jurisdiction is what has farmers, ranchers, home developers, other businesses upset.
To understand the plaintiffs’ legal argument, you need to know about a 2006 Supreme Court case, Rapanos vs. United States. In it, the court established two tests for determining if a body of water falls under federal jurisdiction.
The first is “continuous surface connection.” In his plurality decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the Clean Water Act requires that a body of water have a “continuous surface connection” to another federally-regulated body for federal regulators to have jurisdiction.
The second is “significant nexus,” found in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion. In order to be considered a navigable water, a body of water must “significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity” of “waters that are or were navigable in fact or that could reasonably be so made.”
The water rule fails both tests, the plaintiffs explain:
[C]ountless waters, wetlands, and normally dry lands will be classified as ‘waters of the United States’ despite their complete detachment–both on a surface level and on a chemical, physical, and biological level–to any navigable water.
The Matrix Defense
One example of how EPA fails to meet these tests is by employing something I call the “Matrix Defense.” EPA claims it can determine a federally-regulated tributary to a body of water simply with the use of computer “desktop tools that provide for the hydrologic estimation of a discharge sufficient to create an ordinary high water mark.” Virtual reality trumps physical reality, as the filing explains:
“In other words, if a computer model suggests that a feature has enough flow to create a bed and bank and ordinary high water mark, the Agencies can determine that that feature is a ‘tributary,’ even if the physical indicators have not been observed in the field.”
Unfortunately for EPA, this tactic doesn’t satisfy either Justice Scalia’s continuous surface test or Justice Kennedy’s significant nexus test.
WOTUS is Unconstitutional
The water rule doesn’t just violate the Clean Water Act. The plaintiffs argue it also violates the 10th Amendment, which states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
State governments have the authority to regulate land and water in their states. The Clean Water Act affirms that states have “the primary responsibilities and rights … to plan the development and use … of land and water resources.”
However, with the water rule, the federal government claims regulatory authority over nearly every body of water in America. Waters, including ditches, canals, ponds, and wetlands, as far as 4,000 feet from a navigable water can be regulated by the federal government.
This violates the 10th Amendment. As the plaintiffs state:
The Supreme Court requires a ‘clear and manifest’ statement from Congress to authorize [such] an unprecedented intrusion into traditional state authority.
State and local government sovereignty gets squeezed as the federal government expands its reach.
EPA Avoided Looking at the Economic Effects on Small Businesses
Not only does the water rule conflict with the Constitution and the Clean Water Act, regulators didn’t follow the proper rulemaking process.
The plaintiffs point out that EPA ignored the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) which requires federal agencies to analyze the effects of proposed regulations on small businesses, organizations, and governments.
EPA claims it didn’t have to do this because the water rule “will not have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities,” and it “will not affect small entities to a greater extent than the existing regulations.”
[T]he Clean Water Act and the revised definition proposed in this rule directly determine permitting requirements and other obligations. It is unquestionable that small businesses will continue to seek permits under the Clean Water Act. Therefore they will be subject to the application of the proposed definition and the impacts arising from its application.
The “fundamentally flawed” rulemaking process drove SBA to ask EPA to “withdraw the rule and that the EPA conduct a Small Business Advocacy Review panel before proceeding any further with this rulemaking.”
Finally, the water rule is too vague. If people can’t understand the regulation, how are they supposed to behave lawfully? The water rule “fails to provide fair notice of what conduct is prohibited by the civil and criminal provision of the Clean Water Act and grants overly broad enforcement discretion to” federal regulators, writes the plaintiffs.
To see how this applies in the real world, let’s go back to Charlie Houin’s story:
The water rule states that a “tributary must show physical features of flowing water — a bed, bank and ordinary high water mark — to warrant protection,” as well as connecting to a larger body of water.
Discussing the rules with The Tribune, Houin stood near one of his small waterways that, he said, he has always thought of as a ditch and has never had regulatory issues with. But based on the EPA’s definition, Houin’s small “ditch” could be considered as a tributary because it has continually flowing water that empties into the nearby Yellow River.
This is a major problem, [Justin Schneider, senior policy adviser for the Indiana Farm Bureau] said, because no matter what a farmer may think a waterway is, it comes down to the EPA’s interpretation. A farmer could be in violation and not realize it, he said, calling it “an issue with potential for big repercussions.” Beyond having to obtain expensive federal permits, the Indiana Attorney General’s Office said farmers could face civil penalties up to $37,500 a day for violating the new rule.
Citizens “cannot reasonably determine based on the face of the relevant statutes and regulations what is required of them,” plaintiffs state.
Let’s step beyond how the water rule violates the Constitution and ignores federal law. It also will shower uncertainty over every property owner.
An economy can’t function effectively if people fear that taking some ordinary action like filling in a ditch will require costly permits or unleash the fury of federal regulators.
The easier path to take is to not invest in and improve one’s business. Don’t build an addition to a factory that could employ more people. Don’t build a housing development and increase the housing supply for families. Don’t touch that gully the rain cut in the corn field. Instead, let it go fallow.
That may satisfy a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., but it means frustration for Americans having to live under those rules.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a Holstein cow grazing by a pond in Lancaster, NH. Photo credit: Bloomberg.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/bloomberg_cow_pond_800px-e1437167703694.jpg426640Sean Hackbarthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSean Hackbarth2015-07-17 17:16:352015-07-17 17:16:35What is the Legal Case Against EPA’s Water Rule?
In this video clip, Paul Krugman demonstrates once again that prizes don’t make you an expert on everything. Indeed, his poor prognostications happen so frequently that one wonders if Krugman is an expert on anything. I don’t say that to be unpleasant. If you’re going on TV and enjoying a lavish lifestyle by pretending to know what you’re talking about, shouldn’t you be held to a higher standard?
Let’s pass over for a moment how woefully wrong Krugman was about the Internet. What about the internet of money?
Krugman first says: “At this point bitcoin is not looking too good.”
It is true that investment often follows the Gartner hype cycle. So bitcoin has indeed fallen from great heights and is probably just now making its ascent out of the “trough of disillusionment.”
But so what? There is nothing inherently wrong with bitcoin. In fact, some very savvy, patient people are building an unbelievable set of technologies within and around the blockchain. And if you believe Gartner, most really interesting tech goes through this cycle.
Let’s look back at the Internet. When the dotcom bubble and subsequent burst looked like this:
Do we conclude that because in 2002 the Internet wasn’t “looking so good” that TCP/IP was not viable? That would have been a very short-sighted thing to say, particularly about a system that is a robust “dumb network“ like the internet.
Bitcoin is also a dumb network. But don’t let the “dumb” part fool you, says bitcoin expert Andreas Andronopoulos. “So the dumb network becomes a platform for independent innovation, without permission, at the edge. The result is an incredible range of innovations, carried out at an even more incredible pace. People interested in even the tiniest of niche applications can create them on the edge.”
Then Krugman goes on to ask, “Why does a piece of paper with a dead president on it have value?” Answering his own question he says “Because other people think it has value.”
And this is not untrue. But the problem with this line of thinking is — subjective value notwithstanding — the value of money is also contingent. You might say the value of fiat money is too contingent — especially upon political whims, upon the limited knowledge of the folks at the Federal Reserve, and upon the fact that its unit of account is no longer anything scarce, such as gold.
By contrast, bitcoin has standard of scarcity programmed into it. So, bitcoin is in limited supply, thanks to a sophisticated algorithm.
In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network. The bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency can be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless. (To learn more about this algorithm, visit “Currency with a Finite Supply.”)
Perhaps you don’t trust this algorithm. Certainly Paul Krugman does not. That’s okay, because digital currencies compete, so you can find one you do trust. One crypto currency is backed by gold and funnily enough, it’s called “the Hayek” after the Nobel laureate who wrote about competing private currencies.
Now, what shall we make of the magic of the dollar? Krugman says it is “the fact that you can use it to pay taxes.” That’s sort of like saying that the Internet works because of eFile. Let’s just assume Krugman was kidding.
But Krugman thinks, without irony, that bitcoin “levitates.” That is to say, he’s okay with the idea that the dollar has value because other people value it, but he’s not okay with the idea that bitcoin has value because other people value it, which is a rather curious thing to say in the same two-minute stretch. He goes on to argue that bitcoin is built on libertarian ideology, and that it doesn’t do anything that digitizing the dollar hasn’t done.
And that’s when we realize that Krugman doesn’t have any earthly clue about bitcoin.
Open-source currencies have another layer that multiplies these underlying effects: the currency itself. Not only is the investment in infrastructure and innovation shared by all, but the shared benefit may also manifest in increased value for the common currency.
Currency is the quintessential shared good, because its value correlates strongly to the economic activity that it enables. In simple terms, a currency is valuable because many people use it, and the more who use it, the more valuable it becomes.
Unlike national currencies, which are generally restricted to use within a country’s borders, digital currencies like bitcoin are global and can therefore be readily adopted and used by almost any user who is part of the networked global society.
What Krugman also fails to appreciate is that bitcoin and the bitcoin network is disintermediated. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s direct and peer-to-peer. This elimination of the mediating institutions — banks, governments, and credit card companies — means bitcoin transactions are far, far cheaper. But that also means these institutions could be far less powerful over time. And that’s precisely why it’s being adopted most quickly by the world’s poorest people and countries with hyperinflation.
Hey, look, I understand. In many ways, Krugman is a twentieth-century mind. Keynesian. Unhealthy obsession with aggregates and dirigisme. He believes in big central solutions to problems that robust, decentralized systems are far better equipped to tackle. And he’s not terribly plugged into tech innovation. In fact, here’s that well-played Internet quote in case you forgot:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law” — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other!
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
Max Borders is the editor of the Freeman and director of content for FEE. He is also co-founder of the event experience Voice & Exit and author of Superwealth: Why we should stop worrying about the gap between rich and poor.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/pual-krugman.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-17 12:26:582015-07-17 12:27:17Paul Krugman Is Clueless about Bitcoin by Max Borders
My Haitian babysitter told me to get into the car, an old sedan with peeling paint, driven by a stranger. She’d hailed it, like a cab, and it pulled over for us, like a cab, but it didn’t look like a cab.
“I thought you said we were taking a taxi,” I said.
“This is a taxi.” She pushed me into the back seat.
“It doesn’t look like a taxi,” I whispered.
“Real taxis don’t come into this neighborhood,” she said. “This is a gypsy.”
I thought she was describing the ethnicity of the driver. Only later, listening to radio news reports about city police campaigns against gypsy cab drivers did I understand that my babysitter had dragged me into a mobile version of the black market.
That brief ride through a 1970s New York City ghetto was my only time in a gypsy cab: a bewildered little boy forced into the car of a man I didn’t know. It felt dangerous in a way that even hitchhiking in the Middle East when I was a teenager did not.
So why do I use Uber and Lyft without hesitation? Why do I prefer gray-market ride sharing with unlicensed strangers to hailing a municipally sanctioned taxi?
At this point, my confidence is based on past experience: the dozens of Uber drivers I’ve had were far more pleasant than the hundreds of cab drivers I’ve ridden with. But even my very first time with Uber, I got in without hesitation.
Peer-to-peer apps have made reputation markets real and robust — at least in certain corners of the service economy. Uber drivers have far greater incentive to make me happy than any cab driver ever has. More than their tip depends on it: the rating I give them can affect their future earnings.
Cab companies could have adopted reputation apps years ago as a way to outdo their competitors. But they weren’t worried about competition. City licensing often creates a protective cartel for current cabbies. That’s why Uber and Lyft became so popular so fast: the market — meaning everyone looking for a ride — wanted what the cab industry felt no need to offer us.
Will food trucks be the next service to escape the archaic model of licensing and regulation?
One such official, Chris Salter, told the paper that people selling food from the back of SUVs have posed food-poisoning risks to the public for years: “Did they slaughter a chicken in their backyard and cut it up on a piece of plywood? You just don’t know.”
The solution Salter proposes, of course, is stricter policing and greater regulation. After all, if cops and bureaucrats don’t protect the public, who will?
To the generation that reads newspapers and waits in line for taxis, the argument makes sense: when you eat in a restaurant, you may not know for sure that the food is safe, but the restaurant isn’t going anywhere; even without a health inspector’s oversight, restaurant owners have an incentive to protect their reputations. It’s not hard to spread the word that you got sick eating at Big Joe’s on the corner of 1st and Main. It’s a lot less helpful to say you ate a bad fajita out of the back of a faded green RAV4 in the abandoned parking lot.
When I used to take city cabs, the seats were filthy, the driving was reckless, and the drivers ranged from sullen to rude. But I felt relatively safe. I knew I could always write down the cabby’s name and medallion number. In theory, at least, I could report him and maybe someone would wag a finger at him. That seemed better than nothing.
Licensed food trucks offer a similar assurance: “Salter’s advice to the public is to look for the health grade card at food trucks if they’re unsure whether it’s operating legally. Since 2012, food trucks have been required to display the same cards as restaurants.”
Again, even without the health inspection required to get a permit and a health grade card, food truck owners don’t want to risk customers’ health for fear of losing their permits or having to display a lackluster “health grade” on their cards.
Government licensing acts as a sort of hampered reputation market. The food SUVs have no such incentives.
As in the case of cabbies versus Uber drivers, the legitimate food truck owners are on the side of the government officials: “Many of those owners are upset because the illegal trucks skirt regulation fees and cut into their business.”
But suppose you’re a foodie with fear of salmonella. Would you rather rely on an 11-month-old government report card or just check your food-truck app to see what your fellow foodies have to say? What sort of insurance does the owner carry — what third-party assurance is available? How’s their guacamole?
Don’t like this truck’s rating? The app will guide you to the next nearest truck serving similar fare.
Salter told the Herald-Sun, “We’re not trying to keep anybody from making a living. We’re trying to be fair and to protect the public.” So why is he offering 20th-century advice to consumers in the 21st century? Might he have any interests at stake other than public safety?
No doubt health officials would counter that the sharing economy is an option only for the privileged. It’s not like everyone has a smart phone, right? Right?
Many of the illegal vendors speak only Spanish, Salter told the Herald-Sun. And “many of them can’t read, so even if we pass out documents, they can’t read them.”
So who buys questionable chicken out of the back of an SUV operated by illiterate, Spanish-speaking strangers when Durham has so many government-approved food trucks with English-speaking staff?
Might those who choose to do so be similar to those who hailed gypsy cabs in the New York City of my youth?
“Real taxis don’t come into this neighborhood,” my babysitter had told me. I didn’t need to ask why. I didn’t want to be in that area either. But folks in the bad neighborhoods still needed rides, and they were willing to pay for them. There was extra risk involved for both parties, and the drivers couldn’t make the kind of money that licensed taxi drivers made, but driving a gypsy cab was better than their next-best option, so supply and demand met in illegal exchanges that benefitted both parties.
It’s safe to assume something similar is going on at the back of some of Durham’s SUVs.
These are most likely working people on the margins of the economy who don’t have the time or the money to seek a quick lunch elsewhere. If they’re buying their food from obviously unlicensed and uninspected vendors, that suggests that the higher-scale food trucks aren’t coming to their neighborhood — or that they charge considerably more than the illegal food.
The health officials aren’t protecting these people. At best, they are limiting their options. Worse, they could be driving economic exchanges further underground, where neither the government nor the market can effectively regulate safety.
Salter implies that vendor noncompliance is the result of ignorance, but it’s more likely buyers and sellers who don’t feel especially well protected by the legal system are taking measured risks to improve each other’s lives.
And I bet plenty of them do have smart phones. What they need now isn’t more ardent government oversight; it’s more reliable reputation markets. If there isn’t already an app for that, there soon will be.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/food-truck-with-customers.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-16 11:43:592015-07-16 11:45:48Who Will Protect Us from Tainted Food Trucks? by B.K. Marcus
Anthem says his father taught him “above all else” that true freedom can only be achieved once the world experiences a Hayekian choice in currency that technologies like bitcoin, HayekGold, and other virtual assets are wonderfully making a rapidly growing reality. I know Pop would be the most excited person in the world about all of these new technology developments enabling Austrian economics to flourish in a modern digital society.
Continuing its national battle against the federal government’s attempted takeover of public education, the Thomas More Law Center, last week, filed a friend of the court brief in the Missouri Court of Appeals supporting a lower court decision that held the State’s participation and membership in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (“SBAC”) is illegal and SBAC itself is an “unlawful interstate compact … whose existence and operation violate[s] the Compact Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
In 1926 Margaret Sanger was a guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey. Sanger wrote in her biography:
The Spring home buying season continues to show strength, buoyed by strong first-time buyer volume and share. Historically low mortgage rates, an improving labor market, and loose credit standards, combined with a 32-month-long seller’s market for existing homes, continue to drive up home prices faster than income.
