Tag Archive for: Protectionism

Debunking Hurricane-Season Fallacies—3 Economic Fallacies to Watch Out For

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You might be prepared for a hurricane, but are you prepared for a deluge of fallacies?

With hurricane season upon us, many are preparing for the worst. Windows are being boarded up, pantries are being stockpiled with extra food and water, and rescue crews are monitoring weather forecasts closely. Some have already experienced the worst, and are no doubt grateful they were ready when they got hit.

But while many are prepared for the hurricanes that sweep in, few seem prepared for the deluge of economic fallacies that inevitably accompanies these storms. These fallacies rain down from the highest levels of government and can be even more destructive than the hurricanes themselves. At best, the fallacies cause confusion and panic; at worst, shortages and life-threatening miscommunications.

So, in an effort to help us prepare for the storm before it’s too late, let’s explore three common fallacies that can come up during hurricane season.

The broken window fallacy is a classic hurricane-season misstep. “Hurricanes may do damage,” the reasoning goes, “but look on the bright side. Think of how many jobs will be created because of the destruction. Think about all the demand that will be stimulated. Things may look bleak, but this is actually good for the economy.”

Bastiat debunked this reasoning in his 1848 essay That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen, and countless economists since have echoed his remarks. In the essay, he tells the parable of a shopkeeper whose careless son breaks a window, and he asks the reader whether this is good for the economy. At first glance, it’s tempting to say yes. But as Bastiat shows in the story, this conclusion ignores the unseen effects of the broken window.

“If…you come to the conclusion,” he writes, “as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, ‘Stop there! your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.’”

What is not seen, briefly, is the lost opportunities, the things that could have been done with our resources had they not been needed to replace the broken window. Taking those into account, it becomes clear that the broken window is harmful to the economy. After all, there is now one less window in our stockpile of goods.

The same reasoning applies on a larger scale. There may be plenty of jobs and demand when a hurricane destroys a town, but saying this is “good” for the economy is simply wrong. If this logic were true, the more destruction we experience the better off we’d be! But economic reasoning—and plain common sense—tells us this can’t be right.

Every time a hurricane comes in there is a surge of worry about so-called price gouging—raising prices sharply in response to a supply or demand shock. Hurricane Ian has been no different.

“I want to add one more warning…to the oil and gas industry executives. Do not — let me repeat, do not — use this as an excuse to raise gasoline prices or gouge the American people,” President Biden said on Wednesday. “This small temporary storm impact on oil production provides no excuse, no excuse for price increases at the pump. None.”

“If the gas companies try to use this storm to raise prices at the pump,” he continued, “I will ask officials to look into whether price gouging is going on.” “America is watching,” he added. “The industry should do the right thing.”

According to Biden, the “right thing” for the oil and gas industry is to keep prices right where they are. But if access to gasoline for those who need it most is the goal, keeping the price fixed during a supply disruption will only make matters worse

“[Anti-price-gouging] laws keep prices low during natural disasters but lead to bare shelves, closed stores, and empty gas stations,” explains economics professor Lili Carneglia. “This happens because the low mandated prices push consumers to purchase more water, gas, flashlights, and so on. Yet at the same time, sellers aren’t financially motivated to expend any additional effort to supply more of these necessities. Why would they spend their time or money bringing in additional goods during a disaster only to sell them for the same price they’d get under normal circumstances? This imbalance between the interest of buyers and sellers causes shortages, leaving many without anything at all.”

Laws against price gouging—and the disdainful attitude toward “price-gougers” that pervades our culture—are born from the fallacy that keeping prices low makes goods more accessible for those who need them. In many cases, this simply isn’t true. It’s not a question of having a high price or a low price. It’s a question of having a high price or an empty shelf.

And if someone’s truly in need, you can bet they’ll prefer the high price over the empty shelf any day of the week.

Another policy that sometimes gets discussed in the wake of hurricanes is the Jones Act. Officially called the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act makes it illegal to transport goods by ship between US ports unless the ship is US-built, US-flagged, is owned by Americans, and is at least three-quarters crewed by Americans.

The Jones Act has recently become a hot topic again because of the situation in Puerto Rico. The island is suffering from the damage wrought by Hurricane Fiona and is in desperate need of supplies. As it happens, a ship carrying 300,000 barrels of desperately-needed diesel fuel from Texas was right next to the island on Monday. However, the ship is not Jones Act compliant, so it had to wait until a “temporary and targeted” waiver to the Act was granted Wednesday before it could unload the fuel.

This isn’t the first time the Jones Act has been waived to facilitate hurricane-relief efforts. It was also temporarily waived following Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria. Coincidentally, the Hurricane Maria waiver also concerned Puerto Rico, also happened in late September (2017), and also took two days before it came through.

So, why does this harmful Act exist in the first place? Essentially, the goal is to create a “strong” domestic shipping industry to ensure the US isn’t too dependent on other countries for its shipping (there’s also a mercantilist argument, but we’ll leave that aside for this discussion). If we require these ships to be all-American, the reasoning goes, US shipping will thrive and can be counted on to facilitate commerce and lend a hand should it be needed for national defense. The fear is that American ports, absent these restrictions, would come to be dominated by foreign ships built in foreign shipyards, and should there be a war, those ships would be called back to their home ports, leaving America with few vessels and little shipyard infrastructure to use for commercial purposes (or to commandeer for war).

The idea that it’s good for a nation to be “self-sufficient” in certain key industries like shipping is a typical protectionist talking point, but it has serious problems. Though it might seem like being “self-sufficient” makes us strong and being “dependent” on other nations makes us weak, the reality is exactly the opposite.

Imagine trying to make your home self-sufficient, or even your city or state. You’d have to grow all your own food, mine your own metal, and make everything yourself. Even if trade were only restricted in a few industries, it wouldn’t be long before you became an economic lightweight compared to what you could have been. Your technology will fall behind and you’ll struggle to accumulate capital. In short, your economy will be severely weakened.

This is the inevitable result of trade restrictions. To the extent that you cut yourself off from the world, you cripple yourself. And this is just as true on a national scale as it is on a more local scale.

“What protection teaches us,” said economist Henry George (1839-1897), “is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

All that to say, hampered disaster relief is but one of the many ways “self-sufficiency” makes us worse off.

As with hurricanes, the key to mitigating the damage of economic fallacies is being prepared for them. If we don’t know even basic economics, we are setting ourselves up to be duped, and there are real consequences when that happens.

So just as we take time to board our windows and stock our pantries, let’s also take time to learn economics and think through some of the more common economic fallacies.

Given the stakes, it’s just the prudent thing to do.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Bernie Sanders Is Wrong: Trade Is Awesome for the Poor and for America by Corey Iacono

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential hopeful, is no fan of free trade. In an interview with Vox, Sanders’ made his anti-trade position clear: “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for the American people.”

He also noted that he voted against all the free trade agreements that were proposed during his time in Congress and that if elected President he would “radically transform trade policies” in favor of protectionism.

Sanders and his ilk accuse their intellectual opponents of promoting “trickle-down economics,” but that is precisely what he is advocating when it comes to trade. The argument for protectionism ultimately relies on the belief that protecting domestic corporations from foreign competition and keeping consumer prices high will somehow benefit society as whole.

However, the real effect of protectionism is to increase monopoly and consequently reduce overall economic welfare. In fact, according to a paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Government policies…such as tariffs and other forms of protection are an important source of monopoly” that lead to “significant welfare losses.”

In contrast to Sanders’ assertion that the expansion of free trade has been a disaster for the American people, there is a near unanimous consensus among economists that the opposite is true.

An IGM Poll of dozens of the most renowned academic economists found that, weighted for each respondent’s confidence in their answer, 96 percent of economists agreed, “Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment.”

When the vast majority of economists of all sorts of ideological stripes agree that free trade is a good thing, maybe, just maybe, they’re onto something.

In fact, they surely are. Using four different methods, economists at the Petersen Institute for International Economics estimated the economic benefits from the expansion of technology that facilitates international trade (such as container ships), as well as the removal of government imposed barriers to international trade (such as tariffs). Since the end of World War II, they generated “an increase in US income of roughly $1 trillion a year,” which translates into an increase in “annual income of about $10,000 per household.”

This result is mostly driven by the fact that foreign businesses produce many goods which are used in the production process at a lower cost than their domestic competitors. Access to these low-cost foreign inputs allows American businesses to decrease their production costs and consequently increase their total output, making the nation as a whole much wealthier than it otherwise would have been.

Moreover, contrary to common conjecture, the benefits of international trade haven’t simply accrued to the wealthy alone. Low and middle income individuals tend to spend a greater share of their income on cheap imported consumer goods than those with higher incomes. As a result, international trade tends to benefit these income groups more so than the wealthy.

Indeed, according to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, middle income consumers have about 29 percent greater purchasing power as a result of international trade.

In other words, middle income consumers can buy 29 percent more goods and services as a result of the access to low-cost imports from foreign countries.

Low income consumers see even greater gains with 62 percent higher purchasing power as a result of trade. In contrast, the top 10 percent of income earners only saw an increase in purchasing power of 3 percent as a result of trade.

On top of that, international trade has provided benefits by bringing new and innovative products to American consumers.

According seminal research by Christian Broda of the University of Chicago and David E. Weinstein of Colombia University, the variety of imported goods increased three-fold from 1972 to 2001. The value to American consumers of this import induced expanded product variety is estimated to be equivalent to 2.6 percent of national income, about $450 billion as of 2014. That’s not exactly small change.

The spread of free trade has also made considerable contributions to environmental protection, gender equality, and global poverty reduction. As a result of the spread of clean technology facilitated by freer trade, “every 1 percent increase in income as a result of trade liberalization (the removal of government imposed barriers to trade), pollution concentrations fall by 1 percent,” according to the Council of Economic Advisers.

The CEA also has found that “industries with larger tariff declines saw greater reductions in the [gender] wage gap,” suggesting that facilitating foreign competition through trade liberalization reduces the ability of employers to discriminate against women.

In regards to global poverty reduction, research has shown that in response to US import tariff cuts, developing countries, such as Vietnam, export more to the US, leading to higher incomes and less poverty.

Despite the large gains from trade America has already reaped, there is still room for improvement (contrary to Sen. Sanders’ accusations of “unfettered” free trade). The PIIE economists estimate that further trade liberalization would increase “US household income between $4,000 and $5,300 annually,” leading the them to conclude that, “in the future as in the past, free trade can significantly raise income — and quality of life — in the United States.”

Ultimately, the conclusion that most economists seem to reach is that, from being a disaster, the expansion of free trade has been a tremendous success, and that further trade liberalization would most likely make Americans, and the rest of the world, considerably better off.

Don’t let fear-mongering about foreigners and China scare you: free trade benefits everyone, especially the poor, while protectionism benefits only the politically powerful.

Corey Iacono

Corey Iacono is a student at the University of Rhode Island majoring in pharmaceutical science and minoring in economics.

How Economic Control Threatens Political Liberty, Free Speech and the Rule of Law by Jon Guze

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John Cochrane (aka “The Grumpy Economist”) has posted a long meditation entitled “Rule of Law and the Regulatory State,” in which he makes a very important point:

The United States’ regulatory bureaucracy has vast power. Regulators can ruin your life, and your business, very quickly, and you have very little recourse. That this power is damaging the economy is a commonplace complaint. Less recognized, but perhaps even more important, the burgeoning regulatory state poses a new threat to our political freedom.

What banker dares to speak out against the Fed, or trader against the SEC? What hospital or health insurer dares to speak out against HHS or Obamacare? What business needing environmental approval for a project dares to speak out against the EPA? What drug company dares to challenge the FDA?

Our problems are not just national. What real estate developer needing zoning approval dares to speak out against the local zoning board?

Readers who doubt that this is an urgent problem should read the whole thing, which includes numerous chilling descriptions of regulatory abuse, but here I want to focus on an issue he raises in passing: how best to refer to this urgent problem?

Cochrane says he hasn’t found “a really good word to describe this emerging threat of large discretionary regulation, used as tool of political control.” He considers “socialism,” “regulatory capture,” and “cronyism,” but he rejects all three. Regarding the last two, he notes:

We’re headed for an economic system in which many industries have a handful of large, cartelized businesses — think 6 big banks, 5 big health insurance companies, 4 big energy companies, and so on.

Sure, they are protected from competition. But the price of protection is that the businesses support the regulator and administration politically, and does their bidding. If the government wants them to hire, or build [a] factory in unprofitable place, they do it.

The benefit of cooperation is a good living and a quiet life. The cost of stepping out of line is personal and business ruin, meted out frequently. That’s neither capture nor cronyism.

The fact is, we’ve seen this system of political economy before — most notably in Mussolini’s Italy and in Hitler’s Germany — and there’s a commonly used term for it. It’s fascism. Maybe Cochrane thinks that term is too emotionally charged. However, I’d have thought a bit of emotional charge was warranted. As Cochrane says:

The power of the regulatory state…lacks many of the checks and balances that give us some “rule of law” in the legal system. …

The clear danger we face is the use of regulation for political control. Each industry gets carved up into a few compliant oligopolies. And the threat of severe penalties, with little of the standard rule-of-law recourse, keeps people and businesses in line and supporting the political organization or party that controls the agencies. …

A return to economic growth depends on reforming the regulatory state. But… preservation of our political freedom depends on it even more.

Read the rest here.

This post first appeared at the John Locke Foundation.

EDITORS NOTE: See Steve Horwitz’s “Why the Candidates Keep Giving Us Reasons to Use the “F” Word“; Jeff Tucker’s “Trumpism: The Ideology“; and Jason Kuznicki’s “The Banality of Donald Trump.”

Jon Guze

The Politics of Nostalgia: Why Does the Left Want to Take Us Backwards? by Steven Horwitz

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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.


Steven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective, now in paperback.

Who Will Protect Us from Tainted Food Trucks? by B.K. Marcus

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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?

“Illegal Food Trucks Worry Health Officials,” reports the Herald-Sun of Durham, North Carolina. “Unlicensed food trucks operating illegally in Durham have health officials concerned that customers could end up getting sick.”

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.”

Food trucks in Durham may not yet operate as a cartel — the way they are beginning to do in New York City, for example, where the number of food-truck licenses has been frozen for years — but the complaint is typical of the established players in a protected industry: upstarts with lower costs are threatening our profit margin!

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.

B.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is managing editor of the Freeman.

The Ex-Im Bank Is Dead — But Watch Out for Corporate Welfare Zombies by Daniel J. Ikenson

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At midnight, the gears of crony capitalism ground to a halt at 811 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.

After 81 years of funneling taxpayer dollars to favored companies, projects, and geopolitical outcomes under the guise of advancing some vague conception of the “U.S. economic interest,” the Export-Import Bank of the United States will end its financing operations at midnight tonight.

No more subsidies to Fortune 100 businesses. No more siphoning revenues from unwitting U.S. firms and industries. No more loan guarantees to wealthy, autocratic foreign governments. No more crowding out of private lending. No more taxpayer exposure to a Fannie Mae-like fiasco. No more bribery and corruption scandals. No more collaboration and lending to China’s Export-Import Bank – you know, the entity whose support for Chinese companies is alleged to threaten U.S. exporters and jobs, and is the most frequently cited imperative for reauthorizing Ex-Im.

No more of any of this… for now.

Champions of small government and market capitalism should savor this rare victory. It was won with solid arguments, including over 20 years of analyses from Cato Institute scholars including Ian Vasquez, Aaron Lukas, Steve Slivinsky, Chris Edwards, Doug Bandow, Sallie James, and – perhaps most comprehensively and tirelessly – Veronique de Rugy.

It was won because of columnist/scholar Tim Carney’s persistence in focusing the public’s attention on the corruption bred of corporate welfare and because of the analytical contributions of Heritage’s Diane Katz, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Young, and others who continued to make compelling arguments for shuttering the Bank, despite steep odds against that outcome.

It was won because certain libertarian groups and conservative activists made the issue a priority, recognizing that corporate welfare is as great a threat to liberty as is the Welfare State, and that reining it in should be a priority because success there would lend greater credibility to the effort to rein in the Welfare State.

It was won against great odds, including vast political expenditures and arm-twisting by U.S. business interests on Capitol Hill, a mainstream media that is reflexively unsympathetic to any cause associated with “Tea Party Types,” and a general aversion among establishment organizations to any challenges to the status-quo.

Radical and reckless, excessive and extreme, ideological and idiotic have been the characterizations assigned by media, politicians, and Boeing lobbyists in their attempts to discredit legitimate efforts to purge “crony” and make “market” the new brand of capitalism.

And it was won because House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, knowing the case against Ex-Im reauthorization was more substantive than the New York Times would allow, made good gatekeepers by putting the onus on Ex-Im proponents to answer the critics – a task at which they failed.

So, at midnight, the Export-Import Bank ceased in its capacity to issue new financing. That is something to cheer. It may also be short-lived.

Proponents of the Bank have been regrouping and strategizing to move legislation to reauthorize the Bank at the soonest possible chance. In fact the White House is hosting a conference call for the purpose of advancing that outcome. Here’s the text of the email:

Dear Friend,

Please join us for a conference call on Tuesday, June 30th, at 2:35 PM with President Barack Obama, Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, and Director of the National Economic Council, Jeff Zients, to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

The Export-Import Bank is a critical tool to help U.S. businesses and workers succeed in global markets and grow their exports – it supports high-quality jobs, is a vital tool for small businesses, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny. Its reauthorization is vital to U.S. competitiveness and leveling the playing field for American small business owners and workers. …

This call is off the record and is not for press purposes nor amplification on social media.

Thank you,

The White House Business Council

The battle may be over but the war continues. Given the sway that conservatives have had on this issue, it will be interesting to see whether and how Speaker Boehner tries to circumvent Hensarling’s committee to get a reauthorization bill to the floor. Majority Leader McConnell believes there’s enough support in the Senate for reauthorization, but most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have expressed opposition to reauthorization.

It seems to me that if Ex-Im reauthorization resurfaces in the weeks and months ahead, it will be an issue that provides Republicans with yet another opportunity to demonstrate commitment to limited government, free market principles. Maybe this time they’ll see the value in reclaiming that brand.


Daniel Ikenson

Dan Ikenson is director of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, where he coordinates and conducts research on all manners of international trade and investment policy.

EDITORS NOTE: A version of this post first appeared at Cato.org.

LA Unions Demand Exemption from $15 Minimum Wage They Created by Daniel Bier

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If there was ever any doubt that LA’s minimum wage hike was meant to help the labor unions at the expense of everyone else, I hope we can now put that idea to bed.

The LA Times reports,

Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces. . . .

Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.

“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them,” Hicks said in a statement. “This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing.”

Unions want to give workers and business the option — the freedom! — to prioritize what’s important to them and negotiate their own pay! Isn’t that nice. But only if those workers are paying union dues, and only if those businesses are using union labor.

The minimum wage hike was always meant to make independent workers more expensive and make unions look better by comparison. But it’s a bold move for the unions to simply say, in one breath, “Everyone deserves a living wage! It’ll be good for everyone! Except us, thank you. We’ll set our own pay — and also, give a break to any businesses who agree to go back to union labor.”

More on this transparently corrupt policy of the minimum wage by FEE’s Jeffrey Tucker.


Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

Razing the Bar: The bar exam protects a cartel of lawyers, not their clients by Allen Mendenhall

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The bar exam was designed and continues to operate as a mechanism for excluding the lower classes from participation in the legal services market. Elizabeth Olson of the New York Times reports that the bar exam as a professional standard “is facing a new round of scrutiny — not just from the test takers but from law school deans and some state legal establishments.”

This is a welcome development.

Testing what, exactly?

The dean of the University of San Diego School of Law, Stephen C. Ferrulo, complains to the Times that the bar exam “is an unpredictable and unacceptable impediment for accessibility to the legal profession.” Ferrulo is right: the bar exam is a barrier to entry, a form of occupational licensure that restricts access to a particular vocation and reduces market competition.

The bar exam tests the ability to take tests, not the ability to practice law. The best way to learn the legal profession is through tried experience and practical training, which, under our current system, are delayed for years, first by the requirement that would-be lawyers graduate from accredited law schools and second by the bar exam and its accompanying exam for professional fitness.

Freedom of contract

The 19th-century libertarian writer Lysander Spooner, himself a lawyer, opposed occupational licensure as a violation of the freedom of contract, arguing that, once memorialized, all agreements between mutually consenting parties “should not be subjects of legislative caprice or discretion.”

“Men may exercise at discretion their natural rights to enter into all contracts whatsoever that are in their nature obligatory,” he wrote, adding that this principle would prohibit all laws “forbidding men to make contracts by auction without license.”

In more recent decades, Milton Friedman disparaged occupational licensure as “another example of governmentally created and supported monopoly on the state level.” For Friedman, occupational licensure was no small matter. “The overthrow of the medieval guild system,” he said, was an indispensable early step in the rise of freedom in the Western world. It was a sign of the triumph of liberal ideas.… In more recent decades, there has been a retrogression, an increasing tendency for particular occupations to be restricted to individuals licensed to practice them by the state.

The bar exam is one of the most notorious examples of this “increasing tendency.”

Protecting lawyers from the poor

The burden of the bar exam falls disproportionately on low-income earners and ethnic minorities who lack the ability to pay for law school or to assume heavy debts to earn a law degree. Passing a bar exam requires expensive bar-exam study courses and exam fees, to say nothing of the costly applications and paperwork that must be completed in order to be eligible to sit for the exam. The average student-loan debt for graduates of many American law schools now exceeds $150,000, while half of all lawyers make less than $62,000 per year, a significant drop since a decade ago.

Recent law-school graduates do not have the privilege of reducing this debt after they receive their diploma; they must first spend three to four months studying for a bar exam and then, having taken the exam, must wait another three to four months for their exam results. More than half a year is lost on spending and waiting rather than earning, or at least earning the salary of a licensed attorney (some graduates work under the direction of lawyers pending the results of their bar exam).

When an individual learns that he or she has passed the bar exam, the congratulations begin with an invitation to pay a licensing fee and, in some states, a fee for a mandatory legal-education course for newly admitted attorneys. These fees must be paid before the individual can begin practicing law.

The exam is working — but for whom?

What’s most disturbing about this system is that it works precisely as it was designed to operate.  State bar associations and bar exams are products of big-city politics during the Progressive Era. Such exams existed long before the Progressive Era — Delaware’s bar exam dates back to 1763 — but not until the Progressive Era were they increasingly formalized and institutionalized and backed by the enforcement power of various states.

Threatened by immigrant workers and entrepreneurs who were determined to earn their way out of poverty and obscurity, lawyers with connections to high-level government officials in their states sought to form guilds to prohibit advertising and contingency fees and other creative methods for gaining clients and driving down the costs of legal services. Establishment lawyers felt the entrepreneurial up-and-comers were demeaning the profession and degrading the reputation of lawyers by transforming the practice of law into a business industry that admitted ethnic minorities and others who lacked rank and class. Implementing the bar exam allowed these lawyers to keep allegedly unsavory people and practices out of the legal community and to maintain the high costs of fees and services.

Protecting the consumer

In light of this ugly history, the paternalistic response of Erica Moeser to the New York Times is particularly disheartening. Moeser is the president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners. She says that the bar exam is “a basic test of fundamentals” that is justified by “protecting the consumer.” But isn’t it the consumer above all who is harmed by the high costs of legal services that are a net result of the bar exam and other anticompetitive practices among lawyers? To ask the question is to answer it. It’s also unclear how memorizing often-archaic rules to prepare for standardized, high-stakes multiple-choice tests that are administered under stressful conditions will in any way improve one’s ability to competently practice law.

The legal community and consumers of legal services would be better served by the apprenticeship model that prevailed long before the rise of the bar exam. Under this model, an aspiring attorney was tutored by experienced lawyers until he or she mastered the basics and demonstrated his or her readiness to represent clients. The high cost of law school was not a precondition; young people spent their most energetic years doing real work and gaining practical knowledge. Developing attorneys had to establish a good reputation and keep their costs and fees to a minimum to attract clients, gain trust, and maintain a living.

The rise in technology and social connectivity in our present era also means that reputation markets have improved since the early 20th century, when consumers would have had a more difficult time learning by word-of-mouth and secondhand report that one lawyer or group of lawyers consistently failed their clients — or ripped them off. Today, with services like Amazon, eBay, Uber, and Airbnb, consumers are accustomed to evaluating products and service providers online and for wide audiences.  Learning about lawyers’ professional reputations should be quick and easy, a matter of a simple Internet search.  With no bar exam, the sheer ubiquity and immediacy of reputation markets could weed out the good lawyers from the bad, thereby transferring the mode of social control from the legal cartel to the consumers themselves.

Criticism of the high costs of legal bills has not gone away in recent years, despite the drop in lawyers’ salaries and the saturation of the legal market with too many attorneys. The quickest and easiest step toward reducing legal costs is to eliminate bar exams. The public would see no marked difference in the quality of legal services if the bar exam were eliminated, because, among other things, the bar exam doesn’t teach or test how to deliver those legal services effectively.

It will take more than just the grumbling of anxious, aspiring attorneys to end bar-exam hazing rituals. That law school deans are realizing the drawbacks of the bar exam is a step in the right direction. But it will require protests from outside the legal community — from the consumers of legal services — to effect any meaningful change.

Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall is the author of Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism (Rowman & Littlefield / Lexington Books, 2014). Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.

The Garage That Couldn’t Be Boarded Up Uber and the jitney … everything old is new again by SARAH SKWIRE

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August Wilson. Jitney. 1979.

Last December, I used Uber for the first time. I downloaded the app onto my phone, entered my name, location, and credit card number, and told them where my daughters and I needed to go. The driver picked us up at my home five minutes later. I was able to access reviews that other riders had written for the same driver, to see a photograph of him and of the car that he would be using to pick me up, and to pay and tip him without juggling cash and credit cards and my two kids. Like nearly everyone else I know, I instantly became a fan of this fantastic new invention.

In January, I read Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions for the first time. In chapter 8, Sowell discusses the early 20th-century rise of “owner operated bus or taxi services costing five cents and therefore called ‘jitneys,’ the current slang for nickels.” Sowell takes his fuller description of jitneys from transportation economist George W. Hilton’s “American Transportation Planning.”

The jitneys … essentially provided a competitive market in urban transportation with the usual characteristics of rapid entry and exit, quick adaptation to changes in demand, and, in particular,  excellent adaptation to peak load demands. Some 60 percent of the jitneymen were part-time operators, many of whom simply carried passengers for a nickel on trips between home and work.

It sounded strangely familiar.

In February, I read August Wilson’s play, Jitney, written in 1979, about a jitney car service operating in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. As we watch the individual drivers deal with their often tumultuous personal relationships, we also hear about their passengers. The jitney drivers take people to work, to the grocery store, to the pawnshop, to the bus station, and on a host of other unspecified errands. They are an integral part of the community. Like the drivers in Sean Malone’s documentary No Van’s Land, they provide targeted transportation services to a neighborhood under served by public transportation. We see the drivers in Jitney take pride in the way they fit into and take care of their community.

If we gonna be running jitneys out of here we gonna do it right.… I want all the cars inspected. The people got a right if you hauling them around in your car to expect the brakes to work. Clean out your trunk. Clean out the interior of your car. Keep your car clean. The people want to ride in a clean car. We providing a service to the community. We ain’t just giving rides to people. We providing a service.

That service is threatened when the urban planners and improvers at the Pittsburgh Renewal Council decide to board up the garage out of which the jitney service operates and much of the surrounding neighborhood. The drivers are skeptical that the improvements will ever really happen.

Turnbo: They supposed to build a new hospital down there on Logan Street. They been talking about that for the longest while. They supposed to build another part of the Irene Kaufman Settlement House to replace the part they tore down. They supposed to build some houses down on Dinwidee.

Becker: Turnbo’s right. They supposed to build some houses but you ain’t gonna see that. You ain’t gonna see nothing but the tear-down. That’s all I ever seen.

The drivers resolve, in the end, to call a lawyer and refuse to be boarded up. “We gonna run jitneys out of here till the day before the bulldozer come. Ain’t gonna be no boarding up around here! We gonna fight them on that.” They know that continuing to operate will allow other neighborhood businesses to stay open as well. They know that the choice they are offered is not between an improved neighborhood and an unimproved one, but between an unimproved neighborhood and no neighborhood at all. They know that their jitney service keeps their neighborhood running and that it improves the lives of their friends and neighbors in a way that boarded up buildings and perpetually incomplete urban planning projects never will.

Reading Sowell’s book and Wilson’s play in such close proximity got me thinking. Uber isn’t a fantastic new idea. It’s a fantastic old idea that has returned because the omnipresence of smartphones has made running a jitney service easier and more effective. Uber drivers and other ride-sharing services, as we have all read and as No Van’s Land demonstrates so effectively, are subject to protests and interference by competitors, to punitive regulation from local governments, and to a host of other challenges to their enterprise. This push back is nothing new. Sowell notes, “The jitneys were put down in every American city to protect the street railways and, in particular, to perpetuate the cross-subsidization of the street railways’ city-wide fare structures.”

Despite these common problems, Uber and other 21st-century jitney drivers do not face the major challenge that the drivers in Jitney do. They do not need to operate from a centralized location with a phone. Now that we all have phones in our pockets, the Uber “garage” is everywhere. It can’t be boarded up.

ABOUT SARAH SKWIRE

 Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.