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Joe Biden vs. Adam Smith

by Ryan Young on November 18, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Vice President Joe Biden recently said that every great idea of the last two-plus centuries came from government. My colleague Alex Schibuola and I rebut him over at The Daily Caller using Adam Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as our weapon of choice. Biden, it turns out, is an almost perfect example of what Adam Smith described as the “man of system.” This is not a good thing.

As Smith put it:

The man of system … is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

The problem, of course, is that human beings are not chess pieces. They have their own wants and desires. They move on their own. The man of system does not take this into account. This is why his plans fail time after time, even if he has the best of intentions.

Read our whole article here.

For those of you interested in learning more about Adam Smith, I couldn’t recommend him more highly. Don’t be scared off by his 18th-century prose style. Sit down with either of his books for less than an hour and you’ll develop and ear for it.

I don’t agree with everything Smith said; he invented the labor theory of value. But he was a keen observer of human nature. He was also a kindly soul, who wanted man to be free, happy, and prosperous. The overarching theme of his thought is mankind as social creature.  Our social instincts color how we form our notions of morality (the impartial spectator theory), and explain why economies function the way they do (peaceful exchange, as opposed to simple theft).

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is available for free at the Online Library of Economics and Liberty. You can also get a hard copy or a Kindle edition from Amazon.

For help wading through and digesting Smith’s arguments, I recommend Russ Roberts and Dan Klein’s six-part podcast series about the book, and D. D. Raphael’s short and readable The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy.

Other quality secondary sources on Smith include E.G. West’s short-yet-thorough biography, and P.J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations, which pairs Smith’s economic theories with O’Rourke’s mordant wit.

Image credit: Joeff’s flickr photostream.

Taxes without Borders

by Ryan Young on November 2, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Tech & Telecom

This month’s issue of Info Tech & Telecom News contains an article by yours truly on certain states’ attempts to collect sales taxes from out-of-state businesses. Key point:

Economists have known for a long time that when you tax something, you get less of it. Apparently some state legislators want less commerce in their states.

SuperFreakonomics generates heat on global warming

by Fran Smith on October 19, 2009 · 3 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming

Even before publication, the book SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the topic of hot debate – on economists’ blogs, including Krugman’s, on Amazon, and, of course, on environmental sites.  SuperFreakonomics’ authors are Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Stephen J. Dubner, a former writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.

The heat was generated by Chapter 5 of the book, which deals with global warming and mitigation techniques, such as geoengineering.  Since the chapter is no longer available for perusal on Amazon, it’s hard to take part in the debate.  But here’s one of the co-authors, Dubner, defending the chapter:

Our global-warming chapter has several sections. We discuss how it’s a very hard problem to solve since pollution is an externality – that is, the people who generate pollution generally don’t pay the cost of their actions and therefore don’t have strong incentives to pollute less. We discuss how even the most sophisticated climate models are limited in their ability to predict the future, and we discuss the large measure of uncertainty in this realm, given that global climate is such a complex and dynamic system. We discuss some of the commonly held misperceptions about climate and energy, including the fact that the historic relationship between global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide is more complicated than is generally thought.

The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer.

Here’s how Krugman, with his usual understatement, puts down the authors:

. . .they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.

And that’s not acceptable. This is a serious issue. We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games.

Here’s a review of the whole book in the Financial Times this past weekend.

LibertyWeek 29: The Mother-in-Law of All Debts

by Richard Morrison on February 9, 2009 · 1 comment

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Welcome to Episode 29 of the LibertyWeek podcast, where your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist are happy to slave away in front of hot mikes to bring you the best in news and views. After a brief celebration of twenty-five years of Yuri Andropov being dead, we focus on the 900 billion lb. gorilla in the room, the economic stimulus bill making its way through Congress. Alternate references to it as porkulous, the Stimulus to Nowhere and the Mother of All Debts are also acceptable. Having spent our way through future generations, we take a look at the new e-book reader, the Kindle 2, with a little help from our friends at Ars Technica. Moving on to Scandal Watch, we look into both the faux scandal and the actual conflicts of interest in the herstory of Labor Secretary-Designate Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA). Finally, we give Michael Phelps some additional support and encouragement in a very special installment of Olympic News.

Listen here!

The Amazonians Speak Out

by Julie Walsh on December 5, 2008 · 1 comment

in Environment, Global Warming

I wrote recently of California’s declaration to allow tropical forestry carbon offsets so that California businesses wouldn’t have to actually reduce their emissions, but I suggested that guilt-laden Californians could be doing more harm than good. The countries where they will supposedly be investing in forests have proven records for corruption.

I now feel vindicated. Reuters Africa reports that yesterday at the EU climate talks:

Brazil ruled out on Thursday letting rich countries offset their greenhouse gas emissions by helping to save the Amazon rain forest, an idea under active discussion by the European Union.

Indigenous peoples attending United Nations-led climate talks in Poznan protested that they had no chance of seeing such carbon cash, and appealed instead for money first to root out corruption and cement their land rights…

Some indigenous peoples groups oppose a carbon market approach until their tenure rights are made secure, fearing the lure of billions of dollars may trigger a land grab instead.

I guess they don’t want Nature Conservancy et al buying up their lands and profitting the corrupt in their countries.