I was pleased to see the NY Times report today on efforts around the country to curb union power generally and public employees’ union power specifically. If I was granted the chance to write a constitutional amendment, I think I would ban the unionization of government employees at all levels. Not mentioned in the Times story is the recent and galling example of how pernicious public employee unions can be. Unionization in the private sector is nothing more than individuals fighting over economic resources; unionization in the public sector is the modern incarnation of the Founders’ worst fear: factions using the power of government to extract money from others and put it in their own pocket.
Unrelatedly, the story about the federal probe of the New York Sanitation Department work slow down gives a glaring example of how weird federal criminal law has become. What it seems happened is that union thugs brought our largest city to its knees and endangered the lives of thousands in order to get a better contract for themselves. In a rational world, what would happen is that everyone plausibly involved in the slow down would be fired, banned from future government employment, and have all of their future benefits revoked, and anyone found to have organized the slowdown would be bankrupted because of the financial damages they caused to others.
Instead, “the feds would examine whether the wire or mail fraud statutes were violated by pocketing overtime pay during an illegal job action.” What? Mail fraud and “wire” statutes? Was this slowdown organized through a series of telegrams and forged postage stamps?
Of course not. Instead, federal criminal laws are so vague and all-encompassing that we all break them each and every day. So prosecutors wait until someone does something they don’t like, then they go back and figure out which law they’d like to punish the offender under. If that strikes you as an utter perversion of what a criminal justice system should be, that’s because it is.
This story is supposedly about Medicare losing money, but I thought this was the key graph:
The same hypothetical couple retiring in 2011 will have paid $614,000 in Social Security taxes, and can expect to collect $555,000 in benefits. They will have paid about 10 percent more into the system than they are likely to get back.
That’s for a hypothetical “average” couple. So understand this: For our entire lives we are taxed a specific amount supposedly to pay for our own retirements, and then when retirement comes, we get less out than we paid in!
Whenever there’s talk of privatizing Social Security, free marketeers are shouted down with the same line: “What if the stock market goes down and people lose money?” Well we’ve already got a system that guarantees that we lose money. Lose money. That’s not a low rate of growth, it’s not even breaking even, it’s losing money. If we used low-risk investments with low returns that just kept up with inflation, we’d be fabulously better off. If we made reasonable long-term investments, we’d all be millionaires.
Without touching the worst evil of Social Security (the complete lack of intergenerational wealth accumulation), this a travesty.
Dear All Republicans, Conservatives and Tea Partiers bitching about the “tax increases” proposed in the Simpson-Bowles Report,
You are either completely ignorant about economics, blind to the actual content of the report, or complete frauds when it comes to actually doing something about the federal deficit.
If you want to boost your faith in the future, you need to look no further than that. While some doom-and-gloomers have been saying that in the future we’ll all drive hamster-powered shoe boxes in order to save gas, the truth is that the market responds to consumer wishes and economic stimuli.
Every generation of cars gets faster, safer, cleaner and more fuel efficient. Long live the open road, and raise the damned speed limits, already!
I’ve thought for a long time that the opulence of American higher education – universities with tuition greater than the average income of an American family, fundraising departments raising hundreds of millions to fund endowed chairs for tenured faculty who produce nothing of worth and will earn six figures well into senility, unnecessary administrative employees as far as the eye can see, with most of the actual work of teaching students being done by minimum wage adjuncts and TAs – is unsustainable. It simply makes no sense to have so much of our national wealth and resources tied up in doing so little, when it could be done for so much less.
This probably isn’t the reckoning I’d like it to be (though it would be delicious if said reckoning began in the UC system), but I think we’re going to see much more of this. When soft institutions meet hard times, Reality won’t much care how much it’s denounced in scholarly journals.
My freshman year of college, there were two roomates, Nick and Ian, who lived on my floor and liked to play minor pranks on each other. One of my favorites was when Ian left the room, Nick would get on Ian’s computer and change the wallpaper to some sort of gay porn. When Ian would come back, everyone on the floor could hear him shout, “Whaaaaaa!!!!!”
What made this so funny is that Ian had the exact same reaction every time this happened. No matter how many times Nick did this – and he did it a lot – Ian would never see it coming.
I think of Ian when I read economic stories these days, because it seems that in every single one of them, the news is “unexpected.” No matter whether the news is good or bad (and it’s not at all clear that a month where 200,000 people dropped out of the work force is good news as that story says it is), “experts” and “analysts” never see it coming.
Hayek might point out that we should use this as a lesson: all the stimulus and central planning elements espoused by “experts” are little more than guesses, whose consequences we can’t accurately predict, even in the short term. I don’t think our current leaders are much open to learning this lesson.
Prof. Althouse is, I think, correct that the NYT got played in part of its profile of Roger Ailes.
One thing that too often gets left out when discussing newspaper or magazine profiles of those those at Fox or in the new media is that these are [allegedly] for-profit organizations writing about their competitors. We probably wouldn’t take seriously a Ford employee’s profile of a Honda VP, but a Roger Ailes profile in the NYT or a story about Rush on CNN for some reason gets treated seriously. Perhaps if the NYT or CNN could be trusted to be honest, their stories about their competitors should be taken seriously. But in large measure the success of Ailes and Rush, and a whole swath of openly conservative journalists, is due to the fact that the NYT and CNN can’t be trusted to be honest.
Still, unlike previous economic recoveries, consumers, whose spending accounts for 70 percent of overall economic activity, aren’t expected to solely power this one. Businesses and the government are having to pitch in more.
Dear Ms. Aversa:
I’m not sure what you think “the government” is, but it cannot ”pitch in” to an economic recovery. It can take money from certain people and give it to other people; it can borrow money from certain people (thus preventing that money from being lent to businesses and consumers) and give it to other people. Or it can print additional money (i.e. take money from everyone by devaluing all money) and give it away. Not one of these things “pitches in” to an economic recovery any more than slicing a pie creates more pie.
I’m always impressed by the global warming lobby’s complete inability to understand human nature. The earth’s temperature is rising, they tell us, so we must change the high consumption lifestyle toward which free men have striven for countless generations and revert to 18th century CO2 output levels. When you realize what that means – less mobility, less meat, a colder house in the winter and a hotter house in the summer, women shaving their legs less often – you realize what a stunningly stupid marketing campaign that is.
Let me rephrase that for the less economically inclined: GLOBAL WARMING WILL REDUCE THE PRICE OF PROSTITUTES!
So you’ve got a choice. You can live in a teepee, eat sprouts, and ride an emission-controlled donkey to your town’s only prostitute, who charges extortionate rates, all so you can sleep soundly at night knowing that coastal villages in Bangladesh aren’t being flooded as badly as they might otherwise be. Or you can live in a big air-conditioned house, eat a steak each night for dinner, and drive a fast car to a red light district that has a wide selection of women at low prices, and send part of the money you save on prostitutes to the Bangladeshi Swimming Education Fund. Like our friends in “Hopenhagen,” I think the choice is clear.