The Web Is Getting Interesting
Whatever crosses my mind.
The Web Is Getting Interesting
Personal Responsibility, Happy Meals Edition
Some social issues regarding parenting and childhood are complicated and difficult. This one isn’t. If the incidence of childhood obesity is on the rise, and if children are having health or other problems as a result, is the responsibility of their parents and their caregivers—whoever the adults are who are in charge of them—to take appropriate action. Perhaps some concerted effort is required to remind parents of their responsibilities, but probably the least effective and therefore most inappropriate way to address the problem is by asking the government to do something. All they’ll come up with is something as dunderheaded as banning toys from Happy Meals.
So, save the children—but from parents looking to relieve themselves of their responsibilities, and from government do-gooders all too happy to assist. No parent is perfect, but the more we believe and communicate publicly that parenthood requires being an adult, exercising judgment, and accepting responsibilities, the better off we all, parents and children alike, will be.
How To Live
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Whatever are the merits, or lack thereof, of a tax on estates, you are deceptively wrong to call a decision not to raise that tax a “handout.” Because taxes are paid from resources created and earned by private citizens, resources that are not taxed are not “handed out” to the people who created or earned them; these people already rightfully own these resources. It makes no more sense to describe government’s (non-)act of not raising taxes as a “handout” than it does to describe my (non-)act of not stealing your purse as a “handout.” Failure to understand this fact creates the mirage that government is the source and original owner of all wealth. Not only is such a notion of the state utterly false empirically, it is also – because it is a close cousin of the notion of the divine right of kings – the seed of tyranny.
As Steinglass notes, this finding is economically interesting, but politically useless. I doubt it will even result in a meaningful reduction in the number of people claiming that tax cuts for the rich get saved, while tax cuts for the middle class get spent. The supply of such folk wisdom seems to be pretty inelastic.
Who Spends Stimulus the Quickest? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic
Ideologies get mugged by reality. But there are wheels within wheels and mistaken ideas nested in mistaken ideas, like those Ukrainian dolls. It’s hard to know where to begin to sort it all out.
The Keynesian Stimulus Theory misses the point. Since it is good governance that boosts spending, and bad that suppresses it, the government’s “stimulus” spending to pick up the slack addresses the symptom rather than the cause of the problem, bad governance, and aggravates it, perpetuating bad governance, mismanagement, and waste. The government is to take from productive in order to give to unproductive business, tearing down the productive in order to prop up the unproductive; and, when that fails to have the desired effect, do more of it, until there is no more productive business. And then what would it do? Blame the free market, of course.
Worth more than a thousand words
From a commenter.
Overall, if you go back to the early 1990’s, we were at a stage of technocratic optimism. The old regulatory mechanism had failed (as shown by the S&L debacle), we had learned its lessons, and we were going to do things right. Now, I would say that no matter how optimistic you are when you come up with a new regulatory mechanism, the tendency is for regulatory mechanisms to degrade over time.
