When I read arguments about where we are on the Laffer curve, it sometimes seems as if people are forgetting that maximum tax revenues may not be a good thing. Isn’t maximizing public well-being, which is presumably more correlated with economic growth than with tax revenues, a more sensible goal?

Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular explanations for the crimes of actually existing socialism. While Acton never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly illustrate his aphorism that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[2] For all their idealism, even socialists will do bad things if left unchecked. Hayek, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: under socialism, “the worst get on top.”[3] On this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by brutal cynics as their movement’s power increased. Richter’s novel advances a very different explanation for socialism’s “moral decay”: the movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed “idealists,” their ideal was totalitarianism.

Students of economics are not blank slates for their teachers to write on. They arrive with strong prejudices. They underestimate the benefits of markets. They underestimate the benefits of dealing with foreigners. They underestimate the benefits of conserving labor. They underestimate the performance of the economy. And in doing all that underestimating, they overestimate both the need for the government to solve these purported problems and the likely efficacy of its solutions.

It turns out that the people in red who were cheering for North Korea in their soccer game against Brazil weren’t North Koreans at all, but Chinese actors.

China now exports every six hours as much as it did in the whole of 1978

In fact, the American bourgeoisie could benefit from following this model, so that graduating kids have some more skills besides the ability to update their Facebook from their iPhone during classroom lectures. But the Department of Labor, which has been working for 70 years to cartelize the labor force for labor unions and crush workers who dare to work for less than a wage of which Washington approves, will have none of it. It wants to make sure that youth have as few opportunities as possible.

For most of human history, the royals of the world couldn’t take a train ride, catch a taxi, get an inoculation, have a tooth capped, ride in a car, turn on the heating, turn on air conditioning, run a hot bath, make a phone call, turn on the lights, pop some popcorn in a microwave, visit a doctor with a better chance of being healed than killed, or have a good chance of seeing their children survive to adulthood. Not that long ago, the simplest things that many of us take for granted today, were not available to the richest of men.