Andrew Ferguson makes deeply serious points with great wit. In this essay, he makes a point that sings: we make the world better when we tend our own gardens. Those who go looking to serve in great causes often cause great mischief. And worse.
The Vermont legislators are doing a great job. Simply wonderful. And if you don't believe it, just ask one of them. And if you still don't believe it, ask another.
Makes you feel like bursting into song, doesn't it?
no successful civilization in history -- Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on -- ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers.
Victor Davis Hansen
The bureaucrats and the lawyers will not, however, give up without a fight.
The GSEs, that is. Not the cars. Our friend Amity Shlaes explains the fundamental problem with Freddy and Fanny.
If you are interested in big picture macroeconomics, Janet Yellen has some insight into what's going on. She is currently President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and was on the Fed's Board of Governors in the 1990s.
James Hamilton, econ professor at UC San Diego, at Econbrowser excerpts a speech she recently gave and gives a brief commentary.
Yellen sees three three risks:
Housing: there are at least three reasons for thinking that housing prices have further to fall.
Financial markets: The balance-sheet pressures, and broader financial market dislocations, are likely to be with us for some time. My expectation is that market functioning will improve markedly by 2009. But things could get worse before they get better...
Commodities: I am not yet persuaded that speculation, rather than the fundamentals of global supply and demand, has played an important role in driving up prices.
And her conclusions:
I am somewhat reassured by the recent data, which suggest that my biggest fears on the downside have, so far, been avoided. ... A lot could still go wrong....But the risks to inflation are likely not symmetric and they have definitely increased. We cannot and will not allow a wage-price spiral to develop.
As goes the nation, so goes Vermont.
Report: Car Makers Spent $20 Million in State in 2007
Automobile manufacturers are using their vast marketing budgets to influence the types of cars purchased by Vermont consumers, Attorney General Bill Sorrell said Tuesday.
Puzzled by that? Wondering where the story came from? Why it's news?
I made it up, but only by changing a few words. The actual headline and lead sentence, from the Rutland Herald, is
Report: Drug Makers Spent $3M in State in 2007
Pharmaceutical manufacturers are using their vast marketing budgets to influence the types of medications prescribed by Vermont doctors, Attorney General Bill Sorrell said Tuesday.
So why are we concerned enough to pass a law in one case, but not another? Doesn't advertising help give us information about the cars we buy? Sure, it also tries to convince us to buy a Chevy Malibu instead of a Toyota Camry, but the average consumer is no doubt smart enough to buy the car that best suits his needs, without government oversight.
Are doctors less informed than the average consumer about products that they prescribe for their patients? One would think that doctors who spend 40, 60, or 80 hours a week working don't have a whole lot of time to read about whether drug X is better than drug Y, so why is it scandalous that the drug company that makes drug X tries to give information and convince the doctor (educated person that she is) that drug X is better than drug Y? And drug Y's manufacturer does the same. Doctors are surely smart enough to figure out that they're being marketed to and can be trusted to figure out which product is best for their patients.
Buried in the story we find that Julie Brill, a staff attorney in the AG's office, admits that
the data offers [sic] no insight on whether marketing budgets directly influence prescribing behavior.
But the report sure makes for a good headline and story.
Now, if we could only get the car companies to give us samples before we buy.
(Full disclosure: Two years ago I was retained by a Vermont lobbyist working for the drug manufacturers.)
Senator Bernard Sanders and Sean Cota, the head of the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association, think that speculators are driving up the price of oil. Cota says that
speculation accounts for half of the price oil.
Senator Sanders has
cosponsored legislation that would....curb unrestrained speculation that has driven up crude oil prices
If they are right, then their logic says that banning speculation will reduce the oil's price and volatility. And if it's true for oil, it should be true for other commodities.
The federal government has banned speculation in onions. It's the only product where speculation is legally banned.
Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands.
What has been the result?
The American Revolution was unique in many ways; not least that, among modern political revolutions, it is the only one that can be called an unqualified success. The Founding Fathers succeeded militarily, politically, and – as is often overlooked – economically. We forget that that American experiment cast off the chains of the old feudal model and embraced something entirely new in the world – the insights of Adam Smith.
All this is easy to overlook. Count on Art Woolf to recall and celebrate – gracefully and succinctly – this element of our Revolution.
“These cuts come when more Vermonters will need state services,” Pollina said. “This is a time to put people to work, not throw people out of work.”
Freeps
Mr. Pollina has a point. The time for government to expand services and spend more is when the business cycle is in the down phase. Fiscal policy, that is, should be counter-cyclical, and in broad terms most economists would agree with this proposition. (Right, Art?)
But logic is not as pliable as a politician in debate and if you say spend more money and hire more people on the down slope, then you must also insist on restraining spending and holding down on hiring during an expansion. And this – sadly but, perhaps, inevitably – Vermont did not do. When times were good we spent like drunken sailors – under the euphemism, "waterfall appropriations" – and hired profligately.
One suspects that if Mr. Pollina were to be elected governor and during his second or third term the state experienced boom times, he would be faithful to the logic of counter-cyclical fiscal policy and insist on frugality in budgeting and also impose a lid on hiring. Perhaps even use the opportunity to reform and downsize the bureaucracy.
Of course he would.
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