"I'll tell you why!"

Words of wisdom from Milton Friedman

 

Milton Friedman, an American statistician and economist, was the 20th century's leading advocate of free markets. He received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. 

With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism, later shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics. He believed that the free market, not the state, should determine the best way to achieve stability and prosperity.

125 years ago...

Thanks to Agent 35.

Questioning the overreaction to the virus Dempanic

I haven't written much this week [Did you write at all? Ed.] because I've been waiting for the furore about the "Corona Crisis", aka the Dempanic, to die down. [You couldn't think of another verb phrase? Ed.] Only today have I started to hear a few small voices cautiously whispering that the pandemic (as the WHO calls it) isn't that bad, after all, and maybe it's time that our authoritarian governments start to take their feet off our necks.

I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of the problem, but I don't think it's the huge crisis that the liberal political and media elites want us to believe it is. Their real agenda is to increase the almighty state's control over every single thing that we do, not excluding the things we say and the things we think.

We the sheeple have been led into a huge trap, giving up our natural and constitutional freedoms to the ever-expanding, overweening nanny state. If those who lead us knew what they were doing, rather than making it up as they go along, it wouldn't be so bad. But they don't!

Not that this is anything knew. Here are a few wise words from The Peter Principle, by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. For those who haven't read the book (published in 1969), the authors posit that things always go wrong, not because of Murphy's Law, but because, in a hierarchy, everyone tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

In the chapter headed Hierarchiology & Politics, Dr Peter quotes a student who said to him "I don't know whether the world is run by smart men who are...putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." The good doctor says, in response, that his studies have shown that "capitalistic, socialistic, and communistic systems are characterized by the same accumulation of redundant and incompetent personnel."

Those who (allegedly) lead us say that they're merely following the advice of experts. The problem, as Dr Peter sees it, is that "in any economic or political crisis...many learned experts will prescribe many different remedies!" Why? Because
1) Many of the experts have actually reached their level of incompetence: their advice is nonsensical or irrelevant.
2) Some of them have sound teories, but are unable to put them into effect.
3) In any event, neither sound nor unsound proposals can be carried out efficiently, because the machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies, riddled through and through with incompetence.

Agent 78 would agree. She is still waiting for some "emergency relief" promised weeks ago, to which she is clearly entitled. She has called two departments which might be tasked with doling out the elusive spondulix -- it's not clear which one actually has the responsibility -- but has been unable to get through on the phone. Indeed, she can't even get put on hold. Instead of saying "Hello", the computer at the other end just says "Try again tomorrow," or, believe it or not, "Try again next week."

The "cure" -- throwing money at the "crisis" -- is proving worse than the disease. No matter what they call their strategy, our governments are, in effect, printing money sufficient to ensure that everyone -- citizen or not, suffering or not -- will get some (eventually), and, at the next election, show their gratitude for being given their own money. The mind boggles.

Freedom Index: Canada 6th, UK 9th, USA... errr... lower

Canada's Fraser Institute has just released its Economic Freedom of the World report for 2014. The index, compiled annually by the Fraser Institute and public policy think tanks in the USA and Germany, uses 76 indicators of personal, civil and economic freedoms.

Why do they do this? Because economic freedom has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed studies to promote prosperity and other positive outcomes. It is a necessary condition for democratic development. It liberates people from dependence on government in a planned economy, and allows them to make their own economic and political choices.

And what is economic freedom? The 1996 report defines the concept this way:
Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others. An index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are engaged in voluntary transactions.

The 2014 report (see link at end of this post) puts Hong Kong at the top of the league table. This surprises me a bit, as virtually every month sees demonstrations and protests in the streets of Hong Kong against rule from Beijing and the absence of universal suffrage. However, we must remember that the EFW report concentrates on economics, not politics.

Second on the list is Switzerland, followed by Finland, Denmark and New Zealand. Canada, in spite of the virtual dictatorship of Steve Harper (now campaigning hard for his fourth term as Prime Minister) is in sixth place. The Disunited Kingdom is ninth, and Germany twelfth.

But (I hear you ask) what about the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? After nearly eight years of the Obama maladministration and ever-increasing statism -- the misguided notion that the government must regulate every aspect of business and personal life -- it's not surprising to find the USA in twentieth (20th) place. Fred McMahon, the editor of the study, says the data on America shows a "significant weakening of the rule of law", an erosion of property rights and "an expansion of quasi-judicial regulations".

The least free country in the EFW index is... wait for it... Iran, with whom the USA is about to sign a treaty which will (according to Messrs Obama and Kerry) solve all the problems of the Middle East and the world. The Undemocratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Yemen round out the bottom five.

Further reading: Economic Freedom of the World -- 2014 Annual Report. The whole thing -- 282 pages in .pdf format.