Power & Market

The trade policies of both the USA and the EU seem to be based on the contradictory philosophy that unrestricted trade is beneficial within its borders, even if across internal borders, but not with parties outside those borders.

But this makes no sense. From the point of view of trade, the voluntary exchange of goods, why are the borders between USA and Mexico, and Greece and Turkey, different from the borders between Missouri and Kansas, and France and Germany?

The difference is political and arbitrary.

If protectionism works, which is the policy applied on the USA's and the EU's 'external' borders, then it should work for other borders at well. But instead the 'internal' policy is free trade, and it's considered as obvious for the latter as restricted trade for the former.

Protectionists may produce an argument that 'within USA' is different, since it is within a country. While likely based on a romantic fiction of the (federal) nation, there is significant coordination of policy that facilitate trade between states. That's exactly the core of the European Union as a trade union between countries with different languages, cultures, and political traditions. Countries within the EU are at least as similar and dissimilar as the USA and Canada. Or as the USA and the EU. The differences that can be identified are differences that are caused by policy, which makes them highly suspect as possible rationales or reasons for (specific and different) policy. The question remains, why is protectionism good for some borders, and free trade for others?

It really comes down only to this: politics is able to produce emotionally compelling reasons, based on simplistic identity claims and 'us vs. them', for completely contradictory policies for different instances of the same phenomenon (political borders).

No politician in his right mind would claim that Washington, DC, should adopt a protectionist trade policy with respect to the 50 states. He would be laughed at. But saying the same about, say, the US and Canada is considered very different. And this is the case also for the EU, where it would be political suicide (although not as much [because EU is younger and not yet as politically integrated?]) to state there should be protectionism between Germany and France or between Sweden and Denmark. But it's the 'obvious' and correct policy for the waters between Greece (EU) and Turkey (not EU).

But think about it: if a trade policy is beneficial across some (political) borders, shouldn't it be beneficial across all such borders? The answer is rather obviously 'yes'.

Except in politics, where 'yes' and 'no' are irrelevant--what matters is that a story can be told that, for the time being, may gather support from the electorate. Often by pointing to a threat--always by some 'them'. Canadians are not us; Turks are not us. But Midwesterners and Manhattanites are the same, just like Germans and French are the same?

Originally posted on Twitter @PerBylund

[Editors Note: After days of rioting in the streets of Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to backtrack today on proposed gas taxes. While this episode demonstrated the unpopularity of trying to raise taxes in the name of fighting climate change, Mises Institute Senior Fellow Robert Murphy recently noted at IER that this is only the start for "climate interventionists."]

Say what you will about the climate policy discussions at Vox, but they don’t mince words. They come right out and tell you how much they want to micromanage every last detail of your life. Vox’s resident expert, David Roberts, recently interviewed policy wonk and author Hal Harvey, to discuss which areas of society government should regulate in the name of slowing climate change. Everything was on the table—ranging from building codes to auto fuel efficiency to diet to family size—with the only debate being over the relative results from the various interventions.

Among other results, this peek into the interventionist mentality should serve as a wake-up call for the few writers who keep charmingly calling on libertarians and conservatives to strike a carbon tax deal with progressive leftists. As the Roberts/Harvey discussion says quite plainly, a carbon tax is just one arrow in the quiver of those championing aggressive government intervention to slow climate change.

A Carbon Tax Is Not Enough

Let me validate the carbon tax claim first. Here’s the key exchange from the Vox interview:

David Roberts: These days, people across the political spectrum are talking about carbon pricing. How does it fit into the larger effort?

Hal Harvey: The thing about carbon pricing is, it’s helpful, but it’s not dispositive. There are a number of sectors that are impervious to a carbon price, or close to impervious.

A carbon price works when it’s part of a package that includes R&D and performance standards. It does not work in isolation. It helps, but it doesn’t do nearly as much as is required.

Harvey elsewhere in the interview explicitly criticizes the standard “market solution” rhetoric behind a carbon tax when he says:

[Government-mandated performance standards] have a bad rep from an age-old and completely upside-down debate about “command-and-control” policy. But we use performance standards all the time, and they work really well. Our buildings don’t burn down very much; they used to burn down all the time. Our meat’s not poisoned; it used to be poisoned, or you couldn’t tell. And so forth. If you just tell somebody, this is the minimum performance required, guess what? Engineers are really good at meeting it cost-effectively.

In addition to their (naïve) promises of revenue neutrality, those pushing for a carbon tax swap deal also promise conservatives and libertarians that a “price on carbon” would allow for the dismantling of the existing top-down regulations. Yet we now have several lines of evidence to show just how naïve this hope is: (1) Harvey in the quotation above throws them under the bus. (2) The recent Curbelo carbon tax bill contained no *meaningful* regulatory relief. (3) Economist Paul Krugman is fine with outright bans on new (and existing?) coal-fired power plants, and (4) the people at Vox have said for yearsthat a carbon tax would only work in conjunction with other anti-emission government policies. Notice that I am not scouring obscure subreddit threads to find Marxists posting from a hipster café, I am quoting from quite mainstream sources who are openly declaring that putting “a price on carbon” will not do enough to reduce emissions.

The Interventionist Mentality

The reader should also realize that Roberts and Harvey don’t merely consider fuel economy standards and building efficiency codes when it comes to “command and control” regulations. Everything is on the table, and the only reason to refrain from pursuing certain strategies is the dilution of political capital. The following excerpt illustrates:

David Roberts: The book also has nothing about behavior change — no turning off lights or going vegetarian. Do you find that lever unrealistic? 

Hal Harvey: It’s a policy design book, and there aren’t many policies that have people change their diet. Michael Bloomberg taxed sugar, so there’s one. But we’re not gonna have the tons-of-barbecue-per-capita tax in North Carolina…

We have limited political bandwidth. If you’re serious about change, you have to identify the decision makers that can innovate the most tons the fastest….There are 7.5 billion decision makers on diet. There are 250 utility commissioners in America — and utility commissioners control half the carbon in America.

…

Trying to invoke behavior change on something as personal as eating en masse is morally sound, it’s ecologically a good idea, but as a carbon strategy, it doesn’t scratch the surface.

Indeed, even when they give a nod to basic human rights, Roberts and Harvey sound creepy. Consider this exchange:

David Roberts: Paul Hawken’s Drawdown Project looked at options for reducing greenhouse gases and found that educating girls and family planning were the two most potent. 

Hal Harvey: When I was at the Hewlett Foundation, we sponsored a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research that asked the question: Globally, if you met unmet need for contraceptives — that is to say, no coercion whatsoever — what would it cost and what would the carbon impact be?

We found large-scale abatement at less than a dollar a ton. So I’m completely in favor of that. [Bold added.]

It’s the part in bold that is chilling. For starters, I point out that this is the one area of life—the decision on how many children to have—where Harvey apparently feels that the government should not be using coercion to alter people’s behavior; coercive interventions in every other arena—from building design to diet to urban transit—were only tempered by pragmatic considerations.

Beyond that, the reason Harvey had to stress that his approach would be voluntary is that historically, this wasn’t taken for granted. There is a long and sordid history of wiser-than-thou social planners forcibly restricting how many children others could have, all in the name of some higher social good.

Indeed, Vox’s founder—Ezra Klein—recently got himself into an awkward spot when the website originally promoted his discussion with Bill Gates using the following tweet:

Vox quickly deleted the tweet after outrage and advertised the interview in a more sensitive manner, but the whole episode offered another peek into the interventionist mindset.

Conclusion

On these pages I have tirelessly pushed back against the small but vocal group of pundits and scholars who call on conservatives and libertarians to accept a carbon “tax swap deal” with leftist progressives. Beyond their failure to appreciate some of the technical nuances in the tax literature, these pleas overlook the simple fact that the mainstream thought leaders among the wonkish progressives have long since moved beyond the idea of a simple “price on carbon.” Every aspect of our lives, from our cars to our meals to our family sizes, affects global emissions—and therefore the interventionists want every tool at their disposal to control others.

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.
—Ludwig von Mises.

Civility is the word of the moment.

New stories lament the breakdown of civility in American society, while reports of Antifa street violence in cities like Portland raise uncomfortable memories for older Americans of 1960s riots. Editorial after editorial decries the loss of social cohesion and friendliness across the country, even within families. Pundits and politicians insist we must restore civility in politics. Otherwise we face a bleak and intensifying cold civil war: progressive vs. conservative, urban vs. rural, #metoo vs. Brett Kavanaugh, elites vs. populists, and Never Trumpers vs. Deplorables.

Yet how do they propose to accomplish this? More politics, more elections, and more top-down edicts from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Hillary Clinton, for instance, suggests civility will be restored only following successful midterm elections that places Democrats in control of Congress. And why not? The political world is all she knows, and the political world yields winners and losers, victors and vanquished. In her utterly politicized worldview, things will settle down only when the right people—her people—control US politics. Hers is a zero-sum world, always ruled by the political gang in power.

We hardly should expect an America so wracked by politics to remain civil.

But Ludwig von Mises understood a different world, one organized around property and trade rather than the state. To him, private property was the basis of any civilized society. Without that foundation, without property and a concomitant system of mutual exchange, he knew humans were destined to devolve into poverty, war, and anti-intellectual savagery. Property gives us prosperity, and therefore material abundance to live civilized lives beyond mere the subsistence that marked most of human history. Property rights give us the ability to accumulate capital, to invest in higher productivity, and to have a greater degree of certainty regarding the future.

Civility cannot be sheared from the broader concept of civilization itself. Both words share the same Latin root civilis, which means relating to citizenship or public life. But it also means relating to others with courtesy, manners, and affability. If civilization is the sum total of a society and its culture, civility—or the lack thereof—is its building block, the positive or negative social traits exhibited by people in that society.

Lew Rockwell, our Founder and Chairman, has a long career fighting for both civilization and civility. Along the way he met some of the brightest lights of our time or any time: Neil McCaffrey, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read, Percy and Bettina Greaves, Ayn Rand, Ludwig and Margit Mises, Ron and Carol Paul, and Murray and Joey Rothbard among them.

So I'm sure you'll enjoy my recent interview with him. With the help of Mrs. Mises, whom Murray Rothbard called a “one-woman Mises industry,” Lew Rockwell set about saving the work and name of the 20th century’s greatest economist from obscurity. Today Mises is known around the world, and cited even by his harshest critics as a champion of laissez-faire who fearlessly challenged the supposedly scientific case for socialism.

Don’t miss David Gordon’s review of Kirkpatrick Sale’s remarkable book Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralized Future. Sale is no libertarian, and even an anti-materialist, but he understands the risks posed by consolidated political power. Thus he thinks the 20th century’s trend toward larger and larger centralized states, prevalent both in once-confederated Europe and America, has been harmful to community, peace, and human flourishing.

To Sale’s credit, he is one of many thinkers from around the political spectrum challenging the accepted wisdom that political globalism and political universalism are per se beneficial. Just as Mises elevated self-determination to a defining principle of liberalism, progressives, conservatives, and libertarians increasingly see subsidiarity and decentralization as defining characteristics for a peaceful future.

Speaking of peace, on behalf of everyone at the Mises Institute let me wish each of you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, and a peaceful, happy New Year. All of us want peace and prosperity for the world; all of us share a (true)liberal worldview, and all of us understand how non-interventionism in both the economy and world affairs is key to a better future. Let us all commit to making the world a better place next year through our own contributions.

We have big plans at the Mises Institute for 2019—unique, outside-the-box speakers at events, new podcasts, a new entrepreneurs platform, and new opportunities to earn academic credentials from the Institute—and we hope you’ll be part of them.

This article first appeared in the November/December issue of The Austrian.

The excellent British online magazine Spiked recently published this article warning about deteriorating attitudes toward elderly people in the UK.  As the article points out, there is more to the problem than logistical and financial concerns about providing socialist medical care to an aging population. Nor do increasing lifespans in the West, with attendant increases in loneliness and age-related morbidity, account for this unhappy state of affairs. No, the root of the problem is simply a lack of caring and empathy, made worse by fewer intact multi-generational families and alienation between taxpayers and pensioners:

These are not just technical questions for the social-care sector to grapple with. They are far bigger than that, touching upon the issue of what kind of society we want to live in, and what we expect of each other. At root, there is the issue of what we regard as individual and collective responsibilities; and what the duties of the young are to the old; and the question of how elderly people come to decide for themselves how they should be cared for later in life.

More than that, the problems facing the social-care system need to be understood in the context of a wider generational hostility that is compounding, if not driving, a longstanding official neglect of older people’s care. 

Sad, yes, but entirely predictable. Britain, perhaps faster and more vigorously than most western countries, has fallen prey to the doctrine of "presentism": an ahistorical narrative in which the past is always bad and repressive, feelings and "lived experiences" (generally quite lacking among the young, yes?) prevail over facts, and group identity dictates ideology. If the past is all wrong, the people who lived in it and even prospered during it surely are not to be admired or cared for:

‘Negativity about ageing and older people is pervasive in our society’, says Caroline Abrahams at Age UK. Whether it’s the nasty sentiment that Brexit voters are a bunch of selfish old bigots whose demise can’t come too soon, or that Baby Boomers have been piling up problems for moaning millennials, or that old people are just getting in the way with their ‘bed-blocking’ and their unreasonable expectation that younger folk should subsidise their state pensions, free bus passes, TV licences and winter fuel allowances – again and again, we see generational disdain for older people. 

Democracy, as usual, doesn't help. Brexit voters in the Leave camp skew older, more rural, and more "English." Remainers skew younger, urban, and more "European." In their 2014 independence referendum, younger Scottish voters overwhelmingly chose to leave Britain and fully embrace the European Union; older Scots chose the perceived safety of London pensions over counting on Holyrood and Brussels State pensions and state-provided healthcare, even more sacrosanct in the UK than Social Security and Medicare are here, will never be reduced or addressed by voting. Yet just as the American entitlement system faces a $200 trillion shortfall—the likely cost of future promised benefits minus likely future tax receipts— Britain's younger taxpayers will struggle mightily in coming decades to pay ever-expanding old-age pensions.

America is in the same boat, with the population above age 65 set to double over the next thirty years. Republicans and Trump voters are older, whiter, more rural or suburban, and more likely to see America in far rosier terms than the average Ocasio-Cortez supporter. Social Security, which in 1940 boasted more than 100 paying workers to one beneficiary, today struggles with a ratio of less than 3 to 1. And those three workers in many cases are decidedly younger, more left-liberal, less white, and less affluent than the one beneficiary. Unskilled workers, recent immigrants, and teenagers often work at low-wage hourly jobs, but still pay full Social Security taxes on their meager earnings. 

All of this is a recipe for intergenerational strife. 

The baby boomer mantra—never trust anyone over 30— is now bequeathed to millennials, but for very different reasons. In many senses millennials are more conservative than their grandparents were at the same age, particularly when it comes to sex, recreational drugs, education, and a carefree live-for-today attitude toward life. There is no millennial version of Easy Rider or American Graffiti; slacker paeans like Superbad show teenagers with low aspirations and no interest in eclipsing boomer noncomformity. But millennial distrust for older Americans is based on the strong perception that today's economic and social horizons are far less robust for them than previous generations, generations that are happy to ride out the clock until entitlements run out.

It will get worse. Cultural, economic, fiscal, and political fault lines in America today all bode ill for harmony between younger and older generations. But what should we expect in a country where politics and government dominate? Where transfer payments dominate old age and government schools dominate youthhood?

Family, religion, and civil society don't play nearly the same role for young people today as for Baby Boomers, who rebelled against all three. What we're left with, in the view of many Americans, is a society where government is the only thing we all belong to. Many scoff at the notion of any natural order, without recognizing that government simply substitutes an unnatural political order run by those in power.

Sensible societies harness the energy, optimism, and beauty of youth in productive ways: their talents are unleashed in art, athletics, business, and technology (not war). But apart from standout exceptions young people are not the leaders of sensible societies, because we recognize that what one believes at 16 or 20 or 25 will change, and often change radically. So sensible societies venerate the wisdom of older people, wisdom that is separate and distinct from mere information. Unlike data on a smartphone, this wisdom passes down naturally—albeit not without friction—because everyone recognizes the healthy and mutually beneficial connection between generations. Over time bad ideas, traditions, and modes fall away, replaced by new and better ones. 

Decaying, dysfunctional societies, by contrast, pit generations against each other at the ballot box and otherwise. Politics and government become powerful weapons in an intergenerational cold war. Aging western populations skew the demographic political balance in favor of older people, especially active older voters. Brexit, Trump, and the Scottish independence referendum have now exposed this growing reality.