Power & Market

Rush Limbaugh has died at age seventy. 

Whether or not one agreed with him, Limbaugh was long unavoidable for those who had any interest in political commentary—especially during the 1990s. Limbaugh had a very long career, but his peak in terms of talent and relevance was likely during the Clinton years.

In his early years, I didn't even know Limbaugh had a radio show, because I was in school when his show aired on the radio. Like many people, I only became aware of him when his syndicated television show premiered in 1992. For many of us who fancied ourselves opponents of "big government," Limbaugh seemed like a voice of consistent dissent in the early years of the Clinton administration. 

Limbaugh was relentless in his mockery of Clinton and in contradicting the administration's message. Limbaugh would even hilariously impersonate Clinton with a mock Clinton voice. 

Because he was criticizing the administration in power, Limbaugh appeared to be a true dissenter. He seemed to oppose everything the federal government was doing. He was even seemingly good on foreign policy, questioning the Clinton administration's policies in Bosnia and Iraq. In late 1993, National Review labeled Limbaugh as "the leader of the opposition." This seemed appropriate and true. 

By the late nineties, I was listening to a fair amount of Limbaugh's radio show, largely because I worked as a contractor in janitorial and landscaping services. That meant a lot of driving around in my pickup truck. And that meant a lot of AM radio. 

As a clueless teenager, and later as a clueless college student, I thought that those people who opposed the regime and its schemes would always do so, regardless of who was in power. As the Clinton years ended and the Bush years began, I would learn the error of my ways.

As the Bush years began, Limbaugh suddenly took on a different tone. He was supportive of the administration's plans and programs, even when they were very similar to those of the Clinton years. Things became far worse after 9/11. At that point, Limbaugh became a full-throated defender of the administration, pushing for every scheme the White House was pushing, and advocating for a full-blown GOP-controlled police state. 

In other words, Limbaugh became insufferable. He was no longer funny or biting. He was just another shill for the regime, with a small token bit of skepticism thrown in to maintain some semblance of independence from the official messages coming out of the White House. 

Buy then, of course, I had learned my lesson. Having first begun to participate in political debates during the Clinton years, I thought that those who criticized the administration's abusive and overreaching policies did so out of some sort of principled ideological view. I thought these people agreed with me that it was important to not turn around and take the opposite positions just because "our guy" is in the White House. Thanks to Limbaugh, I learned what a hopelessly naïve position that was. 

It turns out that opposition to the regime among many of these people only matters when "their guy" is the president. The rest of the time, we're supposed to just do as we're told and push the official position, because if we don't, then we might as well be pushing for the bad guy. 

At least, that's the message that was received from Limbaugh's complete about-face in 2001, and the lesson always stuck with me. 

I never bothered to tune back in during the Obama years to see what Limbaugh was up to. I suspect he was back to pretending to be a dissenter as during the 1990s. 

To his credit, in recent years, Limbaugh showed signs of figuring out—finally—that the "deep state" is not the good guys and that all those CIA and Pentagon officials he'd been cheering for all those years were maybe not the selfless patriots he apparently long assumed them to be. He seems to have figured out that the Dick Cheneys of the world are maybe not friends of the American people. 

But for the most part, his legacy was one of being proregime when the GOP is in and being antiregime when the GOP is out. Given that he was an entertainer, of course, it's hard to fault Limbaugh too much for this. He was just giving his audience what it wanted. And what his audience wanted was a simplistic yet incoherent idea which maintained that things are mostly fine when Republicans are in office, but that the world is mess when Democrats win the White House. He was clearly very successful at delivering the message. 

The writer of a recent Forbes article doesn’t want consumers making their own choices about what to buy and how much to buy. Instead, he provides a plan for consumers to avoid what he calls excess consumerism. In other words, what the writer suggests is essentially that "excessive consumption" is terrible for you and everyone else.

To put the matter mildly, the concept of "excessive consumption" has no basis in how flesh and blood people operate in the real world. This view of excessive consumption does not account for the fact that people’s goals are not focused on buying stuff. They are making individual choices using their own income and making their own decisions to fulfill their own needs and wants. They are not seeking the judgment or moral approval of Forbes writers.

One thing is for sure, and that is people prefer to obtain what they want now rather than later. Real people have time preferences—this statement is far from new. Each of us has time preferences, and we express these preferences in the market, where we make decisions on how we spend our time and income. For example, if I asked you to choose between taking $50.00 today or $50.00 in two years, which option would you choose? If you had the option to purchase bread for $1.50 today, would you buy the same loaf of bread tomorrow for $3.00? These examples clearly show that people make their choices to satisfy their want satisfaction under personal time preferences. Unfortunately, the idea of consumerism, or excessive consumption, posed by the recent Forbes article clearly shows a widespread misunderstanding of how real people operate in the marketplace. 

The Consumer Confidence Report finds consumer confidence has improved since December 2020, including a reported an uptick in January 2021, and stated that "Consumers' expectations for the economy and jobs … advanced further, suggesting that consumers foresee conditions improving in the not-too-distant future." This is good news for consumers and producers. Consumers are confident in the market conditions for consumption, and guess what—the customer still rules!

Let us face it, the idea of excessive consumption in the aggregate is all wrong. Those who support the notion of excessive consumption do not see human behavior as it is but rather how they think it should be. What is essential for a functioning Marketplace is not buying more than a Forbes writer believes that one may need, but how people choose to buy more or less of what they want. The market process is about consumers making personal choices using their own time and income to buy what makes them happy and is useful toward their goals. What is wrong with that? I love coffee, and I tend to buy coffee from different places, and I buy beans to make at home. Should a coffee shop owner tell me that I can only buy one bag of coffee because three bags of coffee is excessive? This is true of most things like shoes, streaming movies, exercise downloads. What may be more for one person can very well be less for someone else.

You see, when it comes to consumption, people tend to pick and choose for themselves what is excessive and what is not. The Forbes writer’s proposition is: what is excessive to me should be excessive to everyone else in the world. However, excessive consumption cannot go beyond what is produced—as we all know, there is scarcity.

Like most people, I want to buy what I deem useful, necessary and has value. For one thing, consumers are not bumbling idiots—they have goals in mind as they shop for items. Consumers are attentive to prices, needs, timing, and market conditions related to their situation. As long as excessive buying does not harm others or is illegal, they should enjoy an economic system that produces material goods for consumers' purposes and enjoyment. My enjoyment is a hot cup of joe, and you enjoy power tools or clothes. We can enjoy these things because we earn income to buy them, and they bring joy.

Let us get to the point; consumers who "buy excessively" are, in reality, exercising their freedom in the Marketplace. Consumers can determine on their own to either buy fewer or more significant amounts of bread; however, if they buy fewer amounts of bread, they will cause the incomes of wheat producers to fall. On the other hand, consumers who purchase more video game downloads raise the incomes of people employed in that industry. Moreover, the opposite effect happens when consumers are told not to make their own choices in the Marketplace. Do not buy more than two cups of coffee a day as that is excessive. Ha!

We must remember that production takes time. Rome was not built overnight, and neither were the items bought in person or online by millions of people every day. That means if less is purchased, less will be produced in the future.

Producers and manufacturers determine what to make more or less of based on market demand. Demand begets production. The market provides for those willing to buy, and people who are not willing to buy do not stimulate production. Producers accommodate mass demand with scarce resources. Consumption is a balance of scarcity and abundance, and the outcome creates more choices for consumers. You see, economic thriving does not revolve around buying stuff, it is the outcome of consumer choice.

On the whole, excessive consumption may not fulfill a Forbes writer’s desires, but it may bring true happiness for some people. People who buy—whether excessively or not—fulfill their economic role of supporting business owners and their local community. To assert that consumers should stop "excessively" buying products assumes away the prospect that people do not change shopping patterns or increase family sizes over time. I was always told that you do not bite the hand that feeds you. The market is the only social place where the coordination between consumers and producers can facilitate goals and mutually beneficial choices for everyone involved via the buying process. These "excessive" purchases fuel the economy, which helps all people flourish and live their best lives.

Keep the definition of “maximum employment,” as explained by the Federal Reserve, forever in mind; and remember it every time an economist or central planner uses it to justify their interventions in your life:

Maximum employment is the highest level of employment or lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain while maintaining a stable inflation rate.

However, the Fed cannot reach this lofty goal, as they are unable to articulate exactly what the goal is. This is concerning. Maximum employment is one of the primary mandates of the Federal Reserve. However, they make no apologies. They explicitly state that the Fed

seeks to judge how far the economy is from maximum employment, the Fed will assess a wide range of information on the labor market and not rely too much on any single estimate of a sustainable longer-run unemployment rate.

Jerome Powell told the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday:

maximum employment will require more than supportive monetary policy….It will require a society-wide commitment, with contributions from across government and the private sector.

For us to attain this goal, supposedly, we need more than “supportive monetary policy” (from the Fed). Therefore, it will require more threats of violence, theft, and coercion by the government. Although Powell did not explicitly state these methods, there is no other way to implement a national policy other than with a certain degree of force.

It seems odd to build a society around such vague ideas. But this is the society we live in. It comes as no surprise that Powell’s speech includes a subtitle called: "The Broad Responsibility for Achieving Maximum Employment." He refers to the wake of World War II, seventy-five years ago:

Congress's response was the Employment Act of 1946, which states that "it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the federal government to use all practicable means…to promote maximum employment." As later amended in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, this provision formed the basis of the employment side of the Fed's dual mandate.

Alarmingly, he is suggesting the quest to attain maximum employment will require sacrifices not seen since World War II! Of course, anytime someone refers to the wartime era as an economic model, we must also consider that higher taxes, tariffs, subsidies, grants, loan programs and even make-work programs will soon follow.

It was Powell who first invoked wartime economics, and he even finished his speech with a national appeal, saying:

I am confident that with our collective efforts across the government and the private sector, our nation will make sustained progress toward our national goal of maximum employment.

While on the subject, it would be a disservice to ignore the central planning schemes of other countries during that time, as dutifully noted by the BBC:

Hitler aimed for full employment and by 1939 there was virtually no official unemployment in Germany.

Unfortunately, even the BBC succumbs to shining a positive light on collectivism:

Despite the loss of freedom, some aspects life improved in Germany for many ordinary people if they were prepared to conform in order to have a job and a wage.

We already see Biden and Yellen working tirelessly on a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, while the Fed is now aiming for an “inflation at the rate of over 2 percent over the long run.” The Fed continues to increase the money supply, adding over $100 billion of new money to the system with each passing month, while the question of “asset bubbles” continues to be on everyone’s radar except our central bank's. It becomes difficult to imagine just how many more sacrifices society must make for something scarcely articulated.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is under fire for neglecting to play the national anthem (i.e., "The Star-Spangled Banner") at his team's home games. According to NBC News: 

The anthem has not been played at any of the 13 preseason and regular season games played so far at American Airlines Center at the direction of Mavs owner Mark Cuban….

Cuban confirmed to The Athletic and ESPN that he had altered the pregame ritual, but declined to explain further.

In response, the NBA quickly issued an edict that all NBA teams must play the anthem before every game.

Ridiculously, the Mavericks organization was forced to clarify that "the decision to not play the anthem before games wasn't because the franchise lacks love for the United States."

This is a song and dance we Americans should be accustomed to by now. During the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, Americans adopted a variety of new progovernment rituals designed to inculcate an ideological preference for political unity, uniformity, and obeisance to the regime. Most notable among these was the introduction of the "Pledge of Allegiance," written by a socialist and designed to inculcate into Americans the idea that the United State was forever "indivisible." (It was also part of a business scheme to sell American flags.) 

By the 1920s, the national anthem was growing in popularity as well. 

This was all in contradiction to earlier nineteenth-century values of Jacksonian republicanism, which valued localism and a suspicion of national rituals. Andrew Jackson, for example, had refused to go along with the customary political declarations of days of prayer and "Thanksgiving." The Jacksonian view was that Americans can manage their own cultural affairs at the local level without any need for quasi-religious national rituals of "unity." 

Thanks to the Civil War and the First World War, though, local cultural autonomy gave way to new cultural expectations that Americans stand around pledging allegiance to the state and singing secular hymns extolling the wonders of "the land of the free." Any dissent from these "traditions" was to be condemned as acts of "hating America."

This politicization of pro sports has continued to today, even if it has taken a bit of a left-wing turn in recent years. 

The Rise of the Sports-Anthem Connection

The fact that participation in these rituals at sports games has become almost mandatory—at the risk of being punched in the nose by some red-faced "patriot"—would have struck most nineteenth-century Americans as rather odd. 

Indeed, the connection between the national anthem and professional sports games appears to have not begun until the end of the First World War. Before the First World War, playing the national anthem at sporting events was quite rare. No one expected it to be done, and hiring a band was expensive. 

According to mlb.com, the most conspicuous early use of the national anthem was at game 1 of the 1918 World Series during World War I. Unexpectedly, during the seventh-inning stretch, a military band played the national anthem in an effort to liven up a reportedly surly and war-wearied group of spectators.

Use of the anthem spread from there. The anthem's use expanded even more during the Second World War, as Matt Soniak notes: 

During World War II, baseball games again became venues for large-scale displays of patriotism, and technological advances in public address systems allowed songs to be played without a band. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played before games throughout the course of the war, and by the time the war was over, the pregame singing of the national anthem had become cemented as a baseball ritual, after which it spread to other sports.

But even after the war, the habit of playing the anthem at every game was not firmly in place until the Vietnam War. 

It was during the Vietnam War, however, that the spread of the national anthem's use finally met with some resistance. Historian Marc Ferris, in his book Star Spangled Banner, notes that similar protests took place in the NFL during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ferris recounts how "[r]esponding to [protests during the playing of the anthem at the 1968 Olympics,] the league's commissioner, Pete Rozelle, required players to hold their helmets in their left hands and salute the flag during the anthem." But, This was not without its detractors within the NFL, and, Ferris notes, "Anthem controversies [during the 1970s] helped institute and increased analysis of sports, which turned into the primary battleground over the beleaguered national anthem and its meaning." 

By the Obama era, however, not even this grassroots spread of the anthem was sufficient for the federal government. 

By 2009, the Pentagon was actively using taxpayer money to pay the National Football League to expand "patriotic" displays:

In 2009, Barack Obama's Department of Defense began paying hundreds of thousands towards teams in a marketing strategy designed to show support for the troops and increase recruitments. The NFL then required all players and personnel to be on the sidelines during the national anthem, in exchange for taxpayers dollars. Prior, the national anthem was played in the stadium but players had the option of staying in the locker room before heading out to the field. 

Furthermore, teams that showed "Veteran's Salutes" during games were paid upwards of $5.1 million dollars.

In total, $6.8 million in taxpayer money was doled out to sports teams—mostly NFL teams—for so-called paid patriotism.

A Marketing Gimmick

In most cases, the use of the anthem was not directly subsidized, however. Usually, team owners quite voluntarily employed the anthem as a marketing gimmick. In times of war, team owners were happy to use the anthem as a type of advertising to make an emotional connection between the customers—i.e., the spectators—and the team's product. Wrapping a commercial product in the flag and apple pie to increase sales is hardly unique to professional sports. But pro sports may have used this tactic more successfully than any other industry.

Prior to its use in sporting events, the national anthem had been cunningly used by Vaudeville acts "when the management would bring out the flag to win applause for a poor act." This fact, related by Baltimore Orioles general manager—and World War I veteran—Arthur Ehlers was presented as a reason why Ehlers opposed playing the national anthem at every game. Ehlers felt that overuse of the anthem could be done cynically and would "cheapen" the song.

Ehlers, it turns out, remembered things correctly. In an article in Collier's magazine in 1914, the amused author notes the widespread use of the anthem to elicit a positive response from audiences at performances: 

[N]othing is more destructive to gravity than to watch a small oppressed poodle dog walking a tight wire in a vaudeville show with the United States flag hanging from his mouth, while the orchestra plays "The Star-Spangled Banner" and some stout, earnest woman, standing in solitary grandeur in the middle of the house, glares at the sodden mass of humanity which declines to do reverence to the anthem or the flag or the dog….If encouraged in this sort of business, some clog dancer may yet do the Doxology in ragtime while the audience stands with bowed and contrite heads.1

Apparently, by 1914, it had already become fashionable to use the anthem to browbeat spectators into assigning deep meaning to what was clearly—like NBA basketball—never anything more than trivial lowbrow entertainment. The author, with his sarcastic reference to the anthem as a doxology knew when he was being manipulated.

Decades after the Collier's writer observed the anthem's value as a commercial strategy, Ehlers, it seems, was attempting to actually preserve some dignity for the anthem.

Everything Is Political

The NBA's new mandate that every team must play the anthem is the sort of thing we've come to expect from organizations like the NBA and the NFL. Although the NBA has spent much of its time in recent years trying to appeal to Chinese nationals, it has apparently decided that it's still in the game of pandering to Americans, with gimmicky displays of "patriotism" on the one hand and "Black Lives Matter" slogans on the other. Of course, pro sports organizations could have elected to simply not have any political content in their games at all. That would have been the smart thing to do. Instead, organizations like the NBA and the NFL have spent the last few decades relying on the national anthem as a cynical ploy. Employing "antiracism" and BLM politics is just the natural evolution of this. The NBA's latest turn toward supporting use of the national anthem shouldn't be read as any sort of move toward right-wing politics. It just a signal that the NBA continues to believe it can easily manipulate its audience with slogans and displays of jingoism. The NBA is probably right. 

• 1. "We Shy at Vaudeville Patriotism," Collier's, Mar. 14, 1914.