Category Archives: Free Markets

UPDATED: RELATIVE Economic Freedom: Canada Clobbers the US

Business, Canada, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Regulation

Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, and even Ireland have leapfrogged over the US with respect to economic freedoms, measured by the Heritage Foundation’s 2011 index of Economic Freedom, in accordance with “10 measures that evaluate openness, the rule of law, and competitiveness.

I confess to finding the Heritages’ indices of “individual empowerment, non-discimination [sic], and the promotion of competition” a little vague, if not statist, as they all presuppose a central authority that acts to “empower,” police discrimination, and “promote” competition.

The Canadian Fraser Institute actually considers parameters like the “Size of Government, Legal Structure, Security of Property Rights, Access to Sound Money, Freedom to Trade Internationally, Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business—all recognizable as fundamental to economic freedom.

You know that American freedoms are on the wane when the very constructs our intellectuals use to measure those freedom are, well, so veiled and politically correct.

UPDATE: RELATIVE ECONOMIC FREEDOMS. Ingemar, these indices are relative. Ireland is not free, not by a long shot. Neither are we. According to the Heritage Foundation, Ireland is economically freer than the US. What you need to take away from this, vis-a-vis the US, is the following: If a think tank that is prone to American boosterism rates Ireland, which is bankrupt, higher than America—we are in bad shape. But then you already knew that.

The Trump Card: Trade Aggression

Business, Celebrity, China, Economy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Politics, Trade

Watch out Alec Baldwin (or should that be America?), publicity hound Donald Trump is considering a run for office. Trump is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to look closer to home for the cause of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny and the Fed, for example. Trump thus blames OPEC because he has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate—at the burdens of doing business in the US. OPEC and the Chinese.

Among American opinion makers, Sinophobia is considered an economic theory and is thus sanctioned. Disliking China falls within the realm of economic theorizing. Accordingly, Chinese success is put down to currency manipulation, and not the industry, frugality, and hard work of that people.

The Trump plan to reclaim American power and prestige in the world includes force, of course. Like Baldwin, Trump has never wanted for anything for too long, at least not in recent memory. Strutting around on the world stage; showing those South Koreans and Chinese who’s boss: that’s a perfect complement to the waning testosterone and increasing megalomania that are the ingredients of Trump persona.

UPDATED: Net Neutrality Odyssey

Business, Constitution, Fascism, Free Markets, Internet, Private Property, Technology

If they are not, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules sound awfully like price fixing, or a kind of Internet Civil Rights Act, where everyone must be allowed access to everything without discrimination based on, well, what and how much you purchase.

Ruled by regulators we certainly are.

Article I, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, provides that:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

So what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doing regulating the Internet? Nothing out of the ordinary is the answer. The FCC is just doing what all America’s extra-Constitutional government agencies do: manage all aspects of American life. Hence the term “The Managerial State.”

ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, calls the FCC’s unconstitutional power grab a “jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah”; a bypasses of “branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation.”

Let us not forget that the Net Neutrality odyssey began with that bastard Bush. As Wired reports, “In 2005, then-FCC chairman Michael Powell issued a set of principles, the so-called Four Freedoms, which said that internet users had the right to use the lawful software and services they want to on the internet, access their choice of content, use whatever devices they like, and get meaningful information about how their online service plan works.”

Note the Bush boy’s UN-like language: “Four Freedoms.”

This is important: “Both wireless and fixed broadband service providers will have to explain how they manage congestion on their networks. Cable and DSL companies will have to let you use the applications, online services and devices that you want to. Meanwhile, wireless companies will be prohibited from blocking websites and internet telephony services like Skype. Cable and DSL providers would be barred from ‘unreasonably’ discriminating against various online services.”

An Internet Civil Rights Act of sorts.

The one thing that bothers me is this: Is Comcast, for example, not a franchise (“a privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government”)? The kind of areal monopoly they enjoy and less-than-optimal service they provide in the market seems to suggest that possibility.

Franchise status might also explain why, as Wired observed, “There was one group … which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. They’ve been making the rounds in recent weeks signaling their support for Chairman Julius Genachowski’s compromise deal.”

UPDATE (Dec. 22): GREAT MINDS. Michelle Malkin also finds Civil Rights language to be the appropriate source of metaphor to describe the impetus of laws that’ll mandate equal Internet access to all irrespective of the cost of a product or service.

Under the FCC’s new regime, the market will be fattened and socialized and the price system sundered. This means worse service for all paying customers as the incentive to innovate are removed. When will Out “Overlords Who Art in DC” UNDERSTAND that the price and profit system is the key to prosperity? The correct answer is “never.”

VIA MICHELLE:

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Police State America Erects More Trade Barriers

Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Private Property, Taxation

Did you know that Uncle Sam has imposed a Security Surcharge on incoming packages to the United States? So says a friend who paid an additional $9 over and above the standard fare to mail a small, “secured” item from Australia to the US.

Trade is always invited, consensual and, hence, mutually beneficial to the private property holders that are party to the transactions. When government restricts trade, it violates—not protects—the rights of private property owners to exchange goods and to enjoy freedom of association.

Conversely, free immigration, as the libertarian economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained, “does not mean immigration by invitation of individual households and firms, but unwanted invasion or forced integration.” When government restricts immigration, it is actually protecting private households and firms from these perils.

As Dr. Hoppe noted, “Someone can migrate from one place to another without anyone else wanting him to do so,” but “goods and services cannot be shipped from place to place unless both sender and receiver agree.”

Hoppe’s distinction seems almost mischievous, but it goes to the core of the complementary relationship between free trade and restricted immigration. (Contrary to what you’ve heard from John Stossel, open borders are not the libertarian default position—and they are certainly not the patriotic position. Those of us who live in real communities, removed from the Beltway and the TV Talkers, understand the burdens that state-engineered immigration has imposed on ordinary Americans living in the “Provinces.”)

In the US there are almost no barriers to the free-flow of uninvited people across American borders. Unfettered trade is a different matter; it is taxed and penalized.