Here then, is a practical guide to the Obama administration’s nonsensical solar policy: Washington gives tax breaks to Wall Street to fund LLCs [limited liability corporations] that buy solar panels from the Chinese to “help” the American solar industry, while the ITC [United States International Trade Commission] threatens to levy a tariff on those solar panels, which would raise the price of solar energy to U.S. homeowners. In short, Wall Street pockets the money and consumers get higher solar-energy prices.

We should stop reflexively indicting Wall Street “greed” and focus instead on Washington as the disruptive force in one market meltdown after another. Solyndra, the poster child of the Law of Misguided Subsidies, borders on irrelevancy compared to the full impact of bad economic policy.

The anti-corporatist, anti-favoritist movement is weakened, however, when its supporters misinterpret statistics, simply invent statistics, draw silly conclusions that are so backwards that they confuse everybody, and misuse slogans like Obama supporters are so adept at doing. Take this college professor (!), who somehow has decided that because college education was considered a “public good” by Americans and treated as such by our governments back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, college was “for the 99%” back then and was therefore more affordable than it is now. In case the link rots, it’s just a picture of a man holding a page he printed off from his computer, on which is typed,

I am a college professor increasingly frustrated by the incredible debt I see my students taking on.

According to the University of Minnesota, in 1968 a student working 6.2 hours a week at minimum wage would have earned enough to pay annual tuition and fees of $385.

That was back when education was considered a public good and not a private investment…

…back when education was for the 99%.

occupywallstreet.org

Every single thing this college professor implies and concludes about college education is completely backwards. Additionally, it is widely known throughout American society how backwards his implications and statements are, so he could only have reached his education-socialism conclusions by flagrant dishonesty or willful ignorance.

First of all, as a result of federal government policies designed to increase college enrollment and graduation rates starting in the 1960’s, a higher percentage of students attend college now than ever before. Therefore, whatever “percent” of the population “education was for” in 1968, it’s obviously “for” a larger percentage now, thanks directly to government policies. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (Table 1), in 1968, 38% of 18–19-year-olds were enrolled in college, 30% of 20–21-year-olds were, and 13% of 22–24-year-olds were. In 2010, these same numbers were 51%, 50%, and 28%, respectively (Table 1). Those are huge increases. Therefore, there never was a “back when education was for the 99%”, and it certainly isn’t true that “education was for” a larger percentage of the population at any time in the past than it is now. This college professor obviously knows this, so he is deliberately making misleading statements and committing a puzzlingly stupid misuse of the “99%” slogan.

Second, let’s address the government’s treating education as a public good. As this graphic from The Consumerist explains nicely, the federal government’s guarantee that student loans will be repaid to the loan agency no matter what, beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Higher Education Act, has caused an explosion of loans extended to the last few generations of college students. The Student Loan Marketing Association, also known as Sallie Mae, is basically a semi-private branch of the federal government that originates most student loans. Sallie Mae or another loan agency incurs very little risk in loaning tens of thousands of dollars to a student because it knows that it will receive payment for the loan on time, either by the student or the federal government or both. In other words, some major barriers to originating loans were removed by the federal government, and Sallie Mae cannot lose money from its bad decisions, so it loans to almost everybody.

Therefore, this tuition money is basically free (in the present), so everybody gets it and there’s little incentive for students to make frugal decisions. This increase in college enrollment at all price levels and the nearly complete lack of incentives for the borrowers to cut costs have contributed directly to the astronomical increase in tuition costs over the last few decades.

In other words, the guarantee the federal government places on student debt has guaranteed the need for student debt.

I suspect that the seemingly guaranteed profitability (or at least guaranteed revenue) that this government–financial sector collusion secures irrespective of the results, in combination with the dilution of the college student pool and the ongoing socialization (read: crapification) of K-12 education, contribute to the decreasing worth of a college education today. Everybody has one, and people don’t seem to be obtaining the requisite intellectual substance or life skills from college, so they paid $50,000 to $100,000 for nothing but the obligation to pay even more back over 20 years. I’d be bitter, too. I wouldn’t blame myself very much, either.

But the difference between me and the typical 99%-er is that I look at the facts and draw principled, objective conclusions instead of parroting juvenile, narcissistic, envy-based, socialist drivel because it sounds like something that could bring America one step closer to my Soviet socialist dream.

Every single thing that any government has ever or will ever touch becomes more expensive, less valuable, and less efficient. It distorts the market by distorting incentives, reducing necessary and inherent risk, and shifting costs away from their rightful bearers, among other insults. The treatment of education as a public good that everyone has a right to or at least should have access to has been the predominating contributor to its increasing price and decreasing worth. The Occupiers should be protesting the Congress and the government agencies responsible for the policies that made college so much more expensive and have removed any incentive for tuition to decrease, and not (just) a subset of the people who happen to benefit from this and hundreds of other distortions of financial markets.

But America’s eco-consciousness, it turns out, is fickle. As recession gripped the country, the consumer’s love affair with green products, from recycled toilet paper to organic foods to hybrid cars, faded like a bad infatuation. While farmers’ markets and Prius sales are humming along now, household product makers like Clorox just can’t seem to persuade mainstream customers to buy green again.

Sales of [Clorox] Green Works have fallen to about $60 million a year, and those of other similar products from major brands like Arm & Hammer, Windex, Palmolive, Hefty and Scrubbing Bubbles are sputtering. “Every consumer says, ‘I want to help the environment, I’m looking for eco-friendly products,’ ” said David Donnan, a partner in the consumer products practice at the consulting firm A. T. Kearney. “But if it’s one or two pennies higher in price, they’re not going to buy it. There is a discrepancy between what people say and what they do.”
[...]
Indeed, outside a Whole Foods Market in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, June Shellene, 60, said she did not buy green products as often as she did a few years ago.

“People are so freaked out by what is happening in the world,” she said, before loading her groceries into a Toyota Prius. Of green products, she said, “That’s something you buy and think about when things are going swimmingly.”

As with the arts and with charity, the strength of a society’s conviction to and ability to support environmental conscientiousness depends largely on its economic prosperity. Investment in the arts, in charity, and environmentally friendly products and practices requires prior profitability, just like investment in business projects requires prior profits, and that’s not just business profits. It requires that people have substantial leeway in their finances, meaning that after taking care of their necessities, paying their debts, and putting away money for saving (which I guess you could call personal profit), they still have money left over to indulge in “environmental” charity or to “invest” in their and their descendants’ environmental well-being.

There are plenty of good arguments to be made over whether the conduct of business in the first place causes undue environmental harm and whether people’s priorities are skewed because they put so many things before environmental conscientiousness. But those wouldn’t change the facts that people do make certain sacrifices when money is tight or the future looks less bright and that individual profitability is necessary for many people to invest in products or practices that cost them more in the present (monetarily) but (are believed to) provide more benefit in the long run (environmentally).

This reminds me of what Lew Rockwell once wrote: “Crush an economy and you crush civilization.”

In no particular order:

Economics

1. Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

2. Almost anyone can understand supply-and-demand if they calmly listen. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true.

3. Poverty is terrible, and economic growth, not redistribution, is the cure.

4. The proximate causes of unemployment are labor market regulation and workers’ misguided beliefs about fairness. But the fundamental cause of unemployment is excessive wages.

5. Free competition is far superior to “perfect” competition.

6. Governments with fiat money have near-absolute power over nominal GDP, but much less over real GDP or employment.

7. Moral hazard and adverse selection are largely the product of – not a rationale for – regulation of insurance.

8. Immigration restrictions are a fruitless crime – and do more harm than all other government regulations combined.

9. Communism was a disaster because of bad incentives, not lack of incentives.

10. The last two centuries of rising population and prosperity should fill us with awe – and the best is yet to come.

Philosophy

1. The greatest philosophical mistake is to demand proof for the obvious. See Hume.

2. The second greatest philosophical mistake is to try to prove the obvious. See Descartes.

3. If you can’t explain your position clearly in simple language, you probably don’t understand it yourself.

4. When possible, resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

5. Ignoring the facts of dualism and radical free will is anti-empirical and unscientific.

6. Talking about morality if there are no moral facts is like talking about unicorns if there aren’t any unicorns.

7. There are moral facts.

8. Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

9. Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

10. The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

Politics

1. Voters are irrational. So is believing otherwise.

2. Government isn’t a solution to externalities problems; it’s the best example of the problem.

3. The main output of government isn’t “public goods,” but private goods that people pretend to want much more than they really do. See Social Security and Medicare.

4. People rarely make the the most internally consistent argument for government action: paternalism.

5. The realistic path to freer markets isn’t “free-market reform,” but austerity.

6. Democrats and Republicans are about as different as Catholics and Protestants – and 80% of the union of their mutual recriminations is true.

7. Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.

8. Big reasons why democracy isn’t worse: Unequal participation, political slack, and status quo bias.

9. Libertarians are the dhimmis of democracy.

10. Despite everything, life in First World democracies is amazingly good by world and historic standards and will keep getting better. So cheer up.

Life

1. Life is a gift, and the more the better.

2. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Yep.

3. Be friendly as a matter of policy. Turn the other cheek in the face of ad hominem attacks. It might seem crazy, but it works.

4. Obsessiveness is an powerful solution for physical and social problems. Unfortunately it’s also a major cause of emotional problems.

5. Once you’re an adult, religious people will leave you alone if you leave them alone.

6. People vary more widely than you think. Tell yourself it’s nobody’s fault.

7. Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don’t see any around, quest for them.

8. Raise your children with kindness and respect. “I’m your parent, not you’re friend” is a reason to treat your kids better than their peers do, not worse.

9. Your mind ages at a slower rate than you expect when you’re young, your body at a faster rate.

10. Evolutionary psychology is by far the best universal theory of human motivation. Ignore it at your own peril.

Instead, it seems like everything I read from liberals about taxes, the economy, or the federal budget is “The rich aren’t paying enough taxes!” and “The rich used to pay more, so it follows that they should still pay more!” and “The middle class is being destroyed by low taxes for the rich!” and “The rich don’t pay their fair share!” For instance, when I first saw the title of this article, “How the rich soaked the rest of us”, I optimistically expected to read about inflation, Wall Street bailouts, crony capitalism, restrictions on job creation, barriers to entry, government waste, and/or the complete failure of Obama’s stimulus program. Instead, the entire article is about how the rich used to pay more taxes than they do, and the things they do with their money don’t help others in an economic or social sense, so their tax rates should be increased to redistribute wealth to others and help balance the budget. Not a single time does the author mention the exorbitant spending exhibited by every American Congress since the Great Depression, nor does it mention the inflation that impoverishes everyone else more than the rich, which inflation is necessitated by ever higher spending.

Another opinion column says that the middle class is being assaulted by income taxes. Yeah, just like everybody else. It says,

No one class of citizen has an overly high burden of paying income taxes in 2011. But overall, Americans making $1 million or more are shouldering less of a tax burden than before. When the government has been deficit spending at record levels, it’s time to increase taxes.

First of all, every class of citizen has an overly high burden of income taxes, because every tax is too high. But most importantly, the fact that millionaires are shouldering less of a tax burden than before does not mean they should go back to paying more; it means, as every fact related to income taxes means, that we should continue decreasing taxes on everyone, from rich to poor. And government deficits should be solved by cutting spending, not increasing taxes. As Helmut Shoeck said in his masterpiece Envy, “The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.” Some people having more money doesn’t make others worse off. Spending their money in ways you think will stimulate the economic recovery for the rest of us is a completely debunked, groundsless, immoral 1930′s solution. The only taking of money from the rich that can be justified is taking their money that they gained from inappropriate cooperation with or actions of the government, which surely amounts to billions of dollars, but it would take a libertarian analysis to make that case, which is beyond the comprehension of today’s liberal Democrats, who are limited to class envy and Keynesian spending debauchery.

Allowing people to do what they want with their own money, in addition to being the only morally just solution to any fiscal or tax issue, will result in a greater production of wealth because less economic waste will occur because extra-market decisions by the government will be eliminated and replaced with decisions made entirely based on prices specified by the free market. If any liberal actually had an interest in what is just, then he would advocate reducing (and eventually eliminating) everyone’s taxes, not just some people’s, and if he had any interest in nationwide or worldwide economic growth, for society as a whole, from top to bottom, then he would advocate the economic system that results in the least possible economic waste. This system is the free market, where economic calculation for every single decision and every single transaction is possible and is accurate, based only on the market forces of supply, demand, free exchange, and people’s preferences freely demonstrated.

All that liberal Democrats seem to be able to give us is the same, tired, lame drivel about increasing taxes for the rich and spending ever more taxpayer money on things the taxpayers obviously don’t want (otherwise they would buy them themselves). It is the same class envy and the same Keynesian “tax and spend” rhetoric that has necessitated our high tax rates in the first place, wasted untold trillions of dollars, limited economic growth to a paltry 2 or 3% per year, prevented labor from finding its optimal usage and created 8 to 10% unemployment, and caused more and more inflation to pay for our government’s debts. Why can’t we hear something interesting or inspiring from the American left once in a while, like the virtues of individual decision making and a universal opposition to any more tax increases?

I thought this passage from my economics textbook validated our position (the passage is about the “informal sector” (black market) vs. the “formal sector” in developing countries):

Many economists believe taxes in developing countries are so high because these countries are attempting to pay for government sectors that are as large relative to their economies as the government sector of industrial economies. Government spending in Brazil, for example, is 39 percent of measured GDP, compared to 31 percent in the United States. In the early twentieth century, when the United States was much poorer than it is today, government spending was only about 8 percent of GDP, so the tax burden on U.S. firms was much lower. In countries like Brazil, bringing firms into the formal sector from the informal sector may require reductions in government spending and taxes. In many developing countries, however, voters are reluctant to see government services reduced.

Several insights about political economy can be seen in just that paragraph. First, libertarians claim that the relative freedom from government intervention is what allowed the United States to become wealthy in the first place, while Statists will claim that “correlation” and “causation” have identical meanings and therefore that the lack of a socialistic government was a major cause of the U.S.’s relative poverty 100 years ago. Second, the consumers and businesses that operate in the black market in Brazil obviously do so because they don’t think they benefit from their government’s interventions, at least not nearly proportionally to the costs (taxes), echoing Robert Heinlein’s famous quip, “First, what is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I’ll buy it.” Third, the fact that voters continue to delude themselves into voting for poverty over wealth is as sad and puzzling in the developing world as it is here.

If Brazil had lived for 50 or 100 years under the relative economic freedom that characterized the United States and western Europe after the industrial revolution, then it could afford a large government without such crushing taxes because its businesses would be more productive, its workers would be more individualist, educated, and productive, and its entire economy would most likely benefit from a culture of (relatively) honest business practices, contract enforcement, voluntary worker-rights agreements instead of centrally mandated ones, profit-seeking entrepreneurship, and healthy competition.

(I thought I successfully avoided exhibiting vulgar libertarianism or Right-conflationism by using the word “relative” when appropriate.)

This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against “locavores” who want to grow all their own food or buy it from their neighbors and, presumably by extension, to buy most everything in their lives locally or make it themselves, and yet still live something resembling a 20th- or 21st-century life.

Adbusters supports something called “Buy Nothing Day”

(It’s on November 26th. You’re supposed to purchase nothing. Don’t support your neighbors, your friends, or anyone but yourself. Don’t swap your own stuff for anyone else’s. Regardless of their intent, that’ll be the result.)
[...]
I was kind of enjoying their (ahem) unique point of view until I got to this quote. It’s from a guy named Bill Mollison, founder of something called the Permaculture Movement.

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Oh for the love of God. Where to begin, where to begin.

We are more secure than we’ve ever been because we can’t look out our kitchen windows and see our entire food supply. If the view from your kitchen is your only food supply, and something happens to the area in front of the kitchen window, you’re in deep, deep shit. Google the word “famine” when time permits.

But if you have cheerfully taken part in the capitalist evils of globalization, you don’t have to worry as much. Iowa could waste its entire wheat crop by converting it to enthanol or some other useless boondoggle, and it will hurt me. But there’s always Nebraska. And Canada. And Russia. The Ukraine. As long as those places are growing wheat, and as long as someone in our government doesn’t shut down the supply of wheat (to protect American jobs), then I’ll probably be okay.

As long as some raving locavore doesn’t require me to live off what’s visible from my kitchen window, I’ll be okay.

But wait, Mr. Bill Mollison, founder of the Permaculture Movement, there’s more. I’ve got more for you. Where are you going to get your kitchen, the kitchen you’re going to look out from to view your wheat, your bananas, your strawberries, your lowfat decaf triple-skinny mocha, your carrots, lettuce, arugula, your mineral supplements and your chicken, fish, and occasional slice of roast beef? Where will this kitchen be produced? The kitchen itself. The wood, the brick, the sheetrock, the heat and air vents, the electrical wiring, the ducts, the oven, the stove, the sink and the water faucets? The refrigerator? Pots, pans, and George Foreman Grill? Does that have to come from your front yard?

Will you need to grow the trees for wood within view of the damn kitchen, just to feel safe? Are you going to set up a kiln to make bricks out of local mud? Mr. Mollison, have you ever looked at the different locations that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand blindly coordinates in a united effort to put ceramic tile on your countertops and your floors? Are you going to go off into a blind lefty panic if some of that stuff is manufactured by little dark people who don’t look like you, you racist son of a bitch?

Sorry about that. I can’t stand racism masquerading as compassionate save-the-earth do-goodism. Back to the topic at hand….

Let’s get to the window itself, that window Mollison is looking out of to see his garden and his wheat field and chickens and goats and fish tank and brick kiln and lumber forest and all the other things required to make Bill Mollison feel safe from the efforts of other people in strange places with funny names.

Bill, do you have any idea, any idea at all, what goes into making a damn window? Do you want all that going on in your front yard? Or is food the only thing that makes you break out in fantods if it’s handled by Mexicans? Is it ok if Mexicans or Canadians, or people from across the county line make your window?

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Ok, we’re getting to the end of that insane sentence. “We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window….and see our friends working nearby.” Hell, is there going to be room for them if Bill Mollison requires all of this industry in his front yard? Or are they all going to be Bill Mollison’s employees?
What will the view have to look like from their kitchen windows if they have the same phobias and anxieties that afflict Bill Mollison?

Do you think we might all be better off if we allow everyone else in the world to compete for the honor and privilege of producing our food, kitchens and windows? And we can give them what we produce in return? And maybe, just maybe, they can one day have a kitchen of their own? With windows?

I think the fact that locavore morans like Bill Mollison don’t go buy a few acres of woods and live off the land with their moran hippie friends is strong evidence of my assertion that they want to live a 20th- or 21st-century lifestyle while still growing and making just about everything on their own. What is stopping them? Land is cheaper than housing. I bet there are enough of them to form a community of idiots who think that that life would be anything but toil, misery, and disease. Why not go practice what they preach? Because they enjoy the amenities of modern semi-capitalist life and the benefits the worldwide division of labor brings, that’s why. Maybe they want to remain active participants in the modern world so they can increase support for the State-backed enforcement of their locavore lunacy on captive victims. Anyone who thinks that a logical extension of locavorism would allow people to be much more than hunter-gatherers or, perhaps, Medieval serfs simply isn’t paying attention.

However, aside from those philosophical or economic arguments, you can take the easy road and can cite the fact that everything the government touches turns to crap and that government involvement always, necessarily, invariably leads to government control and government restriction. Your politics and philosophy aside, governments only exist to regulate and control everything, and their control only spreads and strengthens over time, not recedes when it becomes unpopular or impractical. As Mises wrote, one government intervention always seems to lead to another intervention to fix the problems that the first intervention caused, et cetera ad socialism. The fact that a net neutrality debate is even necessary is solely due to prior government intervention in creating telecom monopolies and regulating them through the Federal Communications Commission, and the net neutrality legislation that we will inevitably suffer will only beget more legislation. Here’s a helpful hint for your daily life: when you hear “legislation”, think “restrictions of free choices backed by threats of violent punishment for disobedience”.

In the case of the government controls that will follow net neutrality legislation, it might not be exactly the problems caused by such legislation that lead Congress and the FCC to instate new measures to fix those problems, but rather the opportunity to control and the lust for power will simply be too great to pass up. As a rare intelligent and informed redditor put it (hat tip Mises Blag),

So let me get this straight….the government, the same government that punishes success through the tax code, prevents innovation through burdensome regulation, can’t spend within its means, bails out billionaires with working people’s money, and has created a ponzi scheme in the form of social security to threatens to bankrupt the nation, and generally screwed up everything it has ever touched, getting involved in regulating the internet, is going to help increase speech, entrepreneurship, and innovation? Pardon me for being a little skeptical.

I’ll tell you what will really happen. The first 6 months will be fine. Then, first you will see federal taxes on internet purchases, then you will see ‘fairness’ controls that will restrict the content of what you can say, then you will see political speech regulated in the name of ‘campaign finance reform’, then you will see federal business licenses required for selling goods on the internet, required encryption backdoors, required technologies, national ‘internet IDs’, mandatory content filtering, a ban on anonymizing technologies, and 1,000 other terrors that I can’t even imagine right now. Regardless of the pure intents of the people wanting to push government enforced net neutrality, this will make the internet subject to politics and big money interests.

Here is what you will really get… Boy MP3′s sure are disruptive technology, not anymore! The president just appointed the head of BMG as the ‘internet czar’ (czar=no senate approval required!), after a $5 million campaign contribution, and he just decided that MP3s only exist to facilitate copyright infringement, and therefore must be filtered by all ISPs. And you just thought it would make your netflix download faster.

Government enforced Net neutrality is a dangerous idea that only serves to open the door to the destruction of the internet at the hands of government regulators. A better way would be an industry consortium that self-regulated net-neutrality and ostracized companies that didn’t play ball. Plus, people need to vote with their dollars. Your ISP is throttling Netflix? Don’t do business with them.

Contrary to that dolt Al Franken saying that net neutrality is the most important free-speech issue of our time, net neutrality and everything else internet- and telecom-related are solely a government-control issue. We are all born with the absolute right to completely free speech, and the State can only infringe upon that right, not protect or augment it.