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Government Bureaucrats Screw Up Our Dishwashers And Our Showerheads, To Name Just Two Ways They Worsen Our Lives.

January 18, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The left had another apoplectic fit when President Donald Trump started talking about dishwashers at his Milwaukee rally this week. How dare he focus on something so trivial when House Democrats are busy trying to remove him from office.

But Trump is on to something, and the fact that the liberal elites can’t understand what it is says more about them than it does about Trump.

“Anybody have a new dishwasher?” Trump asked the audience on Tuesday. “I’m sorry for that, it’s worthless. They give you so little water. … So what happens? You end up using it 10 times … then you take them out and do them the old fashioned way, right?”

Trump said that he’s “approving new dishwashers that give you more water so you can actually wash and rinse your dishes without having to do it 10 times.”

“It’s inelegant to talk about it, right? Right? Isn’t it inelegant? I’m talking about dishwashers.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has brought up the impact government energy efficiency mandates have had on dishwashers. But this time, the pundit class responded as if he’d just committed another impeachable offense.

“Donald Trump zeroed in on one of the great issues of our times: dry dishwashers,” says one. “Trump was impeached, but dishwashers that go ‘boom’ are on his mind,” says another.

Vox.com “explanatory” journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted that Trump’s dishwasher complaints “are nuts and suggest he’s never used one in his life.”

But the exuberant cheers at the rally suggest this issue resonates with those who do use this appliance every day. And for good reason.

Despite the sniffing of the left, dishwashers today don’t work well, making them a source of constant frustration for middle-class families who probably don’t know why they take hours to do a fairly poor job of washing dishes.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute compiled data on dishwasher cycle times since 1983, using numbers from Consumer Reports product tests. Back then, the average cycle time was a little more than one hour. By 2018, the average was close to three hours.

The chart CEI produced shows that with every new federal efficiency mandate since 1983, cycle times jumped. Why? Because the mandates increasingly limit how much water and electricity dishwashers can use, so manufacturers have had to make them run longer “to help compensate for the negative impact on cleaning performance associated with decreasing water use and water temperature,” according to a 2016 Department of Energy report.

CEI petitioned the DOE for relief from this madness, and in November the agency said it is working on a new rule that would let manufacturers make faster-cleaning dishwashers that don’t have to comply with the pile of federal mandates.

Imagine that. Consumers will then get to decide whether they value quality and convenience over relatively minor energy savings

Still, why does this matter to Trump?

Politically, it matters because it’s a way for Trump to connect with middle-class families. He comes across as a regular guy. Philosophically, it matters because it lets him expose what the out-of-control federal regulatory state is doing to the country in a way that directly connects with families. That’s why Trump touts his blocking of a federal ban on low-cost incandescent light bulbs, and why he attacks low-flow shower heads and toilets. (It’s worth noting that attorneys general from every deep blue state oppose Trump’s dishwasher rule.)

Not everybody understands that these annoyances are the result of mandates handed down by a few unelected bureaucrats sitting in cubicles in Washington, D.C. By exposing the link, Trump has a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than he would by lecturing audiences about Adam Smith.

Just as important, Trump’s dishwasher diatribe exposes just how out of touch today’s liberal elites are with middle America. The more they sneer about how nuts Trump is to bring dishwashers and lightbulbs up, the better Trump looks to the voters who will determine the outcome of the 2020 election.

Written by John Merline. This article first appeared at Issues and Insights (https://issuesinsights.com)

Our Natural Behavior Is Virtuous, Sympathetic and Kind, Despite What Economists Say.

January 17, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

I went downtown today on the Metro to meet Dan Klein for an EconTalk episode at the DC Hoover Institution offices to record with Dan. I park my car in the Metro lot and get on the parking garage elevator with a rolling suitcase that has my recording equipment. A woman is on the elevator absorbed in her phone and steps out as I step in, thinking she’s on the floor for exiting to the trains. But the elevator has only stopped for me on the 4th floor so she steps back on. When we reach the exit floor she heads out quickly.

There’s a very heavy glass door to get outside. It never works well. And I’m wondering because I’m wheeling this case that’s pretty heavy whether she will hold the door for me, given that she seems to be in a hurry. Indeed she does hold the door, gives me a quick smile and then literally begins to run toward the platform where the trains are. She is wearing some kind of heels and doing the best she can to make time. I roll along as she races ahead of me. When I get to the platform, maybe a three minute walk, she is still there. Her speed ended up buying her nothing as it turned out.

I thanked her again for holding the door and then I asked her why she had done so. She looked puzzled. “I always hold the door,” she said. “But you were in a hurry,” I said. She again looked puzzled. “Did you think about it,” I asked? And of course she said no. I thanked her again and then noticed a tear slowly falling down her cheek. It was cold on the platform. My wife’s eyes can tear up in the cold. Or maybe my door-woman was just struggling to deal with something that was the source of her need to get downtown quickly.

I don’t think she was touched by my gratitude. But I was touched by her very very small act of kindness and loveliness–a small sacrifice of peace of mind to do what she presumed was the right thing to do. A small act of kindness that ended up not delaying her trip, as it turned out. And I was reminded of the Adam Smith virtue of propriety–that sometimes we do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. Economists tend to see the entire world as a giant cost-benefit analysis. And sure, you could treat the opening of a door for a stranger as a selfish act, an act where the cost of delay is worth paying because it outweighs the cost of feeling guilty or some other way of framing kindness. In this view, there is no altruism. Everything is self-interested.

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. Not all behavior is maximizing in this way. Sometimes we just do the right thing because we think it’s good to be a mensch, a person who does what is proper and kind. And yes, I understand you can say that someone who is a mensch is self-interested because feeling like a mensch makes you feel good. But I think that misses what actually happened.

That woman who did the small act of kindness didn’t do a calculation. She did what she thought was right. Period. Sure you can model her behavior as a form of self-interested calculus, but I think that actually misses what happened. She has a rule that she keeps. She opens the door for people who have stuff to roll or carry. And yes, if her hurry had been desperate enough she might not have done it. I get that. But that too would have been impulsive. We are not just calculating machines. Sometimes, we do what we think is lovely and ignore the cost and do it anyway, just for the sake of loveliness.

Ironically, in the conversation with Dan Klein, he returned a number of times to a fascinating point- the idea that being ethical is partly about making being virtuous a form of self-interest. What did he mean? I need to think about it some more but I think he was saying that as we grow as human beings, we can make habits out of virtue so that they become, essentially a form of self-interest. There was much to think about in this idea and I will be chewing on it for a while. You’ll be able to hear it yourself on EconTalk soon. Meanwhile, I hope that woman with the tear on her cheek was just cold. Her small act of kindness warmed my trip downtown.

Russ Roberts is the host of EconTalk, and a Center For Individualism Poetic Justice Warrior.

The Trump Equilibrium Model Beats The Academic Economists’ Models In Real Life.

January 16, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Though the current economy is among the strongest of the past 50 years, critics of President Trump’s transformational trade policies continue to insist that the tariffs are hindering rather than helping the boom. Citing forecasts like the latest from the Federal Open Market Committee, these critics have tarred the Trump tariffs as price inflators, job killers and growth destroyers. Yet with each new tariff—on dishwashers, solar panels, aluminum, steel and more than $300 billion of Chinese imports—the economy remains robust, wages continue to rise, and inflation stays muted.

Why have the gloom-and-doom forecasters been so wrong? The errors come from flaws in traditional economic models. Using a better set of assumptions to assess the economy can explain why tariffs have spurred growth, not hampered it.

Anti-tariff analysts typically rely on static “partial equilibrium” models that predict how short-run price hikes from tariffs might ripple through a small number of product markets. While a tariff on steel might boost employment in that industry, for example, the price of steel would rise for car makers downstream, which would then suffer lower production and fewer jobs. Each tariff shrinks total employment, depresses wages, and increases inflation—or at least that’s how these forecasts typically go.

Yet these effects are scarcely found in aggregate macroeconomic statistics. The economy has added more than seven million jobs during the Trump presidency, and more than 2.4 million Americans have risen out of poverty. The unemployment rate is as low as it has been in a half-century, and the rates for African-Americans and Hispanics are lower than ever. Median household income hit a record $66,000 last year, and income inequality dropped sharply as the lowest earners got the largest proportional gains. More than two million prime-age workers have returned to the labor force.

This jarring disconnect between the forecasts and the real Trump economy would be comical if the policy stakes weren’t so high. What is sorely missing from these forecasts is a “general equilibrium” analysis of tariffs, which would assess the whole economy, with a concomitant “dynamic scoring” of their effects, to account for the new investment tariffs induce.

Take the steel industry. U.S. Steel is spending more than $2 billion to upgrade its plants, such as its Gary Works in Indiana and Mon Valley Works in Pennsylvania. Nucor Corp. has committed billions to facilities from Frostproof, Fla., and Sedalia, Mo., to Marion, Ohio, and Brandenburg, Ky.

Over time this tariff-induced investment, along with lower taxes and sensible deregulation, will boost growth and job creation. Higher domestic production will also help offset any price hikes from the tariffs—steel is cheaper now than when the current tariff was imposed.

Here’s an equally important consideration, this one regarding strategy: President Trump’s imposition of actual tariffs has made the threat of tariffs more credible, and a variety of Trump tariff threats have borne robust results. These include the successful renegotiation of two of the worst trade deals in U.S. history, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deal struck with South Korea in 2007. The administration also forged a new pact with Japan that will boost American electronics along with farmers and ranchers.

The president’s threat of auto tariffs has likewise drawn billions of dollars of new foreign direct investment from the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, and at home, Fiat Chrysler, Ford and General Motors are also spending on new facilities. Combined with job repatriation from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, these investments will boost the fortunes of American auto workers for decades to come.

In addition to missing the upside of supporting American industries, critics overlook the ways the U.S. has suffered under open trade. Research by economists like MIT’s David Autor has illustrated the socioeconomic harm caused by expanded trade with China in the 2000s, which contributed to the loss of tens of thousands of American factories and millions of manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of many Midwest and Southern communities. What followed was an associated rise in the rates of divorce, drug addiction, crime, depression and death, particularly among blue-collar men no longer able to support their families at a decent wage.

The national-security externalities associated with Trump trade policy may be even more consequential. A case in point is the tariffs being used as leverage to defend America’s technological crown jewels from being forcibly transferred to Chinese companies—from artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous vehicles to quantum computing and blockchain. These industries comprise the core of the next generation of weapons systems needed to repel threats from rivals like China, Russia and Iran. One must ask the anti-tariff forecasters: Where are the benefits of a freer and more secure American homeland counted in your models?

An honest, modern analysis of the Trump tariffs would acknowledge the widespread market distortions that currently disadvantage American workers, parse the complex ways tariffs affect trade partners’ behavior, appropriately discount short-term price impacts, dynamically score the many long-term positive effects, and parse the complex ways tariffs affect trade partners’ behavior.

Americans should welcome this analysis warmly—especially in the heartland, where the ugly predictions of the anti-tariff forecasters seem so out of touch with the beautiful realities of the Trump economy.

Mr. Navarro is assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing policy. This article first appeared at wsj.com.

The Introverted Drummer and Philosopher of Progressive Rock – Neil Peart Was His Own Hero

January 15, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

As written in the January 1st Poetic Justice Warrior Year in Review,

Supremely independent, he was able to integrate his sense of the human condition, both heavenly and terrestrially inspired, into magnificent compositions that inspire human flourishing.

Six days later, on January 7th, we lost an exemplar of individualism’s virtues, the inspiring rock and jazz drummer, author, poet, and Poetic Justice Warrior Neil Peart. He is most widely known as the rhythm master and wordsmith for the classic Canadian rock band Rush, and as a principled champion of hard rock as a unique art form,

It’s about being your own hero. I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept.”

In the micro sense, Peart honored the musical innovators that preceded him. In the macro sense, he understood that we stand on the shoulders of civilization’s giants. He found his own inspiration in the philosophical principles of natural and humanistic beauty,

Art gives a spiritual depth to existence. I can find deeper worlds in music, paintings, and books. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can live my life as it should be, not as I’m told to by self-appointed guides.

Dirk, Lerxst and Pratt

Rush was the quintessential power trio manned by Geddy (Dirk) Lee on vocals, bass guitar and keyboards, Alex (Lerxst) Lifeson on lead guitars, and Neil (pronounced Peert, not Pratt) Peart on a prodigious drum kit. Prior to joining the band, Rush was best known in America on Donna Halper’s radio broadcasts at WMMS in Cleveland. With their rising popularity, Mercury Records gave Rush an advance on their self-titled first album and American tour in 1974.

As poetic justice would have it, Rush’s drummer was averse to touring, and Peart had just returned to Toronto from a failed music career attempt in England. He auditioned for Geddy and Alex eight years after launching his mission at age 13 with two sticks, a pad, and drum recordings to learn on his own. Apparently they saw something in the 22 year old drummer whose performance belied his attitude, “What is a master but a master student? And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.” With his cut of the advance, Peart bought his first Slingerland touring drum kit.

Peart’s first master instructor was the legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa; their introduction was The Gene Krupa Story,

The opening sequence is a beautiful overhead shot of Gene actually playing. Sal Mineo mimics it so well that it really works and that was the inspiration. ‘Wow! Being a drummer is romantic and dangerous and glamorous.’ That got me curious.

Over the next 40 years, Rush’s musical style evolved from blues-inspired hard rock, to progressive rock’s composition and instrumentation, including synthesizers in the late 1970s and 80s, and back to their guitar driven roots in the 1990s. What never changed was their musicianship, complexity, and eclectic use of lyrics. In particular, the mythical folklore of Xanadu, the science fiction in The Temples of Syrinx, and the individualist philosophy of Tom Sawyer that belied Peart’s introverted nature,

Though his mind is not for rent    No, his mind is not for rent
Don’t put him down as arrogant    To any god or government
His reserve a quiet defense    Always hopeful, yet discontent
Riding out the day’s events    He knows changes aren’t permanent

Accordingly, another principle of Peart’s philosophy was that “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

The Professor

Sometimes referred to as Mr. P by Geddy Lee, the moniker evolved into the Professor – his commitment to personal and professional excellence had blossomed into the international standard for drummers. According to Rolling Stone, he was considered the world’s best rock drummer by the 1990s, decided to reinvent his style, and engaged the services of jazz drumming guru Freddie Gruber.

Peart’s dedication to self-creation is entirely consistent with Rush’s 1980 hit Freewill,

There are those who think that life You can choose from phantom fears
Has nothing left to chance And kindness that can kill
A host of holy horrors I will choose a path that’s clear
To direct our aimless dance I will choose free will

Because he couldn’t afford to replace broken sticks as a teenager, Peart developed physical methods using their heavier blunt end. After spending time in the recording studio and using click tracks to perfect his timing, he believed his artistic methods had become too stiff, too metronomic. Gruber was able to prescribe training that altered Peart’s physical and artistic methods, “He’s not the kind of teacher who teaches you how to play the drums, he teaches you how to dance on the drums.”

While preparing for the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert in 1989, Peart knew that “To play the songs exactly the way Buddy did, to learn the way he played was not the point. I had to learn the way he thought.” Like a great artist integrates some of their highest values into a philosophical theme, Peart integrated power with precision, complexity with showmanship, and earned the love and respect that he holds dear, and that he writes about for us in his books.

In the world of musical aesthetics, he took the best he could learn from The Who’s Keith Moon, Krupa, Gruber and Rich. From the world of individualist ethics, he took the best he could learn from the hero in Ayn Rand‘s novel The Fountainhead, “I think everything I do has Howard Roark in it. As much as anything, the person I write for is Howard Roark.” Even Peart’s attitude about live performances, “We just have a certain standard to get to. If you don’t get that, no matter how wonderful the audience was to you, you still know it,” was similar to Roark’s motivations, “I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.”

Closer to the Heart

“Playing a three hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.” In his quiet time, Neil Peart also wrote several travelogues describing his dozens of adventures astride a bicycle or motorcycle, greeting strangers, managing grief, and living the one life he had to the fullest. He was only following only his own advice, “Be your own hero.” While this may sound daunting, Peart had discovered some basic precepts for being his own hero, such as Aristotle’s Law of Identity – existence exists,

Why are we here, why does it happen, are the wrong questions. Its what can we do about it. We’re only immortal for a limited time. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

“To be a good drummer is more than being a good timekeeper. You have to control it, not just for yourself, also the guys in the band.” Poetic Justice Warrior Neil Peart also kept time for family, friends, fans, and fellow travelers, creating value, as it should be, Closer to the Heart,

The blacksmith and the artist Philosophers and plowmen
Reflect it in their art Each must know his part
They forge their creativity To sow a new mentality
Closer to the heart Closer to the heart

Where Are The Entrepreneurs To Bring America The Honest, Trusted News Media We Need?

January 14, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

And yet, America’s mainstream media still finds itself in a credibility crisis that seems to get worse every week. Why?

It’s not that the media don’t understand their crucial role in our society⁠—to provide dispassionate reporting about the news of the day. It’s that most mainstream reporters don’t like that role; they want a different one. They don’t want to inform; they want to persuade. They want to be advocates, spinning narratives rather than just reporting facts.

Consider two stories the media failed to cover in 2019.

In October, Indiana authorities discovered that a recently deceased abortionist⁠, Ulrich Klopfer⁠, had hoarded the bodies of 2,246 aborted babies in his garage.

You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard Klopfer’s name before. A quick search of the New York Times finds that America’s “paper of record” published exactly one original article about this blood-chilling scandal.

On the other end of the spectrum is the media’s collective yawn when it came to the abuse of the FISA system by House Democrats to collect and then publicly release the phone records of Members of Congress and members of the free press.

As part of the Democrat House Intelligence Committee impeachment report, committee Democrats included records of phone calls between Republican Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and journalist John Solomon, formerly of the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and The Hill.

Rather than be outraged at the obvious circumvention of the First Amendment and civil liberties, mainstream media pundits rolled their eyes. “Lordy,” said Lachlan Markay, a Daily Beast reporter, in response to my tweet expressing my shock.

Given that Solomon’s and Nunes’ phone records were never the subject of congressional subpoena but were later published for all the world to see in abject violation of their First Amendment rights, one would think “Lordy” would not be Markay’s knee-jerk response.

Moreover, when it was revealed that the FBI altered material evidence and knowingly misled the FISA court multiple times in order to surveil Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, most media outlets yawned and said “mistakes were made.”

“Mistakes?” As Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) put it in disbelief. “It’s not like, ‘oops, I just filed a FISA warrant.’”

“But no political bias was found!” screamed headlines in response to the Department of Justice inspector general’s report⁠—conveniently ignoring Michael Horowitz’s response to questions from both Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in which the inspector general stated explicitly that the “no political bias” claim was actually undetermined, given the unsatisfactory answers they received in response to why the myriad FBI foul-ups regarding surveillance of Trump officials occurred in the first place.

This seems like two stories⁠—one about a creepy abortionist, the other about journalistic apathy in the face of abuse by the surveillance state. But it’s really one story, about the mainstream media’s self-identity as shapers of political narratives rather than unbiased reporters of facts.

The liberal journalists who run mainstream media newsrooms swept the facts of Ulrich Klopfer’s story under the rug, while they flooded the zone with spin about how the FBI willingly distorted facts.

In their narrative, abortion is good and abortionists must be seen as compassionate, caring healthcare providers⁠—not corpse hoarders. And in the same narrative, President Trump is bad and anything that happens to him, even gross abuse of power that threatens us all, is well warranted.

On abortion, on Trump, and so much more, they’re not reporters. They’re propagandists. And after all these years, everyone knows it.

Having squandered the public’s trust, desperate media liberals can now only satisfy their corporate advertisers’ demand for eyeballs with sensationalized hype. Liberal journalists can’t just report the news now, because—like the boy who cried wolf⁠—no one really believes them.

That’s bad news for the old media of leftist activists posing as gatekeepers. But it’s potentially good news for a new generation of entrepreneurs and journalists actually interested in picking up the mantle of accountability and honesty that generations of progressive propagandists have trampled.

Facts are still important, even if the New York Times and NBC news no longer are good places to find them. And the fact is that leftist ideas⁠—not just about abortion and Donald Trump, but about globalism, socialism, and “woke”-ism⁠—are failing all over the world.

There is no reason the news must be a progressive fantasy novel. Just as Donald Trump overthrew the elite establishment in politics, journalistic rebels and outsiders from the Daily Caller and The Federalist to our own American Greatness have shown the media establishment is just as vulnerable to populist insurgencies.

The American people still need an honest, trusted news media. The only question is, who will have the courage to give it to them.

This article by Rachel Bovard first appeared at American Greatness.

It’s Unequal! Lower Paid Workers’ Wages Are Growing Fastest In The Current Employment Surge.

January 13, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The December employment report on Friday was a modest disappointment with fewer new jobs and slowing wage gains. But the report is an exception to other strong recent labor data, and the big picture is that the longest hiring expansion in 80 years is lifting lower-income workers in particular as accumulating evidence shows.

The jobless rate remained steady at 3.5% as labor participation held at its recent high of 63.2%. The 145,000 new jobs are fewer than the 184,000 average monthly gains over the last three months and the 165,000 average over the past year. Most of the slowdown appears to be trade-related and reflects lower business investment.

Wage growth for production-level workers slowed with average hourly wages up 3% over the last year compared to 3.4% in November. Some of this may be monthly statistical noise, and the trend in the last two years has been higher wage growth among lower earners. That’s a contrast to the early years of this expansion when real wages were flat.

The Federal Reserve’s interventions inflated asset values, which helped the affluent but did little for low- and middle-income Americans who don’t own stocks. Enter Donald Trump, whose deregulation and tax reform unleashed a surge of business investment (before his tariff spree) and hiring, which has drawn workers off the sidelines and raised wages.

The comparative data are striking, and mostly ignored by the press. During the first 11 quarters of the Trump Presidency, wages for the bottom 10% of earners over age 25 rose an average 5.9% annually compared to 2.4% during Barack Obama’s second term, according to the latest demographic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages for the middle two quartiles increased 3.2% compared to 2.2% and 2.7% between 2012 and 2016. Wage gains for the top 10% have held steady at about 3%.

Less educated workers have also seen the strongest gains. Wages have risen at a 6.1% annual clip for workers over 25 without a high school degree and 3.9% for those with some college—both about three times faster than during the second Obama term. Wage gains have also accelerated though to a lesser degree—to 3.2% from 2.2%—for college grads.

Irony alert: Socialism-loving young people are getting the biggest pay raises. Wages have increased on average 5.8% annually for teens, 4.4% for 20 to 24-year-olds and 4.8% for 25 to 34-year-olds during the Trump Presidency. Maybe as their incomes rise, more millennials will question the tale of woe and revolution that Bernie Sanders is selling them.

As for inequality, the Gini coefficient that measures the income gap has been declining among folks who earn a paycheck. Rising wages have lifted millions of Americans out of poverty and off the government dole. The poverty rate for blacks (20.8%) and Hispanics (17.6%) is the lowest on record.

Forty million fewer people last year lived in households receiving government assistance than in 2016, and the food-stamp rolls have shrunk by 9.5 million over the past three years. Reduced government dependence is a social good far beyond the lower costs to taxpayers. More important are the benefits in self-sufficiency and the contributions to the community that flow from that.

Democrats on the campaign trail say the middle class is vanishing, but the opposite is true as more Americans escape poverty and others join the ranks of the affluent. Between 2016 and 2018 the number of taxpayers earning less than $25,000 declined 5% while increasing 8% for those making between $100,000 to $200,000 and 13.9% for those making more than $200,000, according to IRS data.

And it’s not only folks along the coasts who are doing better. The number of people making more than $200,000 increased by 9.6% in Iowa and 17.6% in Michigan between 2016 and 2018. The median two-earner household in the U.S. last year made about $101,000, which after inflation is nearly $10,000 more than a decade ago.

Pete Buttigieg claimed during the December debate that wages aren’t keeping up with the cost-of-living. Perhaps he’s spent too much time raising money in California’s Bay Area. In most other areas of the country, wage gains are outpacing the living costs including housing. Average weekly earnings in South Bend, Ind., have grown 9.9% over the last year as employers have increased both hours and pay.

These are the happy wages of a growing economy, and a labor market that has tightened in the long expansion that received a second wind from the Trump-Paul Ryan pro-growth policies of 2017-2018. By stressing growth, they have done more to reduce inequality than did the Obama-Nancy Pelosi policies that stressed inequality at the expense of growth.

This article appeared at wsj.com.

It’s Not Luck: Recognizing And Acting On Opportunity Is The Way To Get Ahead In America.

January 12, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Some people believe that becoming rich is a question of luck. I disagree. Whether chance presents you with a good opportunity or not is not the key question. Rather:

Do you actually recognize the opportunity in front of you? Or do you fail to appreciate it for what it is? As the Swiss author Max Frisch once said, “Chance shows me what I have an eye for.”
And if you do recognize your lucky break, do you take advantage of it? Do you act? Or are you someone who says: “Maybe now is not the right time. Perhaps it’s something to think about one day…”

The likelihood that someone would only ever experience either good or bad luck during their lifetime is very low. Over many years and decades, in most cases, good and bad luck should balance each other out.

1. Setting Big Goals

Jack Ma failed the test to get into university, wasn’t very good at math, and didn’t know much about technology. But from the beginning, he thought big and set very ambitious goals for himself. Shortly after founding Alibaba, he told a journalist: “We don’t want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.” He was so sure of his future success that, in February 1999, he even had one of Alibaba’s earliest meetings filmed—to make sure this key moment was documented to mark the beginning of his success.

2. The Ability to Sell

Two-thirds of the interviewees in my book The Wealth Elite stated that they owed much of their success to their ability to sell. For them, selling is not just about marketing products or services. They define sales far more broadly. To them, selling is all about being able to convince other people, whether it’s getting approval from a government official, persuading the perfect applicant to accept a job, winning over employees, or talking a banker into making a firm financial commitment. “Everything is sales,” explained one of my superrich interviewees.

3. Nonconformity: Taking Joy in Swimming Against the Current

The investor Jim Rogers studied history and philosophy at Yale and Oxford before he took a job on Wall Street in 1968. During hard times for the US stock market, he succeeded in laying the foundations for his wealth and success.

Rogers met George Soros at a major investment bank. Together, they founded the Quantum Fund. They tore up the investment banking rulebook, buying stocks, commodities, currencies, and bonds from all over the world. They were also among the first to use innovative strategies such as short selling.

Unlike most other investors, Rogers bought shares in companies that were in trouble. In the mid-1970s, for example, he invested heavily in the aircraft company Lockheed. Rogers once told the story of a fancy dinner with bankers and investors. One of the other guests had heard that Rogers had been buying Lockheed shares. At that time, Lockheed was hit by a number of scandals and getting bad press nearly every day. The company’s share price had collapsed.

“Who would invest in a company like that?” wondered one of the guests—loudly enough that everybody at the dinner could hear him. The other guests joined in the laughter. Rogers felt humiliated—after all, he was the butt of their joke.

But Rogers had done his homework, and he was right with his positive analysis of the company. The share price shot up, and his fund made a huge profit. At the same time, the S&P 500 Index rose by just 47 percent, the Quantum Fund managed by Rogers and Soros gained an incredible 4,200 percent.

4. Being Able to Handle Setbacks

Most of the superrich have faced serious setbacks and crises. What is striking is the attitude they generally take when things go wrong. They do not blame outside forces or other people but look for the fault in themselves.

They do not complain about being the victims of circumstance or the evil deeds of their opponents; they take personal responsibility for their mistakes. Nor do they make excuses for negative market developments. If the market takes a tumble, they blame themselves for misjudging the market. So often, this is what distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful people.

5. Focus, Focus, Focus

In early July 1991, Bill Gates Sr. invited some guests over for dinner, including his son Bill Gates, Jr.— the founder of Microsoft—and the investor Warren Buffett. These were two of the most successful men in the world who, for many years, had been at the top of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list. The host asked his dinner guests, “What factor do you feel has been the most important in getting to where you’ve gotten in life?”

Buffett immediately replied, “Focus.” Bill Gates, Jr. agreed.

Warren Buffett, too, had focused on a single goal for decades. According to his biographer, Alice Schroeder, even as a child, his dream was to become rich. One of his favorite books was One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. When he was 11 years old, Buffett announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 35. At 16, he had already saved up $5,000. Today, that would be worth about $60,000—not bad for a 16-year-old. His prediction was only off by five years. He made his first million by the time he was 30.

6. The Ability to Win Trust from Others

John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest men in history, is proof of just how important trust is in business. For the young Rockefeller, a key to his future success was realizing that “old men had confidence in me right away.” Throughout his incredible career, he said, his biggest problem was always “to obtain enough capital to do all the business I wanted to do and could do, given the necessary amount of money.”

His ability to win the trust of banks and investors was one of his most valuable assets, as Rockefeller knew well: “It is chiefly to my confidence in men and my ability to inspire their confidence in me that I owe my success in life.” So, what’s the best way to get other people to trust you? By acting and—even more crucially—by thinking in a way that inspires trust. Warren Buffett applies the following test to every decision and action: is it something you would be happy for your wife, family, friends, and neighbors to read about the next day in their local newspaper?

7. Persistence and a Willingness to Experiment

Many books stress the importance of persistence, and that’s true. But staying power alone is no guarantee of success. It needs to be combined with another very important characteristic: the willingness to experiment. Experimentation is more important than a precise business plan.

Michael Bloomberg, No. 9 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world with assets of $55 billion, details the earliest days of his company. One of his key insights is that rigid planning can do more harm than good:

You’ll inevitably face problems different from the ones you anticipated. Sometimes you’ll have to “zig” when the blueprint says “zag.” You don’t want a detailed, inflexible plan getting in the way when you have to respond instantly.

If you want to understand the success of many startup companies in Silicon Valley, you need to understand the idea of “pivoting.” This involves being prepared to radically change your business model at a moment’s notice. The goal is not to stick to an original concept and prove how good it is. The goal is to establish a strong market position. If that means abandoning the plan and giving the company a completely new and different direction, then it’s time to pivot.

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. This article appeared at fee.org.

Private Giving Achieves What Government Can’t—Which Is Why Progressives Hate It.

January 11, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

America has just completed a banner year for private giving. The 10 largest donations in 2019 amounted to $6.2 billion, up 8% from 2018. These went to a wide array of causes, and came from men and women of the right ( Jim Walton, Karen Huntsman ) and the left ( George Soros, Eric Schmidt ). When the total of all U.S. philanthropy becomes available this summer, it will show that Americans voluntarily gave away around $430 billion in 2019.

Private giving builds institutions of civil society that provide valuable services, alleviating many pressing public problems. The New York Public Library has operated as a charity since its founding 125 years ago, and Central Park is run by a donor-funded conservancy that rescued it from decay in 1980. Quietly effective philanthropies get little visibility, though, and scant credit from journalists, academics and politicians.

Instead, progressive editorialists and political candidates openly call for deep cuts in the charitable deduction, an end to tax protections for churches and other charities, the taxing down of personal fortunes, and new regimes in which government becomes the sole ministrant of societal needs. Givers like the Kochs and Waltons are treated as punching bags for ideological reasons, but even liberals such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad and Robert Smith are pilloried for practicing philanthropy.

Mr. Gates is called everything from a rank amateur to a manipulating megalomaniac for making massive donations to public health, education and other causes. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles has been picketed and its patron savaged for his gifts to charter schools. Paying off $34 million of loans for Morehouse College students earned Mr. Smith opprobrium for having made money in private equity.

“A gift like [Mr. Smith’s] can make people believe that billionaires are taking care of our problems, and distract us from the ways in which others in finance are working to cause problems,” writes Anand Giridharadas in “Winners Take All,” this year’s trendiest critique of philanthropy. One of a half-dozen books now out with a similar tone, it was lavishly praised by the Washington Post, New York Times and NPR for arguing that charitable giving is an “elite charade” that does more harm than good, a way of disguising merciless taking by appearing to give back, a tool of injustice in a rigged system, a means of suppressing dissent.

Today’s critics of private giving are most misleading in their suggestion that it is primarily a game played by “the billionaire boys’ club.” That’s not even close to accurate. The lion’s share of America’s vast philanthropy comes from ordinary citizens, 100 million of whom make charitable gifts annually, with the average household donating around $3,000. In addition, 77 million citizens volunteer time and labor. This broad generosity powers some 1.5 million independent nonprofits across the country, operating in every imaginable part of the economy, pursuing a panoply of approaches to national improvement.

Rather than being an instrument of plutocracy, America’s highly decentralized philanthropy is one of its most pluralistic and democratic elements. Philanthropy disperses authority, gives individuals direct opportunities to change their communities, and lets nonmainstream alternatives have their day in the sun.

Charitable problem-solving also has many practical advantages. What works to alleviate homelessness or loneliness in old age may be different in Nebraska than in New York. With government programs it is almost impossible, even illegal, to pursue different strategies in different places. In philanthropy that’s easy—local variegation is one of the field’s inherent strengths. Studies show that philanthropic efforts are more effective than government in the amount of social repair accomplished per dollar.

One reason many progressives are so hostile to private giving is that government and charity are often competitors. They function in many of the same areas and sometimes attack the same problems, albeit in different ways. Critics of philanthropy argue that it is disruptive, even illegitimate, for civil-society groups to compete with the state. Public-employee unions, agency officials and activists for big government scream when social authority and resources migrate from state bureaus and into independent organizations like charter schools, churches, medical charities and trainers of the poor.

Authoritarians have always hated independent civil society. Russian, Iranian and Chinese dictators clamped down on charities in recent years because they want the state to be the only forum for human influence. “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” was Mussolini’s encapsulation. For people with a controlling impulse, private wielders of resources represent alternative sources of ideas and social legitimacy that must be suppressed in favor of unitary government prescriptions.

Even democratically elected leaders are often jealous of civil society and blind to its productivity. Vice President Joe Biden said a few years ago that “every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century, and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.” The late Sen. Ted Kennedy once said that “the ballot box is the place where all change begins in America.”

Actually, government and ballot boxes had surprisingly little to do with many climactic shifts in American history. From the rise of universal schooling to the revulsion against slavery, from the creation of great universities to the national mastery of rocketry and space flight, private donors paved the way for many breakthroughs. Charitable action has been one of the country’s most valuable sources of ingenuity and social progress. In fields from brain research to immunotherapy, from family revival to improving teacher quality, philanthropists continue to lead.

If we view social refinement as solely the work of government, we will eventually despair because the political process so often disappoints. When we recognize the contributions of community institutions, self-help groups, faith activity, local norms, neighborhood networks and grass-roots collaborations, our prospects appear much brighter.

In America, independent problem-solvers pounce on many issues before they even rise to national notice. Privately funded civil society attends to a vast range of problems and threats. This is a distinguishing strength of the U.S. It will be a tragedy if Americans allow our rich tradition of voluntary action to be smothered.

Mr. Zinsmeister is author of the Almanac of American Philanthropy and editor in chief of Philanthropy magazine, from whose Winter 2020 issue this article is adapted.

Climate Hysteria Is A Backdoor For Imposing Personal Interests On The Public.

January 10, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The “fight” against global warming is not a selfless movement wholly focused on saving our world but a means for activists to impose their personal desires on the rest of us. They want to shut down farms, stop homebuilding, dictate what we can eat, and are eager to financially reward politically favored groups.

Our first stop on this tour of private crusades is in the United Kingdom, where Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser for the government, is claiming, according to a recent British Guardian report, that “half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife.”

“We need a large, radical transformation and we need to do it quickly, in the next decade” said the good professor.

Continued Boyd: “If anybody asked me: ‘If there is one thing I can do to help save the planet, what would it be?’ I would say just eat a lot less meat. It’s the easiest thing to do. I’ve done it.”

And we are therefore supposed to be impressed by his commitment and inspired to follow the great man.

Of course he’s not making the sacrifice alone. Others have chosen to cut back or eliminate their meat intake in the name of saving us from global warming. None were easily found at the last United Nations climate conference in Madrid, where “U.N. bureaucrats chow(ed) down on burgers – while attacking meat.”

While some alarmists have gone to war against meat consumption, a UCLA urban planning professor apparently wishes housing was a communal rather than an individual or family affair.

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says the subhead of piece published in The Nation two days before Christmas.

Professor Kian Goh, who is teaching young minds vulnerable to radical thinking, is also critical of property rights in general. He prefers “government-planned and -built public housing,” as well as “new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing.”

“The idea of cooperative living,” (which clearly means “communal” living and therefore is socialism-based) “in both financial and social terms,” writes Goh, “needs room to breathe and grow.”

Obviously there’s no room for the freedom to choose in Goh’s world.

Finally, we move on the reparations crowd, which skipped the steps of Eric Hoffer’s progression of causes and jumped directly to the racket level.

“Shout out if you want to destroy fossil fuel capitalists,” a woman described as an “environmental strategist” told the crowd gathered last week at Fire Drill Friday, a Capitol Hill climate protest held each week.

“We will demand reparations for the harm that they caused,” she tweeted. “Together we will redistribute trillions of dollars to fund a #GreenNewDeal.”

According to Townhall, the woman – who was given a microphone and stage clearly to stir up emotions, and has common ground with Joe “Put Fossil Fuel Executives In Jail” Biden – also said “let me hear your vigor for ending racism while you do it” and “we need to make them pay today.” So again we find evidence that the goal isn’t to stop Earth from overheating, but to fulfill a left-wing wish list.

Even Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who is supposedly a prophetess warning that we’re burning through our blue rock, has tapped into the wider agenda. Last month, she told her thrilled-to-be-scolded followers that “the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”

Sounds much like the warming alarmists who dream of taking down capitalism without firing a shot.

We should be appalled at the dishonesty that’s at the rotten core of climate fanaticism. But we’re not, because its disciples learned from some of the most deceitful and vicious characters throughout history.

This article first appeared at Issues & Insights (issuesinsights.com)

Image by Alejandro Alvarez

Regulators Are Regulators Because They’re Not Smart Enough To Get A Job At A Corporation That Hires The Best Talent.

January 9, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

It’s regularly pointed out that a very small, single digit percentage of applicants to schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford is actually admitted to those schools. Interesting about this is that difficulty when it comes to gaining admission has traveled well beyond the schools mentioned. No doubt some of those reading this piece attended schools 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago that they wouldn’t stand a chance of getting into today.

The reality of college admissions seemingly speaks to a lot of factors, but an obvious driver is that the popular lament about stagnant wages stateside since the 1970s is a monumentally absurd myth. There’s been great economic liberalization since the ‘70s, and earnings for American workers have soared. The world’s producers don’t eye U.S. market share excitedly because Americans are stagnant, but because their earnings continue to grow. This truth has plainly factored into even greater demand for limited seats at the palaces that we call American universities.

After that, there’s been a rapid liberalization of global economic activity too. The world is becoming more well-to-do by the day, and this helps explain why those same U.S. universities more and more resemble a Benetton ad: global demand for the palaces that we call American universities is soaring. China alone can claim over 300,000 nationals attending U.S. universities, and that number will only grow.

Some claim easy federal loans have driven a supply/demand imbalance at U.S. colleges and universities that has led to soaring tuition and applications, but it says here the bigger driver has been economic liberalization that signals less government. Economic freedom begets wealth, and one major way those with means tend to express their status is through college.

Interesting about the massive demand for limited university spots is what it plainly means for businesses. The proliferation of the degreed from around the world has logically revealed itself through growing interest among graduates in top corporations. If demand for a spot at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford is high, one can only conclude that demand is similarly high among the graduates of those schools for spots at the top corporations that those schools have historically sent graduates to. It’s not unreasonable by extension to assume that hiring rates at the best companies more and more resemble acceptance rates at elite U.S. universities.

Which brings us to a recent piece by Wall Street Journal columnist John D. Stoll. Though it’s possible he was merely looking for an irreverent way to begin his column (“To These Firms, Rules Are Golden”), Stoll’s approach was careless. He observed that “Few things can make a chief executive break out in hives as quickly as the word ‘”regulation.”’ Such a statement is true in a sense, but it seems Stoll hasn’t thought much about why it’s true.

To understand why it may be useful to think again about acceptance rates at top U.S. schools, and hiring rates at top U.S. companies. Only the best of the best gain admittance, and this includes athletes who’ve long been coveted by U.S. businesses; Wall Street businesses most notably. While some will say academic standards are sometimes relaxed for athletes, they forget how intensely cerebral are some of the sports these athletes play, not to mention how mentally taxing it is to play them. Translated, an individual who learned football at the knee of Nick Saban, and who did so in grueling fashion, brings skills and remarkable mental toughness to a university and business that the typical college and job applicant doesn’t.

So “regulation” causes CEOs to “break out in hives”? Well, of course it does. While education itself is beyond overrated, acceptance at the top schools says something about the individual. Regulators are those who mostly didn’t rate acceptance at elite institutions, plus it cannot be stressed enough that for the most part those who presume to regulate are the ones who couldn’t get jobs in the industries regulated.

Imagine then, what the above means to chief executives? While the businesses they run aim to achieve greatness by hiring the best of the best, they’re suddenly being “advised” on how to run their businesses, and most often being told how to run their businesses by individuals who could never hope to work for them in a normal world. It’s the equivalent of Goldman Sachs facing a requirement to hire a failed math student for a position on the arbitrage desk, or Saban being forced to play at quarterback someone who was a backup in high school.

After which one imagines that most executives blanch at regulation simply because the very idea brings new meaning to superfluous in a largely free economy. If readers doubt this, they need only drive down any busy, or not-so-busy city street. If one restaurant has a surly staff, another a less than clean kitchen, and another has lousy food, there are countless other restaurants on the same street aiming to meet the needs of the underserved.

Is a local business treating you poorly, or seemingly taking your business for granted? No problem, online stores like Amazon are experimenting daily in search of ways to improve your shopping experience. Considering the internet more broadly, any attempt by a vendor to overcharge you will quickly be exposed through easy searches made by you online. The internet is pricing transparency personified, plus it’s the personification of quality control. Thanks to this source of copious information, bad vendors will be exposed in seconds. In short, regulations cause CEOs to break out in hives simply because they’re a worthless, superfluous, but very expensive add-on to what free markets already do exponentially more effectively.

But wait a second some say, regulations are about safety, or about the protection of businesses from themselves. Implicit here is that regulators exist to see around the proverbial corner in order to help businesses avoid the consequences of their worst instincts. Except that if they could see around corners, they would be extraordinarily rich investors, not salaried regulators. Or they’d have actual, much higher-paid jobs within the companies they regulate. Except that they don’t. Remember, they’re regulators not because they’re good at what they do. They’re regulators because they generally can’t.

All of which brings us back to the true problem with regulation: it’s a problem of low-quality talent being foisted on corporations thick with the best and brightest. Worse is that the low-rated talent has power to dictate how corporations operate. Is it any wonder the word “regulation” gives CEOs hives? Too bad John D. Stoll doesn’t know why.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks.