Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

As Intelligent Individuals, We Should All Un-Brainwash Ourselves About Climate Change.

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Whether it’s the Green New Deal, in which climate change abatement is only one of several radical proposals, or the general brainwashing of the younger generations about the impending end of the world, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals. Leaders from around the world will be at it in earnest this week during the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019.

Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.

The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:

  • Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
  • Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.
  • A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.
  • The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.
  • No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
  • To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
  • Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
  • A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.
  • Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.
  • A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.
  • Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.
  • The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons.

This non-exhaustive list illustrates that salvation with respect to energy production does not lie in solar and wind, especially given that it ignores the subject of transportation, where weight and capacity considerations are not trivial. Electric cars are feasible (although they still need a source of electricity to be charged), but electric airplanes are difficult to conceive.

So, where does that leave us? There are several short-term possibilities that might help on the supply side: greater use of hydropower and large-scale and small-scale nuclear. The last of these is largely untapped but intriguing. Consider that hundreds of ships are powered safely and reliably by small-scale nuclear plants. Although not without some problems, these have operated largely uneventfully for many years, and because of their size, they pose manageable risks and waste disposal.

The long-term solution, we believe, is nuclear fusion. There is no significant waste, and the supply of raw ingredients is essentially unlimited. But significant technical obstacles remain, and the most likely timeframe is 30-50 years away.

On the demand side, efficiency measures can and should continue. Household appliances have become drastically more efficient in the last decade or two. Even ordinary gasoline cars have improved greatly. These efforts should continue, although we should not forget that these advances are primarily applicable to industrialized countries. Plug-in Teslas are not likely to take sub-Saharan Africa by storm in the foreseeable future.

Finally, mankind is resourceful enough to find innumerable ways to adapt to climate change. Many of the predictions of planetary doom are almost certainly exaggerated. Common-sense measures such as protecting rain forests, planting more trees, fortifying coastal protection, and abandoning overly vulnerable property will be necessary. But these costs are eminently manageable.

There are also many ingenious approaches to “geoengineering,” the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change; these include solar radiation management and greenhouse gas sequestration.

We are best served by “un-brainwashing” ourselves about climate change — that is, dispensing with the hyperbole and nescience that distract from reality. The drumbeat of the apocalypse may demand responses, but, especially from politicians, so far it has not elicited the right ones.

Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. They were undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

John the Irishman Led Ireland’s Greatest Export to Medieval Mainland Europe – Reason

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One mission of the Poetic Justice Warrior Society is to recognize the unsung heroes of Western Civilization. While many of the honorees are well known characters, others are relatively obscure. For example, Anders Chydenius triggered the Swedish economic miracle, John Harrison pioneered global positioning systems, and Edward Lloyd created the information age.  Yet no one, so far, is more obscure than John Scotus Eriugena. According to historian Thomas Cahill,

John Scotus is the first philosopher of the Middle Ages, the first truly Christian philosopher since the death of Augustine in 430, the first European philosopher since the execution of Boethius in 524, and the first man in 300 years who was able to think. He also had a vicious sense of humor.

To put Scotus (Eriugena was added to clarify that he was Irish born) in perspective, it’s important to offer a very brief history of Western Civilization before St. Thomas Aquinas published Summa Theologica in the 13th century. Classical Greece’s Golden Age began in the 5th century BC including Aristotle’s Ethics. Rome’s Golden Age begins in the 1st century BC including Cicero’s Five Canons of Rhetoric. In the 5th Century AD, Alaric the Goth sacks Rome, the empire falls, and the European continent sinks into five hundred years of anarchy, violence, disease, illiteracy, and ignorance – the Dark Ages. Except in Ireland; Saint Patrick had arrived.

It is not possible to exaggerate the plight of mainland Europeans after the fall of Rome and the rising power of the Catholic church. After all, St. Augustine had declared in his Confessions that all of mankind was to be damned for Adam’s original sin, the very act of conception had polluted every child in the womb; and in his book, The City of God, he declared that Rome was to be punished for its pre-Christianity sins and pagan deities.

According to historian William Manchester, “The City of God was the first great work to shape and define the medieval mind. One was the medieval man’s total lack of ego. Even those with creative powers had no sense of self.” This is despite the fact that in Confessions, the self-obsessed Augustine was the first to use the word “I” with the meaning we assign to it today. Heaven for me, hell for thee?

The Holy Roman Empire

As French philosopher Voltaire observed, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. After several generations of brutality, relative order returned to central Europe in the form of feudalism. Victorious tribal chieftains became princes, established fiefdoms, and the Vatican fought to expand its influence and power. In the 840s AD, John Scotus crossed the English Channel to France and took up residence at the Palatine School in Paris under the patronage of King Charlemagne’s successor. According to Cahill, Scotus revealed his Celtic heritage with his favorite word, nature, much to the chagrin of Roman Christians and Platonists for Scotus had proclaimed,

Every authority that is not confirmed by true reason seems to be weak, whereas true reason does not need to be supported by any authority.

A wonderful metaphor would be – the US Constitution, whereas the Declaration of Independence. At the time, he was one of only two residents of Western Europe to be fluent in Greek. The other one was incredulous that a barbarian Irishman would know so much Greek. As Cahill writes about Scotus’ book The Division of Nature,

Here is a mind that could grasp the most rarefied distinctions of the Greek philosophical tradition, and more important, could elaborate a new system of thought, one that is balanced and internally consistent. To Scotus, nature is a virtual synonym for reality.

John Scotus’ contributions to Western Civilization are his intellectual courage in the face of secular and religious authority, and his position as the master link that connects the violence of anarchy to the peace of personal liberty. The fall of Rome to the Enlightenment. He was the brightest star among the invading army of Irish monks (but a layman himself) who were armed only with their books. To Charlemagne, they seemed to be everywhere, and according to his biographer and servant Einhard, “he loved the wandering monks.”

In 1225, Pope Honorius ordered all copies of The Division of Nature to be burned, much like the Bishop of Paris condemned Aquinas’ Summa Theologica fifty years after that, for the same reason. Reason.

New Life

With the fall of Roman civilization, infrastructure crumbled, skilled trades disappeared, long distance commerce ceased, libraries burned and books turned to dust, but not in Ireland. It had been totally insulated from Roman culture and already lived its own brand of fun-loving fighting Irish brutality and illiteracy. Its history includes Celtic tribes crossing the Irish Sea from Europe and displacing Ireland’s inhabitants in the 4th century BC.

In 432 AD, then Bishop Patrick arrived in Ireland for the second time. Although he was a contemporary of Augustine and lived Roman traditions in Britain, Patrick owned a philosophy that was opposed to both. According to Cahill, Romans never traveled outside the Imperium and into pagan lands.

So Patrick was really a first, the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. His love for his adopted people shines through his writing, and it is not just a generalized Christian benevolence, but a love for individuals as they are.

St. Patrick worried for their spiritual and physical welfare. As Victor Hugo illustrated so vividly 1400 years later, Patrick believed new life could be found within every soul, not just the mystical waters of baptism. The horror of slavery was never lost on him, and nearly within his lifetime, the Irish slave trade came to a halt. While Roman lands were decivilizing from peace to utter chaos, Patrick was civilizing Irish warrior clans by refusing to be afraid of them. He showed them it was possible to be brave and also be a man of peace.

Under St. Patrick’s leadership, small cities were formed around monasteries scattered throughout Ireland. These inspired scholastic communities of scribes led by abbots and abbesses (heavens!) who preserved and copied manuscripts including the Greek and Roman classics. These were rescued from barbarian destruction in mainland Europe by people seeking peace and safety for themselves in Ireland, and eventually Irish founded communities in Britain.

The Light of the Dark Ages

As poetic justice would have it, from the middle of the 5th century through the 6th, Ireland ironically became Europe’s custodian for literacy and the literature that eventually fed Europe’s newly organizing universities. Poetic Justice Warrior John Scotus Eriugena transformed the humanity and courage of St. Patrick into the intellectual heft of reason, purpose and pride that was the essential ingredient for The Enlightenment and Western Civilization.

 

Silicon Valley Went All-In For Progressive Democrats. Now Those Progressives Are Out To Destroy Their Donors.

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The term “useful idiot,” often credited to Vladimir Lenin, applies to people supporting a cause or movement injurious to their own self-interest. Nowhere is this more relevant these days than in Silicon Valley, a place dominated by brilliant technologists and marketers who often seem to have the social and political acuity of middle schoolers, as evidenced by their strong support for progressive Democrats poised to destroy the underpinnings of their businesses.

California governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign the recently passed Assembly Bill 5, which will effectively turn many contractors into employees. AB5 codifies the California Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles that many contractors should be treated as employees. The legislation’s prime backers are the state’s unions, which see it as an ideal way to organize now out-of-reach workers.

The new measure is potentially devastating, though, for companies like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates, all built around part-time employees, and none yet profitable. Many other tech firms—including profitable ones—use contractors for everything from app development to catering to cleaning. As many as 2 million Californians are employed in so-called gig work. If AB5 passes, job losses won’t just be felt by the ride-hailing firms but also by many other businesses, including newspapers, small trucking firms, some medical providers, and even franchise owners.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Silicon Valley, like many industries, placed its bets on both political parties. Moderate Republicans like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell routinely won congressional elections, as did similarly minded members of the state legislature. But over the past few decades, the Valley has become politically monochromatic, with virtually no elected Republicans. Almost all contributions from Silicon Valley tech owners and employees in the 2016 and 2018 elections went to Democrats. Tech money helped Newsom outspend his GOP rival by three to one—with major contributions from former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Lauren Jobs (widow of the Apple founder) at the top of the donor list. Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt heads data efforts for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and arch-populist Elizabeth Warren. Tech employees are, if anything, more progressive-leaning in their political contributions than their corporate masters.

Just a few years ago, these investments seemed to be paying off. The Obama administration was deferential to tech firms, steering away from any hint of antitrust action. Google representatives met in the White House weekly, and more than 250 people shuttled between working for Obama and Google during his presidency. Now, this power is being challenged. Google is being sued for monopolistic practices by 48 states. Though progressive California has stayed out of the fray, AB5 demonstrates that the tech moguls are losing ground there, too, to better-organized and more politically savvy public-employee and service unions.

The new legislature’s makeup reveals how much power has shifted to the unions. Beyond protecting gig workers, organized labor has broken with tech on education reform, long a Silicon Valley hot-button issue. Under the current legislative super-majority, the Democrats have worked overtime to make sure that California’s schools—ranked 40th on Education Week’s composite score of national school performance—remain mediocre by undermining charter schools, eliminating exit exams, banning suspensions for unruly students, and, as a recent proposal suggests, introducing a new ethnic-studies curriculum for public school students.

The Californian ruling caste’s progressive sentiments have not translated into broad-based economic benefits. According to an analysis by Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, California has created surprisingly few high-wage jobs over the past decade, with 86 percent below the median pay and some 40 percent paying under $40,000—in one of the nation’s most expensive states. In a tech-dominated economy, virtually every other sector has grown slowly, well below results in such key competitors as Texas and Arizona. And even the bounty of Silicon Valley has not helped the state’s middle class, since some 40 percent of all tech jobs have gone to foreign workers.

California, in fact, is creating a huge class of workers struggling to achieve anything close to middle-class standards. Gig-economy workers epitomize this trend. One survey of workers in 75 countries found that most gig contractors earn less than minimum wage, including in the United States. Roughly half of California’s giggers struggle with poverty. The reasons are not hard to identify: they lack many basic protections that full-time employees enjoy—for example, enforcement of civil rights laws.

Some identifiable progressives, like Chris Lehane and David Plouffe (who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign), maintain that the gig economy is “democratizing capitalism” by returning control of the working day to the individual. They point to opportunities that gig work provides for people to make extra money using their cars or homes. Uber and Lyft represent their employees as creatives or professionals, moonlighting as drivers to save up for a vacation or expensive date. That may be true for some, but for many others gig work can look more like modern serfdom.

The battle between the Valley and the socialist-oriented progressives is just beginning, both in California and around the country. The traditional Democratic elite has been recruited to argue the tech leaders’ case. Former senator Barbara Boxer works for Lyft, and Tony West, brother-in-law of presidential contender Kamala Harris, is counsel for Uber. They’re helping direct a wave of tech dollars into Sacramento and Washington to reverse the tide, including a proposed $90 million ballot measure to undermine AB5.

How long will Silicon Valley’s leaders accept these conditions? Both Lyft and Uber have shifted some of their operations out of state, Lyft to Nashville and Uber to north Dallas. Apple has opened a huge new operation in the suburbs outside Austin. But there may be no escape if the ascendant Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in the White House, particularly with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. In these circumstances, Big Tech is likely to be treated in Washington with the kind of scorn that Amazon faced in New York City from local congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now increasingly the national voice of the party grassroots. If Warren wins, tech companies and their high-wage upper-tier workers will have to deal with demands to put workers on their boards and pay huge taxes to fund expanded Social Security and Medicare programs. Privacy legislation could impede their highly profitable tracking and data-collection businesses, and antitrust enforcement could see the breakup of companies like Google and Facebook. At least one progressive, Oregon senator Ron Wyden, has even suggested that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg face “the possibility of a prison term.”

The tech elite has financed a Democratic Party that now appears to favor socialism over capitalism. A socialist movement is even percolating among Silicon Valley tech employees, many of whom see little opportunity to amass enough wealth to buy a house in the exorbitant Bay Area. Like those French aristocrats who backed revolutionary ideas in the late-eighteenth century only to find themselves riding tumbrels through angry crowds, tech elites have spent a fortune promoting a “woke” politics that is turning against them. They may not lose their heads, but they could find their riches fleeced by former allies. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving, self-involved, and cognitively gifted group of . . .  well, idiots.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. 

Climate Doomsters And Extremists Aim To Hijack Markets And Tear Down Capitalism.

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If anyone doubts the reality of that headline, they either didn’t see the Democrats’ climate townhall, or they need to go back and watch it with an open mind. The alarmists’ objective, which fits perfectly with leftist and progressive politics, is to put themselves in charge of the world.

CNN’s climate townhall, a slog that lasted seven grueling hours, was a prohibition-fest. The candidates suggested banning nuclear energy, fracking, offshore drilling, conventional automobiles, all fossil fuels, even red meat, plastic straws, and babies. It devolved into a contest to see which Democratic presidential aspirant could propose the greatest volume of proscriptions.

And for what? Is our ever-changing climate an existential threat? Hardly. A slightly warmer planet “is not going to be the end of the world,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

“The world is just becoming more challenging,” he told a Finnish magazine earlier this month. “In parts of the globe, living conditions are becoming worse, but people have survived in harsh conditions.”

While he’s neither a denier nor skeptic — he is probably best described as a “lukewarmer” — Taalas says he’s concerned about the fanatic elements that are even attacking the “climate experts” who are promoting the man-made global warming narrative. They, he says, “claim that we should be much more radical.”

“They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats,” he said.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore tweeted that Taalas’ statement is “biggest crack in the alarmist narrative for a long time.”

“The meteorologists are real scientists and probably fed up with Greta, Mann, Gore, & AOC catastrophists. Good on him.”

The climate townhall is not the first time those who sow fear have revealed their usually veiled, and always dark, reasons to continue to feed hysteria.

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, has acknowledged the activists’ objective is not to save the world from overheating but to hijack markets and tear down capitalism.

Activist and influential author Naomi Klein asked, “what if global warming isn’t only a crisis?” in a preview of a documentary inspired by her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

“What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” The world must “change, or be changed,” she says, because an “economic system” — our free and open markets — has caused environmental “wreckage.”

The former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last week said Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming, has admitted the New York Democrat’s radical climate plan is a ruse.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said, according to the Washington Post Magazine. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked an aide to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee while the pair met at a Washington, D.C. coffee shop in May. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Sam Ricketts, Gov. Inslee’s climate director, initially said “yes,” changed it to “no,” the Post reported, before finally settling on “it’s dual.” Ricketts said the other half of the GND’s objective is “building an economy” that has “more broadly shared prosperity, equitability and justice throughout.” Which of course would require a massive shakeup of private economic affairs.

Al Gore’s daughter Karenna, who established the Union Theological Seminary’s Center for Earth Ethics, apparently “isn’t so sure” our current political system can “save the climate.” According to Vox, “she sees the Center’s work as exposing ‘the deeper root cause of climate change: a value system and an economic development paradigm based on short-term economic gain.’”

Karenna Gore believes “globalized capitalism and the big corporations that drive it are ‘just draining the integrity and the meaning out of life.’” So she has a better world in mind. “I don’t think we can do all of the same stuff, with the same mentality, and just solar power it,” she says.

Stirring up public fears of an imminent environmental disaster is an old game. Armstrong Economics reminds us that “climate change has been a routine scare tactic since the 1930s.”

“It resurfaced after World War II when they were trying to stop rebuilding industry and the housing market which had been destroyed, … appeared again in the 1960s when there was a great expansion in housing,” then was “flipped upside down” in the 1970s when we were told global cooling “would destroy civilization.”

Today it “is a political issue being used to raise taxes and to regulate human activity by removing ever-greater proportions of our human rights and freedom.”

When we say “tyranny,” we’re not talking about a new reign of terror or being compelled to live under Cuba- and North Korea-like oppression. But what word best describes a government system that issues prohibitions based on whim, and would forcibly redistribute ever greater sums of wealth in the pursuit of consolidating political power?

Until someone suggests a better word than tyranny, it’s the one we’re going to have to use.

Issues & Insights is a new site launched by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day.

Gold-Plated, Sky’s-The-Limit Payout Packages For Retiring Public Workers Pile Up Trillions In Debt On Taxpayers’ Backs.

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State and local governments have piled up trillions of dollars in retirement debt for pension and health-care promises that they’ve never bothered to fund adequately. Yet, even as they strain to pay these obligations, some keep handing out other expensive perks, rarely bestowed in the private sector. The most striking example: governments are accumulating billions of dollars in future debt by letting employees store up unused sick days and vacation days, which they can then “cash out” when they retire. Unsurprisingly, states with some of the largest burdens in this area also carry the heaviest pension debt—California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts among them. Failure to reform these practices puts already-beaten down taxpayers under an even more crushing load.

California owes $3.5 billion in payouts for unused vacation time to workers, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2017 alone, the state paid out $300 million for unused vacation days to retiring workers. Facing severe financial constraints after the 2008 financial crisis, state politicians nonetheless did little to control these costs. Payouts for untaken time off have rocketed upward by nearly 80 percent in less than a decade. The state paid six-figure “goodbye kisses” to about 460 employees in 2017, up from 280 five years ago. One retiring transportation engineer took away $405,000, in addition to his generous salary and health-care benefits. A surgeon in a state prison hospital netted $456,000. One reason these payouts are so generous: California pays for unused days at the employee’s retiring salary level, rather than at his wage rate when he accrued those days. For employees who amass unused time over decades, a tidy sum can be owed.

California politicians have long grumbled that they can’t get a handle on pension costs because of state court rulings that make it impossible to cut pension benefits for current employees—even for work that they’ve yet to do. But no similar restrictions exist on ending the unused overtime perks. The refusal to do so reflects a lack of will among politicians, starting with the governor’s office.

In New Jersey, which has one of the biggest retirement-funding problems, local governments owe nearly $1.9 billion in unused sick time. Only 8 percent of private-sector employers offer this perk because firms consider paid time off for sick days to be a benefit of continued employment, not a retirement benefit. Jersey municipalities are struggling to pay big settlements. The police chief of Englewood Cliffs, a town of about 5,200 residents, received a payout of $587,000 that included 150 unused sick days and 408 unused vacation days. The extra benefit endures despite a 2009 investigation that concluded: “It simply is unacceptable and intolerable for taxpayers to continue to be burdened by these sorts of gold-plated, sky’s-the-limit payout packages for active and retiring public workers—especially when the cost of such arrangements can seriously erode local budgets, drive up property taxes, and actually coincide with the layoffs of essential personnel, including police officers and firefighters.” Former Republican governor Chris Christie and the Democratic-controlled legislature sparred for years over this issue. They agreed to cap state worker accruals at $15,000 per worker, but Christie wanted to eliminate the benefit entirely for municipal employees. The legislature agreed only to cap the size of the payouts that local workers could earn. No deal was reached.

Massachusetts is putting $2.4 billion into its pension system this year, an amount projected to swell to $11 billion in 15 years as the state tries to pay down its debt. Even so, the state pays retirees for unused sick time. Last year, more than 10,000 retirees took advantage of the arrangement. A retiring professor at the University of Massachusetts garnered $185,000 in pay for unused days, while seven other state college employees netted more than $100,000 each and a retiring top officer in the state police took home $112,000. In 2017, the inspector general reported that the state faced a liability of $117 million because of the unused time. Governor Charlie Baker’s efforts to cap the time have met with resistance from the Democrat-dominated state legislature.

Union power is clearly the driving force in places with these steep liabilities. California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have some of the nation’s highest rates of public-sector unionization. Another deeply indebted state is Ohio, where legislators also face union struggles. The state owes workers some $444 million in unused time off, according to one report. One recent Ohio example: a former state pathologist retired with 3,000 hours of sick leave and 600 vacation hours, worth $193,000. The perk persisted in Ohio through eight years of a Republican governor and legislature. The reason: fear of union power. After the GOP passed a law in 2011 to restrict public-sector collective bargaining, unions were able to overturn it via a statewide referendum, making Republicans hesitant to take on the unions again.

Meantime, the debts keep piling up, adding to the public sector’s already-significant retirement-debt crisis.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal, where this article appeared, and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Government Can’t Measure Income, Happiness or Well-Being.

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One of the central problems of aggregate measures of national income and well-being is the fact so much of it relies on incomes, wealth, production, and consumption measured in terms of dollars.

This means only activities that can be tracked, counted, and ranked based on dollar values and production totals will be among those activities reported as having value. These activities include the payment and receipt of wages, and the purchasing of consumer goods and services with money.

For the purposes of economic statistics, these are fairly easy to measure. We can measure how many people have jobs, what wages are being paid, and how much those workers are producing. We can measure how many houses are purchased, how much people are paying in rent, and how many cars are sold. Most of this is measured in unit totals and dollar amounts.

But there is an enormous amount of human effort that goes to activities that cannot be measured in this way.

Child Rearing

For example, if a parent leaves his or her wage work to stay home and educate a child, that will be measured as a drop in total employment and total wages earned in the economy. Meanwhile, the statistics tell us nothing about how much benefit — i.e., psychic income — the parent gained by spending time with the child, or engaging in other activities we call “parenting.”

Moreover, a parent who stays home may also impact the economy by reducing dollars spent in the marketplace on child care, meal preparation, and education services. Instead of buying meals at restaurants and professionally-provided childcare services, this parent instead provides those services at home, without any money changing hands. Thus, the benefits remain “off the books” and uncounted in terms of national statistics.

What the statisticians will see is a drop in revenues for restaurants and childcare services. And we may be told that’s a bad thing.

Even worse — from the statistician’s point of view — the parent may elect to homeschool the child, which means a significant portion of the cost of education will remain unrecorded in the marketplace, and government schools will have less enrollment to report, justifying education spending.

Naturally, if a large number of parents elected to do the same, this could lead to a significant impact to household income statistics, as many households become single-income households, or as parents elected to work fewer hours so as to spend more time with children.

If this were to a happen enough, it is entirely possible that we would hear about a “crisis” in household income as households in the child-raising age range were seeing a decline in incomes and spending. We might even start hearing from “experts” who go on television talk shows to tell us that public policies must be devised to encourage parents to pursue more wage work and purchase more goods and services.

What can’t be seen in this sort of analysis, of course, is the fact that the decline in family wages and consumption may only be reflecting choices being freely made by parents to forego wages and consumption so as to increase the parents’ perceived benefits of child rearing.

Retirement

We may encounter similar problems when it comes to workers making the decision to retire.

After all, when a worker retires — or cuts back his or her hours — wage income naturally goes down. Given uncertainty about the future, the retiree may then also elect to spend less on goods and services such as cars, vacations, and housing.

In measures of wages and spending these activities will show up as a drop in incomes and in household spending.

But what the decision to reture really shows is that some people preferred leisure time more than earning wages in the marketplace.

The picture is even more complicated than this, however. Not everyone retires voluntarily.  Some people retire because they “have to.” That is, in some cases, workers become disabled due to old age or illness, and either cannot physically work, or cannot find an employer willing to hire them. Those people drop out of the work force although they might have preferred to keep earning wages.

At the same time, some people keep working in the marketplace because they did not save enough in the past to allow for retirement at the present time.

And then, of course, there are people who have a sufficient amount of savings to maintain their current standard of living even without their current wages — but nonetheless remain at their jobs because they prefer it to leisure.

The benefit of retirement varies depending on whether it is voluntary or due to disability. How shall we measure this? Government data-collection methods offer little in terms of a solution. Certainly, survey data might tell us a little about how many retirees do so voluntarily, but even then, we can’t measure the benefit of retirement in comparison to the foregone wages.

Moving for a Higher Wage

Sometimes, workers choose to remain in the workforce — but forego higher wages in order to gain other non-monetary benefits.

For example, some workers prefer jobs that allow for greater flexibility in working hours and more time off. These jobs, however, often pay lower wages. The benefit comes in the form of more leisure and greater control over one’s schedule.

Non-monetary benefits can also be gained from refusing to re-locate to a new location to pursue a higher paying job. This translates into lower mobility for workers. According to the LA Times, when this happens, “economists worry” that “with declining job movement may come slower gains in overall employment, wages, productivity and, ultimately, economic growth.”

Maybe.

It may also be the case that many of these less-mobile workers are trading wage gains for gains in terms of family stability and community life that come from staying put. As an April 2019 study from the Federal Reserve concluded: “individuals face substantial non-pecuniary costs to moving … and that they also place high value on proximity to family … and on agreeableness of local social and cultural norms.”

In other words, workers gain substantial benefit from not moving, even though moving to a “better” job would bring higher wages as measured in dollars.

Thus, we find, yet again, statistical measures of “well-being” — if measured in terms of wages and spending — tell us very little about how people truly become better off or at least avoid becoming worse off.

An Extreme Case: Slavery

As a final illustration of the problem with conventional measures of well-being, we can look to the case of slavery.

One of the justifications given for slavery by pro-slavery activists was the claim that slave labor was more productive than wage labor. According to Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, some slavery defenders saw the intense workloads and long hours endured by slaves as evidence of the system’s superiority. As recounted by one Edmund Ruffin: “Free laborers, if to be hired for the like duties, would require at least double the amount of wages to perform one-third more labor in each day.”1

The slaves, however, were not convinced of the system’s benefits. Hummel notes how, after emancipation, “Women and children abandoned the fields, and even black males cut back,” leaving most of the field labor to adult men. Moreover, “The total labor supplied by former slaves fell by approximately one-third.”2

Were we to use modern government accounting methods to measure the contribution of slaves to the economy before and after emancipation, we would likely find emancipation produced a sizable decline to productivity, arguably making the nation worse off.

In reality, this isn’t what happened at all, as Hummel concludes:

Here we encounter a dramatic demonstration of the limitations of economic aggregates for measuring well-being. Income per capita went down because people were better off. They were working less or producing household amenities, both of which represented improvements in the quality of life.”3

The aggregate data doesn’t tell us anything about the benefits and psychic incomes earned from not working the fields for fourteen hours per day. Measuring only worker output, the data would suggest declining productivity and impoverishment. In reality, the opposite was true as more workers’ demonstrated preference was to work fewer hours.

How Well-Being Should be Measured

Unfortunately, economics as a discipline has suffered from the fact so many of its practitioners have become preoccupied with those things that can often be measured — such as jobs and wages — while neglecting the more hidden benefits gained from activities like parenting or choosing to not earn a wage.

But when you’re a hammer, all the world looks like a nail — and this means economists have turned to spinning theories about maximizing wages and spending when it is likely — especially in an advanced economy — many people gain greater benefit from doing something else.

Competent economists, of course, have not lost sight of this fact. As Murray Rothbard noted in his essay “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,”

economics does not deal with things or material objects. Economics analyzes the logical attributes and consequences of the existence of individual valuations. “Things” enter into the picture, of course, since there can be no valuation without things to be valued. But the essence and the driving force of human action, and therefore of the human market economy, are the valuations of individuals.

Unfortunately for the government number crunchers, many people choose to value things that aren’t being added up on spreadsheets. And even if they were, we still wouldn’t know how much people value reading a story to a child, or living close to family and friends.

Moreover, the fact we can know so little about how, why, or when people make certain economic decisions belies the idea that we can formulate economic policy in a way that makes everyone better off. If we believe that policy “works” when measured money incomes go up, we’re measuring success based on a flawed and partial measure. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

  • 1.Hummel, JR. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. (Open Court Publishing, Chicago, 1996.) p. 45.
  • 2.Ibid. p. 322.
  • 3.Ibid. p. 322.

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute, whjere this article fiorst appeared.

How Bureaucrats And Their Socialist Designs Ruin Everything From Dishwashers To Gas Cans To Cars.

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Have you ever wondered why dishwashers today take twice as long to do a worse job of cleaning dishes? Or why it’s so much harder to get gasoline out of a new gas can? Or why cars made decades ago always turn heads, while today’s are drab in the same way?

There’s a simple answer to these modern-day mysteries: Government regulators.

Take the dishwasher. Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced that it would revise its rules regarding dishwasher efficiency. Why? Because the existing rules — which set limits on how much electricity and water a dishwasher may use — are forcing manufacturers to build machines that are worse than ever.

The DOE was responding to a petition from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which found that average dishwasher cycle times climbed from just over an hour back in the mid 1980s to two-and-a-half hours today — with each increase in between the result of increasingly strict federal efficiency mandates.

“It is not technologically feasible to create dishwashers that both meet the current standards and have cycle times of one hour or less,” the petition stated.

Shouldn’t dishwasher efficiency be something that the market dictates? Consumers trade off convenience for savings every day. Why should dishwashers be any different? Particularly when the regulations result in a savings of something like $2 a month.

Government Gas Cans

If CEI wins this battle for consumers, it might want to petition the government to let people buy gas cans that work properly. Most homeowners of a certain age will remember those good old gas cans that had a spout at one end, and a small resealable vent at the other. The vent let air in while the gasoline was pouring out.

But regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t like that simple solution to the physics of pouring liquids. They decided old-style gas cans were too polluting and let too much gas spill on the ground.

So the EPA decreed in 2009 that gas cans must henceforth have: 1) A single, self-venting opening for filling and pouring with no separate vents or openings and 2) a nozzle that automatically closes when it’s not being used.

The result was a gas can with complicated nozzles that can be difficult to handle, are prone to breaking, cost more, and make it harder to pour gasoline. In frustration, people started drilling vent holes in their EPA-approved gas cans and entrepreneurial companies started selling nozzle replacement kits.

Socialist Car Designs

Next, CEI could go after federal regulators who’ve managed over the course of several decades to completely ruin car designs.

Think about it. Why is it that cars made 40 years ago or more are captivating, and varied, with real personalities, while new cars today are, for the most part, indistinguishable?

The reason is that there’s basically only one way to design a car today that meets all the government-imposed safety and environmental regulations.

Jeffrey Tucker, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, notes that “the designs of new cars are boring because regulations forced this result.”

Today, the government dictates nearly every single aspect of a car’s design. Big fronts for safety, low tops for fuel economy, tiny windows, high belt lines, etc. That’s just the exterior. Almost every feature of a car’s interior is also regulated by government.

One car designer noted that “I know of at least one vehicle … that was discontinued entirely because changing curtain airbag regulations would have meant the entire shape of the vehicle had to be redesigned.”

There are plenty of other examples like this of regulators making products worse. Toilets that don’t flush, showerheads that don’t allow sufficient water flow, and other modern product failures, are courtesy of the nanny state.

And all of this, mind you, is just the tip of the regulatory pyramid, with decades upon decades of rules, mandates, and regulations now affecting nearly every aspect of our economy. Has this monstrous regulatory state improved the quality of our lives?  If the above is any indication, the answer is most likely no.

John Merline was Deputy Editor of Commentary and Opinion at Investor’s Business Daily, and was a member of the editorial board of USA Today.  This article first appeared at Issues and Insights.

In Politics, Your Choice Is Worthless. In Economics, Your Choice Is Definitive.

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In nearly 40 years of teaching, I’ve learned that students predictably react with hostility if told that none of their individual votes in political elections will ever determine the outcome of any election.

When discussing public-choice economics, I’m careful never to say that an individual’s vote “doesn’t matter.” Of course it matters, at least to each individual who votes — a reality proven by the fact that each individual who votes chooses to spend time and effort to do so. I’m also careful to preface my remarks with the assurance that nothing that I say should be interpreted as a plea, or even as an excuse, for people not to vote.

No Individual Vote Determines Electoral Outcomes

But I nevertheless do insist on driving home the correct understanding that in any majority-rule election with more than a small handful of voters, the probability of any one vote determining the outcome is virtually zero. I conclude by stating frankly to my students this verity: “Your vote will never make the outcome of any election other than what that outcome will be if you vote differently or if you don’t vote at all.”

Not one of the thousands upon thousands of students who have taken my classes over the decades has ever denied outright that the outcome of any election is extraordinarily unlikely ever to be determined by a single vote. When explained straightforwardly, the “non-determinativeness” of a single vote is simply too obvious to deny.

Yet intellectual awareness of this reality seems, strangely, to fuel in many students a need to venerate voting — to describe voting as being not only a sacred secular act, but as the most precious right that an individual can possibly possess.

And what’s true of students is true of the public at large. Majoritarian democracy is widely (if mistakenly) regarded as being synonymous with freedom, and the right to vote is held to be a priceless privilege that gives to each person who exercises it remarkable power to determine how he or she fares within society by giving each person a loud voice in determining the course of society.

Very few people are willing to accede to the reality that voting gives no individual any influence whatsoever over the manner in which he or she is treated, or how he or she fares, in society. The widespread romantic belief is not only that the person who votes has a meaningful say in the affairs of society, but also that the “say” that a person has through voting is more powerful and important than any other “say” that a person can have in society.

As a simple matter of arithmetic, however, this belief is a complete fairytale. Yet it persists.

Contrast this myth of the power of voting with another myth, one almost diametrically its opposite — namely, the myth that in markets every ordinary person is powerless, with his or her puny individual choices swamped and made insignificant both by those of “powerful” others and by faceless market forces.

Decision-Making Power Within Markets

A prominent version of the “people are powerless in markets” myth is the notion that, because each of us in markets is highly dependent upon the efforts of others, we as individuals are not really responsible for that which we produce.

Barack Obama alluded to this myth when, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he reminded his audience that businesses that use infrastructure such as roads and bridges to transport their goods to market “didn’t build that.” Nor do businesspeople typically provide for the education of their workers. The insinuation is that any profit that businesses earn could not have been earned without these state-supplied goods and services. And — the insinuation continues — because the state made possible these profits, the state is entitled to a large chunk of them.

Others have exposed the factual and logical errors that infect the insinuations drawn from Obama’s “you didn’t build that” declaration. What’s relevant here is the stark difference between the presumptions at the root of the “you didn’t build that” myth and those at the root of “voting gives each individual a real say” myth.

While of course it’s true that each individual in the modern market economy is highly and daily dependent upon literally billions of strangers for his or her existence — with most of these strangers, by the way, not being operatives of the state — it is emphatically untrue that each individual in market economies has no significant personal influence over his or her economic well-being.

Of course roads, bridges, communications networks, and all other manner of infrastructure make possible nearly every productive effort of people in modern economies. But to be necessary is not to be sufficient. The most extensive network of highways by itself produces no economic value. Ditto for the most excellent schooling of the population, and for the most efficient judiciary. Actual economic value arises only if and when entrepreneurs create goods and services to be made available on markets.

Without the creativity, risk-taking, and efforts of individual entrepreneurs, no economic value would be produced. This reality is made not one whit less certain because successful entrepreneurs rely upon infrastructure as well as upon the productive efforts of countless strangers in the market.

If, for example, Steve Jobs had lazed about all day gazing at his navel, we would not today have as many and as high-quality smartphones and other electronic marvels as we have. And if you retort that had Jobs been nothing but a lazy navel-gazer then some other entrepreneur would have done pretty much what the real Jobs actually did, I will note that we would then still be beholden to that other entrepreneur for his or her individual creativity, risk-taking, and effort. In no case does infrastructure itself create valuable goods and services, however beneficial, or even necessary, it might be for the creation of valuable goods and services.

And what’s true for successful, famous entrepreneurs is true for each ordinary person.

The market gives to the plumber, the pipefitter, and the political-science professor each a real and meaningful say in how his or her life proceeds. The young man who chooses to pursue a career as a physician need not persuade 51 percent of his fellow citizens to endorse his choice; that choice is his and his alone. Likewise for the woman who chooses to delay having children in order to work full-time as an attorney: the decision is hers, and it’s a decisive one.

Unlike in politics, each person’s individual decisions outside of politics are typically decisive. Each of us, individually, chooses what to eat, what to wear, where to live, whether or not to attend college, whether or not to have a pet hamster, with whom we have sex and how often, how many tattoos and piercings adorn our bodies. This list is practically endless.

In short, popular mythology insists that matters are exactly the reverse of what they are in reality. We are told that we have meaningful voice when we don’t, and that we don’t when we do.

The danger is this: as the state comes to superintend ever more aspects of life, the say of each individual in how his or her life plays out diminishes. Yet the naïve, stubborn popular belief that the most powerful “say” that each person has in democratic society is through the vote will mask this loss of personal say. People will be herded down the road to serfdom, all the while with each person mistakenly supposing that, because he or she votes, he or she chooses to make this ominous journey.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

The Greatest Romantic Novelist and Poet Who Continues to Give Us Depth of Soul

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Perhaps no one in history more poetically communicated the abstract concepts of justice and injustice better than Poetic Justice Warrior Victor Hugo.

As Poetic Justice Warrior Lisa VanDamme teaches us, “With a symphonic integration of all the resources of language, great poets take the most elusive nuances, thrills, mysteries, and motifs of love and throw them into sharp relief.”

Victor Hugo did this masterfully through the fictional characters he brought to our lives. Great literature is essential for showing us the heights of virtue and the depths of depravity. It teaches the richness of lives with purpose and the despair caused by ignorance or injustice. It gives our lives gravity.

Paquette’s Despair

In 1831 Hugo published his first novel, Notre Dame de Paris (aka Hunchback), in which he captured the grief of misfortune and injustice with his characterization of Paquette, a vibrant teenage girl who became orphaned, resorted to prostitution, began to age, and joined a monastery.

As she could not have a lover, she gave herself up to longing for a child. The good God had pity on her, and gave her a little girl. I cannot describe to you her delight; she covered it with a perfect rain of tears, kisses, and caresses. She grew handsome again. Her old friends came back to see her, and she readily found customers for her wares.

Upon leaving her daughter at home and asleep for a few moments, she returned to find the baby missing.

My pretty little daughter! If anyone will give me back my daughter, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog. When night came, she went home. A child’s cries were heard coming from Paquette’s room. Instead of her lovely little Agnes, so rosy and fresh, there was a hideous little monster, blind, deformed, and crawling about the floor.

The only thing remaining for Paquette to cling to was one little shoe that had adorned Agnes’ tiny foot. Poetic justice would be to see her daughter thriving again.

Radoub’s Virtue

Thirty three years later Hugo published his last novel, Ninety Three. It is the story of a peasant revolt during the French Revolution. Central to the narrative are the exploits of the “Blues,” the soldiers of the French Republic, and their encounter with a peasant woman and her three young children. Sergeant Radoub and his battalion dedicated themselves to the safety of the children. When they are taken hostage during a battle with the Royalist “Whites,” Radoub owned it,

You see, commander, our babies are in that tower. Do you understand this, master? We do not want any harm to happen to them. I took advantage of the truce to go up on the plateau, and I saw them through a window. I swear a thousand times by all that is holy that I, Sergeant Radoub, that I will do something desperate. And this is what all the battalion say: ‘We want the children saved, or we want to be all killed. This is our right, yes, to be all killed.

Its important to emphasize that Radoub’s battalion had no use for the arbitrary self-sacrifice required by collectivism; it was about their freely chosen values. Their virtue was selfishness. The novel’s philosophy is about the humane values of individualism that transcend tradition and duty to hierarchy.

An even more stark example of intransigent devotion to traditional hierarchies and systems of justice is in the character of police Inspector Javert in Hugo’s masterpiece Les Misérables, published in 1861.

Thenardier’s Evil

In the characters of the innkeepers who enslave a young child they are hired to care for, Cosette, Hugo does a marvelous job depicting the depths of human depravity in Les Misérables. The Thenardier’s extort her mother Fantine over Cosette’s care. As only Hugo can explain,

In all Thénardier’s outpourings, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul – in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.

Unfortunately, the hugely successful and brilliant Broadway musical version makes light of their cruelty. Instead, it portrays them as cartoon characters. In the personage of Fantine, Hugo revisits Paquette’s despair, but he also introduces Fantine to a character of justice, courage, and virtue. Poetic justice was served by the one who saves her daughter Cosette – Jean Valjean.

Valjean’s Entrepreneurship

In Jean Valjean, Hugo creates the ultimate self-made man. Destitute, he is arrested for stealing bread for his starving sister’s family, and his sentence is extended to 19 years because of escape attempts. Once released he is still destitute, and also a convict. Ultimately, Valjean has a spiritual epiphany, adopts an alias, and after six years of living dedicated to honor and virtue, he becomes a wealthy factory owner and mayor of his city. As Hugo explains about the transformation:

Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became vicious: I became a firebrand. Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me.

His company hired Fantine, but the manager eventually fired her without cause. This destroyed her ability to send money to the Thénardier’s, and it destroyed her spirit. Valjean found her in the direst of straits, recognized her, and did everything possible to redeem his manager’s decision. He knew despair as well as anyone, and he knew redemption even more. He paid it forward with the morality and resources of a successful capitalist. As the novel marvelously illustrates, Valjean had respect and compassion for his employees, customers and strangers.

Depth of  Soul

As Poetic Justice Warrior Frederic Bastiat explained, justice is achieved only when we rid ourselves of injustice. Victor Hugo was a keen observer of injustice and he understood that the solution is within us individually. It is spiritual, then cultural, and lastly political. As Hugo tells us about Les Misérables:

The book which the reader has before him, in its entirety and details, is a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from corruption to life, from hell to heaven. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul.

Here Hugo states clearly that metaphysics is the essential fundamental in the philosophy for human flourishing. In ethics, justice manifests itself in the compassion and benevolence of the individual self-made man and woman. Great artists have perfected their ability to integrate these ideals into a philosophical theme and present them in concrete form. Like Beethoven‘s Eroica and Ode to Joy, great romantic novels and poetry educate us about our deepest human emotions and our greatest potentialities. They give us depth of soul.

British Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson saluted Hugo by saying: “Victor in Poetry. Victor in Romance. Victor in Life.” It is poetic justice that nearly 1 million mourners participated in Victor Marie Hugo’s funeral procession in 1885.

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