The Three-Headed Monster Giving Us Lousy Public Policy

Art Carden  August 24, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research

We have made fantastic strides in our understanding of how the physical and social worlds work. While the Great Enrichment of the last three centuries or so that happened because we adopted the Bourgeois Deal of “Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich” has lifted us to standards of living our ancestors could not have imagined. However, the prosperity we enjoy is constantly under attack by a political monster that never stops putting obstacles along the road to riches. The monster is a powerful beast with three heads: ignorance, avarice, and arrogance. Together, they help us understand why public policy is not much better.

Ignorance 

First, we don’t know what to do. It is a revelation to many economics students that policies like minimum wages, rent controls, laws against “price gouging,” and tariffs on goods made in foreign countries hurt the people they are intended to help. People don’t appreciate how well markets work, they don’t know how poorly communism has fared, and they don’t understand just how much better off we are than our ancestors were. We try to correct this with education, but economics is not easy–and for the individual citizen, learning the ins and outs of supply and demand analysis is not likely to do much to change public policy.

Second, we don’t know what is being done. This isn’t because we’re lazy or failing in our civic duty; rather, it’s because public policies generate concentrated benefits but dispersed costs. Sugar tariffs, for example, are worth many millions to U.S. sugar producers, but they probably don’t cost an individual family enough for it to be worthwhile to even measure the burden. A quick glance at the Federal Register on Friday, August 4 contained a front-page link to this request for 

comment on a proposal to update the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) to provide consumers with information about crashworthiness pedestrian protection of new vehicles. The proposed updates to NCAP would provide valuable safety information to consumers about the ability of vehicles to protect pedestrians and could incentivize vehicle manufacturers to produce vehicles that provide better protection for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. In addition, this proposal addresses several mandates set forth in section 24213 of the November 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, enacted as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

How many people know section 24213 of the November 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law? How many people had a reminder in their task manager that they needed to submit a public comment (the deadline was July 25, by the way)? Few and fewer, I suspect, because it’s exceedingly unlikely that taking the time and energy to concentrate on this is going to change the course of public policy. Of course, auto manufacturers probably have someone whose job is to know because there might be millions of dollars at stake.

Avarice

Why live at your own expense when you can live at someone else’s? This, incidentally, is precisely how Frederic Bastiat defined government, as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” A lot of us may not realize we’re doing this. People would recoil in horror at the idea of breaking into a neighbor’s house and stealing the cash in his wallet. They vote enthusiastically, however, for policies that take a slice out of his paycheck. Reining in avarice requires constitutional checks that oblige us to respect others’ rights. It also requires a cultural change whereby we reject the ancient notion that other people exist to serve us and recognize that they have their own prerogatives we may not know or approve of but that are literally none of our business.

Even when rules, regulations, and spending programs look like they are there to protect the innocent, they usually have support from a special interest that stands to make a lot of money from it. Consider the New Car Assessment Program mentioned above. Incumbent automakers can make it harder to compete by mandating new safety equipment that is there to protect pedestrians. We get more expensive cars and automakers get higher profits because they have fewer competitors. And due to the Peltzman effect, pedestrians might not end up being much safer.

Arrogance

Arrogance is our political beast’s third head. Arrogance comes with thinking the world is a simple place that would be easy to fix if we only had the political will to put the right people in power or make the right policies. Experts in international economic development tend toward arrogance: It is easy to see the cures for all that plagues Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America from a comfortable office at an American or European university.

Modern noblesse oblige demands that those of us who know better boss around the benighted fools who do not share our enlightened worldview. Maybe it is for their own good. Maybe it is because we among what Thomas Sowell called “The Anointed” are burdened with glorious purpose like Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Doesn’t everyone know that we are going to change the world? Historically, it might have been because someone was chosen by the local deity. Nowadays it might be because we are experts in The Science™, which is settled. Regardless, the world has not yet realized that we should be in charge, and they would gladly hand us our rightful scepters and crowns if they knew what was good for them.

Can we slay this three-headed monster? Doubtful, but there is reason to be optimistic. The last three centuries of rhetorical, institutional, and cultural change have clapped it in irons to the benefit of a world that is rapidly making poverty history. Even with these handicaps, it still does a lot of damage; however, if we can bind the monster even faster by eschewing political relations and embracing commercial relations, we can reduce its threat to our freedom and flourishing.

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Art Carden

Art Carden is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

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Loudoun County Requires Parents to Sign NDA-Like Form to View CRT-Style Curriculum

Landon Mion Oct 26, 2021 

Parents of students attending Loudoun County Public Schools are being required to sign a form similar to a non-disclosure agreement to view part of a curriculum linked to critical race theory.  LCPS spent about $7,700 to become a licensed member of the Second Step Programs, a branch of Committee for Children, a progressive nonprofit.   The presentation of the material can only be provided in person and parents are required to acknowledge that the viewing of the curriculum is "not a public event" and prohibits "copying, broadcast or recording of any kind."

Portions of the curriculum can be downloaded from LCPS' website.................."Terry McAuliffe and his allies want to keep parents in the dark and shut them out of schools while they force their radical political agenda into classrooms," Youngkin spokesperson Christian Martinez told Townhall. "McAuliffe pushed Critical Race Theory into Virginia’s education system when he was governor, but Glenn Youngkin will ban it on day one so kids can learn how to think instead of what to think. That’s why Republicans, Independents, and Democrats are coming together in support of Glenn Youngkin for governor.".......To Read More.......

My Take - How is it legal to not permit the public to see public records, and no matter how they frame this, it's a program that will be implemented in their schools, so how can this not be public records?  How can any NDA be imposed on the public to see what belongs to the public?  

I have to believe this NDA clabber is unenforceable.  And if someone violated it what would this school board do?  Sue them?  After all, Virginia has sunshine laws, which in Virginia are called "The Freedom of Information Act is a series of laws designed to guarantee that the public has access to public records of government bodies at all levels in Virginia."  

Virginia also has the "Virginia Open Meetings Law, under the Freedom of Information Act, legislates the methods by which public meetings are conducted", so are they going to court and say these parents right to transparency is wrong, the State's transparency laws are wrong, and claim it's wrong to expose the public to information they have a right to know in accordance with Virginia law?  

What arrogance by these people.   CRT should now be the least of their concerns, because there's a move to investigate this Board of Education criminally over rape.  As the evidence starts to pile up against them, you have to wonder how can these people not end up in jail for being complicit in concealing a crime, and a serious crime to boot.  While they claimed they weren't aware of this rape, we now know they lied, it was a crime they were informed about and tried to conceal.

One thing is clear, this Board of Education will not be there after the next election, short of massive voter fraud, and these people need to be criminally charged....then we'll see the arrogance disappear.... especially, if found guilty, they end up in prison filled with rapists.  

That will be interesting. 

Leftists versus the People

February 24, 2018 By Jeffrey Folks
 

Do they really hate ordinary people that much?

Yes, they do.

For liberals, the distinction between the "dumb masses" and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.

At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer's faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change.

Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.

Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith.  Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity.  This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of "knowing more than others" is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little.

Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it............liberalism is a temper, not a philosophy.  It has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially "progressive" or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes.  It exerts control and demands obedience........Read more

The Arrogance of Anger

By Jon Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

The Left are chronically angry. There is always something in the world that is not right and must be changed IMMEDIATELY if possible. Each Leftist probably has his own little wellspring of  anger and some may be dispositionally angry: Nothing may suit him.  He is in a permanent state of upset and disquiet.  The things that Leftists usually say they are angry about --  inequality, racism etc. -- are probably just convenient hooks to hang his expressions of anger on but there always seems to be some real, genuine anger motivating him. Often it is just that  he is not getting the recognition and praise that he thinks he deserves.

And that anger explains many things about the Leftist. It explains his impetuosity for starters. "Pass a law" is his recipe for fixing everything.  Finding the source of the problem he identifies and devising solutions that might work given time are alien ideas to him. The slow build that leads to permanent structures and systems is not for him.

The anger also explains the arrogance of Leftists and their pretence to elitism. Anger never considers that it might be in the wrong.  It always feels itself to be in the right.  It has no self-doubt. If Leftists really were an intellectual elite there might be some reason to regard them as wise governors but any ability they do have is nullified by their anger and urgency to change no matter what.  And that is why Leftist policies always have unfortunate side effects.  They may confer some benefit but also do a lot of harm.

The "Affordable Care Act" (Obamacare) is a classic example of that.  For the great majority of Americans it has made health insurance LESS affordable.  It was just not well thought out because it had to be enacted URGENTLY.

And for most Leftists, no parade of facts and logic will wean him off his poorly-considered beliefs.  The habitual anger of the Leftist is hard to give up, because wanting to feel/be right is part of human nature.  From the basic physical survival drive, through to intellectual and moral issues we like to be right.

That confidence in one's own rightness is however thoroughly deplorable in the Christian tradition.  As it says in  Luke 18:

"He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed[a] thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’  But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’  I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” 

I like that scripture and believe that it forms part of my personal values.  The Pharisees there are directly analogous to the modern-day Left, who think that they know it all and are confident in their own righteousness.  So it is no wonder that Leftists hate Christianity.  Christ condemned them.  Leftists much prefer the arrogant religion of Mohammed.