Voice For Liberty in Wichita

I, Pencil is one of the most important and influential writings that explain the necessity for limited government. A simple object that we may not give much thought to, the story of the pencil illustrates the importance of markets and the impossibility of centralized economic planning.
The size and scope of government, both at the national [...]

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In Barriers Broken?, Lew Rockwell takes a look at what barriers have been broken with the election of Barack Obama.
Conflict is the critical word here, for the conflict view of society is what is really behind the hysterical claims that Obama’s real contribution is to have broken through barriers. … What is the alternative to [...]

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Steve Moore, The Wall Street Journal:
Washington created this crisis!
We can move towards capitalism or socialism. … Lefties want to socialize this economy. …
Liberals love jobs but they hate employers.
We’re redefining welfare benefits as tax cuts. …
You can not create jobs by taxing small business! …
No more bailouts!
What harms prosperity: higher taxes, moving away from free [...]

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Herman Cain:
Prosperity is less taxes, less spending, and less government. Nancy Pelosi believes that property is a “new direction.” …
I have a message for all the liberal kool-aid drinkers: There is no Department of Happy in Washington DC!
Prosperity equals the pursuit of happiness, not a guarantee.
allenfuller tweeted: “He [Cain's father] achieved the American Dream the [...]

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Fred Barnes remarks:
The election is not over. Sarah Palin knows this, but I wish someone would tell John McCain. We need to prepare for the worst. We may face liberal majorities in congress and a liberal president. …
The crisis may not ease. …
There may be no veto of liberal legislation.
A great threat is card check. [...]

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Video from bloggers row at Americans For Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit:

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Mayor Steve Lonegan, State Director, AFP-New Jersey, who is an inspirational speaker:
The greedy businessman? But what about those who represent us in Washington?
The central planners attack productivity and call it greed.

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Photographs taken today at the Americans For Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington, DC. I am the photographer, except for one photo in which I am the subject.
Click here for the photos at Picasa Web Albums.

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Free markets may yield odd results and certainly unequal outcomes, but the greater opportunities and prosperity have made the tradeoff worthwhile for American society.
From Our Economic Past ~ Equality, Markets, and Morality by Burton Folsom, Jr., posted at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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Remarks to be delivered to the board of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, at tonight’s meeting.
Regarding the Ken Mar Redevelopment District: There is simply no way to look at this TIF district other than as a transfer of $2.5 million from the taxpayers to Reverend Harding’s group. Why? According to material prepared by [...]

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Paul Jacob, in a Common Sense commentary writes about David Boaz’s article in the Wall Street Journal (available at the Cato Institute) which describes the effort to obtain a customized Starbucks card with the phrase “laissez-faire” printed on it.

The request was rejected. But the socialist slogan “people not profits” was accepted by Starbucks, as was the United Farm Workers slogan “Si Se Puede.” (”Yes we can,” adopted by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.)

Here’s what you find if you read Starbuck’s mission statement: “Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.”

It seems that some political ideas are more “diverse” than others.

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From Dan Mitchell, Center for Freedom & Prosperity http://www.freedomandprosperity.org

John Stossel eviscerates David Brooks, the ostensibly conservative columnist for the New York Times. Brooks has argued for big new government initiatives to boost human capital. Stossel correctly notes, though, that Brooks wants to expand failed government programs when the right approach is to move in the other direction:

David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.” Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition. Brooks writes that Hamiltonians like him “think government should help people get the tools they need to compete.” But when has government ever been good at that? He claims the state can “increase the quality of human capital” by, for example, providing “Quality preschool [to] help young children from … disorganized homes. … ” Really? What is the chance that it would be “quality” preschool if government runs it? Even the acclaimed Head Start has not been shown to have any lasting effect on academic performance. …When I asked Brooks why a government that performed as ineptly as FEMA did after Hurricane Katrina will be better at running preschools, he said, “Some lives are so screwed up, it’s hard to make them worse.” Government coercion almost always makes things worse. It discourages individual effort, and sucks capital away from more productive uses. …America became an economic power despite, not because of, Hamiltonian intervention. Hong Kong and much of East Asia went from abject poverty to affluence in a few decades not because their governments gave people “tools they need to compete” — they didn’t — but because they exercised limited powers.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2007/06/27/big-government_conservatives

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Writing from Davenport, Iowa

A column by economist Walter E. Williams (Why we’re a divided nation) strongly makes the case for more decision making by free markets rather than by the government through the political process.

When decisions are made through free markets, Dr. Williams says, both parties win, because in a free market, parties voluntarily enter into only those transactions that benefit them.

When decisions are made for us by the government, however, it is almost always the case that one party’s gain is someone else’s loss. Therefore, there is conflict. The more decisions made through politics, the more potential for conflict. Coalitions arise in order to try to get more from the government, and the most effective coalitions “are those with a proven record of being the most divisive — those based on race, ethnicity, religion and region.”

The final paragraph of the column is this:

The best thing the president and Congress can do to heal our country is to reduce the impact of government on our lives. Doing so will not only produce a less divided country and greater economic efficiency but bear greater faith and allegiance to the vision of America held by our founders — a country of limited government.”

In an earlier post, I mentioned some columns by Dr. Williams that I thought were important. This column is certainly one of his best, as it very simply, in one short page, shows us a major fault in our current political landscape.

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This is an excellent article that exposes how little some people like Michael Moore think about the systems they consider corrupt and unworkable. It appears that Mr. Moore is so consumed with an anti-market bias that he hasn’t really considered the true causes of the problem with healthcare in America. He isn’t the first person to have problems with an anti-market bias, nor do I suspect he’ll be the last.

Michael Moore Confirms that Government Health Care is Sicko
by Diana M. Ernst, Pacific Reserach Institute

Michael Moore showed up in Sacramento last week to promote his film Sicko. Senator Sheila Kuehl hailed Moore as a prophet of truth to the American people but the filmmaker is so mired in his own health hysterics that he regularly contradicts himself .

He rails against “for-profit” health care, but 85 percent of U.S. hospitals are non-profit, and almost half of privately insured Americans have polices from non-profit health insurers.

Moore referred to the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor hospital in Los Angeles, where a patient died of a perforated bowel after lying on the emergency room floor for 45 minutes. Since 2004, the hospital has received more than a dozen state and federal safety citations. Hospital errors included leaving sick patients unattended which resulted in death for three of them, giving patients the wrong medications, and using Taser stun guns to restrain psychiatric patients.

This hospital is not private, however. It is owned by the County of Los Angeles. So much for reliable government care. And the private insurers Moore rails against are currently selling health policies laden with government mandates and regulations.

The Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAHI) has reported that mandated benefits have increased to the more than 1,800 today. In some states, mandated benefits have raised the cost of individual health insurance by 45 percent. Government solutions that create more government amount to nothing but expensive salt in the wound. Such is Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to tax hospitals and physicians for mandated health coverage, and such is Senator Kuehl’s government monopoly plan, promoted as a “single payer” system.

We need to help insurers to be more competitive, not scrap them for big-government bureaucracy. Mr. Moore’s foolish preference of abolishing private insurance in favor of government-run, single-payer health care will not create universal care, only a government monopoly. In other words, Moore thinks the government should provide “free” health care that isn’t required to meet any standards.

Mr. Moore also thinks Canada is a good role model, but two years ago the Canadian Supreme Court found that government monopoly health care violates basic human rights. The winning plaintiff in this case, Mr. Zeliotis, needed hip surgery. When he tried to pay privately for his operation rather than wait in the public line (which takes two to four years) the Canadian government stopped him. Mr. Zeliotis argued against government interference with his freedom to choose private medical care. The denial of such a choice prolonged his pain and threatened his safety.

Mr. Moore also likes the single-payer system in Cuba, a one-party communist state. Some 11 million Cubans attend run-down facilities, receive dated prescription drugs, and are even required to bring their own sheets, food and soap to the hospital. Communist Party bosses get better treatment but when it came time for the great dictator Fidel Castro to go under the knife, he flew in a specialist from Spain. To adopt the health-care system of a totalitarian dictatorship like Cuba would be kind of, well, sicko. But government-run health care also presents problems right here at home.

Medicaid was instituted in the 1960s under President Johnson for the poor, but it has grown far beyond its capacity, putting its financial capabilities under great strain. In order to keep costs down, Medicaid underpays physicians, who have increasingly stopped accepting Medicaid beneficiaries as a result. Government restrictions on physicians also make it challenging to get prescription drugs for Medicaid patients.

Mr. Moore’s remedies fail as heath-care reform and do not even amount to effective propaganda. He needs less rhetoric and more direct experience. He should get on a Canadian waiting list for treatment, try the “second” system that serves most Cubans, or follow a Medicaid patient’s struggle to get health care from the government.

Meanwhile, union nurses and hospital employees were among 1,000 people who must have taken sick time to cheer Michael Moore Tuesday. Perhaps Speaker Nuñez and Senator Kuehl will investigate how patient care suffered while their caregivers took to the streets.

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Our economy is so intertwined and interdependent that it is impossible for the government to guide it in any direction without setting off a long chain of consequences. This is another example of the folly of centralized economic planning.

As I’ve written in the past, to determine the true value of ethanol, remove all subsidies for producing it and the corn used to make it, and end the tariff on imported ethanol. Very rapidly the market will tell us just how much a gallon of ethanol is worth.

Dan Mitchell summarizes The Wall Street Journal:

The shine is off corn ethanol, and oh, what a comedown it has been. It was only in January that President Bush was calling for a yet a bijillion more gallons of the wonder-stuff in his State of the Union address, and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley was practically doing the Macarena in his seat. And why shouldn’t Mr. Grassley and fellow ethanol handmaidens have boogied? They’d forced their first mandate through Congress, corn farmers were rolling in dough, billions in taxpayer dollars were spurring dozens of new ethanol plants–and here was the commander-in-chief calling for yet more yellow dollars. All in the name of national security, too! Corn ethanol seemed unstoppable, but a remarkable thing happened on the road from Des Moines. Just as the smart people warned, the government’s decision to play energy market God and forcibly divert huge amounts of corn stocks into ethanol has played havoc with key sectors of the economy. Corn prices have nearly doubled, which means livestock owners can’t afford to feed their animals, and food and drink manufacturers are struggling to buy corn and corn syrup. Environmentalists are sour over new stresses on farmland; international aid groups are moaning that the U.S. is cutting back its charitable food giving, and many of these folks are taking out their anger on Congress. …The hugely influential National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has gone so far as to outline a series of public demands, including an end to any government tax credits (subsidies) for ethanol and an axe to the import tariff on foreign ethanol. Put another way, the cattlemen are so angry that they are demanding free markets and free trade–a first. …The National Turkey Federation estimates its feed costs have gone up nearly $600 million annually and is surely letting loose on members from turkey states such as Minnesota and Missouri. The National Chicken Council, which represents companies that produce, process and market chickens, has been hitting the southern political caucus, putting pressure on senators from big poultry states such as Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama. Chicken giant Tyson’s, the second largest employer in Arkansas (after Wal-Mart), even felt the need to warn about the effect of rising corn prices on its business in its first quarter earnings statement. Food and drink manufacturers, which rely heavily on corn and corn syrup for their products, are also making the Washington rounds. The Grocery Manufacturers Association this week called for Congress to undertake a study before it imposed a bigger ethanol mandate. Soft-drink companies such as Coca-Cola (of Mr. Chambliss’s Georgia) are also up in arms.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrasselpw/?id=110010094

And summarizing John Stossel:

When everyone in politics jumps on a bandwagon like ethanol, I start to wonder if there’s something wrong with it. And there is. Except for that fact that ethanol comes from corn, nothing you’re told about it is true. …If ethanol’s so good, why does it need government subsidies? Shouldn’t producers be eager to make it, knowing that thrilled consumers will reward them with profits? But consumers won’t reward them, because without subsidies, ethanol would cost much more than gasoline. The claim that using ethanol will save energy is another myth. Studies show that the amount of energy ethanol produces and the amount needed to make it are roughly the same. …even turning all of America’s corn into ethanol would meet only 12 percent of our gasoline demand. …the standard mixture of 90 percent ethanol and 10 percent gasoline pollutes worse than gasoline. …Surely, ethanol must be good for something. And here we finally have a fact. It is good for something — or at least someone: corn farmers and processors of ethanol, such as Archer Daniels Midland, the big food processor known for its savvy at getting subsidies out of the taxpayers. And it’s good for vote-hungry presidential hopefuls. Iowa is a key state in the presidential-nomination sweepstakes.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2007/05/23/the_many_myths_of_ethanol

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I, Pencil is one of the most important and influential writings that explain the necessity for limited government. A simple object that we may not give much throught to, the story of the pencil illustrates the importance of markets, and the impossibility of centralized economic planning.

From the afterword to I, Pencil by Milton Friedman:

Leonard E. Read’s delightful story, “I, Pencil,” has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand — the possibility of cooperation without coercion — and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

Link to a pdf of I, Pencil: http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/I,%20Pencil%202006.pdf

Link to Leonard E. Read reading I, Pencil: http://www.fee.org/events/detail.asp?id=6239

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From an article by Kenneth P. Green on energy policy. It explains why subsidy in any form is bad policy.

First, subsidies breed corruption. They don’t create incentives for honest people that already have a market-worthy product — such people can already sell their goods into the market easily. Rather, subsidies create a fertile garden for rentseekers who are unable to sell their goods competitively in a free-market, and prefer to tap the coercive and redistributionist force of government to lever their uncompetitive good into the market at the public’s expense. Rather than contribute to overall social welfare by giving consumers the best goods at the least cost, or even maximizing the efficient use of people’s taxes, rent-seekers undermine social welfare by foisting inferior or over-priced goods onto the market while taking money from people that could be used for other important purposes. This is a particular problem in countries with relatively weak property rights regimes, and countries with legal institutions insufficient to prevent it.

Full article at http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.26353/pub_detail.asp.

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Thank you to Karl Peterjohn for this excellent, well-researched article.
Urban Renewal: A Flawed Idea That Failed 50 Years Ago
By Karl Peterjohn, Executive Director Kansas Taxpayers Network
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1) Urban renewal failed across the United States in the 20th century. The urban renewal efforts from the 20th century that are the foundation for the newly proposed redevelopment [...]

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From Dan Mitchell:

Walter Williams summarizes why the Food and Drug Administration is likely to delay the approval of drugs that benefit people. Simply stated, they adopt a risk-averse strategy to avoid being criticized for allowing a dangerous drug on the market, even though almost all drugs can be dangerous:

…if you’re an FDA official, what are your incentives in terms of whether to approve or disapprove the marketing of a drug that has a tremendous benefit to some patients and poses a health threat to others? Former FDA Commissioner Alexander Schmidt hinted at the answer when he said, “In all our FDA history, we are unable to find a single instance where a Congressional committee investigated the failure of FDA to approve a new drug. But the times when hearings have been held to criticize our approval of a new drug have been so frequent that we have not been able to count them. The message to FDA staff could not be clearer.” There’s little or no cost to the FDA for not approving a drug that might be safe, effective and clinically superior to other drugs for some patients but pose a risk for others. My question to FDA officials is: Should a drug be disapproved whenever it poses a health risk to some people but a benefit to others? To do so would eliminate most drugs, including aspirin, because all drugs pose a health risk to some people.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/05/30/fda_friend_or_foe

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The Miracle and Morality of the Market
Richard M. Ebeling

Click here to read the article.

In this short article we learn the simple mechanism that makes our economy work so well. Interfering with that mechanism is not only harmful, it is immoral.

Prices convey the information that we need to make our economy work. Here is why:

How are the activities of an increasingly larger group of individuals successfully coordinated, so that all the multitudes of demands and supplies are brought into balance and harmony? The Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek showed how all of the knowledge and information in society can be encapsulated in the price system of the free-market economy. In our roles as both consumers and producers we communicate to one another what we think goods, resources, capital, and labor services are worth to us in their various and competing uses through the prices we are willing to pay for them. These “price signals” serve as the means for all of us to decide and coordinate what we want and are willing to do together with other members of society.

Because of the information conveyed by prices, is not necessary for a government to rule over the economy to cause it to function properly. In fact, government intervention in the economy is harmful, because the market is so complex that it is impossible to guide effectively. Central planning of economic activity will make people poorer, not wealthier. As Thomas Sowell relates: “The last premiere of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: How do you see to it that people get food? The answer was that she didn’t. Prices did that. And the British people were better fed than those in the Soviet Union, even though the British have never grown enough food to feed themselves in more than a century. Prices bring them food from other countries.”

The moral dimension of the market refers to how in a free society, people enter into transactions freely, choosing those that they believe will benefit them:

There are none who are only masters and others who are simply servants. In the market society we are all both servants and masters, but without either force or its threat. In our roles as producers — be it as men who hire out our labor for wages, resource owners who rent out or sell our property for a price, or entrepreneurs who direct production for anticipated profits — we serve our fellow men in attempting to make the products and provide the services we think they may be willing and interested in buying from us.

Yet we know there are those who wish to interfere with the working of a free market through various means. All attempts to do this reduce the amount of liberty we are able to experience.

Too many want to dictate how others may make a living, or at what price and under what terms they may peacefully and voluntarily interact with their fellow human beings for purposes of mutual material, cultural, and spiritual betterment.

Often the concept of free markets is viewed as contrary to a moral society. Those who advocate government programs to make us better off are portrayed as noble, virtuous, and smarter than the rest of us. This article shows us that they are not that at all — they are immoral. Why? Almost all these programs forcibly take money from one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong. There is no moral right for anyone or any government to do that, no matter how noble the cause appears.

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The contrast between the statist Hillary Clinton and the libertarian Milton Friedman. Gathered by Thomas D. Kuiper.

The Free Market

“The unfettered free market has been the most radically destructive force in American life in the last generation.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton on C-Span in 1996 stating her troubles with the free market

“What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”
– Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961

Social Security

“We can’t afford to have that money go to the private sector. The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton in a disagreement with a Republican congressman

“I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else’s old age.”
– Milton Friedman, WSJ, March 15, 1988

Health Care

“I had a few ideas about health care, and I’ve learned a few lessons since then, but I haven’t given up the goal, and that’s why we kept working step-by-step to insure millions of children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton at the 2000 Democratic Convention, still wanting socialized medicine in the United States

“It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?”
– Milton Friedman writes against Hillary’s health care plan; WSJ, Feb.13, 1993

Government Spending & Taxes

“Other developed countries…are more committed to social stability than we have been, and they tailor their economic policies to maintain it.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton writes her affinity for Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare policies

“Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.”
– Milton Friedman, WSJ, June 15, 1995

Free Trade vs. Fair Trade

“Too many people have made too much money.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton condemns the insurance industry, feeling it’s not fair that certain businesses are making ‘too much money’

“‘Fair’ is in the eye of the beholder; free is the verdict of the market. (The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.)”
– Milton Friedman, WSJ, Mar. 7, 1996

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This is an excerpt of a speech given by Walter E. Williams on February 6, 2005 at Hillsdale College. The complete speech, titled “The Entrepreneur As American Hero,” can be read here: http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2005/03/.

At this juncture let me say a few words about the modern push for corporate social responsibility. Do corporations have a social responsibility? Yes, and Nobel Laureate Professor Milton Friedman put it best in 1970 when he said that in a free society “there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

It is only people, not businesses, who have responsibilities. A CEO is an employee, an employee of shareholders and customers. The failure of the corporate executive community to recognize this, and its willingness to engage in activities unrelated to the pursuit of profits, means national wealth will be lower, product prices will be higher and the return on investment lower.

If we care about people’s wants, rather than beating up on profit-making enterprises, we should pay more attention to government-owned non-profit organizations. A good example are government schools. Many squander resources and produce a shoddy product while administrators, teachers and staff earn higher pay and perks, and customers (taxpayers) are increasingly burdened. Unlike other producers, educationists don’t face the rigors of the profit discipline, and hence they’re not as accountable. Ditto the U.S. Postal Service. It often provides shoddy and surly services, but its managers and workers receive increasingly higher wages while customers pay higher and higher prices. Again, wishes of customers can be safely ignored because there’s no bottom line discipline of profits.

Here’s Williams’ law: Whenever the profit incentive is missing, the probability that people’s wants can be safely ignored is the greatest. If a poll were taken asking people which services they are most satisfied with and which they are most dissatisfied with, for-profit organizations (supermarkets, computer companies and video stores) would dominate the first list while non-profit organizations (schools, offices of motor vehicle registration) would dominate the latter. In a free economy, the pursuit of profits and serving people are one and the same. No one argues that the free enterprise system is perfect, but it’s the closest we’ll come here on Earth.

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The Chamber of Commerce, long a supporter of limited government and low taxes, was part of the coalition backing the Reagan revolution in the 1980s. On the national level, the organization still follows a pro-growth agenda — but thanks to an astonishing political transformation, many chambers of commerce on the state and local level have been abandoning these goals. They’re becoming, in effect, lobbyists for big government.

…

In as many as half the states, state taxpayer organizations, free market think tanks and small business leaders now complain bitterly that, on a wide range of issues, chambers of commerce deploy their financial resources and lobbying clout to expand the taxing, spending and regulatory authorities of government. This behavior, they note, erodes the very pro-growth climate necessary for businesses — at least those not connected at the hip with government — to prosper. Journalist Tim Carney agrees: All too often, he notes in his recent book, “Rip-Off,” “state and local chambers have become corrupted by the lure of big dollar corporate welfare schemes.”

…

“I used to think that public employee unions like the NEA were the main enemy in the struggle for limited government, competition and private sector solutions,” says Mr. Caldera of the Independence Institute. “I was wrong. Our biggest adversary is the special interest business cartel that labels itself ‘the business community’ and its political machine run by chambers and other industry associations.”

From Stephen Moore in the article “Tax Chambers” published in The Wall Street Journal February 10, 2007

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From The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2007: “Ethanol gets a 51-cent a gallon domestic subsidy, and there’s another 54-cent a gallon tariff applied at the border against imported ethanol. Without those subsidies, hardly anyone would make the stuff, much less buy it — despite recent high oil prices.”

Remove this subsidy and the tariff. Remove the subsidy paid to farmers who grow the corn that is used to make ethanol. Then, the free market will rapidly tell us the true value of ethanol.

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Today there are adults — including educated adults — who explain multimillion-dollar corporate executives’ salaries as being due to “greed.” Think about it: I could become so greedy that I wanted a fortune twice the size of Bill Gates’ — but this greed would not increase my income by one cent. …One of the reasons why central planning sounds so good, but has failed so badly that even socialist and communist governments finally abandoned the idea by the end of the 20th century, is that nobody knows enough to second guess everybody else. Every time oil prices shoot up, there are cries of “greed” and demands by politicians for an investigation of collusion by Big Oil. There have been more than a dozen investigations of oil companies over the years, and none of them has turned up the collusion that is supposed to be responsible for high gas prices. Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their “greed”? Or could it all be supply and demand — a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like “greed”?

– Thomas Sowell

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