Voice For Liberty

Tag: Role of government

  • The Candlemaker’s Petition

    By Frederic Bastiat

    A PETITION

    From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

    To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

    Gentlemen:

    You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

    We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

    We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation.

    This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

    We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

    Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

    First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

    If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

    If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

    Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate.

    Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

    The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

    But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

    There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

    It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

    We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

    Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

    We have our answer ready:

    You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

    Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

    “But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.”

    Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

    Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

    But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity.

    Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

    If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

    Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

    Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?”

    But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

    To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is a gratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production.

    Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), Sophismes économiques, 1845

  • Attacking Lobbyists Wrong Battle

    The economist Walter E. Williams has recent column that places the recent lobbying scandal in proper perspective.

    Professor Williams explains to us that given the “awesome growth of government control over business, property, employment and other areas of our lives” Washington politicians (and I would add state and local politicians too) are in the position to grant valuable favors. “The greater their power to grant favors, the greater the value of being able to influence Congress, and there’s no better influence than money.”

    Continuing: “The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied another group of Americans. A variant of this privilege is to get Congress to do something that would be criminal if done privately.”

    “Here’s just one among possibly thousands of examples. If Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) used goons and violence to stop people from buying sugar from Caribbean producers so that sugar prices would rise, making it easier for ADM to sell more of its corn syrup sweetener, they’d wind up in jail. If they line the coffers of congressmen, they can buy the same result without risking imprisonment. Congress simply does the dirty work for them by enacting sugar import quotas and tariffs. The two most powerful committees of Congress are the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees. These committees are in charge of granting tax favors. Their members are besieged with campaign contributions. Why? A tweak here and a tweak there in the tax code can mean millions of dollars.”

    What is the solution? I believe, and I know Dr. Williams does too, that we should reduce the power that government has over our lives. I believe we should rely more on free markets for solutions to problems, as these markets are composed of people voluntarily entering into transactions, rather than a coercive government forcing decisions on us based on who lobbied the hardest. Dr. Williams also relates this story and solution: “Nearly two decades ago, during dinner with the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, I asked him if he had the power to write one law that would get government out of our lives, what would that law be? Professor Hayek replied he’d write a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans.”

    Hayek also wrote in his book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.” We are well down this road, where government becomes more important than liberty and individuality. This is the battle we need to fight. Lobbying scandals are just a symptom and manifestation of the larger problem.

  • Winning lawsuits: how being irresponsible pays off

    Winning Lawsuits: How Being Irresponsible Pays Off
    Sarah McIntosh, Flint Hills Center for Public Policy

    They are everywhere — in the office, on the street, in the malls, and even in your house. They can end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. No, it’s not pests I’m referring to. What is this pervasive problem, you ask? Torts.

    Simply put, a tort is a negligent or intentional civil wrong. Tort law has been around for a long time, but in the last couple of decades tort liabilities have expanded exponentially.

    It used to be that if you invited someone to your house you were responsible for taking reasonable steps to protect people from hazards in your home. Now, however, in many states you are responsible for protecting people who you did not invite — even people breaking into your home.

    Our culture has changed in the United States. Instead of treasuring personal responsibility and property rights, we reward people who act unreasonably and unlawfully.

    Take for instance the case of the homeowners in Pennsylvania who lost a $500,000 lawsuit to someone who broke into their home. When the robber left their house he tried to escape through the garage. The automatic door opener was not working, however, and since the door to the house had locked when the robber shut it, he was stuck in the garage. He spent eight days living on a can of soda and dry dog food. He was awarded that $500,000 for his “undue mental anguish.”

    The robber broke the law and violated the homeowners’ property rights and still thought he had the right to compensation for anguish brought on by his own illegal behavior.

    Or what about the man who won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand? The neighbor didn’t see that the young man was busy stealing his hubcaps.

    Should this outcome be surprising? Maybe not. We have been on this path for decades, a path of transforming right and wrong not based on our own actions or rights but because we don’t like to see people physically or emotionally hurt. So, we ignore the fact that the party held liable is “hurt” by forcing compensation to make ourselves feel better for the irresponsible person’s pain.

    For instance, a jury awarded a woman $780,000 after she broke her ankle when she tripped over a toddler running inside a furniture store. The store had to pay for her pain even though the running child was her own. Apparently the jury ignored the fact that the woman had a responsibility to control her own child. Is this really the direction we want to take our society?

    Do we want to live in a world where we aren’t expected to take responsibility for our misbehaving children, or our own stupid actions? While that may sound comforting to some, it means that EVERYONE is potentially liable. If you have any assets, watch out.

    We have created a culture that is quick to blame others for our own mistakes. Take the case of the woman who sued Winnebago when she set the cruise control to 70 on her RV and left the seat to make herself a sandwich. Apparently Winnebago should have explained in the owner’s manual that cruise control isn’t the same as automatic pilot.

    The consequences of these lawsuits are that whenever we buy something we have pages of warnings about products that seem to grow more ridiculous yearly. We create a societal cost by shifting the blame. When companies are sued, their costs are born by their future customers. When individuals are held to too high of a standard in their homes, society starts to lose out on the value of spending time with people in their homes.

    We also lose some freedom when these behaviors are allowed. We lose the freedom of how we want to live in our own homes. Should we put up warnings for those breaking in? Should we leave some extra food and water in the garage just in case?

    As society breaks down along these lines, more and more laws will be created to legislate “fairness,” compensation, and morality. Children will learn to blame others for their own bad acts. No one will be responsible for themselves but everyone will be responsible for everyone else.

    When unreasonable, risky, or stupid behavior is rewarded, everyone ends up paying. Is that what we want?

    Sarah McIntosh is Vice President of Programs for the Kansas-based Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. A complete bio on Ms. McIntosh can be found at http://www.flinthills.org/content/view/24/39/, and she can be reached at sarah.mcintosh@flinthills.org. To learn more about the Flint Hills Center, please visit www.flinthills.org.

    The Flint Hills Center for Public Policy is an independent voice for sound public policy in Kansas. As a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank, the Center provides critical information about policy options to legislators and citizens.

  • Bureaucratic Incentives Create Deadly Consequences

    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

  • The Williams rules

    Here’s why we should listen to the economist Walter E. Williams. From a column of January, 2007.

    The kind of rules we should have are the kind that we’d make if our worst enemy were in charge. My mother created a mini-version of such a rule. Sometimes she would ask either me or my sister to evenly divide the last piece of cake or pie to share between us. More times than not, an argument ensued about the fairness of the division. Those arguments ended with Mom’s rule: Whoever cuts the cake lets the other take the first piece. As if by magic or divine intervention, fairness emerged and arguments ended. No matter who did the cutting, there was an even division.

    …

    We have a set of rules that are known, neutral and intended to be durable. Those rules were created by our founders and embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Those rules have been weakened by a Congress of both parties that picks winners and losers in the game of life. The U.S. Supreme Court, which was intended to be a neutral referee, has forsaken that role and become a participant. All of this means we can expect a future of bitterly fought elections and enhanced conflict.”

  • Political power is the opposite of freedom

    The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us – we’re supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

    Remember that one’s relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people.

    The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The 20th century’s worst tyrants were political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

    Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system, the rule of law, which we should celebrate – not political victories.

    — Congressman Ron Paul

  • The Plunder of the Legislative Process

    It is amazing to read the words of Bastiat, written over 150 years ago, but applicable today:

    Your principle has placed these words above the entrance of the legislative chamber: “whosoever acquires any influence here can obtain his share of legal plunder.” And what has been the result? All classes have flung themselves upon the doors of the chamber crying: “A share of the plunder for me, for me!”

    — Frédéric Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy [1848]

  • Bureaucracy vs. something that works

    Here’s how the education bureaucracy and teachers unions won out over students in the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act:

    The federal No Child Left Behind Act is set for renewal this year, and the big news so far is that President Bush is resurrecting the voucher proposal from his first term. “We can lift student achievement even higher by giving local leaders flexibility to turn around failing schools,” Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address, “and by giving families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose something better.”

    The President campaigned on this concept in 2000, too, only to throw NCLB’s choice provisions over the side to cut a bipartisan deal with Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller. Both Democrats carry water for the teachers unions, and so it’s no surprise that both men quickly denounced the new Bush proposal last week. Let’s hope Mr. Bush isn’t merely using “choice” again as a negotiating ploy to be tossed out once talks on Capitol Hill get going.

    NCLB’s testing provisions have been useful in bringing more transparency to achievement gaps among schools, and among certain types of students within schools. But the most effective way to hold public schools accountable is by arming parents with more education choices. Nothing motivates teachers, principals and administrators like the threat of losing their charges (and the attendant funding) to “something better.” Mr. Bush could pick worse fights than arguing that poor kids should be able to escape failing schools.

    — The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2007

  • The motivations of politicians

    News reports say that former Wichita mayor Bob Knight may be considering a bid for that same office. Here’s a Voice For Liberty in Wichita article from January 25, 2005 regarding Mr. Knight.

    The Motivations of Politicians

    Presently Mr. Bob Knight of Wichita, a private citizen, is promoting the building of a casino in Park City, Kansas. These articles from The Wichita Eagle have reported Mr. Knight’s position on casino gambling in Kansas when he was the mayor of Wichita:

    “GOP governor hopefuls stake their positions” (July 3, 2002) “Knight and Kerr said they oppose gambling but would consider voter approval.”

    “Trump has no plans for local casino” (May 9, 2003) “Last year, Ruffin said, he approached former Mayor Bob Knight about the possibility of relocating the track to downtown and adding a casino if lawmakers approved. Knight was not interested, he said.”

    “Gambling on the slots” (May 22, 2002) “Wichita Mayor Bob Knight, seeking the Republican nomination, said gambling is an unreliable source of revenue. ‘I don’t think it fits my sense of how you build and sustain a strong state,’ he said.”

    The cynic in me imagines Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy of the television show Law and Order with Mr. Knight on the witness stand asking — justifiably indignant — “Were you lying then, or are you lying now?”

    But I do not know Mr. Knight, and there may be other explanations. It may be that as mayor of Wichita, he wasn’t being very careful or thorough in forming his opinions. A Wichita Eagle editorial “Plan requires serious look” states in part: “He [Knight] acknowledged that as mayor he had opposed an earlier casino plan for Wichita. But after studying this project, he said, he became convinced that a true destination casino could pay off handsomely for the Wichita area and region.” Mr. Knight has been out of the mayor’s office for less than two years. What about the Wichita area has changed in that time that makes a casino a good bet (so to speak) now?

    Or, has a casino always been a good idea, but Mr. Knight either didn’t know that when he was mayor, or he just didn’t want the citizens of Wichita gambling on his watch?

    I do not know the answer to these questions, and given our collective experience with politicians, I probably wouldn’t believe Mr. Knight if he answered them. Such is the credibility of the motivations of politicians.