Category: Economics

Take a look at this map.

Lots of reds and greens with some yellows in there.

Now mentally sub in some other colors.

Change the reds and yellows to blue, and change the greens to red.

If you do that, what does the map start to look like? Rather a lot like the election map from 2004. Not perfect, but close.

But this map isn’t a map of voting results. It’s a map of gas prices.

The redder the color of a county, the higher the gas prices. The greener the county, the less gas costs there.

Some of the factors affecting gas prices may be geographic (it’s harder to get gas to some places than others), but the political aspect is not to be ignored.

Big government folks like their governments . . . well . . big, and to fund those big governments they need big taxes. That’s one of the reasons California consistently charges so much more for gas than Arizona. California has a HUGE gas tax compared to other states, and there are gas stations right over the border in Arizona that advertise the fact that you can fill up there without paying the California gas tax.

It works! If I’m heading east, I wait till I get to Arizona to fill up my tank for long road trips. It’s only two hours away, and I’ve usually got enough in the tank to get there before filling up.

It was interesting on my recent trip to see what the gas prices were elsewhere. At one truck stop, a trucker I ran into was positively livid about them and used vulgarity to express himself. At numerous stops people commented to me about how high the prices were.

To me, they weren’t nothin.’

I live in California.

We always have the worst gas prices in the  nation.

Thanks to our lovely blue-state legislature.

HERE’S THE SITE THE MAP IS FROM.

AND HERE ARE THEIR TIPS ON HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON GAS.

For a while I’ve wondered what supergenius Thomas Sowell would say about a particular argument that some might make regarding immigration.

It could be argued, and some have argued, that an open borders or open borders-like policy could be justified on the same grounds as a free trade agreement.

Free trade agreements between nations remove protectionist barriers between them so that their economies can work more efficiently and grow, to the mutual enrichment (literal enrichment) of the populations in both nations. The more efficient the market is allowed to be, the more it can generate value for those who participate in the market.

For example: Suppose that the nation of Freedonia is really good at making computers but really bad at making DVD players. It can make high quality computers really cheap, allowing purchasers to get a good product at a low price. But it’s home-grown DVD players are shoddy and expensive.

Now suppose that the nation of Sylvania is the reverse: It has lots of high-quality, inexpensive DVD players but makes shoddy, expensive computers.

The market-efficient solution is to allow Sylvania’s DVD players to get sold in Freedonia and to allow Freedonia’s computers to get sold in Sylvania. That way both populations get high-quality products at low prices, and they can either spend the rest of their money on something else (growing their economies further) or take extra time off from work to spend with their family since they don’t need to make as much money to purchase the things they want to buy.

(NOTE: If computers and DVD players are too frivolous for you, replace them with carrots and potatoes or other commodities that you find meaningful.)

(NOTE 2: If Freedonia and Sylvania are too frivolous for you, replace them with Tomania and Osterlich or other countries that you find meaningful.)

A market that allows commodities to freely flow from where they are abundant to where they are not thus improves the lives of people in both places.

Until original sin gets involved.

Original sin makes us want to do things like protect our interests at the expense of others.

For example: Suppose that you’re a maker of DVD players in Freedonia. You make substandard, expensive DVD players, so it’s not in your interest to have to compete with the DVD player makers in Sylvania, who crank out better, cheaper DVD players than you do.

So you start lobbying your legislators to pass protectionist measures like tariffs and import caps to keep you from having to compete with the DVD players makers in Sylvania. You don’t want there to be many Sylvanian DVD players on the market, and you want them to be as expensive as possible for the consumer so that customers will buy yours instead.

After all, you don’t want to have to retool your manufacturing process so that your players are as good and as inexpensive as those from the other country, and you certainly don’t want to have to get out of the DVD player making business and learn how to make something else useful. You want to maintain the nice, comfortable status quo that existed before Sylvanians were able to compete with you.

The fact that protecting your interests by limiting the supply and jacking up the price of Sylvanian DVD players hurts both the people in Sylvania and your fellow Freedonian citizens/customers is beside the point. You just want to make sure that your interests are protected, even at the expense (literal expense) of others.

And that’s normal for humans in a fallen condition.

It’s a real act of maturity to be able to say, "Y’know, those folks are just better at this than I am. I should either improve myself or find something else productive I can do. That way everyone’ll benefit."

But if this free-trade principle benefits people in both countries by allowing commodities to move to where they’re most needed, what about applying it to labor markets?

Should we have an open borders policy, too, so that workers can move with as little impediment as possible from where the jobs ain’t to where the jobs are?

Even if that meant some displacements of natives from positions in some jobs, so that they’d need to get retrained for other fields, wouldn’t a long-term, mature view of the situation mean that the people of both countries would ultimately benefit in the end?

There’s certainly a measure of truth in that, but how much truth is there? On balance, would it be a good thing or a bad thing?

What would Thomas Sowell say about this?

Interestingly, what he says is the same thing that many who favor closed markets say. Have you ever heard opponents of free trade insisting on how evil it is to treat people like commodities?

Sowell’s answer to the open borders question is the same: People are not commodities.

GET THE STORY.

People can rationally come to different conclusions on what should be done about the presence of millions of illegal aliens in the United States, but as that matter is debated, we should at least try to avoid some of the most obviously absurd arguments.

I therefore propose that we, as a nation, retire the "Illegal aliens take jobs Americans won’t do/don’t want" argument.

This is patent nonsense.

Anybody using this argument either has no grasp of economics or is being disingenuous due to the presence of an ulterior motive. (Them’s yer two choices, so take yer pick, Mr. Bush.)

To see the absurdity of this argument, let’s cast it in its starkest form: Food.

Before we do that, though, let me issue

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: The following treatment has nothing to do with ethnicity. It has to do with economics. In what follows I will talk about two groups of people–illegal aliens (whatever their ethnicity) and Americans (whatever their ethnicity). The fact that most (but by no means all) of the illegal aliens in this country are Latino in origin is irrelevant to the economic principles involved, as is the fact that many Americans are also of Latino origin. If you need to, swap the terms "America" and "Americans" for those of a random country somewhere else on the planet. The economic principles apply no matter where you are.

Now . . .

It is often noted that illegal aliens play a large role in the construction, landscaping, and domestic service industries, but nice buildings, nice landscapes, and nice domestic services are luxuries. Our most pressing survival-related need is for food, and so the "Jobs Americans won’t do" argument can be cast most starkly if we look at the role of illegal aliens in the agricultural industry.

Suppose that all of the illegal aliens working in the agricultural industry decided to quit their jobs. What would happen to the U.S.?

Will we be seeing headlines in the New York Times like this one? . . .

Food Rots In Fields As The Nation Starves!!!

Of course not.

Americans are not going to starve themselves to death because they "won’t do" the job of harvesting the food.

Americans have been harvesting food ever since there have been Americans (otherwise they would have all starved long ago), so they are certainly capable of it.

Why, then, are so many illegal aliens taking the place of Americans in the agricultural industry?

Because they come from a different economic background and are willing to do the jobs for less.

The effect of illegal aliens in the agricultural industry is not that they do work that otherwise wouldn’t get done. It’s that they depress the wages in the agricultural industry to the point that such jobs are unattractive to Americans.

It’s that whole supply-and-demand thing.

When you’ve got a greater supply of something than you have demand for it, the price will go down. If manufacturers make loads of DVD players and start to outstrip the demand for DVD players then the price of DVD players will go down as part of competition for customers.

Same thing happens in labor markets.

If the supply of agricultural workers outstrips the demand for agricultural workers then the wages attached to such jobs will go down as part of competition for employment. When the wages are depressed past a certain point, some of the workers will say, "Y’know, I could do better in a different industry" and they decide at that point that they "won’t do" the agricultural jobs at the depressed wages being offered for those jobs.

But what happens if the labor pool shrinks? What happens if all the illegal aliens decide to quit?

When the supply of agricultural workers shrinks so that it no longer outstrips the demand for agricultural workers and employers start raising wages in order to attract the workers they need, and the work gets done.

Trust me, Americans are not going to starve themselves to death if they have no illegal aliens to harvest food.

What will happen instead is that the wages offered for such jobs will rise, Americans will start valuing such jobs more as a result (instead of looking down on them), and they will start doing them. The food will get harvested, and when it is sold to the public the added labor costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of a modest increase in food prices.

But there will be no massive wave of starvation in the U.S.

Something similar applies to the jobs in other industries that currently have high levels of involvement by illegal aliens. If the supply-and-demand situations of those industries were readjusted then Americans would be attracted to jobs in them as well, and the work would still get done. People might economize in some areas (e.g., taking care of the kids yourself instead of hiring an illegal alien to serve as a nanny), but we won’t see headlines like:

American Buildings Rot Due To Lack Of Construction Workers!!!

Landscaping Crisis Dwarfs Hurricane Katrina!!!

Absence Of Domestic Services Causes American Family To Fall Apart!!!

People who want to maintain the status quo on illegal immigration–or who want to legalize the status quo via amnesties and guest worker programs–may still argue for these on other grounds (e.g., that there is an overall positive economic impact from having millions of low-paid foreign workers in the U.S. or that it’s a practical impossibility to remove them all), but whatever you want to see done about illegal immigration, you’ll need to argue it on grounds other than the "Jobs Americans won’t do" notion.

That one’s a non-starter, Mr. President.

P.S. BTW, Mr. President, do you realize how arrogant and insulting you are being when you use the "Jobs Americans won’t do" argument?

This argument can be parsed one of two ways: (1) "Such jobs are beneath us as Americans, so we need to import foreigners to do these lowly tasks for us" or (2) "I preside over a nation of such hopelessly spoiled brats that we need to just cave in to their juvenile refusal to do such jobs."

The first is arrogant and insulting to people from other countries. The second is arrogant and insulting to Americans.

Since it can be parsed both ways, the argument is arrogant and insulting no matter what your nationality.

Earlier I mentioned the Vatican position paper saying that developed nations should reconsider their farm subsidies and agricultural trade barriers so that those in the developing world won’t be hurt by them.

Unfortunately, protectionism is a perpetual risk for every nation, including those in the developed world.

After all: What politician doesn’t want to be able to please certain segments of his constitutency by offering it subsidies and protectionistic trade barriers to keep the prices it can charge for what it makes high?

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting analysis of how the U.S. has been able to ward off the kind of protectionism that has hurt Europe’s economies, as well as a warning about what may be on our horizon.

He writes:

The beauty of the American free-trade consensus over the last few decades is that it split two outlooks that tend to go together: nationalism and socialism. In terms of economic policy, nationalism is indistinguishable from socialism. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. And what is the difference between socialized medicine and nationalized healthcare?

Liberals are naturally sympathetic to socialistic arguments, conservatives to nationalistic ones. But to everyone’s benefit these two outlooks have been quarantined in different parties. Conservatives have been culturally nationalistic but economically liberal (in the classical sense). Liberals have been economically nationalistic — on healthcare, regulation, taxes, unions — but culturally liberal. Although it’s been quite painful for them, this cultural liberalism has kept the Democratic Party in favor of free trade and immigration. Protectionism hurts foreigners and poor Americans, after all.

Indeed, to be fair, the Democratic Party has been heroic in bucking its base — the economically nationalistic labor movement — on free trade. FDR, Truman and Kennedy were all consummate economic nationalists. Free trade was tactically in their interests for a long time because it dovetailed with labor’s interest. When the United States stopped being the manufacturer to the world, the Democratic Party struggled — not always successfully — to stay pro-trade on principle, even at the cost of votes. Meanwhile, the GOP has had the opposite challenge: to stay pro-free trade even as its ranks swell with working-class voters enamored with their paychecks, not Adam Smith.

Now, a win-at-all-costs Democratic Party has realized that this is the perfect moment for it to re-brand all of its economic ideas in the language of patriotism. Many Republicans are determined to fight the Democrats for this turf. So they too are bending their economic policies to fit their cultural conservatism.

And if we let them follow this path, we’ll have the same problems as Europe in no time.

GET THE STORY.

One doesn’t normally get the impression that many high churchmen are committed exponents of the free market.

Even when the free market is circumscribed by laws safeguarding fundamental moral values (like: You can’t buy and sell intrinsically immoral goods and services), and while John Paul II acknowledged that the market is able to do better for man than Communism, the impression is still given that many churchmen are somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the free market.

But there seems to be an evolution of thought occurring on this subject. As the economies of the world have developed, it has become more and more clear what works and what doesn’t, and the reputation of the free market seems to be improving in at least some ecclesiastical circles.

One recent sign of at least part of this is a March 9th position paper issued by the Holy See for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s conference on agrarian reform and rural developement.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate a copy of the document, but from what can be gleaned of its contents from the news, it appears that at least some folks at the Vatican appreciate the fact that protectionistic farm subsidies and trade barriers in the developed world hurt farmers in the developing world.

Thus, according to the Catholic News Service (EXERPTS):

Justice requires that wealthy nations reconsider the level of subsidies they offer their own farmers and the barriers that countries place on the import of agricultural products from developing nations, the Vatican said.

While developing countries have to take responsibility for their own agrarian policies, the Vatican said, rich countries cannot ignore the impact their internal policies, particularly farm subsidies and trade barriers, have on the poor.

"Correcting this situation means appealing for a concrete concept of justice capable of being realized in policies, rules, norms and acts of solidarity," the Vatican said.

What you’ve just heard is the sound of one shoe dropping.

The other shoe–if it is to drop–is the recognition that what’s good for the third world in this respect is good for the first.

The fact developed countries are as economically developed as they are is no accident: It’s because they developed a legal and cultural environment in which economic development could take place, and that has been helped along by refusal to engage in economic protectionism and thus have free markets.

True, Europe is presently in the grip of a wave of protectionism that has hampered its economy, and even here in America there are protectionist elements (like all the farm subsidies the government gives out), but an important part of our economic development is that our markets are free-er than they could be.

It’ll be interesting to see how thought on these matters evolves in ecclesiastical circles in the future.

GET THE STORY.

A U.S. bill with a face-value of $10,000 has been moved to a more secure location for safekeeping and historical archiving:

"The $10,000 bill bears the likeness of Salmon P. Chase, for whom the bank was named. Chase was a U.S. senator who served as treasury secretary under President Lincoln.

"The large bill was discovered in a bank customer’s safety deposit box after the owner died 20 years ago. The woman’s family exchanged the currency at face value, and the bank stored the bill in a plastic sleeve for protection.

"But bank officials decided the bills would be safer at the JP Morgan Chase & Co. corporate office in New York. The bank sent the bills there last month by armored truck.

"The government stopped printing bills larger than $100 in 1945 and hasn’t issued any since 1969. The Green Bay bills were printed in 1934."

GET THE STORY.

A way long time ago I pointed out that print-on-demand (POD) technology was not simply a replacement for traditional publishers that aspiring authors could use to get their works out and presented to an admiring public.

POD tech works on the same principle as computer tech: "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

Writers who are not yet ready for prime time can get their work out via POD publishers, but they will sell precious few copies because the work is . . . well, not yet ready for prime time.

But POD tech CAN serve as an important compliment to existing publishing houses for writers who ARE ready for prime time.

Enter JMS.

Earlier I mentioned his project of publishing all the scripts he wrote for B5. That’s something he (and his colleagues) are doing through Cafe Press, which is a POD publisher of books (and other things).

In a Usenet post, JMS explains how this technology is already changing the publishing industry:

Others have asked why I (and the B5 scripts team) are going through
Cafe Press rather than a major publisher. The answer is very simple:
over the years, I’ve had many publishers approach me about publising
the B5 scripts, but they take the same timid line WB has always taken
about the show. We had to push like hell to get the DVDs released, and
they still insisted on testing the water…putting out one disc first
(same with the VHSs) to "test the waters"….and of course now the DVDs
have grossed half a billion bucks for WB.

So when the publishers approached me, it was with the same, "Well,
let’s put out one book now, the ‘best of’ scripts, then we can think
about doing more down the road, so we can test the waters." When I
explained that i wante all of the scripts to go out, all 14 volumes,
nearly a hundred scripts…they couldn’t even fathom such a thing.
It’s never been done, not on this scale. But with Cafe Press, we CAN
do all 14 volumes.

This collection is really the Rosetta Stone of the Babylon 5
universe…and I wanted that to get out there in full, to kind of
finish the job properly. Here’s the scripts, here are the stories
behind the scripts, the arc, the production, here are the photos and
the memos, so that when it’s done…it’s really done. Again, we’re
talking here over 6,300 pages of material…14 volumes, each nearly an
inch thick…it’s just monumental.

A few other places came and said they could do it, but their plan was
to do even FEWER copies, limited edition stuff, hardcover, at a cost of
sixty to two HUNDRED bucks per copy, which I thought was just way, way
beyond the pale. The whole point of the exercise is to get this into
the hands of as many people who want it as possible. The way we’re
doing it now, for a bit over four hundred bucks, folks can get all 14
volumes, plus the 15th free, which is a heck of a lot more affordable,
given what scripts and the like sell for on Ebay.

For me, on a personal basis, it’s been an amazing process to go back in
time, through the memos, scripts and photos, and re-live those years.
Which is one of the reasons why the intros/essays have been ballooning
out in size…from 13,000 words to 15,000 to 18,000 words, not COUNTING
the other material. I’m putting it all in…all the stuff nobody ever
heard about…it’s all going in here.

And then, when it’s done, the tale will at last be told in its
entirety…the show, and the show *behind* the show.

Again, though, bear in mind that there is a ceiling on how long these
will be available at www.babylon5scripts.com so if there’s somebody who
doesn’t know about the site, you may want to let them know in time to
get in while the Cafe Press price breaks will give them maximum
benefit.

I have to be honest…I’m enjoying the hell out of this.

jms

SOURCE.

So: The major publishers aren’t on the verge of going out of business due to POD, but the dynamics of the marketplace are already changing because of it. Projects like the complete JMS B5 script series would NEVER have happened through a regular publisher, but now it is happening because the technological changes with the introduction of POD.

It’s apparently selling like crazy, too.

It’ll be interesting to see how this technology matures (and what impact it has on authors’ royalties since at that point all authors will need publishers for are things like copy editing, proofreading, and typesetting–services POD publishers are sure to offer for a fee–and marketing).

I’m frustrated.

For some reason I cannot fathom, though there are TONS of Godzilla movies out on DVD, the original version hasn’t been released–so far as I can tell.

I’m not talking about the Raymond Burr-infested American release of Godzilla King of Monsters. I’m talking about the ORIGINAL Raymond Burr-free Japanese version from 1954 (titled Gojira in Japanese).

It’s supposed to be much less campy, much more artistic, and much more gooder.

Yet I can’t find it!

I’ve tried going to the Amazon.co.jp site to order it from Japan (I’ve used the British and German Amazons to order stuff from overseas before), but the Japanese writing system is just too much of a barrier at present for me to find what I’m looking for.

So I was wondering: Could someone who reads Japanese check the site and let me know if they’ve got an original DVD version of the film–preferably with English subtitles?

Or if anyone knows of a western release of the original version, I’d love to know about that, too.

Thanks much, folks!

GET THE STORY.

If so, I apologize, for that was not my intent.

I’m referring to Scott Richert of ChroniclesMagazine.Org, who has responded to my latest two posts in our exchange, HERE and HERE.

Mr. Richert appears not to wish to continue the exchange (he titles his second post "Final Thoughts in the Case of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII, Pius XI, et al. v. Jimmy Akin," and he refers to me "bring[ing] what remained of this conversation to a screeching halt").

Mr. Richert had requested that I do an analysis of the just price concept and how it compared to my own views, and in my previous post I did so. In his reply (the second link above), Mr. Richert does not engage my analysis on the merits but lodges a number of complaints against me as an author.

Continue reading “I Think I Made Him Mad”