Category: Economics

Suppose that you are a secretary who has just been put out of work by a word processor and that you are abducted by the Seven Deadly Sins, which really aren’t mortal sins but disproportionate desires and who take you aboard their space ship.

Fortunately, two Jedi Knights come to your rescue and a stunning sci-fi action set-piece results.

Jedi Ben Ken uses his light saber to dispatch Lust and Gluttony straight away. They never have a chance to lay a hand on you. Then he uses his laser sword to intimidate Sloth into inaction. He never gets a hand on you, either.

Meanwhile, Jedi Nick Ken uses his light saber to puncture Pride, following which he and Anger have a protracted duel, which both lose–mortally wounding each other in the process.

Unfortunately, while the Jedi are dealing with these enemies (the Easter Bunny lurking sinisterly in the background the whole time), Greed bites your leg with his sharp fangs. Worse yet, Envy gives you several vicious bites.

Seeing your peril, Jedi Ben leaves Sloth and quickly dispatches these two before taking the body of his fallen comrade, Jedi Nick, to be fitted with new robotic parts, so that he’ll be more machine than man now.

The Easter Bunny, grinning evilly, then takes you back to Earth and drops you off at the headquarters of the MoveOn.Orgpeople who are currently fanning the flames of class warfare in America.

Still stinging from the (infectious!) bites of Greed and Envy and being out of a job yourself, you find yourself really agreeing with the people the Easter Bunny left you with when they heap scorn on the fact that, even though the economy is growing and wages are going up, "The gap between rich and poor is widening." They regard this as a clear "injustice," and you find yourself agreeing with them.

You go home, buy a bottle of iodine for your bite wounds, and think about all this.

Next day, a friend of yours who is an accountant at your friendly neighborhood defense plant (working on a mysterious project) calls you up to tell you exciting news! He know that you, like many secretaries, were recently put out of work by word processors, but he happens to know of an actual secretarial job that’s open!

He then recounts to you a conversation he had with a local doctor who makes $70 an hour for medical work but who has to spend half his time on secretarial work. The accountant, who was in to see the doctor following a glue swooning, pointed out that everyone would benefit if he just hired a secretary, and he agreed!

You interview for the job, get a quite competative offer of $15 an hour, and are on the verge of accepting, when a thought occurs to you based on what the nice folks that the Easter Bunny left you with told you . . .

• Currently the doctor spends half his day, or four hours, doing medical work, which at $70 an hour means that he makes $280 a day.
• You, being out of a job, make $0 a day.
• The gap between him (rich) and you (poor) is thus $280 a day at present.

But what happens if you take the job offer?

• He’ll be able to devote eight hours a day to doctoring, meaning that he’ll take in a total of $560 dollars a day.
• He’ll pay you $15 an hour for eight hours work, meaning you’ll get $120 a day.
• His pay will thus be $440 a day ($560-$120).
• The gap between the two of you will then be $320 a day ($440-$120), which is more than the $280 it was before! In fact, the gap will have widened by $40 a day!

You feel Envious of that $40 that he will make and regard him as being Greedy for widening the gap in this way. He should not benefit at all by hiring you. That would be unjust. You should be just as well off as he, even though he spent eight years in medical school and racked up huge debts and is taking the risk of an entrepeneur and paying vast sums in medical malpractice insurance. All people should make the same income regardless of life choices. That’s what the nice folks the Easter Bunny left you with said. Nobody should be benefitted by hiring a new employee, but they should hire them anyway.

Smiling self-satisfiedly like the Easter Bunny, you decline the job offer and go home.

What does this teach us?

That the Easter Bunny is not to be trusted?

We need liberal concealed-carry laws so you can bring your own light saber?

Glue-swooned accountants will blab too much info?

That there is an imbalance in the Force?

Yes! It teaches us all of these things!

But it also teaches us something else: The fact that the income gap between the job-offerer and the job-holder increases is not a sufficient reason to turn down a job offer. It is better to have a job than not (unless an Easter Bunny-inspired welfare state makes this not the case).

What is important to you is how you benefit, not how someone else benefits. In every free economic transaction, whether it is a job offer or a purchase in the supermarket, both parties perceive themselves to be benefitting–and both are likely to benefit through the creation of new wealth. But if the parties start eyeing each other enviously, worring that the other party is benefitting "too much"–to the point that it disrupts the transaction–then both are deprived of the benefit they would otherwise gain through the transaction.

What matters is increasing your own benefit, regardless of how much others may be benefitting. If you refuse a transaction not because it doesn’t benefit you enough but because it benefits the other party too much then you are acting from Envy and cutting off your nose to spite your face, contrary to the virtue of Prudence.

No! I have not introduced blog ads here on JimmyAkin.Org!

But I am showing you a captured image of a blog ad to illustrate something about a current advertising trend.

To your left you’ll see a frame of a Flash animation that is appearing on other blogs, such as PowerLine (where I got this one).

In the real animation, the happy spider bounces up and down to attract your attention.

And it works!

Now, normally, I totally tune out anything in the margins of the pages I’m looking at. I make it a matter of principle to overlook ads obnoxiously placed in the middle of text I’m reading, too.

To deal with people like me, advertisers are trying different approaches to try to grab the attention of professional ad-ignorers.

One strategy is pure evil: It involves having the ad involve vast amounts of motion and color to attract your attention. The archtypical example of this is an ad that was running a few weeks ago by a company called "Jamster," which sells ringtones.

It’s ads were horrendous. They featured a repulsive and depraved looking photo-art fishman (with a figleaf over his genitals and a pair of aviators’ goggles) who zoomed jerkily and frenetically back and forth across the ad space in a nauseating fashion.

It was certainly enough to catch even the most veteran ad-ignorer’s attention, but it was also as repulsive as all get out and undoubtedly made many viewers want to burn Jamster’s headquarters to the ground or at least report it to the United Nations for violating the Geneva Convention on the use of torture.

Incidentally, JAMSTER IS BEING SUED FOR ITS SELLING PRACTICES, though not for the noxiousness of its ads.

A second strategy involves offering the reader simple games, as in the "Win a free iPod!" campaign. Though I never play videogames, these also attracted my attention. I wanted to shoot the bad guy! I wanted to blast the flying saucer! I wanted to punch the prizefighter! I wanted to squash the bug!

Unfortuantely, I already had an iPod, so I didn’t. (Except on a few occasions.)

Many wondered whether the offer of a free iPod was fake, and it turned out that it wasn’t (though there were additional requirements for getting one).

A third strategy is exemplified by the company who I frame-grabbed above. It’s ads are meant to get you to go for a new mortgage quote.

The ads this company uses have eye-catching colors, interesting images, and a modest (not overwhelming) degree of motion. It has a variety of different ads that it uses (dinosaurs, haunted houses, etc.), but I picked one that has a bouncing, friendly spider in an interesting-looking lab.

Let’s look at the advantages this form of advertising has:

• In the Flash animation I frame-grabbed, the friendly spider bounces up and down a bit to draw my eye.
• It’s a spider! Spiders can be dangerous!
• But it’s smiling, signalling that it’s friendly and happy.
• It has Big Eyes. (Humans are suckers for big eyes, or rather big mammalian-looking eyes like this spider has. It’s part of why we find babies and puppies and kitties cute.)
• It’s fuzzy. (Humans are suckers for fuzziness. It’s another mammalian characteristic.)
• It’s high-contrast (black and white) making its face more memorable (that’s one of the reasons Mickey Mouse is glommed-onto by so many kids even though his high-pitched voice means there are so few cartoons about him: He has a high-contrast face).
• It’s legs are stuck out like it’s about to spring into action.
• Why is the big-eyed, fuzzy spider bouncing and smiling and about to spring into action?Does it want to play? (This is classic play-inviting behavior.)
• It’s in a lab with cool colors–both figuratively and literally (green, blue, and purple are the "cool" as opposed to "warm" colors of the spectrum).
• Labs are interesting!
• What’s in those neat-o green test tubes?
• What are the blue and purple ray-emitters for?
• What else is in the lab that I can’t see?
• Who runs the lab?
• And why?
• Can I go to this lab and play with the technological doo-dads there?
• Can I play with the friendly spider?

You see how many ways the ad invites you and draws you into it, even subconsciously?

It’s a way of offering the reader something pleasant in exchange for looking at the ad (unlike the evil <anathema!!!>Jamster</anathema!!!>), and insofar as that goes, great. Advertisers need to make their products known to folks, and if they offer something pleasing in exchange for the attention needed to make them aware of it, that’s a fair trade.

But there’s a problem here.

The ads can be so pleasing that the viewer feels let down when the ad has done its work.

I’m intrigued by the happy, bouncing spider in the lab! I’d like to play with the spider!–if it was a real entity. Or, failing that, I’d like to watch a little story about the spider or play a little videogame about him in the lab or something!

I WANT MORE HAPPY, BOUNCING SPIDER IN THE LAB!

But noooooooooo! If I click on any part of the ad, it takes me to a site where I can get a mortgage quote, and there is NO MORE HAPPY, BOUNCING SPIDER IN THE LAB!

EVER!

Maybe the next generation of web advertising will allow me to satisfy my impulse to interact with what caught my attention and intrigued me–before giving me a chance to purchase whatever it is that’s being sold.

Or maybe not.

It brings to mind a line that the Devil gets to deliver in the original (1960s) version of the movie Bedazzled:

"I came up with the seven deadly sins in one afternoon. . . . The only thing I’ve come up with lately is advertising."

Suppose that you are a baby and that you are abducted by medical doctors.

At first they’re going to perform medical experiments on you, but you’re such a cute little tyke that they decide, instead, to raise you as one of their own.

They’re very diligent in training you in the ways of medical doctors, and by the time you are an adult you’re a medical doctor who can go toe to toe with the best in the profession.

You even win prizes for gladatorial combat with other physicians in the scalpel matches in the operating theatre of the Collosseum.

But you also have another skill: You’d make a really good secretary. The secretaries of the doctors who abducted you also took a shine to you as a child and trained you in the ways of secretaries as well. (Before they were put out of business by word processors.)

Eventually, you decide to strike out on your own and open your own practice.

You’re an entrepeneur!

You are also your only employee. But that’s okay, since as a doctor-secretary by training, you can both treat the patients and do the secretarial needs your business has. You do the secretarial work in the morning and see patients in the afternoon.

But you discover is that you have too many patients and not enough time. Your waiting room is filling up with countless patients who are workers from the nearby defense contractor that is working on a top-secret project that results in numerous splinters, splinter infections, and faintings from inhaling too many fumes from glue.

You’re at the breaking point. You simply can’t treat all the patients. Something has to change.

Then an accountant from the plant who is in to see you following a glue swooning gives you an idea. He points out that, as a doctor, you make $70 an hour, but secretaries make only $15 an hour. If you took the four hours you use for secretarial work in the morning and spent them doctoring, you’d make an additional $280 a day. If it requires one hour of secretarial work per hour of doctor work, you’d then need a full-time secretary, who you could hire for $120 a day. This would be a win-win-win-win situation:

1. You would win because you would have an addition $160 in income per day ($280-$120)
2. The secretary would win because now she would have a job giving her $120 a day (secretarial jobs being few and far between since the advent of word processors).
3. The patients would benefit because now you’d have the time to treat them all.
4. And the nation as a whole would benefit due to the very exciting but hush-hush project the workers are striving to accomplish.

What does this teach us?

That you should always listen to glue-swooned accountants?

That every doctor needs a secretary?

That flying saucers are real?

No. It teaches us that specialization can benefit everyone. Look at the difference between our society, where we have specialized labor, and the time when everyone had the same job (hunter-gatherer) and there was no specialization of labor and life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Which would you rather live in? The fact that we have specialized labor vastly increases social and economic efficiency, just as it increases your efficiency as a doctor, and makes life better for everyone.

The same principle applies on levels higher than that of the individual. It also applies to companies. If every bookstore had to oversee everything from the training of writers to the writing of books to the editing, layout, proofreading, printing, binding, and selling of books, they would be a much less efficient and smaller than they are, with only a handful of titles available. By specializing in one thing–selling the books–and leaving to others the creation and manufacture of them, bookstores are able to offer thousands of titles on every subject imaginable, benefitting everyone (except, of course, for readers of those books that should be burned).

The principle also applies to countries. Different countries specialize in different things, to the benefit of the whole world. Places like Hong Kong and Singapore and Vatican City could never grow all the food they need for their populations, and so they don’t. They import it and spend their time providing goods and services that the rest of the world needs (like those great Vatican City circuitboards), to the mutual advantage of both.

Suppose that you’re a little child and that you’re abducted by the public school system.

Every day a large yellow metal machine that makes a humming noise appears before your house, and you are expected to cooperate with your abduction under the threat that the truant officer will make things hard on you and your family if you don’t.

During the times that you have been abducted by the public school system, aliensteachers bent on undermining American society mess with your brain and implant the idea that "self-expression" has such a high value that it trumps everything else in life.

They further implant the idea that "You can be anything you want to be."

One day in art therapy class, you build a tiny model of a figherplane out of toothpicks and glue.

The commandantteacher of the art class holds it up for all the other children to see and praises it highly as an outstanding example of your self-expression.

You are awash with emotion. This is the first time that an alien overlordteacher has ever praised anything that you have ever done.

You imprint on the moment.

The making of toothpick fighterplanes becomes for you, forever, the defining mode of your self-expression. It is you mission in life.

But soon the novelty of making tiny toothpick fighterplanes wears off. Soon you must move on to bigger and better toothpick fighterplanes in order to recapture the feeling of satisfaction and approval that the praise of your art class commandantteacher gave you.

So focused are you on your mission in life that you think only about making bigger and better toothpick fighterplanes. You completely ignore your other studies. You never pick up any skills besides those needed to make toothpick fighterplanes.

By the time you graduate from the local state college (where you major in art), you are producing full-scale, incredibly realistic fighterplanes made entirely out of toothpicks and glue.

But then college is over.

Your abduction by the public educational system is over.

It’s now time to . . . "Find a job." (Dum! Dum! Dum!)

Of course, there are no employers willing to pay you to make toothpick fighterplanes for them full time, so you become an independent artist.

You’re an entrepeneur!

You start approaching art museums and the governments of towns where aviation and the military are big local industries and start trying to sell them your toothpick fighterplane sculptures.

You make some sales!

It’s a real fad for a while for people to buy your works!

But then the fad ends.

Suddenly people aren’t buying your toothpick fighterplanes any more.

Several towns tell you that they’d like one, except the town right next door already has one, so it’s not really a novelty that will add anything to their community.

You’re stunned!

You complain!

You argue all the advantages your toothpick fighterplanes have to offer a community!

You point out that Catholic social doctrine says that a worker deserves a just wage allowing him to make a decent living for himself and his family.

But the towns still aren’t buying.

You just can’t sell enough of your magnificent toothpick fighterplane sculptures to make a living.

Unfortunately, with all the emphasis with which the public school system has been placing on self-expression and its message that "You can be anything you want," the public school system failed to communicate to you other messages like "You need to develop a marketable skill" or "You need to develop a form of art that there’s a sizeable market for."

What does this teach us?

That the public school system does not prepare children to face real life?

Yes, that’s exactly what it teaches us!

But what else?

That public school teachers are all evil aliens?

That self-expression is worthless and everyone needs to just conform?

That art is a worthless encumbrance of society that is not worth our time?

No, it teaches us none of those things (despite a superficial plausibility to the first).

What it does teach us is that we have to have the skills to do marketable work–that is, work for which there is a market. We do not have a right to decide that we want to do a particular thing and that the rest of the world has to conform itself to what we want to do.

It also teaches us that when we start upon a particular line of work, we must be aware that we are taking a risk. Risk is part of the job. There may be a market for our work one day but not the next. If we take a risk and it doesn’t pan out, or stops panning out, we cannot blame the world for that. We simply misestimated the market for what we wanted to do.

It finally teaches us that we must seek to exercise the virtue of prudence exercise foresight and adaptability in determining what skills we cultivate and what jobs we pursue.

Otherwise we may find ourselves trying to sell toothpick fighterplanes in a market that’s already saturated with those.

Suppose that you are a defense contractor and that one night you are abducted by aliens who are bent on undermining Earth’s planetary defenses.

The aliens tamper with your brain and implant the idea that, instead of building your current defense project (a new kind of jet fighter that is just the thing to knock down pesky flying saucers) out of metal, you should build it out of toothpicks instead as this will make it really extra strong and light and good at knocking down flying saucers.

They also also abduct all of your employees, so they all think this is a great idea, too.

Thus you set to work building the great toothpick fighterplane.

You order large quantities of toothpicks and glue and your workers eagerly set about building the toothpick fighters. MillionsBillions of dollars are spent on acquiring enough toothpicks and glue to make numerous planes entirely out of toothpicks.

Your brain-poisoned employees labor happily and energetically and put in long hours, for which you happily pay them their salaries plus overtime, they are such effective and enthusiastic workers.

You also pay for their medical insurance, which is needed to cover the innumerable and unavoidable splinters in workers’ fingers, the resulting infections, and the constant faintings and work-related accidents from inhaling too much of the everpresent glue fumes.

Finally, the fighters are ready to deliver to the Pentagon (which for some reason has been remarkably lax when it comes to inspecting how the project is going). You and your workers couldn’t be prouder of the wobbly, creaky fleet of toothpick fighters that you have produced, and you are very much looking forward to the Pentagon taking delivery of them and giving you the multi-billion dollar check you need to replenish your company’s now badly-depleted bank accounts.

It therefore comes as a total shock to you when the Pentagon says that it won’t pay!

You’re devastated!

You complain!

You try to argue them into paying!

You point out all the "advantages" that the aliens made you believe toothpick fighters would have!

You point out that vast sums of money went into the raw materials for the planes!

You have your human resources department trot out documentation showing all of the countless hours of regular time and overtime that your workers worked.

You point out that Catholic social doctrine holds that workers need to be paid a just wage allowing them to support themselves and their families with human dignity.

Yet for all this the Pentagon remains completely unmoved.

It believes the planes are, in its word, "Useless."

And, again in it’s words, it’s "Not paying."

What does this teach us?

That we all need to sleep with a can of Grey-Away next to our beds?

That we need to constantly monitor ourselves for traces of alien mind manipulation?

That an invasion is imminent?

No.

It does, however, teach us a very fundamental lesson about economics.

Many people, thinking from the viewpoint of a product producer, suppose that the value of an item is determined by the raw materials or the labor that went into making it.

This is false.

The real value of an item is not determined by raw materials or labor but utility. A fleet of toothpick fighter planes is useless for making war against aliens since they will shake apart before they even lift off the runway. They thus have no value to the Pentagon.

This shows something about where value is established: It isn’t fundamentally determined on the side of the seller but on the part of the buyer (at least in the sense of the word that I’m discussing). Buyers who place more value on a product will pay more for it.

Of course, the seller can try to generate value in the buyer’s mind by advertising to him all of the ways in which the thing could be useful to him (even if that’s just making the buyer look more "cool" and "hip" to others). He can even refuse to sell the item if his price isn’t met and thus try convincing the seller up in what price he’s willing to pay, but that is just a way of sharpening for the buyer a choice between having the item and the value he perceives in it and not having it.

Ultimately, it is how useful a buyer perceives an item to be, or how much he values it, that determines what price he is willing to pay for it.

Now that the Pentagon has passed on your fleet of toothpick fighter planes, your best bet is to sell them as works of art (at vastly reduced prices that will at best only recoup part of your costs in making them).

You and your employees also probably want to let the Pentagon study your brains to figure out what the aliens did to them and how to protect other defense contactors from the same treatment.

An alien invasion may be imminent.

One of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous works is The Shadow out of Time, in which a 1908 professor of economics has his mind mentally switched with an inhuman being belonging to a civilization that lived millions of years ago. The foreign being’s mind lives in his body, and he lives in the foreign being’s body back in the remote past.

The switch happens when the professor is giving a lecture in economics to his students. He’s suddenly faints and, when he is brought round, it appears to everyone that he has a case of amnesia. (It’s really the foreign being who has no knowledge of the professor’s life.)

The being’s job is to research human culture in the early 20th century, and it stays five years at the task. But in 1913, it concludes that it has learned all it can and returns to its own time, simultaneously returning the economist to his own body.

In the story, the professor describes what happened he he first awoke after the being’s departure, having no memory of what had transpired:

About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables–syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon–the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned–I began to mutter in English.

"–of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of–"

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back–a spirit in whose time scale it was still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

When I first read the bit about linking the economic cycle to sunspots, I laughed. I figured it was just a joke on Lovecraft’s part. Though initially very conservative, Lovecraft by this late point in his life (in the middle of the depression) was impoverished and entertaining a form of socialism. I reckoned he was just spoofing the economics of the earlier period by making up a fantastically absurd theory.

But he wasn’t!

It turns out that the "Jevons" he mentions was a real guy–William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)–a real economist, who really did advocate the idea that the economic cycle is linked to sunspot activity:

In 1875 and 1878, Jevons read two papers before the British Association which expounded his famous "sunspot theory" of the business cycle.  Digging through mountains of statistics of economic and meteorological data, Jevons argued that there was a connection between the timing of commercial crises and the solar cycle.  The basic chain of events was that variations in sunspots affect the power of the sun’s rays, influencing the bountifulness of harvests and thus the price of corn which, in turn, affected business confidence and gave rise to commercial crises. 

Jevons changed his story several times (e.g. he replaced his European harvest-price-crisis logic with an Indian harvest-imports-crisis channel).  However flimsy his explanations, Jevons believed that the periodicity of the solar cycle and commercial crises — approximately 10.5 years, by his calculations — was too coincidental to be dismissed.  Needless to say, all this was a bit on the cranky end and, ultimately, the statistics did not bear him out. 

Nonetheless, it remains a significant piece of work as this was perhaps the first time that the phenomenon of the business cycle was identified.  Economists had long been aware that business activity had its ups and downs, but not that they necessarily followed any regular pattern.  They generally believed that "crises" arrived haphazardly, punctuating the smooth advance of the economy at irregular intervals. Jevons was perhaps the first economist to argue that the phases of business activity had a regular, measurable and predictable periodicity [SOURCE].

Don’t that beat all!

What Lovecraft says about Jevons being characteristic of the economists of the period trying to link economics with science is also true. Economics was then being constituted as a social science and there was a lot of borrowing of terms and concepts from other sciences (e.g., physics, mathematics, biology). Jevons’ sunspot theory may indeed represent a kind of apex to this process.

Two points to Lovecraft!

BTW, this is going to be economics week here on the blog. I hope to have a string of (hopefully entertaining) pieces of economics, putting up one each day.

I’ve been wondering what Thomas Sowell would have to say about the current illegal immigration controversy that’s brewing.

It seemed to me that, as a free market advocate, Sowell might be, not favorable toward illegal immigration, but favorable toward broadening the American market whereby migrants would be able to do work here in America legally on a much larger scale than as been the case heretofore.

If the free exchange of goods and services is the best way to foster economic development then ceteris paribus expanding the U.S. labor market to include neighboring countries might make sense.

One could argue, though, that this is not the case. Having a free market, labor or otherwise, presupposes a kind of institutional openness and level playing field that may not exist between America and Mexico. I haven’t thought through the situation with sufficient thoroughness or researched the America-Mexico situation enough to know whether that relationship would make sense. (Which is why I’m interested in what Sowell has to say. He’s the expert; not me.)

I do know that I am opposed to folks entering America illegally. I especially don’t like long, porous borders in an age of global terrorism with us as the main target of the terrorists’ efforts.

If people want to come here to improve their economic condition and America can handle the influx, fine. But breaking laws is not a good thing. The law might need to be changed to better facilitate matters, but lawbreaking itself is a bad thing, especially when conducted on a massive scale. I understand that desperation can make breaking the law morally licit in extreme individual cases but if we’re talking the kind of humanitarian crisis that would justify mass disregard for the law then something needs to be done to address that desperation. (Massive disregard for the law being itself a huge societal "bad.")

What needs to be fixed in such a case should not be too hastily assumed to be American immigration law. If America has worked out a system that makes it attractive enough that folks want to come here because of the economic opportunities that it offers that their own homeland doesn’t then it seems to me that the logical thing to do is change the country of origin’s system so it it more closely approximates the American model and thus creates economic opportunities that don’t require immigration to a foreign land (which is itself a cost to the immigrants).

For example, if it’s easier to get a business license in America than Mexico, resulting in greater economic opportunity in the former than in the latter, then it seems that the logical first thing to do is not to demand that America change its immigration policy but to change Mexican law so that it’s easier to get a business license there, too.

Indeed, this would seem to be a justice issue. It would seem unjust to ask one country to bear the costs of accepting massive immigration when this immigration is being driven by disordered economic policies in the migrants’ country of origin.

Fixing the situation back home so people aren’t desperate to migrate to a foreign land is the real solution to the problem. Bettering economic conditions back home so that immigration to a foreign land is a matter of personal choice rather than of economic necessity is the real way to help people.

Now, some folks may pick up on one point I just mentioned–the cost of absorbing massive immigration–and say "Ah! But in reality there is no cost! After all, many of the immigrants are taking jobs native-born Americans won’t do! It thus helps them by having them be employed and helps us by getting these undesirable jobs done."

Enter Thomas Sowell.

EXCERPTS:

Virtually every job in the country is work that Americans will not do, if the pay is below a certain level. And the pay will not rise to that level so long as illegal immigrants — "undocumented workers" — are available to work for less.

Even those who write editorials about how we need Mexicans to do work that Americans will not do would not be willing to write editorials for a fraction of what they are being paid. If Mexican editorial writers were coming across the border illegally and taking their jobs, maybe the issue would become clearer.

You cannot discuss jobs without discussing pay, if you are serious. And, if you are really serious, you need to discuss all the welfare state benefits available to Americans who won’t work.

When you say that Americans have a "right" to have their "basic needs" met, you are saying that when some people refuse to supply themselves with food and shelter, other Americans should be forced to supply it for them.

If you subsidize workers when they won’t work and subsidize employers by making illegal aliens available to them, then under those particular conditions it may well be true that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans won’t do. But such statements conceal more than they reveal.

Hard-working immigrants may indeed be a godsend, not only to farmers and other employers, but also to families looking for someone to take care of children or an aged or ill member of the family. But Americans worked as farm laborers and as maids before there were "undocumented workers" to turn these chores over to.

If it has been done before, it can be done again. All that prevents it is the welfare state and the attitudes it spawns.

GET THE STORY.

I originally wrote a form of the following as a comment down yonder, but thought I’d bump it up to the main blog area because of how interesting the idea is.

My Benedictine friend wrote:

The [Rule of St. Benedict] explicitly directs monks to avoid all greed in business, and to sell or barter their goods at prices lower than others asked.

Following which, a reader asked the very perceptive question:

I know this was really not St. Benedict’s plan, but…

If the monks were to sell their goods at prices lower than others asked, wouldn’t that undercut other purveyors of goods?

Fr. Pedrano (a Benedictine) then said:

In St. Benedict’s culture of bartering and trade (not everyone had cold, hard, cash; no one had plastic), merchants always tried to keep their "prices" high. Maybe St. Benedict’s injunction about charging low prices ended up "undercutting other purveyors. I don’t know. He did write of situations where a monastery could be too poor even to hire laborers to help them with the fields, or to keep certain cultural "dietary" standards–specifically wine–on the table. In those cases, he tells his monks to be satisfied with poverty and work, and to be consoled by the resulting fact of being "true monks."

This–the calling to be "true monks"–seems to me to hold the key to the economic dilemma.

Every free economic transaction involves the exchange of a good or service for something or some things perceived to be of comparable value.

But the things of comparable value are not necessarily money or even material. One might, for example, have a transaction in which one person will give a loaf of bread in exchange for having a song sung or in which one sings a sing in exchange for having an essay proofread.

It seems to me that in this case, the monks received some money in exchange for their goods but they also received other, non-material things of value, such as the chance to make a statement about charity, the importance of the spiritual over the temporal, the chance to themselves make a monetary sacrifice, etc.

As a result, it seems to me that, if they were willing to accept these things in exchange for particular goods or services they had to offer that it would constitute a legitimate transaction in a free market, since the market does not presuppose that all transactions are monetary (barter, for example, may be used, and having the chance to make a statement against greed would seem to be a form of non-material barter).

Should the monks carry this too far, it seems that normal market correction methods would likely address the situation. For example, if they accept so little for their goods and services that their monastery can no longer support itself then they’ll either modify their practice or go out of business as monks.

Similarly, if they are undercutting others so much that they are driving people out of business, impoverishing families who were struggling to begin with, and gravely harming the local economy and are so hardcore in their practice that they won’t modify it when this is made known to them then the amount of ill will generated against them is likely to be such that the Medieval town being harmed would would stop patronizing them, dry up their vocations, burn down the monastery, etc.

The market has a way of correcting for severely disruptive business practices, at least in the long run, since nobody has the unlimited resources needed to permanently sustain fundamentally unsound business practices.

As long as extremes are not pursued, though, it seems that the value of being able to make sacrifices and statements about greed and charity can (and even should) form a legitimate part of economic transactions.

What I want to know is: Does this mean I can get a discount next time I’m at the Prince of Peace Abbey book & gift shop? (Kidding!)

Recently I blogged about the fact that it is not morally obligatory to boycott when there is not a well-founded chance that the boycott would bring about the desired change in the behavior of the boycott’s target. For example, there is no realistic chance of getting secular booksellers (online and off) to purge its inventory of anything and everything that is out of keeping with Catholic moral and doctrinal theology.

The attempt to even begin such a boycott against secular booksellers at present would only do damage, as chronicalled in my previous post on the subject.

But not all boycotts are doomed to failure.

After it emerged that eBay did have some offensiveness exceptions in its policy regarding what can be listed on its site, it became a real possibility that pressuring eBay would result in an expansion of its policy to include a prohibition on allowing individuals to sell consecrated Hosts by their service.

And now that’s happened!

I got rumblings of this a few days ago, but now I’ve had multiple individuals e-mail me messages they received from eBay announcing a change in the policy. Here’s the one that such as <Rule 15b>Eric Giunta</Rule 15b> sent:

Hello Eric,

Thank you for your email regarding the sale of the Holy Eucharist by one of our community members. We respect and appreciate your comments regarding this sensitive matter.

As you may know, eBay does not sell items itself. Rather, we are a global marketplace for sellers and buyers who transact directly with one another. Each day eBay’s sellers list 5 million items on the site, and those sellers decide what items they want to list. eBay did not possess, list or approve the sale of the Eucharist. The buyer and seller completed the Eucharist transaction on April 11th, before eBay even became aware of the listing.

As a marketplace, we strive to respect the diverse perspectives of our sellers. We also work hard to promote an open environment for trade. That said, eBay has policies in place to remove listings for illegal items as well as highly offensive listings that promote hate or intolerance.

We understand that the listing of the Eucharist was highly upsetting to Catholic members of the eBay community and Catholics globally. Once this completed sale was brought to our attention, we consulted with a number of our users, including members of the Catholic Church, concerning what course we should take in the future should a similar listing appear on our site. We also consulted with members of other religions about items that might also be highly sacred and inappropriate for sale. As a result of this dialogue, we have concluded that sales of the Eucharist, and similar highly sacred items, are not appropriate on eBay. We have, therefore, broadened our policies and will remove those types of listings should they appear on the site in the future.

As always, we welcome and appreciate the assistance of the community in upholding the rules of our site. Should you see another Eucharist listed on our site, we encourage you to notify us so we can take appropriate action. Further, we encourage you to directly communicate with the seller. Members are often unaware that a particular item is offensive to others. A respectful e-mail to the seller is often all that is needed for the seller to voluntarily remove the item. We believe this modification strikes the appropriate balance between respect for our community’s values and our goal of providing an open marketplace offering practically anything on earth.

Again, we sincerely appreciate your concern and thank you for communicating your views with us. Your input has helped us frame a policy that will enable us to better serve our diverse community of users around the world.

Regards,

Oscar on behalf of Bill Cobb
Community Watch Team
eBay Trust & Safety

And there was much rejoicing!

Admen are secretly plotting to invade your cellphone with their evil advertising.

They feel they have to: People’s reliance on television is waning in the face of cellphones, laptops, Blackberrys, and similar devices that all have one thing in common: They’re distractions from watching television.

Furthermore, folks are buying devices (like digital recorders) that allow them to avoid commercials even when they are watching television.

It’s an adman’s worst nightmare.

Yet he’s got a problem: We already have laws against telemarketing people if they don’t acquiesce to it. (I never do. As soon as I realize I’m talking to a telemarketer, I tell him to take my number off his list and not to call again. Consequently, I almost never get telemarketing calls.)

And nobody’s going to buy a phone that forces you to watch or listen to a commercial when you want to make or receive a call.

We also have ample demonstration of the public’s refusal to have spam invade their e-mail boxes in the form of laws against this that will stiffen and become more effective with time (or else e-mail will go the way of the dinosaur and be replaced by a better, spam-secure system).

So what’s an evil adman to do?

Create content that is compelling enough that you’ll seek it out and be willing to put up with the advertising it contains.

This works in principle: It’s the principle on which TV shows support themselves: You tune in for the content and are willing to tolerate the advertisting.

But can it work on your cell phone? There are folks talking about producing mini-TV shows for cell phones (many of which now have color screens on which such shows could be watched). They even exist already in some countries. But can content that compelling be done under the format constraints a cellphone poses?

Time will tell.

In the meantime, the evil admen scheme and dream in their sinister sunken city.

GET THE STORY.