Thomas Sowell: Wealth, Poverty, and Politics

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics HooverInstitution Recorded on September 8, 2016 Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell discusses inequality and how it is part of the human condition. Sowell notes that political and ideological struggles have led to a dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. What is important is not inequality but human capital; once human capital is unleashed it creates an enormous amount of wealth for people of all classes. In addition there needs to be a sense of humility and gratitude for the generations that have gone before us for the prosperity we have today.

Trickle Down Economics: Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge

To read Dr. Sowell's essay: "Trickle Down Theory and Tax Cuts for the Rich," click on the link below:

http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/Sowell_TrickleDown_FINAL.pdf

Happy 100th Birthday Milton Friedman

The inestimable Thomas Sowell, a former student of Milton Friedman, devoted his column at National Review Online today to his mentor who was born 100 years ago today,

If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there has never been a time when he was more needed — he would be 100 years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman’s death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense. Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like Free to Choose or the TV series of the same name.

To read the entire piece, click on the link below:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312648/milton-friedman-s-centenary-thomas-sowell

"NO THEY CAN'T" John Stossel on Uncommon Knowledge

This is the entire five part interview of John Stossel about his new book: NO THEY CAN'T, by Peter Robinson of The Hoover Institution for Uncommon Knowledge.

Thomas Sowell: More on Intellectuals and Society

From the website of The Hoover Institution at Stanford University:

On the occasion of the publication of a new edition of his book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell returns to Uncommon Knowledge for a wide-ranging interview.

This is the entire five parts of the latest interview of Dr. Sowell by Peter Robinson at The Hover Institution.  It's typical Sowell: full of wisdom that can be at the same time pithy and humorous.  Please don't miss any of the 52+ minutes of the interview; you can watch one segment at a time and return and pick it up where you left off.

The Revised and Expanded edition of the original Intellectuals and Society is available at Amazon.Com.  The original edition by Dr. Sowell was published in 2009.

For additional posts on Thomas Sowell, you can type his name in the "Search This Blog" box under the flags on the right.

Krauthammer: Obama's Energy Policy

Charles Krauthammer expanded on what he says in the above video in his column today at National Review Online.

Herewith some excerpts (emphasis added):

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.

President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling...

But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline. It gave the game away, because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and already obscenely wealthy sheiks. 

Obama boasts that on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive. These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies. They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting. This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural-gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.

“The American people aren’t stupid,” said Obama on February 23, mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less, that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home . . . that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”

So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?

It's been fairly obvious over the past three years that Obama has virtually no understanding of economics.  He has now demonstrated that he doesn't even grasp the basic principle of supply and demand.

 

The Freeman: "The Parable of the Broken Traffic Lights"

This parable was published today on The Freeman Online.Org, by Steven Horwitz, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University.

The Freeman is a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Here's a bit of the parable:

Suppose on some sunny afternoon in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept.  He wonders why... 

As his brain slowly awakens, he stumbles across the likely culprit: Something must be wrong with the traffic lights.  He concludes that the lights are not working, leaving the drivers to figure out how to negotiate the intersections on their own.  Wouldn’t that, he wonders, cause many accidents?  He turns to his wife and suggests that explanation.  She replies:  “If you came to a traffic light and saw it was not working at all, wouldn’t you slow down and proceed cautiously?  In fact, after Hurricane Katrina didn’t people in New Orleans just treat broken traffic lights like four-way stops, without explicit direction to do so?”  Our fellow acknowledges his wife’s insightfulness and continues to ponder.

Soon it hits him: It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green.  If all the lights were green, drivers would have no reason to think the lights were not working and would proceed through every intersection — with the result being the hundreds of accidents...

If you've guessed by now that Professor Horwitz is drawing an analogy by using those traffic lights to somehow represent the actions of the Federal Reserve System in responding to the boom that generated the post-2001 financial crisis, you would be right.  If you click above on "This parable," you can read the whole piece.

Trifecta: "Obama's Big Lie" (on the Economy)

It doesn't get any scarier than this.  According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the U.S. Economy will shut down in 2027, and this administration is doing nothing to stop it.

Paul Ryan for President!

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=105&load=6648

The Gimme Generation Doesn't Get It.

Economics Professor Jack Chambless of Valencia College in Florida had his students write an essay on the American Dream: what they thought it was, and how much government should provide its citizens to ensure their achieving it.  The results were depressing: 80 percent of the students manifested their belief in Marxism, but the good news is they probably had no idea what that meant.  Apparently, indoctrination is alive and well in our higher education system.

One solution to this problem is clear: parents, rather than encouraging their "children" to attend 13th grade, either at a university or through distance learning programs, should give those "children" a choice between Parris Island, Great Lakes, or Ft. Jackson.

H/T: jpa1948

Walter Williams: "Presidential Nonsense"

Dr. Walter Williams, renowned Economist (and close friend of Thomas Sowell), writing at Townhall.Com today:

"Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, "We can't go back to this brand of you're-on-your-own economics." Throughout my professional career as an economist, I've never come across the theory of "you're-on-your-own economics." I'm guessing what the president means by -- and finds offensive in -- "you're-on-your-own economics" is that it's a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can't force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can't live at the expense of other people."

"Let's try a few survival of the fittest questions. Which companies do you think should survive and expand, those that can meet the changing wants of their customers in a least-cost fashion or those that cannot do so? If the means of communication become cheaper through fax machines, the Internet and telephones, should subsidies be expended to help the U.S. Postal Service survive? Years ago, typing was done on a mechanical typewriter; milk was delivered to doorsteps via horse and wagon; slide rules were used to make calculations. Should any of these products and practices have survived, or was it OK for natural selection to consign them to the dustbin of history?"

 H/T: rutusmc

Economics 101: The New Deal was a Bad Deal

Here's what Economist Dan Mitchell had to say at BigGovernment.Com about the big government policies of Herbert Hoover, FDR, and the myths about the Great Depression.

"I’ve commented many times about the misguided big-government policies of both Hoover and FDR, so I can say with considerable admiration that this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity packs an amazing amount of solid info into about five minutes.

"Perhaps the most surprising revelation in the video, at least to everyone other than economic historians, is that America suffered a harsh depression after World War I, with GDP falling by a staggering 24 percent.

"But we don’t read much about that downturn in the history books, in large part because it ended so quickly.

"The key question, though, is why did that depression end quickly while the Great Depression dragged on for a decade?

"One big reason for the different results is that markets were largely left unmolested in the 1920s. This meant resources could be quickly redeployed, minimizing the downturn.

"But this doesn’t mean the crowd in Washington was completely passive. They did do something to help the economy recover. As Ms. Fields explains in the video, President Harding, unlike Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, slashed government spending."

Paul Ryan: Another One Who Got Away

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, perhaps the best spokesmen of the GOP on what needs to be done to repair the damage caused by the current administration, have declined groundswells of encouragement to become candidates. Surely, though, there will be spots for both in the next administration.

What Is A "Fair" Share?

From The Heritage Foundation today:

America has heard a lot of talk about the “Buffett Rule” — President Barack Obama’s plan to make the tax code more “fair” by permanently raising taxes by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with most of the burden falling on families and businesses earning more than $250,000 per year. But if he wants to talk about “fairness,” he should look at how much top income earners already pay in taxes, as the chart below shows:

(Click to enlarge)

In a new paper, Heritage’s Curtis Dubay explains that the supposed “fairness” of the new rule is anything but fair:

To President Obama, it is “fair” to raise taxes on families and businesses earning more than $250,000 a year by raising their income tax rates and limiting their deductions. That must also mean he believes that they currently pay too little in taxes.

Yet the data show the highest-earning families and businesses already pay the lion’s share of the federal income tax burden. According to the IRS, the top 1 percent of income earners—those earning more than $380,000 in 2008—paid more than 38 percent of all federal income taxes while earning 20 percent of all income. The top 10 percent ($114,000 and above) earned 45 percent of income and paid 70 percent of all taxes. At the same time, the bottom 50 percent of income earners—those earning less than $33,000—earned 13 percent of all income and paid less than 3 percent of federal income taxes.

"Economics 101": Poverty in America

That's Hadley Heath of the Independent Women's Forum. She made the below video in cooperation with The Center for Freedom and Prosperity to explain, graphically, everything we need to know about poverty in America.



Hadley's video was posted today at Big Government.com, by Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, who added the following to his post:

Last but not least, the video doesn’t address every issue in great detail, and there are three additional points that should be added to any discussion of poverty.

1. The biggest beneficiaries of the current system are the army of bureaucrats that receive very comfortable salaries administering various programs.
2. The Obama Administration is looking to re-define poverty in a way that would expand the welfare state and increase the burden of redistribution programs.
3. The welfare reform legislation of the 1990s was a small step in the right direction because it eliminated a federal entitlement and shifted responsibility back to the state level. This success story should be replicated for programs such as Medicaid.

This last point is worth emphasizing because it is also one of the core messages of the video. The federal government has done a terrible job dealing with poverty. The time has come to get Washington out of the racket of income redistribution.

Daniel Hannan: On The Proximity of The End

Daniel Hannan MEP is warning of the end of the European Union, but his remarks could also be directed at the United States.

"You cannot spend your way to growth. You cannot increase consumption without producing anything (at least not in the long term). You cannot debase a currency without consequences, and you cannot keep borrowing forever. And if you try to keep doing those things, what happens? You're about to find out."

Wouldn't You Really Rather Have a Ford?

Paul Ryan: Pro Growth Tax Reform

Paul Ryan, unfortunately, chose not to run for president in 2012, but he'd make a great Secretary of the Treasury (haven't had one of those for a while).

Uncle Sam's Debt Crisis: A Primer

PowerLine Judges Must Be Democrat Appointees

At the beginning of this summer the Powerline Blog offered to give away $100,000 to the Power Line reader who best dramatized the national debt. The winners have been announced as well as the runners-up.

On Saturday, August 6th, we posted one of the non-winners in the contest, and have linked below to the winner. We stand by our assessment that "Doorbell" (the non-winner we posted last Saturday) should have won, and hereby call for impeachment of the PowerLine Judges.

Here's the "winner."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AgL-I3PxHE&feature=player_embedded

Powerline Blog: Next Generation Debt

John Hinderaker of PowerLineBlog.com, posted this video, which did not win a prize in the Power Line Video Prize competition. It probably should have.

H/T: dcbate