김일중(조갑제닷컴)
나는 내 깃발에 탄핵이 기각되기를 바라는 간절한 염원을 달았다. 자유민주주의, 반공, 시장경제체제, 한미 유대 강화, 조국의 통일이란 염원을 달았다. 제발 공산주의자와 사회주의자들이 정권을 잡아 나라를 망치는 일이 없기를 바라는 소망을 달았다.
남미의 좌파통치로 베네수엘라의 국민들이 광장의 비둘기와 쥐를 잡아먹은 그런 일은 이 땅에서는 결코 일어나지 않기를 바라는 희망을 깃발에 달고 시위 현장을 찾아다녔다. 김정은의 이북처럼 국민 모두가 깡통 차고 빌어먹는 그런 일은 이 땅에서는 없어야 한다는 염원을 내 깃발에 매달았다.
나는 성조기를 들었을 때는 그 깃발에 미국에 대한 감사를 달았다. (발췌)
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청춘은 눈부실 만큼 찬란하고 아름답다. 라이언 맥긴리의 '피퍼스(Peepers)'는 세계적인 무용수 피나 바우슈의 춤 동작으로 연출한 사진이다. /디뮤지엄
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2014년 7월 8일 ·
Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.
수학자들은 상징으로 생각하고, 물리학자들은 대상으로, 철학자들은 개념으로, 기하학자는 이미지로, 법학자는 법적 구성물(constructs)로, 논리학자는 연산자로, 작가들은 인상으로, 그리고 멍청이들은 단어로 생각한다.
탈레브의 이 말은 철학자들이 곰곰히 생각하고, 일반인을 위해 해설을 붙이면 좋을 듯하다.
좌파들이 민주주의나 평등, 사회적 정의 등 그럴듯한 단어로 대중을 현혹하고, 나아가 정치적 선전선동으로 이어지는 작금의 현실에서, 위의 말은 생각할수록 더욱 빛나는 명언이다.
Thesaurus에 나온 construct의 동의어
↔natural law, law - a rule or body of rules of conduct inherent in human nature and essential to or binding upon human society
↔law of nature, law - a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature; "the laws of thermodynamics"
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Democratic Socialism and the End of Interventionism
February 12, 2016
A second group seems to be less radical. They reject socialism no less than capitalism. They recommend a third system, which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism, which as a third system of society’s economic organization, stands midway between the two other systems, and while retaining the advantages of both, avoids the disadvantages inherent in each. This third system is known as the system of interventionism. In the terminology of American politics it is often referred to as the middle-of-the-road policy. What makes this third system popular with many people is the particular way they choose to look upon the problems involved. As they see it, two classes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the wage earners on the other hand, are arguing about the distribution of the yield of capital and entrepreneurial activities. Both parties are claiming the whole cake for themselves. Now, suggest these mediators, let us make peace by splitting the disputed value equally between the two classes. The State as an impartial arbiter should interfere, and should curb the greed of the capitalists and assign a part of the profits to the working classes. Thus it will be possible to dethrone the moloch capitalism without enthroning the moloch of totalitarian socialism.
–Ludwig von Mises, Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism (Included in Planning for Freedom)
In preparing to write this article on the phenomenon of so-called democratic socialism, inspired as it was by the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, it struck me as a wondrous vindication of the foresight of Ludwig von Mises, who in the 1950’s exposed the anti-capitalist efforts of the “intellectual class.” One of the ways in which Mises most vigorously challenged them was in their claim that they had found a third way between “the excesses” and “anti-social nature” of capitalism on the one hand, and the problems to be found in the soviet style socialism that had arisen during the 20th century. This phenomenon of interventionism was marketed as a “middle of the road policy” that would bring about the ideal socio-economic state of civilization. Interventionism was supposed to keep some aspects of capitalism and yet regulate, subsidize, and intervene where necessary to bring about a more just economic situation. Mises, though, with piercing logic and in his uncompromising spirit, made the case that government intervention, because it would be harmful for the very people it sought to help, begat intervention; and socialism, not bliss, was the end game of tampering with the economy.
And here we are, a half century since Mises bravely made his lonely case for “unfettered capitalism” against the established opinion of his day, facing the prospects of Bernie Sanders. Interventionism has destroyed us. The trend has been downward sloping from occasional tampering into the economy, one dreary step at a time, toward total control. And interventionism, as Mises said it would, has caused tremendous wreckage of western civilization. What I am claiming here is that it was decades of slowly and consistently tampering with the market system, trying to “make it better,” that has had a snowball effect in both inviting more and more government and each point along the way making things worse. One step at a time, ever closer to socialism. And at long last Keynes’ “long run” is here and Bernie stands ready to seal our fate.
What has democratic socialism to offer and what of the alleged differences with marxist socialism?
Firstly, we should note off the bat that there are indeed a variety of flavors of socialism. In the past on this site (primarily here and here), I have mainly distinguished between three of them: marxism (communism), fascism (corporatism), and Fabianism (stealth, elitist socialism). I have distinguished between them by commenting:
In Russian communism [marxism], the State is the supreme power and its will is to be pursued as the goal of political life. It is this way under Nazism and Fabianism as well. But the means to achieve this varies. In the Russian model (we can call this “Leninism”), everything is outright owned by the state and the ruling class gets to make the decisions for all society. Under the Nazi/Fabian model, ownership is nominally in “private” hands, but the control ultimately belongs to the state, who has the authority to determine prices, set regulations, control subsidies, and handout penalties. Whereas the Leninist model is a raw State monopoly, the other models are more of a corporate monopoly, achieved and enforced by the strong arm of the State. This has also been referred to as “Corporatism.” But it is important that we remember it is still a type of socialism.
The Nazi model and the Fabian model, however, find their chief difference in how they present themselves to the masses. Whereas Nazism is about brute military force, the creation of racial conflicts, and the brutal elimination of political opponents by public displays of vicious behavior, Fabianism was historically not like that. Fabianism, was far more secretive, quiet, and under the radar. It did not declare itself out in the open and loudly. Instead, it sought financial control of banks, the media, the legislature, the courts, and the education centers. It pushed ideas via the universities, via novels, via plays.
With this in mind (and there are many more differences in the flavors), one can think of democratic socialism as sharing the public ownership features of the marxist model, but also sharing the opposition to the very brute force that characterized traditional Marxism. This is why the entire framework is unique, in a sense, because it is not seeking violent revolution against the current control centers of the western world (therefore making it more like Fabianism), but at the same time it does want to assume ownership of the means of production (therefore making it more like Marxism). The latter point is why the reader should completely reject anyone who is trying to make the case that “democratic socialism has nothing to do with traditional socialism.” Actually it does. That is the point. The public ownership of the means of production is the goal of both marxism and democratic socialism. The (flawed) idea behind socialism is that the central authority has the knowledge to determine the proper allocation of scarce resources in order to meet the goals of consumers.
Democratic socialists claims that, contrary to Marxism, they want the government to obey the will of the people as expressed via the voting booth. Besides the more obvious point that once in power it is historically ignorant to assume that the “desire of the people” will take precedent over the desire of those actually wielding the power of coercion (those who operate the state), we make the more fundamental criticism that there are both economic and moral objections to the scheme of democratic socialism.
In a sense, democratic socialism is democracy perfected and fulfilled. It is the theory of democracy pushed to its logical conclusion and it is why the republican (not to be confused with the GOP) founders of the United States, for whatever non-libertarian flaws they had, were highly skeptical of democracy and it is why one of the most important Austro-libertarian theorists of our time wrote an entire screed against it. Democratic socialism, at a moral level, is the idea that by expressing one’s desires by voting, one can legitimately outsource the dirty role of plunder against the property owner. Ethically, democratic socialism proposes that one is morally justified in advocating that his neighbor be expropriated, if the role of expropriation is fulfilled by those empowered to do so by the voter himself.
Democratic socialists hide behind the curtain of the ballot box to accomplish what would be obviously wrong if done by the non-government actor. The majority of people, on the surface, claim to believe that it is not ethically justifiable to take from another what does not belong to them; but since democratic socialism is becoming increasingly popular, especially amongst the youth, we know that these people do not really take seriously the age-old ethical principle that it is wrong to steal and to aggress against one’s fellow man or his property. Democratic socialism then, is morally disastrous and operates under the illusion of being more ethically defensible than marxism. Marxists announced their unethical means toward their desired goals; but democratic socialists keep their means hidden behind of the veil of the vote.
Libertarianism as a positive political theory stands athwart any aim to justify the aggression of an individual and his property. The libertarian makes the case that a man has the moral right to be free and secure in his person and property by virtue of the fact that it is ethically wrong for one individual to initiate aggression against another. Profoundly, libertarianism also extends this principle to its logical conclusion and declares that, not only does no private citizen have the right to ignore it, but no group of people coming together and calling themselves a “government” can do what is wrong for the private citizen. Moreover, no amount of voting can vindicate the wrongful behavior of a government. The democratic socialist idea that declaring property “public” can justify trespasses and aggressions, has no foundation.
Economically, democratic socialism claims to work on behalf of the “people” as opposed to “big business.” One of the things that democratic socialists overlook is the inner contradiction in their position; namely, that if what they are pursuing really is “what the people want” then they wouldn’t need the state to do it. The state fundamentally distinct in the way it operates compared to the market. The market is the free and voluntary exchange of individuals whereas the government, by definition, is the agency in society that contradicts the free and voluntary exchange of individuals. For if the government was doing what the people would have chosen on their own, the government wouldn’t be needed. Thus, the democratic socialist arrangement is the systemic opposition of the will of the people under the guise of working on behalf of the will of the people. In reality, it is the working on behalf of one group of people (those that want, but do not have) over against another group of people (those that have). It is the politicalization of plunder.
Pushing deeper into economics now, we find that democratic socialism assumes that the free market is such that one person is always taking advantage of another. This is problematic on the basis that the free market, by definition, is such that each party in the exchange is demonstrating his preference for the good being received over the good being traded away. Because such an exchange is the result of voluntary action, we can therefore infer that each party anticipates being better off (i.e. profiting) from the exchange. Compare this free market arrangement with democratic socialism in which the government is given the authority to enforce whatever law the voter wants him to, despite the opinion of those who do not want to participate. In the free market, those who do not want to participate in a given exchange are free to go about their way peacefully. Not so with socialism. Those who do not pay their taxes, comply with labor laws, adhere to whatever regulatory standards are put in place, and so on, are forcefully prevented from doing what they will with their property.
Besides the moral problems, this has tragic consequences at an economic level as well. The democratic socialists, like all socialists, misunderstand the source of economic prosperity. They therefore assume that it is by laws that society can be made more prosperous and wealth can reach the less well off. But laws cannot bring into being that which the underlying economic conditions do not warrant. What I mean by this is that there are certain desires that central planners might have, but they have no idea whether and how these desires can be fulfilled. Moreover, they do not know whether their aims are constructive or destructive because there is no rational basis for their economic decision making. Even further still, they do not know the cost of pursuing these desires and what the society will lose out on if the society is forced to pursue the government’s ends.
The difference between capitalism and socialism, and the reason why there are only two basic models for a certain industry (say, healthcare), is the presence of a price mechanism. A price is the tool that human actors have on the free market to rationally allocate scarce resources according to their most needed ends. Because prices on the free market are paid voluntarily by human actors economic actors can know where capital should be employed in order to make a profit. But under a socialist model, there are no prices and therefore there is no rational foundation on which to make a determination regarding the allocation of scarce resources. How can a government, which runs things according to bureaucratic decision making (that is decision making without the tool of prices) have any knowledge whatsoever about whether they are improving society and working in accordance with the values of the consumers? The “consumers” under socialism have no choice in the matter!
Thus, “public” healthcare, education, agriculture, shelter, and so on are made worse off under an arrangement that is fixed by rules and regulations, wherein the individual running the enterprise cannot respond to consumer demand. It is the lack of the price mechanism that caused the socialist economies of history’s past to result in mass food shortages, destitute poverty, and so on. There was no build up of capital, no ability to save and invest and therefore grow the economy, just a handful of industries in existence, wasting mass amounts of resources while producing few economic goods. Socialism is an impossible pursuit.
Now, Bernie Sanders and all the other democratic socialists will cry out in opposition that the lack of socialism in the United States has caused tremendous pain for a great deal of people. There should be two things said in response. First: the western world has actually done staggeringly well in regards to creating a standard of living unparalleled in the history of the world. Think about just how well off the poor are in America compared to the poor around the world. This is due to the bits and pieces of capitalism that still remain; the fact that we still have prices, there is still a small ability to create capital and employ it to productive ends. But secondly, it is true that, in some ways, things are getting more difficult of a good many people. The reason for this is not the lack of socialism, democratic or otherwise. The reason for this is the fact that the United States (and indeed, the entire world), has been the victim of intervention after intervention. There has of course been an increase in rules and regulations but, much more significantly, there has been a complete war declared on the economy’s capital stock by way of a central bank that has the monopoly ability to increase the money supply and therein influence interest rates to the downside. This causes a magnificent misallocation of resources and an eradication of savings and true investment of capital. Without capital and savings, economies regress backwards. Things become more expensive, life becomes harder, leisure becomes more of an impossibility.
Over the years, increased government intervention and a central bank that is the antithesis of a capitalist system have worked together to challenge the gains promised by a capitalist order. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is working in unison with the very central bank that has destroyed the United States economy by expressing his desire that it keep interest rates low and continue to print more money. In other words, far from providing an antidote to the things that are plaguing this nation, Sanders is advocating an increase in the disease.
As the socialistic financial system deteriorates and Mises’ prophetic warning of the results of intervention come to reality, it seems that there are now only two alternatives: socialism and capitalism. Interventionism has failed us. As nations fall, the masses tend toward handouts, free stuff, and a covetous declaration of war on the wealthy. Socialism increases in popularity. Interventionism is considered by both the masses and the “intellectuals” to be not enough; it is held that only socialism can save us now.
What they do not realize is that we got into this mess because we have tended toward socialism this whole time. What they do not realize is that they are embracing the fulfillment and end game of rotten statist policies. They seek refuge in the very thing that they previously had only in small doses.
The end of interventionism has come. Whether socialism or capitalism awaits us is yet to be seen.
C.Jay Engel
출처: reformed libertarian
2016년 버니 샌더스가 미국 대선에 나타났을 때는, 지금의 우리의 상황과도 유사했다. 경제가 어려워지면서 사람들은 자꾸 죽을 꾀를 생각해내는데, 그게 바로 사회주의 또는 개입주의이다.
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미제스의 단언 “사회주의 경제는 불가능하다.”
가격이 없는 사회주의 경제는 경제적 계산이 불가능하고, 따라서 성립할 수 없다.
Entrepreneurs and Socialism
October 21, 2015
This is a continuation of my series on Entrepreneurs, Profits, and the Social Welfare see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5
In the last piece in this series I looked at profit-oriented firms versus government agencies that do not own their capital, sell their products or services on the market, or have the ability to have profits and are therefore bureaucratic in nature. In a truly centrally planned economy such as socialism all the means of production are fully own by the State. The idea was that the community would determine the production of consumer goods, which of course means not the community but a small special body of officials tasked with these decisions. Production would be for use not for profit. This difficulty aside (how a small minority group can carry out the communal will) we pursue concrete criticisms of socialism and its centrally planned economy that naturally arises out of Mises’s conception of the entrepreneur and consumer sovereignty. One of Mises’s most innovative and profound contributions to economics was his work on the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist society.
The socialist calculation problem is unique to Mises in regards to free-market economic schools criticisms of socialism. Many, especially establishment economics, saw nothing economically wrong with socialism and focused their criticisms on the incentive problems within socialism. Its problem was largely political. Under from each according to his ability to each according to his need why would engineers, doctors, or high-skilled persons work very hard or endure long hours of study and preparation if they cannot reap the benefits? Or, as Rothbard quipped: who, under socialism, will take out the garbage? But leftist economist and socialist were convinced that the dawn of their system would bring about a new man, one that didn’t care about his title or pay. They would even abolish the division of labor, he could be a fisherman in the morning and field worker in the afternoon. There may be some malfeasants, especially in the beginning, but once people tasted of the new economic policies he would be a changed man. He would swap material incentives for moral incentives and become the New Socialist Man (perhaps a distant cousin of Nietzsche’s übermensch).
Yet we may even cede the radical Marxist here, it bears no relation on Mises’s socialist calculation problem. Even supposing the central planning board is made up of angels devoid of greed and desire for personal gain, supposing they even have an army of this New Socialist Man, how will the planners decide what to do? Mises’s argument was not merely that this system would be difficult or inefficient or even that it would become quickly corrupt. Mises’s argument was that without market prices derived from the genuine exchanges of goods by their owners it was impossible to conduct rational economic calculation that was not arbitrary or chaotic.
The problem for Mises lies not so much in consumer goods but in the intermediary markets, the market for the factors of production (land and capital goods). In consumer goods Mises conceded there may be a set of amount of goods per person discounted for age/gender/family/etc and small amounts of direct exchange or there may be a quasi-faux (like the soviet Ruble) which comrades can use for certain items. They may come to a price of cigarettes in terms of cigars or the price of ham in the terms of canned beans and so on. There may then be some sort of price which households may use on a small scale to calculate and economize.
However in the case of the production factors since the State is the owner of the means of production it is both buyer and seller. Since the socialist state is the sole owner and arbiter of the factors of production there can be no exchange. You cannot exchange with yourself. As Mises says “because no production good will ever become the object of exchange, it will be impossible to determine its monetary value…Calculation in terms of money will here be impossible.”
Without exchanges, and therefore prices, there is no intelligible production costs and no conceivable opportunity costs (what you could have done). There is no way appraise the value attributable to the next best alternative which the central planning board has foregone by choosing one production route over another. There is no way to calculate whether increasing the amount of steel in a bicycle is a better use of resources than if that steel had gone to cars, or even if producing X amount of bicycles is better than the proportionate amount of cars you could have made instead. The central planning board cannot know without prices whether the value added of an extra car or bike produced is worth the cost of using up the scarce resources under their control.
This is not to say that production is impossible under socialism but that economizing resources and using them efficiently is. They may certainly be able to produce bicycles but without prices and economic calculation of profit and loss they will not know how the bike should be constructed or if it was worth it(even according to their own value scales). In eliminating the possibility of ownership of the means of production they have eliminated exchange and thus–the entrepreneur.
Profitable entrepreneurs are those who arrange the material resources in a society to the optimum types of goods and the most efficient methods of producing those goods. When thinking of this concept, of the maximum social utility and an optimal diffusion of satisfactions of a certain good we would do well to remember that most factors can be employed by a wide variety of firms, let alone industries. For instance, one may complain about the price of car tires and the malicious restriction of tire output. However it is not simply tire companies bidding over the use of rubber, but also the makers of hydraulic hoses, gardening hoses, rubber bands, shoemakers, and so on. These all bid and set the price and distribution of rubber throughout an economy through their own entrepreneurial decisions. Through economic calculation using the price structure entrepreneurs allocate how much rubber they can feasibly use. Producers of refrigerators and car manufacturers may compete over the same limited supply of metal, machines, skilled-laborers, and transportation in an economy towards totally different products.
No one person is in charge of carefully setting aside enough metal to make so many refrigerators and so many cars. In the first place this exchange economy “renders it possible to base the calculation upon the valuations of all participants in trade. The subjective use value of each [actor] is not immediately comparable as a purely individual phenomenon with the subjective use value of other men. It only becomes so in exchange value, which arises out of the interplay of the subjective valuations of all who take part in exchange.” In socialism, there is only one will acting, whether that be the will of a dictator or a board of democratically elected economic planners either way the factors of production are beyond the arena of exchange. The market however allows a price to emerge due to the interactions of multiple actors asserting their valuations and appraisals of certain goods.
Mises likened the markets for production factors to a great public auction. “The bidders,” he said “are the entrepreneurs. Their highest bids are limited by their expectation of the prices the consumers will be ready to pay for the products. The co-bidders competing with them, whom they must outbid if they are not to go away empty-handed, are in the same situation.” Since by their buying or abstaining consumers set the prices of good Mises concludes that “all these bidders are, as it were, acting as mandatories of the consumers.”
This in turn places limits on the feasible uses of factors by entrepreneurs. The price of silver places a serious control on its use of being made into furniture. In this prices carry information to entrepreneurs. Mises went so far as to say they speak and call out to entrepreneurs. “A factor of production through its price sends out a warning: Don’t touch me, I am earmarked for the satisfaction of another, more urgent need.” It is as if the capitalist-entrepreneurs were to go down an aisle at Home Depot the various materials would be calling out to him “use me,” or “don’t use me”.“But under socialism these factors of production are mute. They give no hint to the planner.”
Without economic calculation how does socialist economies plan production? The Soviet Union provides many examples of irrational production that became even its own economist planned chaos. Arbitrary planning lead to the now iconic photostock images of rusting tractors sitting in a field full of unharvested wheat even as citizens in urban centers waited in bread lines. They had allocated too much labor into producing steel which produced tractors that went unused because there was not enough labor or not enough gasoline to utilize the equipment since they had brought too many laborers to work the steel factory and not enough refineries or farms. They relied on what they called Gross Output Planning. Various industries were given targets which Joseph Salerno describes as “mutual lying.” Ministers of these industries and commissars would intentionally report exaggeratedly low capacities which would in turn be upped by those higher in command allowing them to still meet their quotas and avoid a trip to the great white north.
One problem was that quality was hard to set in quotal terms in comparison with quantity. Much of soviet output had no relation to use. Women were pictured walking around in dresses five sizes too big because the textiles industries quotas were in yards and larger dresses made it much easier to achieve. In a famous speech by Nikita Khrushchev to the politburo he derided the chandelier industry complaining of chandeliers so heavy “that they pull the ceilings down on our heads” because industries were measured in terms of weight of output. This famous soviet nail factorycartoon to the right depicts the manager of nail factory being congratulated for meeting his quota with one single nail. On the hand if the measure was individual units they made tiny useless easily producible nails. Often when these gimmicks failed soviet economists would resort to, as Mises called it, “playing market” and would actually look at prices in the West in order to make economic decisions. It was also reported in the press that black markets had been established all over the Soviet Union which they were essentially allowing because it allowed them to see the price of some items. Even more dramatic was the CIA’s discovery of the ordering of thousands of Sears catalogs by Communist China to be used for gauging prices.
Only as those states were surrounded by a sea of capitalism and markets were they able to provide even a subsistence level of living for half a century before either utter collapse and ruin or slow evolution into state-capitalism like in China. This is why Mises critique is so important and unique that a “socialist economy itself is ‘impossible’ (“unmöglich”)—not just inefficient or less innovative or conducted without benefit of decentralized knowledge, but really and truly and literally impossible.” Other schools (even free-market ones) ceded the economic possibility of socialism and focused on the incentive problems and corruptions that were likely to occur within socialism, but this is to miss the point. Let me borrow an analogy from Robert Murphy’s Choice. Consider how the game of basketball might be changed if instead of keeping score by shooting baskets the score was kept by the amount of times the ball was dribbled by each team. Wouldn’t it be moot to argue about the merits and incentives to score baskets being reduced? In the socialist commonwealth it is not simply that there is less incentive to be productive it is that you do not even know what productive is or what it would like or how to measure it?
Yet it is held that is much more morally superior and socially responsible when profits are done away with as a possibility, but it is not considered that this also does away with losses, and economic calculation as a whole. An economy under full state-intervention yes may be free from greed or profits but what is lost in losing losses? Is this a more efficient system at achieving optimal social utility, is it even possible to know or measure? Is it more moral? Is the control of multiple complex and variant industries and plants by a single board of central planners far removed from the processes of production more moral than those who take ownership over the factors of production and take upon themselves any loss from a mistake that they may make in entrepreneurial judgment? How can any endeavor be gauged as successful? How can any process be judged efficient? “Success and failure remain unrecognized in the dark.” Mises concludes with a devastating critique of the one tenant many concede to be socialism’s advantage, even if limited. “The advocates of socialism are badly mistaken in considering the absence of discernible profit and loss an excellent point. It is, on the contrary, the essential vice of any socialist management. It is not an advantage to be ignorant of whether or not what one is doing is a suitable means of attaining the ends sought. A socialist management would be like a man forced to spend his life blindfolded.”
출처: reformed libertarian
Brian Jacobson
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자본주의는 사람들을 자유롭게 내버려두면 저절로 발생하는 것이다. 그것은 정교하고 인공적인 계획을 필요로 하지 않는다.
개별 기업가들의 의사결정의 총합이 비록 때로 오류를 범하기도 하지만, 정부의 중앙통제의 결정보다는 결국에는 더 우수하다.
케인즈 이후로 경제학은 인간의 행동을 숫자로 환원하고, 중앙 계획자들이 그것으로 모든 것을 알고 있다는 듯이 행동하는 사례가 만연했다.
지금 우리에게 필요한 사람은 바로 홍콩의 카우퍼스웨이트(John James Cowperthwaite)와 같은 자유주의자이다.
The Man Behind the Hong Kong Miracle
Lawrence W. Reed
Monday, February 10, 2014
Three cheers for Hong Kong, that tiny chunk of Southeast Asian rock. For the twentieth consecutive year, the Index of Economic Freedom—compiled by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation—ranks Hong Kong (HK) as the freest economy in the world.
Though part of mainland China since the British ceded it in 1997, HK is governed locally on a daily basis. So far, the Chinese have remained reasonably faithful to their promise to leave the HK economy alone. What makes it so free is music to the ears of everyone who loves liberty: Relatively little corruption. An efficient and independent judiciary. Respect for the rule of law and property rights. An uncomplicated tax system with low rates on both individuals and business and an overall tax burden that’s a mere 14 percent of GDP (half the U.S. rate). No taxes on capital gains or interest income or even on earnings from outside of HK. No sales tax or VAT either. A very light regulatory touch. No government budget deficit and almost nonexistent public debt. Oh, and don’t forget its average tariff rate of near zero. That’s right—zero!
This latest ranking in the WSJ/Heritage report confirms what Canada’s Fraser Institute found in its latest Economic Freedom of the World Index, which also ranked HK as the world’s freest. The World Bank rates the “ease of doing business” in HK as just about the best on the planet.
To say that an economy is “the freest” is to say that it’s “the most capitalist.” Capitalism is what happens when you leave peaceful people alone. It doesn’t require some elaborate and artificial, Rube Goldberg contrivance cooked up by tenured central planners in their insular ivory towers. But if we are to believe the critics of capitalism, HK must also be a veritable Hell’s Kitchen of greed, poverty, exploitation and despair.
Not so. Not even close.
Maybe this is why socialists don’t like to talk about Hong Kong: It’s not only the freest economy, it’s also one of the richest. Its per capita income, at 264 percent of the world’s average, has more than doubled in the past 15 years. People don’t flee from HK; they flock to it. At the close of World War II, the population numbered 750,000. Today it’s nearly ten times that, at 7.1 million.
Positive Non-Interventionism
The news that the HK economy is once again rated the world’s freest is an occasion to celebrate the one man most responsible for this perennial achievement. The name of Sir John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) should forever occupy top shelf in the pantheon of great libertarians. Some of us just write about libertarian ideas. This guy actually made them public policy for millions of citizens.
The late Milton Friedman explained in a 1997 tribute to Cowperthwaite how remarkable his economic legacy is: “Compare Britain—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set—with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its former mother country.”
A Scot by birth, Cowperthwaite attended Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh and then studied classics at St Andrews University and at Christ's College at Cambridge. He served in the British Colonial Administrative Service in HK during the early 1940s. After the war he was asked to come up with plans for the government to boost economic growth. To his credit, he had his eyes open and noticed that the economy was already recovering quite nicely without government direction. So while the mother country lurched in a socialist direction at home under Clement Attlee, Cowperthwaite became an advocate of what he called “positive non-interventionism” in HK. Later as the colony’s Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, he personally administered it.
“Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's ‘hidden hand’ than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism,” Cowperthwaite declared in 1962. “In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.” He didn’t like protectionism or subsidies even for new, so-called “infant” industries: “An infant industry, if coddled, tends to remain an infant industry and never grows up or expands.” He believed firmly that “in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”
Ever since the days of John Maynard Keynes, economics has been cursed by the notion that human action should be distilled into numbers, which then become a “pretense to knowledge” for central planner types. In many collegiate economics courses, it’s hard to tell where the math leaves off and the actual economics begins. To Cowperthwaite, the planner’s quest for statistics was anathema. So he refused to compile them. When Friedman asked him in 1963 about the “paucity of statistics,” Cowperthwaite answered, “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”
If that sounds quaintly backward or archaic, let me remind you that the biggest economic flops of the past century were both centrally planned and infatuated with numbers. Whole ministries were devoted to their compilation because even lousy numbers gave the planners the illusion of control. But not in Hong Kong!
Statistics, no matter how accurate or voluminous, are no substitute for sound principles. Powered by an abundance of the latter under Cowperthwaite, the HK economy soared during his tenure. Writing in the November 2008 issue of The Freeman, Andrew P. Morriss noted that in his decade as financial secretary, “real wages rose by 50 percent and the portion of the population in acute poverty fell from 50 to 15 percent.” It’s hard to argue with success. After Cowperthwaite’s retirement in 1971, less principled successors dabbled in social welfare spending but they financed it through land sales, not increased taxation. Tax rates to this day are right where the old man left them.
Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education
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What happened last Thursday has the potential to be a disaster for American liberal education.
지난주 목요일 사태는 미국 인문 교육에 재난이 될 가능성이 있다.
지난주 미들버리 대학에서 봉변을 당한 찰스 머리Charles Murray 교수의 말
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“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin
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좌파들이 점령한 캘리포니아의 해변에 홈리스들이 텐트를 치고 살고 있으며, 범죄와 오물로 악취를 풍긴다는 소식이다.
Shocking Video Footage Of Sprawling California Tent City
by Tyler Durden
Mar 6, 2017
California, 1 of only 6 states where Democrats control the governship, statehouse (with a super-majority nonetheless) and state supreme court, is perfectly setup to implement a Bernie Sanders-inspired socialist utopia where everyone makes the same amount of money, enjoys limitless social programs and is never exposed to the horrors of gender-based bathroom signs.
And while liberals would like for you to believe that their socialist agenda is the cure for poverty (in addition to pretty much every other problem plaguing the world), California's reality paints a slightly different picture. In fact, in just the latest example that all is not well in California's socialist utopia, Dan Lyman recently exposed this shocking video footage of a sprawling tent city that is 'home' to an estimated 1,000 residents.
As Lyman points out, what was once a beautiful bike trail along the Pacific Ocean has now been transformed into a tent city, rife with crime, that reeks of garbage and human feces.
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