Paul M. Jones

[C]onventional wisdom, especially among progressives, is that money can buy elections. The Citizens United case was supposed to be the end of democracy since it meant unlimited corporate spending on elections.  If money really did buy office, 2012 should have been great evidence for the hypothesis.  

Instead 2012 looks like a case study in the powerlessness of money, in the triumph of the autonomous voter.  For instance, the Sunlight Foundation reports that 2/3 of outside cash was spent on losers.

via Money Has Little Influence on U.S. Politics, Garett Jones | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

It's not just that many voters are socially liberal and prioritize social issues, causing Republicans to lose a portion of the electorate every Election Day based on those issues. Of course, that's true, but Republicans have a broader problem: their positions on social issues are turning off many voters from the very idea of agreeing with them on any issue. Conservatives like to bring up "the law of unintended consequences." Well, how many professional Republicans are willing to face the fact that their party's retrograde positions on social issues have been inadvertently holding economic conservatism hostage?

via Jaltcoh: How can Republicans win after 2012?.

[R]estore the 20 percent excise tax on motion picture theater gross revenues that existed between the end of World War II and its repeal in the mid-1950s. The campaign to end the excise tax had studio executives and movie stars talking like Art Laffer, as they noted that high taxes reduced business income, hurt investment and cost jobs.

The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two. Deficits are high again, and there's already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like. But in these financially perilous times, why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman's day -- when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.

For extra fun, they could show pictures of David Geffen's yacht and John Travolta's personal Boeing 707 on the Senate floor. You want to tax fat cats? I gotcher "fat cats" right here! Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

via Sunday Reflection: Repeal the Hollywood tax cuts! | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Egypt’s streets have long been a perilous place for women, who are frequently heckled, grabbed, threatened and violated while the police look the other way. Now, during the country’s tumultuous transition from authoritarian rule, more and more groups are emerging to make protecting women -- and shaming the do-nothing police -- a cause.

“They’re now doing the undoable?” a police officer joked as he watched the vigilantes chase down the young man. The officer quickly went back to sipping his tea.

The attacks on women did not subside after the uprising. If anything, they became more visible as even the military was implicated in the assaults, stripping female protesters, threatening others with violence and subjecting activists to so-called virginity tests. During holidays, when Cairenes take to the streets to stroll and socialize, the attacks multiply.

But during the recent Id al-Adha holiday, some of the men were surprised to find they could no longer harass with impunity, a change brought about not just out of concern for women’s rights, but out of a frustration that the post-revolutionary government still, like the one before, was doing too little to protect its citizens.

via Egyptian Vigilantes Crack Down on Abuse of Women - NYTimes.com.

Some low-wage employers are moving toward hiring part-time workers instead of full-time ones to mitigate the health-care overhaul's requirement that large companies provide health insurance for full-time workers or pay a fee.

Several restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to limit schedules of hourly workers to less than 30 hours a week. That is the threshold at which large employers in 2014 would have to offer workers a minimum level of insurance or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 for each worker.

Via Health Law Spurs Shift in Hours - Yahoo! Finance.

Depression? Anxiety? Listen to Ed Finkler talk about his experiences. This is a great act of generosity from Ed and well worth your time.

On today’s Very Special Episode of /dev/hell, we talk about Ed’s struggles with depression and anxiety, and how it’s impacted him as a member of the open source community. Yeah, we know, total buzzkill, but this is important stuff. We hope that by talking about it, folks with similar issues will be more likely to seek help.

via Episode 15: Whack Job Central - /dev/hell.

It's not enough that there be no laws against so-called "price gouging. We also have to acknowledge the reluctance of sellers to raise prices when they expect negative customer sentiment afterwards.

There were no laws against price gouging. But the petrol stations knew that every single customer would hate them if they were the only station to let prices rise such that supply and demand came back into equilibrium. And so because the stations didn’t gouge, we were in a terrible equilibrium where everyone’s rational response to the below-clearing price was to hoard, because there was real risk that the stations would run out of fuel. And there was real risk of running out of fuel because of the hoarding. Breaking the hoarding equilibrium would have required a coordinated price hike that both allocated fuel to its highest valued uses and told everyone that there would be fuel available for them in an emergency if they really really needed it. That latter part is crucial – it kills the incentive to hoard.

How to solve that particular problem? Via When the hoarding equilibrium sets in.

When the government delivers something, even in an atrocious and/or wasteful fashion, it gets credit for caring. Take Medicare -- the market could distribute all the health care dollars and services in a far more efficient manner, but then people would have no one to thank.

Markets just work, in a stunningly efficient and yet thankless way. Why?

The problem is one of agency. The agent of a government is a politician whom the people have placed in office for the management of government services. The beneficiaries of this agency are both the people (Food stamps! Auto bailouts!) and the politicians themselves (votes from food stamp recipients). Because the recipients of the goodies see a direct causal line from government to their mouths, they do not see the politician as acting in his own interest (basically bribing voters into keeping him in power). The voter thinks of his vote as a reward.

But who are the agents of the "market?" Businessmen. Their activity benefits the people, as well, of course. But the benefits to the people in the businessman's case are unintended -- his prime objective, about which he is nearly always straightforward, is to enrich himself.

So, "who you gonna trust?" A greedy, selfish businessman whose activities benefit you in a spectacular fashion by accident, or a paternalistic government that takes care of you dismally, though on purpose? Sadly for many, the questions of agency and purpose trump the only metric that really matters in economics -- results.

via Markets or government: Whom do you trust? | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Intense competition by new entrants, who put old companies out of business or force unwelcome and disruptive changes. Microsoft displaced IBM, and Google is displacing Microsoft. Walmart displaced Sears, and Amazon.com may displace Wal?Mart. Typewriter companies didn't invent the world processor, nor did they adapt. The post office didn't invent FedEx or email. Kodak is out of business. Toyota gave us cheaper and better cars, not Ford/GM/Chrysler competition. When the older businesses survive, it is only the pressure from new entrants that forces them to adapt.

...

So, where are the Walmarts and Southwest Airlines of health care? They are missing, and for a rather obvious reason: regulation and legal impediments.

A small example: In Illinois as in 35 other states7, every new hospital, or even major purchase, requires a "certificate of need." This certificate is issued by our "hospital equalization board," appointed by the governor (insert joke here) and regularly in the newspapers for various scandals. The board has an explicit mandate to defend the profitability of existing hospitals. It holds hearings at which they can complain that a new entrant would hurt their bottom line.

via You Should Repeatedly Read Cochrane's "After the ACA", Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

Anthropomorphizing the collective – that is, assuming that this mythically single-minded collective possesses a set of ordered preferences that are analogous to a set of ordered preferences of a sort that is possessed and acted upon by each flesh-and-blood individual – and assuming, in addition, that actions by the state faithfully reflect and pursue these preferences, is a never-ending source of deep confusion.

If it is stipulated that Jones and Smith are one entity – that Jones and Smith are to each other much like a person’s left side is to that same person’s right side – then if Jones, say, steals $1,000 from Smith, no relevant harm is done.  Jones and Smith are assured by some furiously typing professor that they “stole” it from themselves.  Smith possesses $1,000 less than before; Jones possesses $1,000 more than before.  Being, by assumption, the same entity – “Jonessmith” – this collective entity Jonessmith bothers itself unnecessarily if it should worry that it might be made worse off if its Jones part routinely snatches resources from its Smith part.

Likewise, if the Jones part borrows money from the Smith part: the furiously typing professor – who sees “Jonessmith,” rather than Jones and Smith – concludes that the Jones’s-part obligation to repay the Smith-part cannot possibly be a burden to “Jonessmith” because, well, Jonessmith is a single entity.  It owes it to itself.  Therefore, concludes the furiously typing professor, it is naive to worry about the amounts of money that the Jones part of Jonessmith owes to the Smith part of Jonessmeith – and, hence, equally naive to worry that the Jones part of Jonessmith might today be borrowing (quaint word here!) too much from the Smith part of Jonessmith.

via Quotation of the Day….