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Scott Adams's Political Survey of Economists
Buffaloaf writes "Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wanted to have unbiased information about which presidential candidate would be better for the economy, so he financed his own survey of 500 economists. He gives a bit more detail about the results in a CNN editorial, along with disclosure of his own biases and guesses as to the biases of the economists who responded."
Now we actually turn to Scott Adams for actual unbiased information about economics? Or, at least an attempt to explain the biases up-front? That just hurts my head!! :-P
Where's the punch line?
But, seriously, good on Scott Adams for actually doing this on his own. I think had anyone else tried to do this, we'd all be screaming loudly that they were inherently biased and had an agenda.
No matter how it goes, Adams will get more material for the strips. ;-)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's a surprise. Maybe enomomists make less money than I thought.
Are there any other stat sites like this out there? When my wife was in High School her poly-sci teacher handed out papers describing the different platforms and the candidates. Then took the students down to get registered. Does anyone do this anymore?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
That has to be one of the most thoroughly explained and analyzed surveys I've seen in a long time. The fact that he analyzed the leanings of the respondents and took that into account was really well done.
Now, can we also ask them who is really responsible for the current bank crisis (whether profit hungry execs, slimy people luring people into bad mortgages, people flipping houses and then wanting a bailout when burned, government policy...)?
My initial reaction was: There's far more Democratic economists than Republican ones. Perhaps their Democratic bias is because of their evaluation of who's better for the economy, and not the other way around?
I think probably the easiest way to prove this would be to show not just independents, but those who have switched from Republican to Democrat, or vice versa. Someone who's been Democratic for 50 years isn't likely to change their mind, and that could influence the economic evaluation.
However, someone who tends to think independently, even if they actually register with one party or another -- that is, someone who was recently the other party -- might provide a better indicator.
Then again, it's still impossible to tell. Maybe, long-term, Democrats have been better for the economy, and thus, economists tend to be long-time Democrats?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's not exactly inconclusive either. Obama was granted higher marks on everything except international trade which is not surprising, but still dramatically skews the results due to that issue's importance to the economy overall. One could argue that international trade has the lion's share of effect on the gdp, but I'm not convinced the economists were taking into account exports.
Obama's platform for international trade is to import less and export more. I would say that's effectively going to bolster our economy by boosting our gdp in the long run. But can he actually pull it off? The desired effect could take a few years to reach our gdp.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The plain fact is that the economists surveyed think Obama would be better for the economy, by almost two-to-one. It's kind of sad how Adams had to dress the fact up by noting how many were Democrats vs. Republicans, essentially declaring it a tie:
Despite his own strong evidence that the economists were being objective -- their own income levels did not correlate to whether they thought the rich should be taxed -- he doesn't even tell us the plain fact until after he dresses it up.
His CNN writeup was an excuse to repeat three times that he would have his taxes raised by Obama. Well yeah, he makes zillions of dollars. No mention of Obama's plan to cut taxes, for almost everyone, by more than McCain's plan.
I look forward to his next survey of economists, in which he asks which is better economically, capitalism or communism, and then weights the results before revealing them. ("Not surprisingly, 88% of market-favoring economists think capitalism would be best, while 80% of socialist economists pick communism. Our economists favor capitalism on 11 of the top 13 issues, but keep in mind that" etc.)
That's like saying you should ask burger flippers at McDonalds what the long-term growth strategy for the company should be.
Economics is fundamentally different from accounting, they are barely even related fields.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Both wish for more government manipulation of the economy. Obama would like absolute government control of services arbitrarily deemed as necessary (in order to buy votes). McCain, under the guise of "free market", offers false choices under a government-controlled system. McCain wants you to believe that you can have the benefits of a free market through government regulation - that, somehow, socialism with (forced) choices will not fail. All they're saying is, "pick your poison - and there's no option not to be poisoned."
All you have left is to determine which system will lead to a faster or slower death, and decide which death is more preferable.
From time to time, Scott will do something interesting and write it up on his blog. I subscribed to his blog for a while, but I ended up unsubscribing because of the over-the-top sarcasm and overall negative tone. It just didn't feel healthy to *read* it.
The fact that Adams has attached himself to a medium through which he distributes mockery as social commentary is really not surprising to me at all. I know smart people who are trying to make the world a better place by making positive things happen, so it frustrates me that Adams won't just drop all the grudges and stop acting so defensively. We need more smart people on the offense, starting awesome new projects and using their creativity to lift people up.
It's a racist epithet referring to black people.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
From the CNN article:
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, ...
Then maybe you are in the wrong tax bracket. Try being in mine for a while. I think most people would prefer to be in a tax bracket that gets taxed like that and keep the rest, rather than where they are now.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think it's really cool that Scott Adams paid for this survey. And I was impressed by his analysis of the results. But I am not sure how much value there is in the result.
Democrat economists favored Obama (88%!). Republican economists favored McCain (80%!). Independents (who, as Scott Adams pointed out, are mostly in academia) favored Obama (just barely: 46% Obama to 39% McCain). Not really earthshaking results nor unexpected. Maybe he should ask for his money back.
Really, the biggest surprise to me is how solidly the recommendations aligned with the political party of the recommending economist. It makes me wonder whether economics is really that subjective, or whether ideology is trumping objectivity here.
I was amused that Scott Adams described himself as "Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff". I could say the same. My own recommendation: vote for gridlock. Since Congress is in the hands of the Democrats, vote for the Republican candidate, just to put some quicksand under the wheels of big government.
My favorite quote:
Heh. Scott Adams is a comedic genius. Actually, I think we can shorten that to: Scott Adams is a genius.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Wow, the economists have joined the parties that they think are best for the economy. Shocking.
Not even this is surprising:
In January 2009, the total national debt will be the same, regardless of whoever is going to become president. This is a massive drag on the economy.
Furthermore, this is just a president, not a central committee chairman. The president obviously has some power, but he's definitely in second place. The part of government that has the most influence over the economy (congress), isn't getting nearly as much media coverage for their elections, as the president is. The next truly economy-related election is in two years, not in two months.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
But, assuming that Adams was unbiased in his selection of samples (I haven't read TFA), we can conclude that there are more democratic economists than republican. Maybe that alone tells us something about who's better at running the economy.
What?
The Scott Adams commentary contained this provocative remark:
Some of you will wonder how reliable a bunch of academics are when it comes to answering real life questions about the economy. You might prefer to know what CEOs think. But remember that CEOs are paid to be advocates for their stockholders, not advocates for voters. Asking CEOs what should be done about the economy is like asking criminals for legal advice.
Presumably criminals stand to benefit by giving others bad legal advice, and as criminals they could not be trusted to forgo personal gain for the principle of honesty. Likewise, CEOs stand to benefit by harming the economy and could not be trusted to forgo personal gain for the sake of improving the economic welfare of the nation.
Do CEOs benefit from a bad economy? "Yay! business is looking up because the economy is failing!". It is a more daft than deft analogy.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
From TFA:
Man, that's sad. He's making more than 200K (must be, or the O-man's plan has him in line for a tax cut), and *that's* his whole basis for voting? No cocern for society as a whole huh? Just your own personal pocketbook. I guess in that case the %98 of the rest of us should blindly vote Democratic, as we'll get a tax cut.
Let's not even mention the fact that he's not actually going to *raise* taxes on the rich, so much as rescind the huge "temporary" emergency tax cut Bush pushed through in his first term as an "economic stimulus package". That economic experiment sure worked well, didn't it?
The results demonstrate that democratic economists lean left and republicans lean right. Economics ought to be unbaised. The fact that it is baised indicatse that economists can't be trusted to understand economic issues objectively.
It says nothing of the sort. You assume that being "liberal" makes you see economics in a certain way. There's also the possibility that through a study of economics, you come to be a Democrat or Republican.
The big question is, what is meant by "the economy"? Are we talking pure growth in GDP, or an equitable distribution of wealth, as well?
The question is, if there's a disagreement in science (like, say, about how life on Earth started), should we look at intelligent design "scientists" and evolutionary biologists and say, "Wow, there's a disagreement about the origin of life! Therefore, scientists cannot be trusted to understand the issue objectively!" Umm.... what a scary world that would be.
It appears that the Bush administration did see a train wreck coming:
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
So see why the free market couldn't correct earlier check this commentary out:
Financial Markets Are in a Mess
The results demonstrate that democratic economists lean left and republicans lean right.
That's actually not what it says. It says that among economists, those who believe Democrats are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate, and those who believe Republicans are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate. That's pretty rational behavior.
It also tells us a significant but not overwhelming majority believe Democrats are more likely to be good.
There is no real information about how biased the thinking process that helped them arrive at these conclusions was.
Tweet, tweet.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion." - George Bernard Shaw
CEOs are hired for who they know, not what they know. Their contacts lead to favourable contracts and favours from politicians. In other words, they are the private sector version of politicians. These are frat people and as long as their staff can keep them out of making stupid decisions, they are worth it to the stockholders.
It's the exceptional CEO that knows about stuff as well as knowing about people.
Out of curiosity, how would you explain the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of budget deficets by Reagen, Bush I, and Bush II, all 'fiscal conservative' Republicans, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of budget surpluses of Clinton, a 'tax and spend liberal?'
Honest question.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Woah, what? How is this subjectivity so surprising? Let Uncy DanOrc451 tell you a story here from the frontlines of objective academic science from the perspective of a bemused non-scientist observer.
I was at MIT a few months ago picking up my brother to go play tennis, and I witnessed a practical fistfight break out between two teams of scientists. Apparently, a physics experiment of some kind was being run by two academic teams across some departmental boundary, one focusing on theory and the other focusing on actually conducting the experiment for the theory guys.
Bypassing the technical gobbledygook they were (literally) screaming at each other and focusing on the English bits, it became apparent that the situation was this: the experiment failed to confirm the theory. The theory folks were furious at the experimental folks since they clearly must have been incompetent and done the experiment wrong; their theory was perfect and beautiful. The experimental folks were furious at the ivory tower theory folks for refusing to accept the results of their clearly valid experiment, since that was what the scientific method was all about in the end.
What was striking about it was the fury and the absolute certainty that their work and worldview on either side was right, and that each thought the other half didn't really "get what science was all about."
I really thought we were going to have some broken glasses on our hands. It was quite a scene, and "objective" would be about the last conceivable word you'd apply to the situation.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
And, since there were more than 3x as many Democrats in the pool as Republicans, I would assume that many of the "Independents" were also left-leaning. For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
It's entirely possible that the field makes liberals instead of attracting them. I suspect that the important factor is less "being an economist" than being an academic. Non-academic types go into industry, and (I'd imagine) would be more likely to be rightists.
One other factor: the economic mode of analysis encourages nonjudgementalism regarding individual decision-making, so I suspect that economists would tend to be socially liberal, whatever their fiscial position.
The one fact that jumped out at me though was the lack of correlation between the economists' view on taxation and their own income. This single fact mutes my own cynicism.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, give the windfall to a bunch of clowns with a 14 percent approval rating (Congress), and hope they spend it wisely. Unfortunately, the alternative to the guy who promises to pillage my wallet is a lukewarm cadaver. I'm in trouble either way.
if you check out those sentences, you may think that the republican administrations up to date, especially this administration, havent taken cash out of his pocket. and democrats, supposedly, take cash from your pocket, and give it to senate to waste. how simple. but also, how stupid.
...
yea republican administration didnt increase your taxes, up until now. but what did they do instead ? they used EXISTING public funds and wasted them on foreign wars and crap, totaling to $400bn/year for iraq, ALONE.
spent money, has to come from somewhere, right ? sure. and since these republicans are the puppet of big business, and they cant tax them, and since they wont tax you also, what can they do ? they used existing public funds from ELSEWHERE. juggled all kinds of government funds, issued bonds, sold bonds to chinese and so on.
i dont think there is anybody among you who would be stupid as to not understand that these spendings, these debts are going to be paid from somewhere.
from where ?
not the little green men, for sure. YOU are going to pay it. EVEN IF it doesnt come directly from your pocket in the form of taxes.
and here you have, a financial disaster, in which you not only sank yourselves, but dragged ENTIRE world down with you. what a shame, what ignorance, what foolishness. EVERYone of us on the globe, suffering because of this.
'deregulation' 'hands off business'
economy is another SOCIAL aspect of human life. as with every social aspect of life, because there are more than one person involved, there are going to be opportunists, schemers, bastards, criminals, fraudsters, every kind of people.
if you do "hands off", that basically means that all these ill willed elements of the society will be free to roam as they like in that field of life.
and so it did happen. some smartyboys came up with a scheme to make quick bucks over another segment of society, painted some high risk loans so nicely that low income people were lured to take them, and then also sold bonds tied to these high risk loans not only nationally but internationally. and, because 'hands off business', they werent regulated, overseen, controlled and checked if they were attempting anything fishy.
way to go.
now we are all headed towards the bottom of the trash can, globally.
and yet, a person like scott adams, STILL talks about 'take money from my pocket with taxes'.
HELLOOOOOOOO !!!?!?!?! with this goddamn global crisis, more cash is going to get out of your pocket than democrats can EVER tax out of you !!!
holy cow.
people, it happened. it should NOT have happened, but it happened.
so please, this time, be smart, think long term, and elect someone who is not as idiot as to still say "deregulation" every other sentence.
Read radical news here
For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
Maybe that's why republicans think you can cut taxes and increase spending and everything will work out okay.
OK, I'll bite.
The truth is that for the last 50 years or so, the "profession" of "economist" has attracted what you would call "liberals" (or what I would call "statists") who believe in increased government control of or interference in economic affairs.
Since the late 1940s Keynesian macroeconomics have been the fashion with the vast majority of economists. Therefore, economics has tended to attract people who agree with his theories, ie. central government planning of the economy.
Keynesian theories are regarded as "gospel" for most economists. People who view it as wrong are generally not considered "credible." It's not hard to see how this profession would then attract people with a similar political philosophy.
From there, it's not such a stretch to see a fairly heavy statist-leaning bias in this survey of economists.
N.B. : I am not saying one or the other is right, nor faulting Scott Adams in least. I'm merely trying to point out the flaws inherent in the system....
http://clightnirish.wordpress.com/
A "fucking cartoonist"?
How many books have you written? Have you started your own food company yet?
Wealthy people don't get that way by being lazy, son.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'll try to help out here, though I'm probably a poor substitute for BAG.
See, Republicans are Fords. And Democrats are Toyotas. And Scott Adams has surveyed a bunch of auto industry employees about whether the industry would do better with the CEo of Ford or the CEO of Toyota running the entire auto industry.
More Toyota employees respond to the survey than Ford employees. It turns out that most employees of Toyota say the CEO of Toyota would make the auto industry better; most employees of Ford say that the CEO of Ford would do a better job.
Wait, who am I kidding. Even the employees of Ford know that the top brass at Ford are idiots.
Let's give this another shot:
The economy is a Ford Explorer. The tires on the car (the Republican machine) all agree that the car won't go anywhere if they aren't in charge, even though they are bald and going flat. The transmission (the Democratic machine) thinks that only changing gears can save the car. The engine (the "captains of industry") knows it's really in charge, but lets the tires and transmission duke it out for symbolic control of the car. Palin is the rear spoiler and the neons, pretty but do nothing for performance. Biden is the horn, but more apt to annoy everyone when he makes noise. Nader is the cataliytic converter, and Ron Paul is the loose lugnuts on the tires.
But it doesn't matter, because there are Toyotas and Hondas and Hyundais and Nissans and tons of other cars that are out-competing us... and the truth of the matter is that we need to scrap the Explorer.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Poor people DON'T PAY TAXES, particularly on the scale that the middle class-upward does.
Actually, the deficit is the annual contribution to the debt.
I think that pretty much sums-up the situation in the USA. People don't even talk about the debt anymore. The most you can hope for is talk of reducing the rate at which you are adding to the debt.
Scott Adams is an idiot. He had a funny take on the other idiots who surrounded him in his PacTel cubicle in the 1990s, but that's just the idiot leading the idiots. Read his "Dogbert management books" for business insights that aren't even funny, in ways that show he actually knows as little about business management as the idiots he mocks.
Here's Adams' latest demonstration of his idiocy, in this stupid (and not funny) editorial:
The surge escalation has failed. Of course throwing tens of thousands of new US troops at a civil war will succeed in beating back the enemies, making them less likely to try attacks than when the US military was spread too thin to intimidate. No one questions whether our military is good at killing and intimidating enemies, when Washington (run by Bush and McCain's Republican Party) isn't keeping them too weak to do the job.
But the surge's job wasn't just to drop the killing. That was a means to an end, to create a political opportunity that was totally squandered. The Iraqi government is a farce that hasn't governed anything, even when we give it a break in the action during which it can concentrate on governing. It has failed. And since the purpose of the surge escalation has failed, the surge has failed. Anyone saying any different just thinks that the purpose of war is to kill. It's not, and those people have lost the Iraq War since they started it.
But hey, if the surge worked, then we won. Let's get the hell out of there already. Not stay the "100 years, maybe forever" that McCain thinks equals victory. If we've got to keep troops there, we're losing. Only getting out of there is any real measure of victory.
Yeah, and then he totally ignored that most economists are Democrats. Because people who understand the economy vote for Democrats. Even among Republican economists, more Republicans support Obama than Democrat economists for McCain. That speaks much more than what Adams' single datapoint survey says.
Of course, that is what every single American (who isn't crazy) says about their political bias.
And there we have the basic evidence of Scott Adams idiocy. Or rather, his lying. Obama might be raising Adams' taxes, if he makes over $250,000 a year. He's almost certainly not going to raise yours. You can see for yourself with the Obama Tax Cut Web Calculator, which takes 15 seconds and 3 status facts about you to show you the dollar amount of your Obama tax cut.
Adams is a rich guy who makes his money satirizing incompetents running big orgs. His pocketbook is threatened by Obama because he's made so much more money than most people, benefited so much more than most people, from the exact kinds of idiots he needs in power for him to sell more books and cartoons. He's as scared of McCain as he is of Obama, because though he believes McCain won't tax him (but the country would fall apart, an expensive proposition even for a cartoonist who has to live in it), because McCain is boring. Which means he won't be a good c
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make install -not war
have a strong feeling that if they were polled the results would be heavily skewed towards the candidate that is not announcing large tax increases...
Well, let's get past taxes for a minute.
You have a government of size X. You need funds to pay for that government.
It would be nice if that government could be pared down to a more reasonable size. Every president in my lifetime has promised that. Interestingly, the ones who were most philosophically aligned to do so have done the least to actually do so. How much of that is due to the political difficulties of asking Congress to defund projects to their constituents, and how much of that is because they were being dishonest to one degree or another I will leave to the reader.
The fact is that not one president in the last 30 years I have been paying attention to these things has shrunk the federal government. If you think the next one will, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and I are having a party at my place on Friday. Come by, we'd like to hang out.
Back to reality, as an elected politician, you have a few choices as to how to raise money to pay for the functions of government.
Borrow it from the capital markets and let your successor worry about how to pay for it (strangely popular!)
Raise taxes on the broad base of taxpayers and risk their ire and having them vote you out of office.
Raise taxes on a small percentage of people at the top, knowing their assets are much more fungible than the bottom 95%, and that if they are overtaxed, you will be in the uncomfortable position of having lost both a large part of your revenue base and a large segment of the capital that makes the economy possible.
I don't particularly want my taxes raised, or anyone else's. At the same time, we've had this narrative for the last 8 years that
a) If you slash taxes on the top few percent, the capital markets will flood over and the economy will explode! (it has, but not quite the way we were promised).
b) If you raise taxes etc. etc., you'll ruin everything. This ignores that the marginal tax rates through much of the era from WWII through the early 1980s had confiscatory rates (90%) on the top end.
For the record, you'll never see a 90% tax rate ever again. The modern economy wouldn't support it. At the same time, the argument for regressive taxation is growing pretty thin.
The problem has existed for at least 7 years. It seems to be caused by the fact that Slashdot's page counter doesn't handle nested threads well. It will only create a new page at a top-level thread, so where there are 3-4 pages of one thread, none of the other threads will show up until you've made it to some arbitrary point in the page list where the algorithm punts you to the next top-level comment.
It's been a long time.
In Scott Adams's survey of members of the American Economic Association, he found 48% Democrats, 17% Republicans, 27% Independents, 3% Libertarian, and 5% Other or not registered. However, in this working paper by Gross and Simmons (at Harvard and GMU, respectively), surveying economists working in academia, they find 34.3% Democrats, 37.1% Independents, and 28.6% Republicans.
Anyone have ideas on what's up with the disparities in the statistics? The only explanation I can think of is that the AEA includes economists in the public sector, where (as one might expect) folks tend to favor government intervention in the economy.
(By the way, for anyone curious, the stats for academia as a whole are 45.2% Democrats, 38.9% Independents, and 15.9% Republicans. In English it's 51.0/47.1/2.0, in computer science it's 32.3/58.1/9.7, and in electrical engineering it's 13.2/55.3/31.6)
The 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 budgets had total spending for the year lower than total income for the year, not based on any sort of future payoff. Those were the first surplus budgets since 1969's small surplus. The deficit returned as soon as Clinton left office, as all of Bush's budgets have been in deficit.
See the CBO data, the past 15 years of which Wikipedia nicely graphs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Academia as a whole is fairly left-leaning, but economics departments are probably the most conservative field of academia. Where do you think the underpinnings of the libertarian philosophy were carried out? In university economics departments, in the U.S. centered around the University of Chicago's.
Of course, it depends on what kind of conservatism you're looking for. If you're looking for free-market, minimal-regulation, efficient-capitalism, free-trade sorts of conservatism, it's not only still present but probably the dominant position in American economics departments, the so-called "neoliberal consensus" (the "liberal" in "neoliberal" is not very closely related to modern American political liberalism). Only a minority of American economists take any sort of strong opposition to that in favor of social democracy or socialism or anything of that sort.
If you're looking for something more narrowly political, like people who think George Bush's (or Ronald Reagan's) economic policies are good, well yes, you'll look more in vain, but not really because of anything to do with liberals vs. conservatives; more because supply-side economics has never been widely respected among even the conservative wing of economists.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let's play the monopoly game. You have a market monopoly, and I'll name a monopoly propped up by government. Last person to name a monopoly wins. I'll go first, so the game will be over sooner. Your local water company is a monopoly. Now you go. You'll name Microsoft sooner or later. In spite of its being propped up by copyright law, I'll give you that one out of pity. Now I'll go. Your local sewer company is also a monopoly. Now it's your turn again.
I'm waiting....
Nothing? I thought not.
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Oh, and did you know that the government FORCED banks to make CRA loans? "CRAP" loans are more like it. Countrywide was very proud of how well they complied with the law -- how many CRA loans they made .... and where are they now?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I will never forget a conversation I had with a Dutch friend while visiting Holland.
The Dutch, in general, are a fairly conservative people overall. (yes, I know - generalization....)
So we got to talking about the conservative people vs the liberal laws they have regarding social issues. I asked him about this apparent contradiction and I will never forget his reply: "Holland is a very very diverse country. The alternative to social liberalism is chaos. There are so many different groups with different beliefs that we have to have liberal laws".
Which is exactly opposite of what we seem to do here in America. There's a lesson in there somewhere.....
The point is that were you to remove that structure, big competing companies would merge into monopolies, to the detriment of the economy, and history has demonstrated this, yeilding a legal structure to prevent that "bug" in the capitalist model.
In the 1930's, lots of banking regulations were put into place in response to the collapses of the Great Depression. A few years ago, we had major banking deregulation. Now we have the current mortgage crisis, because we let loose one of the bugs in the capitalist system -- people will take loans that they can pay in the short term but not in the long term, if you let them.
That doesn't mean capitalism is wrong or broken, it just means that capitalism only works with some amount of regulation; and some folks seem to forget that from time to time. Can there be too much regulation? Sure! But there can also be too little.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Russ, your 'monopoly game' is completely specious.
It ignores the fact that most of the state-supported monopolies are in markets that would support natural monopolies if it weren't for government intervention.
While the implementation has been wrought with problems, "state-supported monopolies" exist to restrict the actions of what would naturally be a monopoly anyway.
So, in order to make your game less specious, let's change the requirements a bit. With the exceptions of patents (since they are outside the realm of this short discussion), you name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does not tend towards monopoly, and I'll name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does.
Ready... set... go.
[crickets]
The fact of the matter is that there is no perfect free market, and market inefficiencies tend towards monopoly. Even within the Austrian school of economic thought, it's required that correction be made for monopolies in order for models to work efficiently.
And I'll note that copyright law does not enforce monopoly. Copyrighted works are not commodity goods.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This policy resulted in a greater flow of money throughout the economy - because when people who aren't rich get money, they are much more likely to spend it.
Clinton then invested the money received into infrastructure and programs for the poor and middle class - further empowering them to lift themselves up, and the economy with them.
THEN the Gingrich GOP started demanding tax cuts, and Clinton steadfastly refused - going as far as shutting down the actual government because Clinton kept vetoing them. They wanted trickle-down fantasy tax cuts - Clinton wanted to pay down the debt. Thus we got the surplus.
Every President that's tried trickle-down: massive debt. The one president so far that's tried tax cuts for the poor and middle-class: one of the greatest economic upturns of the last 100 years.
Thats' how it is. Reality actually may have a liberal bias.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Life is abundant near oil rigs, in fact, much more so than in open locations. The food chain begins with the platform's legs and goes all the way up to the top rung of predator fish. They are protected from over fishing because the trawlers can't get near, and sport fishing doesn't take enough to harm the population. Diving is usually pretty good, too, with lots of visibility. Some studies indicate that less oil seepage comes from off shore platforms than from natural leakage (Santa Barbara is a case in point).
Impetuous! Homeric!
"Corporations are treated legally as individuals because they must be in order to have liability. Are you opposed to that?"
There is no reason that liability and "individual" have to go together. Laws (and courts) created corporations and their "personhoood" and can be changed.
In any case, corporations are designed to prevent personal liability. The only liability they have is monetary and that only really applies to their shareholders. You can't put corporations in jail. They can be immortal.
"I don't see how you can say that someone has property rights but then dictate how they can use their property."
The same way we dictate limitations to other rights. Owning property and the use of it are two different things. Related yes, but not the same.
The thing that tips economists is, I suspect, the same thing that tips most other analytical minds: the Republican party has been steadily tightening ties to the religious right. While religion is not uncommon among thinkers, secularism is more common, and evangelicalism is generally distrusted as too prescriptive and intolerant
nope, as a degreed economist, the thing which tips competent economists is the republican attachment to reaganomics.
reaganomics attacks the consumption side of the GDP equation, which also happens to be the largest portion.
It places implicit trust in agents who have no real liability, and are subject to moral hazard which republican economic policy-makers ignore.
It ignores the long-term consequences of allowing producers to put the squeeze on their labor (hint: you become unable to sell what you make, and... and this is a very relevant one today... people are financially unable to support a home purchase)
There are numerous other aspects of economic policy which incompetent politicians on both sides ignore: such as the fact that offshoring as a multiple-round game results in destruction of the middle class, but that's a discussion for another time.
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Corporations are treated legally as individuals because they must be in order to have liability. Are you opposed to that? It seems important. . .
I think he's for that, but you aren't. For example, Ford knew that the Pinto would kill people. They made them anyway. The bean counters said it would be cheaper. And, after it was discovered that they were killing people for profit, they were sued. If not for the discovery of the memo that revealed this, it probably would have been cheaper to kill people, go to court, lose, and keep going.
Now, if I were to kill someone for profit, as an individual, would I be allowed to continue my business that previously resulted in the deaths of people, as well as never see the inside of a jail cell? If you think that a hitman who killed people for profit should go to jail, then you are anti-corporation.
I don't see how you can say that someone has property rights but then dictate how they can use their property.
I have the right to bear arms. I do not have the right to use them on you. Is that a simple enough description of how someone can "own" something and still not have 100% control over how it is used?
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