Today’s ‘Read the Whole Thingers’ (050707)
Arnold Kling at TCS Daily talks about the solution to poverty — and it isn’t central planning:
Poverty may fall in half in the next ten years even if we do not enact any of the recommendations of this task force (the Center for American Progress’s Task Force on Poverty). In fact, a reasonable guess is that the recommendations themselves would, if anything, slow the rate of progress against poverty.
The point of this essay is to simply state the obvious. If you look at poverty from the broad perspective of international and historical comparisons, the solution to poverty is decentralized entrepreneurial activity under capitalism.
The capitalist solution to poverty is unsatisfying to many people, because it is not planned or intended. Policymakers and anti-poverty programs per se are not involved.
….. The intentions of the anti-poverty crusaders are good. However, the results of centrally-planned anti-poverty efforts are small, and perhaps negative (certainly very negative in the case of Communism). Decentralized capitalism, in which no one sets out to broadly reduce poverty, is the best anti-poverty program.
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The Institute for Legal Reform published its Legal Climate Survey last week. Its description:
The 2007 State Liability Systems Ranking Study was conducted for the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform among a national sample of in-house general counsel or other senior corporate litigators to explore how reasonable and balanced the tort liability system is perceived to be by U.S. business.
Delaware’s legal climate came in best by a wide margin over #2 Minnesota. West Virginia’s was worst, trailing second-worst Mississippi badly. More locally, Ohio came in 24th, Indiana 8th, Kentucky 33rd, Michigan 23rd, and Illinois 46th.
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Teaching the children not so well — The guy has a point about illegal-immigrant parents:
Phil Magnan, director of Biblical Family Advocates, says the illegal immigrant movement in America is teaching children that they do not have to submit to the governing authorities.
“I’d considered the issue for quite some time and thought about the impact of parents actually ignoring the loss of the land and actually thinking in terms of that they were somehow entitled to the United States and what kind of lessons that actually teaches children,” Magnan notes. “And what I had seen was, in reality, their parents are, by their actions and their attitudes, actually teaching children that it’s okay to steal and that it’s okay to covet your neighbor’s goods,” he says.
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Don Luskin’s weekly SmartMoney.com column smacked down the bears and business press — both of whom deserve it:
The mentally vacuous pessimists and the brainless bears have been saying that the economy will soon slip into recession. They’ve been saying it will happen in the spring. And the summer. And the fall. And the winter. They’ve been wrong, wrong, wrong — but they’ve saying it for so long it’s become the conventional wisdom. In a recent poll, a majority of Americans said they think we are in a recession right now.
It goes to show how powerful the media is in forming opinions. With the unemployment rate at an ultra-low 4.4%, and with disposable personal income having grown 4.5% (even including inflation) in the first quarter, everybody really knows there’s no recession. In fact, in the same poll, a majority said that their own personal financial situation was just peachy. Yet the majority still somehow thinks that there’s a recession on. It’s just for everybody else, I guess.
