The Policeman Is Not Your Friend, 2nd Denver Edition
[UPDATE below.]
Yikes, just six days ago I posted a video of Denver cops beating up a guy who was standing there, talking on his cell phone. To counteract the inevitable “hey man, this is one bad apple, I bet you call the cops when a guy breaks into your house” comments, I mentioned that I come across videos like this weekly.
Well, this time we came in ahead of schedule. David Kramer over at LRC tips us off to this video. Cops pulled a car over and ticketed a guy for running a stop sign, and a guy walking his dog went up to tell the driver, “If you want, I’ll testify in court that you stopped at the stop sign.”
Naturally, the police put him in the hospital.
UPDATE: A few more thoughts on this:
(1) In addition to putting a guy in the hospital for daring to mess with their Ways & Means Committee, the cops here probably were ticketing a guy who actually stopped at the sign. I mean, if I’m out walking my dog and see cops stop someone who blew through a stop sign, I’m probably not going to “fight the power” by walking up and offering to lie to help a guy who might have run me over or hit my dog.
(2) For those of you who dismiss these types of videos by saying, “Well, I’m not a black guy in my 20s,” or, “I don’t wear baseball caps sideways and go to strip clubs at 2 am,” how do you feel about this one? This was a white guy walking his dogs, and his apparent offense was offering to help someone who apparently was being wrongly fined. So that means in order for you to “keep your head down” at this point, not only do you have to be white and not hang out in rough neighborhoods at night, but you also have to keep your mouth shut when you see cops breaking the law.
(3) Am I the only one who is shocked at the comfort with which these keeps methodically beat this guy up, in broad daylight and with traffic going by? Wouldn’t you think that the cop on the left would have hesitated to openly punch the guy several times, knowing there could be a bunch of witnesses?
Tom Taylor on Austrian Accounting
Tom Taylor, author of an underappreciated primer on Austrian economics, just so happened to email me (about one of my Mises Daily articles) when a Free Advice reader had asked me about accounting books that were Austrian-friendly. Since Taylor is an accounting guy at Wake Forest, I asked him. Here’s his answer (reprinted with permission):
Unfortunately to my knowledge there are no accounting texts that explicitly take on an Austrian thrust. But conventional Managerial/Cost Accounting is easily connected to Austrian thought regarding cost of production (alternative/opportunity costs), transfer pricing, as well as the socialist calculation problem. As to Financial Accounting, i.e., reporting to external parties including investors and creditors, the entrenched paradigm has aspects which can be seen as Austrian-like although it is never explicit as such and is non-Austrian in many other important aspects.
Does a Bad Bet Become Good, When the Stakes Are Raised?
Suppose you were at the casino and you were playing the minimum $10 bet at a Blackjack table. You get a 6 and your heart sinks. The dealer gives himself an Queen and you feel particularly devastated. But then your next card is a 4. You are so giddy you’re about to double down.
The guy to your left is a sharp whiz kid who knows all the right people and goes to all the cool parties. He tells you authoritatively, “Dude, you don’t want to double that against a dealer 10, at least if you’re playing Basic Strategy. You haven’t been counting cards I take it?”
You sheepishly agree and pull back your $10 chip.
But then you are stunned to see that the whiz kid slides forward another $500 chip to double his own bet. He has a 7 and a 3.
You ask him what he’s doing, and he explains, “Oh, I just lost my job. So it’s really important for me to walk out of here with a lot of money today.”
If you enjoyed that story, you might like this analysis of occupational licensing from Matt Yglesias (HT2 Alex Tabarrok):
A number of people, including many commenters here and even alleged conservative James Joyner think you should need a professional license to become a barber because you might hurt someone with a straight razor. Uh huh. At best this would be an argument for regulating people who do shaves with a straight razor, which would be considerably narrower than current comprehensive regulation of hair stylists.
Meanwhile, though “torts and the free market will take care of it” isn’t the answer to everything, it’s surely the answer to some things. Getting some kind of training before you shave a dude with a straight razor is obviously desirable in terms of strict self-interest. If you screw it up in a serious way, you’ll face serious personal consequences and the only way to make money doing it—and we’re talking about a very modest sum of money—is to do it properly. People also ought to try to think twice about whether their views are being driven by pure status quo bias. Barbers are totally unregulated in the United Kingdom, is there some social crisis resulting from this? Barber regulations differ from state to state, are the stricter states experiencing some kind of important public health gains?
Last you really do need to look at how these things play out in practice. If you just assume optimal implementation of regulation, then regulation always looks good. But as I noted in the initial post the way this works in practice is the boards are dominated by incumbent practitioners looking to limit supply. One result is that in Michigan (and perhaps elsewhere) it’s hard for ex-convicts to get barber licenses which harms the public interest not only by raising the cost of haircuts, but by preventing people from making a legitimate living. States generally don’t grant reciprocity to other states’ licensing boards, which limits supply even though no rational person worries about state-to-state variance in barber licensing when they move to a New Place. In New Jersey, you need to take the straight razor shaving test to cut women’s hair because they’re thinking up arbitrary ways to incrementally raise the barrier to entry.
In principle, you could deal with all these problems piecemeal. But realistically this sort of problem is inevitably going to arise when you pit the concentrated interest of incumbent haircutters against the diffuse interest of consumers. It’s hard enough to make sure that really important regulatory functions related to environmental protection, public safety, and financial stability are done properly.
Carrie Fisher Steals the Show at George Lucas Tribute
I have no idea what chain of events led me to watch this. But it epitomizes the Procrastination Break category on this blog.
(Incidentally, I also saw the Mark Hamill speech, which I will not reproduce here. I can only hope for Master Skywalker that he went first that night.)
Comment of the Quarter: George Selgin
I was checking out my Mises email folder and came across this blog comment from George Selgin on a past article:
Could everyone please, I mean PLEASE, stop writing FED? It isn’t an acronym, for goodness sake–it doesn’t stand for Fiat Emitting Disaster or something like that. It’s just an abbreviation of Federal. Got that?
Thanks for your attention. And oh yes: nice article, Bob.
Seriously, I have wondered about that too. I think Gary North always writes “FED.” What is the deal? Is it like “teh”?
Is Our Money Based on Debt?
As the Magic 8-Ball would say, “my sources say yes.” Details here. An excerpt:
Different groups often notice different aspects of the same phenomenon — this is the point of the famous tale of the blind men encountering an elephant. When it comes to the Federal Reserve, Austrians usually focus on how its tinkering with interest rates leads to the boom–bust cycle.
However, plenty of non-Austrians hate the Federal Reserve System too. For some of these critics, one of the most perverse features of our present monetary system is its basis in debt. Specifically, if Americans ever began seriously paying down their debts, the supply of dollars would shrink. In the present article I’ll explain this strange fact.
This is one of those (rare) instances where my position has totally changed. In fact, I used to have inside jokes with one prominent Austrian thinker (who shall remain nameless to protect his identity) about these “cranks” who would always criticize us for not bringing up the crucial fact that our money is based on debt.
I was reassured in my stance when I came across an old 1970s or 1980s clip of Murray Rothbard fielding a similar question from someone at a liberty event, and Rothbard had no clue what the guy’s point was.
Well, I now see the light. It’s true, more often than not the person bringing up this fact will then go on to denounce interest per se–or worse yet, to say that the “optimal” monetary system involves zero-interest money printing by the Treasury–but there really is an important sense in which our money supply right now is tied to public and private debt.
Next week, I have a Mises Daily tackling the follow-up question: If the creation of new money is tied to expanding the debt, then don’t interest payments necessarily require the creation of more money (and hence more debt)? I know you want my answer right now, but you have to wait. It will build character.
Give the First One Away, Then Charge Them When They’re Hooked…
So is our philosophy at the Mises Academy. Below is the first ever lecture at the online Mises Academy. Note that they edited out some of the things you would actually see if you signed up for an Academy class (such as the chat box and “whiteboard” which I will be using in the upcoming classes).
Still, this is an introductory lecture that can stand on its own, so if you want to be soothed on your commute, then by all means listen to me introduce the business cycle class…
And remember, I am soon teaching classes on private law & defense, as well as Principles of Economics.
Does the Parable of the Talents Prove That Jesus Loved Commerce?
In the comments to my blog post reconciling Austro-libertarianism with Christianity, “Austrian Banker” argued that Jesus didn’t condone the charging of interest. (AB’s point was that modern Austrian economists should find this awkward.)
In response, Matt J wrote:
As for Jesus’ teaching specifically, in Matthew 25, verses 14-30 are where Jesus gives his ‘Parable of the Talents’, likening the kingdom of God to a man who entrusted his servants with some of his property (talents). When he returns he finds servants who invested his property wisely and earned him more. One servant buried the talents he received in the ground, dug it up, and gave it to the master.
The master says: “‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.” (v. 26, 27)
The servants who took what the master gave him and increased it were deemed “good and faithful”. The one who buried it in the ground, not so much as earning a bank’s interest rate, was deemed “wicked and slothful’. Jesus used this as a metaphor for the kingdom of God. Does that sound like Jesus was against interest?
I understand where Matt J is coming from, but I actually don’t think the Parable of the Talents proves that Jesus had no problem with the charging of interest, or that He was a capitalist (which I’ve seen right-wing Christians claim).
I’m not saying Jesus is opposed to the charging of interest; my point is merely that you can’t conclude one way or the other, from the above parable.
If you doubt this, try a different parable, from Matthew 18: 23-35:
23″Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents[a] was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26″The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ 27The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28″But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.[b] He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
29″His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
30″But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32″Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35″This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
So are we to conclude that not only is Jesus OK with charging interest, but that He’s also OK with debtor’s prison and even torturing people who don’t pay you back the principal?
Some of the other parables too do not exactly depict the “protagonists” in a very Christian light. For example, the guy who finds a treasure in a field, then covers it up to buy the field. Depending on how we fill in the details of the story, that could be borderline deceptive.
And should a Christian woman rejoice after finding a lost coin? Isn’t that a bit iffy, investing so much happiness in a piece of money?
I think the answer to all this is that Jesus was clearly trying to use familiar examples to which the listeners could relate. They obviously could not comprehend the true, full nature of the Kingdom of God, and so Jesus had to “dumb it down” for them into parables.
So to repeat, I’m NOT saying that Jesus thought charging interest was immoral, I’m just saying that the Parable of the Talents alone doesn’t clinch it for me one way or the other.
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