The City of Miami recently charted a new course in its approach to urban planning, voting to reinstate various minimum parking requirements for new developments after a 7-year experiment in relaxing them. The move, which was enacted in March by a 4-1 city commission vote, will make it harder to build smaller and more affordable housing units in the city’s denser areas.

In a recent piece for Slate, Henry Grabar captured some of the reaction to the change.

“I feel like we’re developing around parking and not developing around housing,” said Natalie Duran, a developer who has built 10 small projects under the parking exemption. “Parking is a luxury, and housing isn’t.”

“I can tell you that none of our tenants or clients are asking for more parking,” said Andrew Lenehan, a contractor in the Miami area. “They’re asking for more efficient buildings close to the urban core where they work, dine, and go to school.”

Members of Miami’s planning board were equally unimpressed, calling the move “bizarre,” “baffling,” “shameful,” and “garbage.” The board’s advisory vote was 9-2 in favor of maintaining the relaxed version of the parking requirements.

The impact of the change will be noticeable, says Andrew Frey, the developer who lobbied for the original ordinance that relaxed the laws in 2015. Many small developments had sprung up in the city’s core neighborhoods because of the relaxed requirements, but with the new requirements, he says the vast majority of these small-scale projects will stop.

One architect said he was designing a building with 17 units on a 5,000 square-foot lot, but with the new parking requirements, he says the lot can only accommodate six units.

“Each new Miami apartment will once again be required to come with 1.5 parking stalls, rounded up, whether residents want them or not,” Grabar notes. “The cost of building those spaces, spread across fewer units, will wind up raising rents—if the law doesn’t kill off projects altogether.”

The big question, of course, is why. Why impose such harmful requirements on developers, and ultimately tenants, businesses, and homeowners?

The simplest answer is the one that’s always given for these kinds of measures: parking congestion. “There’s no room to park in the streets,” said Commissioner Joe Carollo. “What we can’t have is this free-for-all we’re having right now.”

Whether or not Miami’s streets genuinely face a parking shortage is, of course, a matter of debate. Even if they do, it’s also a matter of debate whether reinstating minimum parking requirements is the best way to address the shortage (as opposed to, say, setting up parking meters).

But while parking congestion is certainly worth discussing, Grabar has some other ideas about what might really be prompting this move. For one, there’s an ongoing feud between Commissioner Joe Carollo and one of the developers of these smaller units. What’s more, Graber notes that “under the new system, any builder seeking to construct less parking must come before the city commission and plead their case. That gives the city commission new power, and creates an incentive for developers to make the right donations to grease the wheels of zoning exemptions.”

In other words, this whole thing could just be a charade to facilitate some good-old-fashioned corruption.

Whatever the reason, it’s worth taking this story as an opportunity to think through the broader debate around minimum parking requirements.

As mentioned above, proponents argue these requirements are necessary because there would be too much parking congestion on the roads without them. The problem, however, is that the government has no way of knowing how much is the “right” amount of parking for any given residence or business. As a result, the minimums are basically just arbitrary numbers. Numbers which make zero sense in many cases.

The problem is exacerbated by the political incentive structure. As Ryan McMaken explains, local residents hoping to free ride by parking on city streets for free often demand parking minimums for local businesses so that no one takes “their” spot. And since the costs of parking minimums in terms of wasted space are not nearly as conspicuous as the angry resident complaining that there’s nowhere to park, politicians have a strong incentive to err on the side of overly-abundant parking requirements for new developments.

The result is cities that look like this.

Image credits: Vox

“It’s estimated that in America there are 8 parking spots for every car, covering up to 30% of our cities, and collectively taking up about as much space as the state of West Virginia,” Will Chilton and Paul Mackie note in a Vox video on the topic.

“Look at any place from the air…and you’ll see an awful lot of land taken up for parking,” says Donald Shoup, an economist and UCLA planning professor who drew attention to this issue with his book The High Cost of Free Parking. “And most people don’t know why: it’s our policy that we require our cities to be built with a lot of parking.”

Indeed, a quick glance at the aerial view of most cities is all that’s really needed to appreciate just how much these requirements have shaped our urban centers. The amount of space taken up by empty parking lots is hard to ignore, and it makes you wonder whether such profligate land use would have ever been considered if it wasn’t mandated.

The impact of these laws on the character of urban communities is also hard to miss. As Michael Manville notes in a brilliant piece for The Atlantic, “America did not become a country of strip malls and office parks because we collectively lost aesthetic ambition. These developments are ubiquitous because they are the cheapest way to comply with regulations.”

So what’s a better solution? In short, there needs to be a market for parking spaces so that prices can facilitate a balance of supply and demand. Full parking lots (a shortage) will command high prices, inducing local developers to build more parking. Empty lots (a surplus) will see lower prices, inducing local developers to devote land to other uses.The parking market will take different forms in different contexts (parking meters, paid lots, etc.), but that’s exactly the kind of flexibility that’s needed to address a problem as context-specific as this.

Of course, this approach is unpopular because it means people will have to pay for parking. But the truth is, parking was never really free to begin with. Its costs were simply hidden in the form of higher taxes, higher rents, and higher prices at the businesses we frequent. So it’s not really the case that we will have to start paying for parking that we weren’t paying for before. It’s just that the costs will become more visible.

What’s more, they will likely come down over time because we won’t have to pay for all the “free parking” that hardly ever gets used.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

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During Ukraine’s long history, there have been shortages of geopolitical manipulations against the Ukrainian people. Long before the current conflict, they can be seen in the Russo-Turkish Wars and Catherine the Great’s settling of German colonists among Ukrainian communities in order to displace local Turkish populations. Yet nothing compares to the early Soviet strategies which systematically and utterly changed the landscape of Ukrainian society and history.

It all started with the same justification given today: state unity. Lenin, Stalin, and others wished for total military and economic control over the surrounding Slavic areas, in order to minimize the chances of rebellions by royalist sympathizers, pro-Western groups, or ethnic minorities who didn’t desire to be under the Soviet yoke. The early Soviet state enacted policies which pitted said groups against themselves, and made it appear as if the Bolsheviks were the heroes; Lenin was the one who brought prosperity and security to regions which have suffered under the totalitarian regimes of Russian Czars for centuries. One of these policies was Dekulakization: where well-to-do free peasants—or ‘kulaks’—were rounded up, expropriated, and deported to Siberian work camps and gulags. After the ousting of Czar Nicholas II, Lenin labeled these independent farmers and landowners as enemies of the state—an entire class opposing the will of the USSR and the tenants of Bolshevism. The communists couldn’t have a successful, independent class of laborers in one of the Union’s most fertile and prosperous regions; control was needed. In promoting the dekulakization, Stalin stated:

“In order to eliminate the kulaks as a class, it is necessary to openly break their spirit and resistance, and deprive them of the sources for further existence and development. The party’s current policy in the towns and villages marks a new procedure for eliminating the kulaks as a class.”

A 1930 Soviet Propaganda Poster: “Kick the kulaks out of the kolkhozes”

State-led propaganda was readily disseminated through Ukraine; propaganda of ‘greedy capitalist’ kulaks refusing to support their local communities and hoarding foodstuffs and winter rations spread like wildfire. Pogroms rose up and drove the free peasant class out of towns. In order to maximize the effects, Soviets threw the term kulak around liberally, where a farmer with just a couple of cows could be put in the same ‘kulak boat’ as a landowner with 5-6 more acres than his neighbors. The fast-and-loose definitions regulated by the State had countless individuals, regardless of their economic impact or personal successes, silenced and disenfranchised, just because Lenin decided so. Lenin signed the Hanging Order in 1918—a command to round up, dox, and kill people labeled as kulaks, writing:

Comrades! The uprising by the five kulak volosts must be mercilessly suppressed. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, for we are now facing everywhere the “final decisive battle” with the kulaks. We need to set an example.

1. You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than 100 of the

notorious kulaks, the rich and the bloodsuckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Take all their grain from them.

4. Appoint the hostages — in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

This needs to be done in such a way that the people for hundreds of versts around will see, tremble, know and shout: they are throttling and will throttle the bloodsucking kulaks.

Telegraph us concerning receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

PS. Find tougher people.

Silence All Dissenters

Vigilante groups and Soviet battalions alike rounded up and deported any Ukrainian even suspected of acting against the State. Ethnic and religious minorities, and those who wished to preserve their Ukrainian heritage, rather than submit to Soviet culture and doctrine, were hunted down as well.

Anti-kulak parade; banners read: “We will liquidate the kulaks as a class” and “All to the struggle against the wreckers of agriculture”

Since the Soviet Union worked hard to destroy evidence which pointed to the expulsion efforts, it’s difficult to know exactly how many people suffered under this policy. It is estimated that around 390,000-600,000 people died due to starvation, illness, and execution during the dekulakization of 1929-1933.

With the eradication of an entire economic class in Ukrainian society, the Soviets were free to take control of all agricultural and industrial processes in the area. Wide sweeping dictacts championing collectivization and fealty to the state resulted in Soviet-run farming communities called ‘kolkhozes.’ In accordance with Bolshevism, the means of production were to benefit the state, not the individual. State-run farms liquidated all assets, controlled grain supply, and only paid their farmers in grain rations, not currency. Landowners and farmers were forced to give their yields to regional officials, where it was then dispersed back to the populace. The Ukrainian people—being made up of mostly agriculturalists at the time—were completely dependent on the Soviet State for sustenance and security.

Collectivization in Practice

The summary disappearance of a massive segment of Ukrainian agricultural society quickly led to a man-made famine which affected the vast majority of the Soviet Union. State control over grain supply resulted in the inadequate distribution of food to the Ukrainian and Caucus regions; most of the collectivized food went to fuel the Moscow and St. Petersburg metropolises.

What came next has been labeled one of the worst atrocities of modern history: Holodomor. In just one year (1932-1933) a great famine occurred in Ukraine which stole 3.3 to 5 million lives. The Court of Appeal of Kyiv recently found that the lives lost during Holodomor may have been closer to 10 million.

Primary sources of the Holodomor account for the daily struggle and unspeakable horrors Ukrainians experienced. Fedir Burtianski, a laborer who set out to find work in the Donbas mines, recounted the time he witnessed the trial of two brothers and their father who were accused of committing cannibalism. He recounted one of the accused stating:

“He said, ‘Thank you to Father Stalin for depriving us of food. Our mother died of hunger and we ate her, our own dead mother. And after our mother we did not take pity on anyone. We would not have spared Stalin himself.'”

For Stalin, the deaths were just a statistic. His regime quickly replaced the depopulated region with Russian laborers. The industrial growing areas of Donetsk and Luhansk saw an influx of Russian colonists, as did the Crimean Peninsula, which acted as one of the USSR’s warm-water ports—a crucial military and trade component. The cruel and impersonal relationship between occupying Soviets and the native Ukrainians is evident throughout the existence of the USSR: from Lenin’s collectivization all the way up to Chernobyl, where Soviet officials cared more about containing the explosion and protecting Moscow than taking preventative actions that would have prevented the accident from happening in the first place.

For the USSR, its people—whether in the Moscow metropolis or the Ukrainian lowlands—were seen as a means to an end; they were numerous cogs in the regime’s machine, rather than individuals with civil and political rights. The people of Ukraine were held at the mercy of Lenin, Stalin, and others; they were powerless in every sense of the word. With no recourse to preserve their way of life and means of production, they were subservient to an entity which had control over all; one which not only decided the fate of millions of Ukrainians, but also merely blinked at the famines they created, and brushed them off stating that it was all for the security and proliferation of the greater Soviet Union.

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Originally Appeared Here

Another day, another alarming inflation metric. We just got the numbers for the Personal Consumption Expenditures index (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s favored inflation metric, and they’re jaw-dropping. The PCE hit a 40-year high in February, with the measured prices rising 6.4% year-over-year. 

What does this mean in real life?

A new Bloomberg analysis sheds some light on this key question. It finds that this year, inflation will cost the typical US household an additional $5,200 just to afford the same goods as last year. That’s $433 a month taken out of the average family’s budget.

Why is this happening?

Inflation is a Policy Choice

In the mainstream media and among progressive economists, price inflation is often portrayed as an abstract force beyond our control, like the weather. But in reality, it is directly caused by reckless government policies.

The Federal Reserve decided to “stimulate” the economy amid the pandemic by (digitally) printing trillions of new dollars out of thin air. But scarcity and trade-offs are the defining reality of economic life, so their actions had consequences. By putting trillions of new dollars out into the economy, they made the dollars Americans currently held less valuable—inflating away our savings and wealth. 

Just consider the below graph, which shows the number of US dollars in circulation over the last 5 years:

What’s more, the federal government flooded the economy with “stimulus” money. 

It ran up massive, multi-trillion-dollar budget deficits—at the very time various levels of government were restricting economic life and constraining supply. Through trillions in debt, Congress signed us up for grave economic costs in the future in order to artificially inflate consumer demand in the short term, which doesn’t work as “stimulus” to begin with. 

Yet when you do this at the very same time you are constraining the economy and hindering the supply chain, it’s inevitable that price levels overall will surge as demand so far outpaces supply. 

So, no, inflation isn’t an abstract phenomenon. But it is, essentially, an indirect tax on everyday Americans.

Inflation will cost the average US family an extra $5200 this year just to maintain their same life.

That’s a tax on Americans, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s money-printing & the federal government’s fiscal recklessness.

Inflation is a policy choice.

Hold them accountable.

— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@brad_polumbo) March 31, 2022

Inflation is a ‘Stealth Tax’

What is a tax, after all, other than a cost forcibly imposed on the citizenry to finance/enable government expenditures? And that also perfectly describes the inflation currently hitting Americans in the wallet. 

The government wanted to engage in reckless money-printing and spending without bearing the political brunt of directly raising peoples’ taxes. As a result, our savings were inflated away.

When the money printer goes “brr,” your wallet goes “ouch!”

— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@brad_polumbo) March 31, 2022

That’s the textbook definition of a “stealth tax.”

Even John Maynard Keynes, hardly a free-market economist, famously acknowledged this reality.

“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens,” Keynes once said. 

Keynes found agreement on this point from across the spectrum. Nobel-Prize-winning free-market economist Milton Friedman similarly quipped that “inflation is taxation without legislation.”

Ultimately, Americans shouldn’t fall for this financial sleight-of-hand. 

“Inflation” isn’t really what will cost families $5,200 extra this year. The government is what’s truly imposing that burden upon us all.

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Originally Appeared Here

High gas prices and runaway price inflation more broadly are top-of-mind for many Americans right now. 

As a result, progressive politicians are feeling the squeeze to explain why the federal government’s money printing and deficit spending aren’t to blame. And if Bernie Sanders’ latest radical proposal is anything to go by, some of them are getting pretty desperate. 

The Vermont senator just unveiled a proposal for a 95 percent tax—yes, 95 percent!—on business profits above their pre-pandemic levels. This comes as part of his larger attempt to blame corporate greed and “price-gouging” for inflation. 

“The American people are sick and tired of being ripped-off by corporations making record profits, while working families pay absurd prices for gas, rent and food,” Sanders said in a tweet alongside the news. “The time has come for Congress to work for working families and demand that big corporations pay their fair share.”

The American people are sick and tired of being ripped-off by corporations making record profits, while working families pay absurd prices for gas, rent and food. The time has come for Congress to work for working families and demand that big corporations pay their fair share. https://t.co/ohPKaKfeCY

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 25, 2022

Here are some of the details of the senator’s plan. 

“Companies would pay the current 21% corporate tax rate on earnings up to the amounts they recorded before the pandemic, and then have to pay a 95% rate for profits above those levels,” Bloomberg explains. “The total tax is capped at 75% of a company’s income in a single year. The levy would only apply to corporations with at least $500 million in annual revenue.”

Here are three big problems with this radical and misguided proposal.

1. It Doesn’t Address the Actual Problem

Corporate greed and “price gouging” are not, in fact, the reasons behind the current surge in prices that is hitting Americans so hard. As economist Brian Riedl noted, oil companies, for example, are no less “greedy” or “profit-seeking” today than they were in May of 2020, when gas prices fell below $2/gallon. 

Were they just feeling super generous then and extra greedy this year? Of course not. 

Whether it’s @BernieSanders making it or @TheJuanWilliams, the argument that ‘corporate greed’ is to blame for high gas prices is silly & has no basis in economics.

Clip from me on w/ @KennedyNation @FoxBusiness: pic.twitter.com/45FmL5lEzb

— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@brad_polumbo) February 17, 2022

If only we could return to May 2020, when national gas prices fell to $1.93/gallon because oil companies decided they love us and didn’t care about making money. Is that how pricing works? https://t.co/GzdJQHPG5N

— Brian Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@Brian_Riedl) February 16, 2022

Economists across the political spectrum have dismissed Sanders’ nonsensical notion out of hand. An IGM Chicago survey found that, weighted for confidence, 80% of economists disagreed with this explanation for inflation. 

Image Credit: IGM Chicago

2. Hiking Taxes on Business Would Lead to Higher Prices & Hurt, Not Help, Average Americans 

Hiking business taxes, naturally, increases the costs suppliers face.

So, it’s a textbook example of something that causes a decrease in supply. What happens when supply goes down? You guessed it: prices go up. 

“By lowering profits, this policy would discourage businesses from investing in the creation of new technologies for increasing the supply of oil,” FEE economist Peter Jacobsen explains. “[It also] could incentivize companies to move business operations outside of the US.”

“For the[se] reasons, a tax on profits will likely lead to a lower supply of oil,” he said, using one example of an industry that would be impacted. “Other things equal this will mean higher prices at the pump.”

Senator Sanders wants to respond to the high inflation the government’s meddling caused with… more government meddling in the market. Is it really a surprise this would only backfire? 

3. Profits Are Actually a Good Thing, Not Something to Punish 

Sanders’s plan is also misguided in its very nature, by targeting profits when they’re actually something to be celebrated.

This misunderstanding underscores why Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards called the plan “idiotic.”

“[One thing] the Left doesn’t seem to get about the market economy is the huge risks, that businesses earn both profits and losses,” Edwards told FEE. “Companies get denounced for high profits, but companies that lose money also get denounced as poorly managed. The reality is that over time, returns are equalized across industries to normal levels as investment flows to winners and away from losers. And if the government doesn’t stand in the way, competition eats away any above-normal profits.”

“Profits are beneficial as they signal where investors should put resources to benefit the nation’s economic growth,” the economist added. 

“Workers do better as resources flow over time to profitable firms and productivity rises.

Most profits are reinvested to expand businesses, which helps workers.”

 “The Sanders plan would steal more profits from companies, leaving less for reinvestment and reducing opportunities for workers,” Edwards concluded.  

This argument echoes the words of the famed economist Ludwig von Mises, who famously explained, “Profits are the driving force of the market economy. (…) In fighting profits governments deliberately sabotage the operation of the market economy.”

The Takeaway: A Bad Idea Rooted in Class Warfare

There’s simply no defending Sanders’ radical new plan on its merits. Taxing business profits at 95 percent, even only above a certain threshold, is obscenely unfair, economically illiterate, and totally off-base when it comes to actually addressing inflation.

What’s really driving this proposal is not substantive policy considerations, but Bernie Sanders’ deeply ingrained propensity toward class warfare and envy. While it might make for effective political pandering, that’s no way to run a country. 

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Originally Appeared Here

In December 1985, Ronald Reagan said on his weekly radio address that “Nicaragua was an imprisoned nation… condemned by a dictator in designer glasses.” Reagan was referring to Daniel Ortega, one of the leaders of the Sandinista movement and at the time, the first elected president of the newly democratic Nicaragua. Ortega had visited the United Nations’ anniversary celebrations and was severely criticized for his visit to an Upper East Side optical shop where he allegedly spent more than $3,500 in designer sunglasses (about $9,228.68 in 2022’s dollars).

Back then, Nicaragua was the stage of one of the proxy wars of the Cold War. Daniel Ortega was a strong supporter of communism, the USSR, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In the 1980s, under both Carter and Reagan, the US government funded “the Contras,” rebel groups that opposed the Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction Government, which replaced a forty-three-year dynastic dictatorship.

Nearly 40 years later, in January 2022, Ortega secured yet another term in office, this one lasting until 2027. By then, Ortega will have held power for fifteen consecutive years and 26 years altogether.

How has Daniel Ortega held onto power so long? In light of Ortega’s recent election victory, is Reagan’s characterization of Ortega as a “dictator” of “an imprisoned nation” accurate today?

To answer these questions, let’s look at a bit more history and then some political philosophy.

The Return of Ortega

After losing the elections in 1990, 1996 and 2001, a more pragmatic and pro-big-business Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007.

At the time, the Nicaraguan Constitution prohibited consecutive reelection and limited presidents to two terms. In 2009 a ruling by Nicaragua’s Supreme Court of Justice allowed Ortega to run for reelection, which he won in 2011. In 2013, Ortega proposed a constitutional reform that was approved by the National Assembly (with a Sandinista majority) allowing indefinite reelection with a simple majority. He then won the 2016 elections.

In 2018, the country was roiled by protests against the government. Ortega’s military and police responded with extreme force. The regime ordered doctors to deny health services to university students who were hurt in the protests. According to a 2019 Interamerican Court of Human Rights report, 328 were killed, 3 missing, 130 imprisoned, and 88,000 Nicaraguans were exiled as a result of the protests.

From that point on, the repression grew stronger. During the 2021 elections more than 40 political dissidents were imprisoned, among them seven opposition candidates who were strong contenders to unseat Ortega. Unsurprisingly, Ortega “won” with 75 percent of the votes (the remaining quarter was divided among other candidates approved by Ortega). Eighty percent of eligible voters refused to show up for the rigged elections. A CID Gallup poll showed that 65 percent of the citizens preferred to vote for an opposition candidate.

Ortega has also censored the press and nationalized five private universities, consolidating even more power to suppress dissent.

Tyranny Defined

Considering this history, is Daniel Ortega’s government legitimate, as his supporters claim, or is it a dictatorship or tyranny, like Reagan said and Ortega’s opponents agree?

To settle this in a rational, unbiased manner, we should first define our terms. What is tyranny? What makes a government just or unjust?

To shed light on these questions, let’s turn to one of the most influential philosophers of government in world history: John Locke (1632-1704).

According to Locke, the proper role of the government is that of a public servant. Government should be “for the people.” So, any ruler who serves himself instead of the public is a tyrant. As Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Government:

“Tyranny is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage.”

This doesn’t mean government can do anything it wants so long as “it’s for the good of the people.” According to Locke, the mandate of government is strictly limited to protecting the liberty of the people. Any government that systematically violates the very liberty it was created to protect is also a tyranny.

Locke believed that whenever a government was behaving as a tyranny, the governed had the legitimate right to remove and replace that government. He rhetorically asked:

“…which is best for mankind, that the people should always be exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power, and employ it for the destruction, and not the preservation, of the properties of their people?”

In 1688, during the Glorious Revolution, John Locke supported the overthrow of King James II. He wrote a treatise justifying this radical action, arguing that even kings are mere “trustees” charged by the people to defend their liberty. If the government abuses that trust, the stewardship of power can and should be revoked. “The people,” Locke insisted, “shall be judge.”

In other words, the people must judge whether their government is properly defending their liberty. Based on that judgment, they have the right to depose any tyranny; and any ruler who denies the people that right by clinging to power is undoubtedly a tyrant.

Still a Tyrant

Now that we know what makes a tyranny, let’s consider if Daniel Ortega fits the bill.

Is Ortega letting the people judge for themselves whether he should be entrusted with defending their liberty? No. By manipulating the electoral process and violently suppressing dissent, he is taking that choice away from them.

In rigging the political system, he is also serving himself and his power clique instead of the public.

And by violating civil liberties, he is flouting the only legitimate purpose of government: which is to protect liberty.

On all three counts, Daniel Ortega’s regime is “textbook” tyranny, according to the political philosophy of John Locke, the guy who literally wrote “the book” on tyranny.

And like all tyrannies, Ortega’s is driving the people to flee in droves. Nearly 170,000 Nicaraguans left the country in 2021, the largest number since the socio-political and economic crisis intensified in 2018. According to a CID Gallup survey presented by El Confidencial, 65 percent of respondents intend to migrate. Almost a sixth of the total population in Nicaragua has departed the country.

In the years since 1985, Ortega has left behind his designer glasses and communist rhetoric, but has continued to practice the oppression characteristic of all communist regimes throughout history. Ortega has used his power to manipulate the political system to stay as president of the country. Even if there are elections, citizens are not able to choose a real opposition option to escape the tyranny. Some Nicaraguans are migrating, doing what they can’t do through the political system: choose a different type of government that serves them best.

Reagan was and is still right: Ortega is a dictator and Nicaragua is an imprisoned country. Unable to shake Ortega’s tyranny, the people are staging a jailbreak.

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Originally Appeared Here

“Why do you always talk about capitalism and not the market economy? The mere mention of the word capitalism turns so many people off.”

It’s a critical question that I have often been asked. First of all: Yes, it’s true.

For many people, “capitalism” has a bad ring to it, probably all over the world. That is certainly the case in the 14 countries I commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey into attitudes toward capitalism. The survey proved that support for capitalism rises significantly everywhere if only you avoid mentioning the irritating word itself and frame your questions to describe what capitalism means using other words. This was no surprise; it was exactly what I expected. But what is much more interesting is that in nine out of the 14 surveyed countries, there was no majority in favor of capitalism even when the word was not used in the questions. In most countries, anti-capitalist views elicited more support than pro-capitalist opinions, even when we avoided using the word itself.

But wouldn’t it still be wiser to dispense with the word if it irritates so many people? The economist Deirdre McCloskey, whom I hold in high esteem, suggested years ago that the term “innovism” should be used as an alternative because it better describes what “capitalism” actually means. It has not caught on. It is difficult, almost impossible, to introduce a completely new term into the public discussion. After all, 99.99 percent of people don’t even know what such a new word means.

In some countries, people prefer to speak of a ‘market economy.’ In Germany, you often hear people refer to a ‘social market economy.’ However, the meaning of the term has evolved since it was originally popularized by Ludwig Erhard, the German Minister of Economics at the time (1949-1963). For Erhard, “social market economy” did not mean—as it is interpreted today—a third way between socialism and capitalism. The freer the economy, Erhard was convinced, the more social it would be. At the end of the 1940s, the formula of the ‘social market economy’ primarily served to make a return to the capitalist economic system palatable to Germans, which was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time. After all, the National Socialists had used strong anti-capitalist rhetoric, and ‘social’ aspects were already strongly emphasized in Germany at that time.

In contrast to its modern meaning, Erhard regarded the market economy as such as “social”—irrespective of subsequent redistribution efforts, of which he was skeptical. The more successful the economic policy, the more social policy in the traditional sense would become superfluous.

However, the term “social market economy” has long since been usurped by its opponents. Today, everyone in Germany is (apparently) in favor of the “social market economy.” Even representatives of the anti-capitalist far-left party Die Linke profess to be so. That is why I prefer to speak of capitalism, even if perhaps a term such as “entrepreneurial economy” would better capture the essence of what I mean by “capitalism.”

If a term has negative connotations, there is no point in focusing exclusively on changing the word. On the contrary. Those who avoid a word because they are afraid of criticism are only demonstrating their inner insecurity and weakness. And there is not the slightest reason to feel insecure or weak. Before capitalism came into being, most people in the world lived in extreme poverty – in 1820, the rate was 90 percent. Today, it has fallen below 10 percent. The remarkable thing is that in recent decades, the rate at which poverty is declining has accelerated more than in any previous period of human history. In 1981, the rate was still 42.7 percent; by 2000, it had fallen to 27.8 percent, and by 2021 it was below 10 percent. With such a track record, no supporter of capitalism should feel the need to be ashamed or hide.

Too often I have heard people “defend” capitalism by arguing, “Yes, capitalism is by no means ideal and has so many drawbacks, but the bottom line is that it is still better than other systems.”

Why so defensive?

I’ve had good experiences being offensive as a defender of capitalism. I speak at events all over the world on this topic, and I often wear my “I love Capitalism” T-shirt. Even if there are many young people in the audience who tend to be anti-capitalist, they usually respect the fact that there is someone there who professes his views clearly and doesn’t mince his words. And if the term provokes some people—so much the better: because then the discussion about the benefits of capitalism can start immediately!

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Originally Appeared Here

A typical head of state craves pomp and circumstance, especially if he’s at the center of it. If others (such as taxpayers) are picking up the tab, it takes principled character to opt instead for quiet simplicity. The majesty of ceremonies and the adoration of crowds—replete with bands and uniforms and soaring rhetoric—can be heady stuff.

At least one American President-elect chose old-fashioned thrift over modern excess. The occasion was his inauguration, no less. The man was Warren Harding.

The affable and unpretentious Senator from Ohio was elected President in a landslide in November 1920. Voters saw in Harding an opportunity for “normalcy” after eight years of a pompous, arrogant, high-taxing and big-spending “progressive” named Woodrow Wilson. They weren’t interested in a new president celebrating himself at great expense, and they deeply appreciated Harding’s example.

By early January 1921, with two months to go before Inauguration Day on March 4, Harding’s increasing displeasure with the unfolding plans for the big day boiled over. On January 10, he slammed the brakes. The headline in The New York Times on the following day read,

HARDING VETOES ELABORATE INAUGURAL;

TIME TO SET AN EXAMPLE OF THRIFT;

CEREMONY SIMPLE; BALL ABANDONED

According to the page one story, the President-elect ordered the committees in charge of the inauguration “to abandon all features of the program that would make his induction into office an affair of extravagance or pomp.” That meant no parade, no ball, and “nothing savoring of ostentation or money squandering.” Anything more than “a simple, dignified program would find him an unhappy participant.”

That Harding would opt for a humble event came as no surprise to those who knew him or who had listened to his promises during the campaign. Nor did it surprise anybody that he dramatically cut federal spending on just about everything before his untimely death in August 1923. As economist Dan Mitchell points out, his easing of Wilson’s big government burdens fostered a quick end to the inflation and recession his predecessor’s policies had caused.

Routinely dismissed as a bad chief executive, Harding’s reputation is undergoing a long overdue renovation. The latest contribution in that regard is a new, must-read biography by Ryan S. Walters titled, The Jazz Age President. Read it, and you’ll forever be skeptical of the lazy, biased, conventional historians who worship power and those who wield it.

Warren Harding didn’t just tell audiences what they wanted to hear. He sometimes told them what they did not want to hear. He went to Birmingham, Alabama to condemn racism and Jim Crow laws, for example—a fact I’ve previously pointed out.

Conventional historians praise Presidents for the bills they signed into law but often it requires more courage and conviction to veto them. On that score too, Harding can be judged favorably. He vetoed six bills in the 2-1/2 years he served in the White House. None of the six was overridden. That may not sound like a lot but remember, his party controlled both houses by big majorities; Congress didn’t send him much it thought he wouldn’t sign.

Four bills Harding vetoed concerned minor issues and generated little attention, but one concerned a bonus for veterans of World War I. It stirred up quite a fuss. As the bill worked its way through the House and Senate, Harding gave ample warning that he wouldn’t even consider a bonus that wasn’t paid for. Congress ignored him and sent the bill to his desk. He rejected it, noting as follows:

In legislating for what is called adjusted compensation, Congress fails to provide the revenue from which the bestowal is to be paid. We have been driving in every direction to curtail our expenditures and establish economies without impairing the essentials of governmental activities. It has been a difficult and unpopular task. It is vastly more applauded to expend than to deny.

After the Civil War, Congress paid pensions to veterans of the conflict and their dependents. Sixty years later, in 1923, it sent a bill to Harding to grant pensions to women who married aging Civil War veterans long after the war. It even authorized higher payments to them than what recent widows of veterans in the war with Germany were getting. His veto message included this unassailable objection:

The compensation paid to the widows of World War veterans, those who shared the shock and sorrows of the conflict, amounts to $24 per month. It would be indefensible to insist on that limitation upon actual war widows if we are to pay $50 per month to widows who marry veterans 60 years after the Civil War.

Congress should have known better than to expect Harding to sign such bills. This was the same man who declared at his modest, unembellished inauguration that “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government.” He had expressed a desire to put “our public household in order.” He said he wanted “sanity” in economic policy, combined with “individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future.”

If somebody told me all that, I wouldn’t even think of asking him to approve a check for an able-bodied 30-year-old simply because she married an 80-year-old veteran.

This was the same Warren Harding, remember, who gave the country perhaps the best Treasury Secretary in its history, Andrew Mellon. According to historian Burton Folsom, Mellon slashed government expenses and eliminated an average of one Treasury staffer per day for every single day he held the office. Harding, Mellon and Calvin Coolidge (Harding’s successor), together with a friendly Congress, reduced the federal budget and cut the national debt by more than one-third.

In late summer 1921, President Harding and his wife Florence journeyed to Atlantic City, New Jersey for a weekend vacation. When his hotel figuratively rolled out the red carpet, the President ordered it rolled back. The New York Times reported the incident as analogous to a veto in a story on September 12:

The Presidential veto was exercised here today when Warren G. Harding disapproved elaborate plans that had been made for the entertainment of his party.

Among other things, a solid gold dinner service of 1,000 pieces, gotten out especially for the Presidential meals, was returned unused to the Ritz-Carlton safe…He refused to eat from plates of gold.

…A special suite had been arranged for the President’s party on the fifth floor of the hotel. A fleet of automobiles and Boardwalk rolling chairs had been reserved. But the President wanted none of these. He used his own machine [car] and rejected a propelled chair when strolling on the Boardwalk after a luncheon. The President was here, he said, just like thousands of others—for a weekend—and he expected and wanted no special favors.

If you can’t find anything good to say about Warren Harding, you haven’t looked very far.

For additional information, see:

Warren Harding’s Historic Speech on Race: How Black and White Americans Responded by Lawrence W. Reed

Warren Harding: The U.S. President Who Reduced Federal Spending by Nearly 50 Percent in Just Two Years by Dan Mitchell

The Two Presidents Whose Economic Policies are Most Misunderstood by Historians by Ryan S. Walters

The Ten Best Presidential Vetoes in American History by Lawrence W. Reed

Andrew Mellon: Unleashing Wealth Creators by Lawrence W. Reed

Andrew Mellon: The Entrepreneur as Politician by Burton W. Folsom

Should a V.P. be One Person’s Choice? by Lawrence W. Reed

The Depression You’ve Never Heard Of by Robert P. Murphy

The Depression of 1920-21: Why Historians and Economists Often Overlook It by John Phelan

The Jazz Age President by Ryan S. Walters

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Originally Appeared Here

On Feb. 25, the CDC made its expected announcement that it was updating its framework to monitor and contain COVID-19.

“We’re in a stronger place today as a nation with more tools to protect ourselves in our communities from COVID-19, like vaccination, boosters, broader access to testing, availability of high quality masks, accessibility to new treatments, and improved ventilation,” said CDC Director Rochelle Paula Walensky.

Most media headlines focused on the CDC’s relaxed mask guidelines, which advised that most Americans could ditch masks. How the CDC arrived at this conclusion has received little scrutiny, however.

Changing Its COVID Risk Formula

As many people likely noticed, the CDC changed its mask guidance even though COVID cases and COVID mortality remain high. As of March 1, daily new cases stood at roughly 60,000 based on its 7-day rolling average, which is significantly higher than last summer and virtually identical to one year ago. Meanwhile, about 1,600 Americans continue to die each day of COVID-19, according to government data, a figure that is, again, exponentially higher than last summer and similar to a year earlier.

Walensky explained the healthy agency’s reasoning in her call with reporters.

“With widespread population immunity, the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower,” Walensky said, according to the transcript. “Now, as the virus continues to circulate in our communities, we must focus our metrics beyond just cases in the community and direct our efforts toward protecting people at high risk for severe illness and preventing COVID 19 from overwhelming our hospitals and our healthcare systems.”

There are two takeaways here.

The first is that Walensky’s call to direct efforts “toward protecting people at high risk for severe illness” sounds a bit like the Focused Protection strategy many public health experts and epidemiologists have been advocating all along, some of whom were labeled “fringe” scientists by the government’s top infectious disease bureaucrats.

Second, it’s worth examining how Walensky reached this conclusion. During the call, Dr. Greta Massetti of the CDC noted that “70% of Americans are in areas with low or medium COVID 19 community levels.”

Image Credit: CDC

Just days before, however, CDC data showed the vast majority of US counties were suffering from high transmission (see below). Then, virtually overnight, most of the US suddenly was in the low or medium category.

Massetti explains the CDC simply changed the formula it used to measure community transmission, or “updated metrics in this framework,” as she says.

“A community’s COVID 19 level is determined by a combination of three pieces of information,” Massetti explained, “new hospitalizations for COVID 19, current hospital beds occupied by COVID 19 patients or hospital capacity, and new COVID 19 cases.”

By simply changing its formula to include hospitalizations and hospital capacity, the CDC took the vast majority of the US from a state of high community transmission to low or moderate. The color red is also conspicuously absent.

Image Credit: CDC

‘It’s Time We Accept COVID Is Here to Stay’?

Many people likely are not angry that the CDC changed its COVID risk formula. The changes are likely going to allow most Americans to resume life in a somewhat normal fashion again, without being forced to show vaccine passports to eat in a restaurant or wear a mask to go to yoga class or run to the grocery store.

Numerous surveys show this increasingly is what Americans want.

A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that 46 percent of respondents believed Americans should “learn to live with” the virus and “get back to normal,” while only 43 percent said, “we need to do more to vaccinate, wear masks and test.”

An Echelon Insights poll showed an even stronger inclination to stop restrictions, with 55 percent of voters saying that COVID should be “treated as an endemic disease that will never fully go away,” compared to just 38 percent of voters who said COVID should be “treated as a public health emergency.”

Meanwhile, a Monmouth University poll found that 70 percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.” The same poll also showed sharp drops in support for vaccine mandates, social distancing, and mask mandates.

New York Times writer Nate Cohn observed something important about the recent polling and the American mood.

“The [polling] results are especially striking at a time when coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and even deaths are near record highs,” Cohn wrote in February. “Indeed, the same polls showed that the public’s concern about the virus increased during the Omicron wave. But in a telling indication of the public’s attitudes toward the pandemic, greater worry about the virus has not translated to greater support for measures to stop its spread.”

On Friday, the CDC revised its covid risk formula.

With this single change, the pandemic abruptly eased going from 90% of the United States in High-Risk Red to less than 30%. pic.twitter.com/iwhlxYMPPZ

— Clarity (@covid_clarity) February 28, 2022

A Lesson in Economics

The CDC’s sudden and radical change to its COVID risk formula appears to be a response to this change in mood.

Many will contend that this is not how “science” is supposed to work, and they’d be correct. But pandemic policies were never “scientific” because science can never tell us what we should or must do.

“[T]here is no such thing as a scientific ought,” the economist Ludwig von Mises observed, echoing a famous argument by philosopher David Hume. “Science is competent to establish what is.”

Pandemic policies were created by public health officials and politicians. And public choice theory—a field of economics pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan—tells us these people make decisions based on incentives just like everyone else.

As I’ve previously explained, early in the pandemic, the incentive for most public officials was clear: take every precaution necessary to avoid being blamed for COVID deaths—regardless of the efficacy or damage of the policies.

“It’s important to remember that politics, above all else, is about self preservation. And imposing government restrictions that don’t work and cause serious harms is a better political strategy for most politicians than telling people to act responsibly, wash hands, maintain a prudent distance, and avoid touching your face,” I wrote in 2020. “So if you’re wondering why our world has begun to resemble a Joseph Heller or Kafka novel where orders and action seem arbitrary, senseless, and counterintuitive, look to public choice theory.”

Social distancing and masking are not more effective today than they were two years ago. Nor are they less effective. The basic science of non-pharmaceutical interventions remains the same, even if some contextual factors of the pandemic have changed (new variants, the presence of vaccines, etc.).

The primary change is the appetite for non-pharmaceutical interventions. Americans have grown tired of them, and this above all else is likely what prompted the CDC to change its COVID risk formula, which virtually overnight took the vast majority of the country from a state of high community transmission to low or moderate community transmission—even though cases and mortality remain high.

The scary color of red is now gone completely from the CDC’s graphics. And all but a handful of Democrats at Tuesday’s State of the Union address appeared with faces bare indoors in a crowded Capitol building.

To understand why and how it happened, don’t look to science. Look to public choice theory.

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Originally Appeared Here

When the Federal Government ordered the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s (at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $580 billion in 2022 dollars), it all but killed America’s privately operated passenger railroads. Since then, rail travel in America has mostly consisted of government-subsidized Amtrak services of deteriorating quality that amble across the country, catering to a niche market of leisure travelers and those with no other options. On the busy Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. there is still enough demand to operate a busy, profitable service, but elsewhere Amtrak’s services are too slow, inconvenient, and infrequent to effectively compete with highways and airlines.

But with gas prices rising and traffic congestion strangling many American cities, passengers, investors, and government planners are all reconsidering railroads. Several new projects have sprung up across the country, aiming to link major cities a few hundred miles apart, where a train might provide a more convenient journey than a plane, car, or bus. Some of these projects are led by state governments, others by private companies. The contrast between the two is dramatic. To illuminate that difference, compare the government-run California High Speed Rail project with Brightline, a new private rail system in Florida.

Approved in 2008, California High Speed Rail (CHSR) was expected to deliver a 520-mile two-track, electrified high-speed railway on an all-new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2029. Fourteen years later, CHSR is now only expected to have a 171-mile single-track section between Madera and Bakersfield will be operational by 2030. Meanwhile the project’s cost has ballooned to $80 billion from an original budget of $33 billion, and costs are expected to rise further to $100 billion, or triple the original budget. 

Meanwhile in Florida, a very different kind of passenger railroad is already up and running. Brightline was launched in 2012 by the Florida East Coast Railway, a private freight railroad. Unlike CHSR, Brightline mostly uses existing routes, removing the need to acquire (or appropriate) large amounts of land. Instead of building the whole line before beginning any passenger services (as CHSR is doing), Brightline began construction on a 70-mile section from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2014 and opened it to passengers in 2018. This meant that Brightline already had an operational, revenue-producing service before embarking on the 170-mile northward extension to Orlando Airport. That extension is expected to open in 2023, and the entire project will cost about $1.75 billion, raised through private financing.

This equates to about $7.3 million per mile for Brightline, compared to $153.8 million per mile for CHSR (using the current $80 billion budget). Why will CHSR cost at least twenty times more per mile than Brightline? How has Brightline managed to deliver a high-speed intercity passenger rail system within ten years whereas CHSR needs twenty-two years to deliver an incomplete, scaled-down version of its original plan? Much of the answer comes down to the fundamental nature of public works projects such as CHSR.

In his Economics in One Lesson, economist Henry Hazlitt noted that many (if not most) public works projects do not even aim to address a clear need. Instead, said Hazlitt, they are justified in two ways: in terms of the jobs they create, and the end product they will produce. However, this overlooks the many alternative ways in which private individuals and businesses may have spent the money that the government instead appropriated through taxation and allocated to the project. When a private business spends money on a project, it expects a return on its investment. As such, it aims to provide a product it expects people to want or need. 

However, a government agency advancing a public project doesn’t need to do this. The government can force people to pay for whatever undertaking it chooses, regardless of whether there is a real need, or whether the project is a wise solution for that need. The result of this, as Hazlitt notes, is that projects are created for their own sake, for the activity and job creation that follows, not to solve an actual need. Such a project does not deliver good value for money, as the motivation is not to produce the best product for the cheapest price, but to create a large project involving as much activity as possible. 

The comparison between CHSR and Brightline is an excellent example of Hazlitt’s observation. Both projects will, if completed, provide a useful service that will benefit many people, but CHSR will do so using an astronomical amount of money that could have been put to myriad other uses. It will succeed in its goal of creating a project to generate activity, regardless of whether it ever delivers a viable or even operational railway. A private company considering providing a new transport option must assess demand for that new service, determine the likely revenue, and therefore how much it can afford to spend creating it. Brightline did this, planning its project with a budget proportional to demand and raising that money from investors who expect a return. 

One of CHSR’s giant viaducts over nothing. Credit: State of California.

Conversely, CHSR’s budget is completely divorced from the revenues it will produce, and there is no expectation for it ever to make a profit. As such, the project is massively over-engineered, with numerous large viaducts that pass over empty desert, and several grand landmark bridges and structures designed more to look impressive than to satisfy a need. This, combined with CHSR’s promotional materials, show that the project is designed to “create” jobs and give California an impressive megaproject. In a recent press release, CHSR proudly celebrated having created 6,000 jobs for local workers—but it’s not even close to finishing the much-reduced central section of the high speed railway it’s building. Not only does Brightline have a system moving passengers and producing revenue, but it’s also provided Miami with a shining new retail and residential development above its station in the heart of downtown. This is because private railroads rely on more than just passenger revenues to pay the bills—they also get revenue from developing the property they own. This is commonplace in Japan, where private railways build and operate shopping malls around their city center stations, with the mall and the railway both driving up each other’s revenues. 

We should let businesses identify demand and satisfy it accordingly. The resulting projects will do a better job of serving actual needs, will be more numerable, and will encourage more economic growth to fund further projects in the future. Private projects may not create as many jobs in the short term as public ones, but they create a far more prosperous economy in the long run. Brightline is now planning another railway to span the 270 miles between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Let’s see how quickly it will deliver a completed project compared to CHSR, with the latter’s fourteen-year head start.

CHSR exemplifies what happens when the government manages a major project—delays, budget overruns, and needless expenditure. Brightline shows what is possible when a private business is in control. Sadly, America’s original railroads were driven out of business by government-funded roads and airports (many of which are now in dire need of repair). Let’s hope Brightline is the first of a new generation of private rail projects that will reintroduce some entrepreneurial spirit into the transportation industry in the United States.

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Originally Appeared Here

I’ve repeatedly heaped praise on Ronald Reagan.

I’ve also lauded Calvin Coolidge on several occasions.

And I even once extolled the virtues of Grover Cleveland.

Today, we’re going to celebrate the fiscal achievements of Warren Harding.

Most notably, as illustrated by this chart based on OMB data, he presided over a period of remarkable spending discipline.

Harding also launched very big—and very effective—reductions in tax rates.

And his agenda of less government and lower tax rates helped bring about a quick end to a massive economic downturn (unlike the big-government policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, which deepened and lengthened the Great Depression).

In an article for National Review last year, Kyle Smith praised President Harding’s economic stewardship.

In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States. …America in 1921 was in a state of crisis, reeling from the worst recession in half a century, the most severe deflationary spiral on record… Unemployment, it is now estimated, stood somewhere between 8.7 and 11.7 percent as returning soldiers inflated the size of the working-age population.

Between 1919 and August of 1921 the Dow Jones average plummeted 47 percent. Harding’s response to this emergency was largely to let the cycle play out. …The recession ended in mid-year, and boom times followed. Harding and Congress cut federal spending nearly in half, from 6.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The top tax rate came down from 73 percent to 25, and the tax base broadened. Unemployment came down to an estimated 2 to 4 percent. …Harding was a smashing success in a historically important role as the anti-Wilson: He restored a classically liberal, rights-focused, limited government, and deserves immense credit for the economic boom that kicked off in his first year and continued throughout the rest of the 1920s.

Smith’s article also praises Harding for reversing some of Woodrow Wilson’s most odious policies, such as racial discrimination and imprisoning political opponents (Wilson also had a terrible record on economic issues).

Now let’s look at some excerpts from a new article authored by Vance Ginn of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and John Hendrickson of the Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation.

President Harding assumed office in 1921 when the nation was suffering an overlooked severe economic depression. Hampering growth were high income tax rates and a large national debt after WWI.

…President Harding’s chief economic policy was to rein in spending, reduce tax rates, and pay down debt. Harding…understood that any meaningful cuts in taxes and debt couldn’t happen without reducing spending. …Not only was Harding successful in this first endeavor to reduce government expenditures, his efforts resulted in “over $1.5 billion less than actual expenditures for the year 1921.” …The decade had started in depression and by 1923 the national economy was booming with low unemployment.

By the way, the $1.5 billion-plus reduction from 1921 to 1922 may not sound like much, but it was a 30 percent reduction in the size of government (and this was back in the days when government was a relatively small burden).

That would be akin to cutting more than $1.5 trillion from this year’s federal budget.

What a great idea—perhaps even better than my other libertarian fantasy.

P.S. Thomas Sowell has praised Harding’s economic policies.

P.P.S. And I’ve applauded Bill Clinton’s economic policies. Or, to be more precise, I’ve praised the policies that were enacted during his presidency.

This Liberty International article was republished with permission.

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Originally Appeared Here