Your Teacher Said What?! (34 page)

For that, you'll have to read chapter 8.

Although I still think the best travel book ever written is Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad
, in which he famously complains about having Michelangelo (he calls him Michael Angelo) for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and between meals, finally admitting that he “never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.”

You start trying to teach your children and end up learning a lot yourself. One thing I learned about was a man named Eugen Richter, a man who spent his life supporting free markets and trade and opposing both Germany's socialists
and
Chancellor Bismarck. Richter wrote a book titled
Pictures of the Socialistic Future
, in which he parodied—sort of—the kind of welfare state in which emigration is prohibited, since “persons who owe their education and training to the State cannot be accorded the right to emigrate, so long as they are of an age when they are obliged to work.” Which doesn't say much about the United States but is a pretty good description of, oh, say, East Germany.

China and India are giant economic powers, but mostly because of their giant populations. China's per-capita GDP is essentially the same as Angola's; India's is less than Mongolia's.

It would be poetic justice of a sort if Paul Krugman had a Harvard pedigree, but his academic credentials come from Yale and MIT, and he now teaches at Princeton. Same difference.

For more on unionism, see chapter 9.

For more on the law in question—the Davis-Bacon Act—see chapter 9.

For more on financial regulation, see chapter 2.

Yet another regulation—the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE—tells automobile companies what the average mileage of cars has to be.

I'm not making up either of these. The Obama administration has reinstated the Clintonera regulations intended to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, regulations that will cost between $4 billion and $100 billion annually. And the new $600 gas threshold? Part of (don't laugh) health-care reform—a provision that even the
IRS itself
calls “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance” (IRS Report Number IR-2010-83, July 7, 2010, “National Taxpayer Advocate Submits Mid-Year Report to Congress”).

We could give some credit to Jimmy Carter for deregulating the price of natural gas, but we'd have to take away points for the $20 billion he invested in the conversion of coal into natural gas because of a “shortage” that vanished once he deregulated its price. In fact, his deregulation-regulation-deregulation policies were so clumsy that—did I mention it was Jimmy Carter?

Borlaug, who died in 2009, also estimated that it would take an additional five billion cows to produce enough “natural” fertilizer to produce the needed nitrogen, to say nothing of uncounted tons of methane, a greenhouse gas. How Progressives can, at the same time, be against both global warming and synthetic fertilizers (and Borlaug himself, who supported intensive agriculture as the best defense against deforestation) escapes me. But they are. At a 2002 meeting in Rome that included Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, the final conference report blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger.

Ricardo was, like me, a onetime stockbroker, but—unlike me—he got
really
rich doing it. When he retired from the stock exchange to write books such as
The Principles of Political Economy
, he was worth somewhere north of half a million pounds—somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in today's dollars.

One historian I found—Richard Sennett, in his book
The Craftsman—
described guilds as protecting the artisan “not only from external competition, but also from the competition of his fellow-members [thus leading to] the destruction of all initiative. No one was permitted to harm others by methods which enabled him to produce more quickly and more cheaply than they. Technical progress took on the appearance of disloyalty.”

Just in case you think this is an artifact of the past, Davis-Bacon is still in place eighty years later: It was an explicit part of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus bill), even for projects funded only “in part” by the federal government.

Probably as a direct corollary, unionized industries produce 2 percent to 3 percent
less
job growth annually than nonunionized ones.

And the one with the longest and best-known connection with organized crime in America. It would be easy to classify unions as “good” or “bad” based on their association with criminals, but I'm not sure that the economic cost of “good” unions is any less than that of “bad” ones.

A lot more: At the federal level, the average government employee earns 45 percent more than the average private-sector worker with similar duties and qualifications; in Ohio, they earn 34 percent more in total compensation, including wages, benefits, and pension; in Michigan it's 47 percent.

It is no coincidence that until the 1960s, government employees weren't even allowed to unionize.

Public employees who are forbidden to strike, like most police and firefighters, get an even better deal: They are usually allowed to demand “interest arbitration,” in which a third party settles contract disputes, thereby letting local politicians off the hook for the most expensive settlements.

Ever since former governor Palin coined the word, I have been using it on
Squawk Box
to combine “refutation” and “repudiation”—simultaneously dismantling and denouncing a position. In November 2010, the
Oxford American Dictionary
picked it as the word of the year.

Or as virtually every Progressive calls it, “carbon.” The transformation of carbon dioxide—a colorless, tasteless, and quite harmless gas—into “carbon,” with all its echoes of the dirty stuff that is dug out of the ground and coats the lungs with dust, is one of the greatest PR triumphs since the days of P. T. Barnum.

The formal name for the statute signed by President Obama on July 21, 2010, is “An Act to Promote the Financial Stability of the United States by Improving Accountability and Transparency in the Financial System, to End ‘Too Big to Fail,' to Protect the American Taxpayer by Ending Bailouts, to Protect Consumers from Abusive Financial Services Practices, and for Other Purposes.” Washington doesn't do concise.

This is the same logic that allows homeowners to deduct the interest on mortgages from their income tax.

In all fairness, by August 2010, Congressman Frank was actually calling for the abolition of Fannie and Freddie and even admitting that maybe “everyone shouldn't be a homeowner.” Better a few trillion dollars late than never, I guess.

For more on scarcity, see chapter 2.