Market Correction

20 January 2009

Editor, The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

To the Editor:

You report that Barack Obama will call for "a new era of responsibility" ("Obama to Call for a New Era of Responsibility," January 20).

His actions belie his words. By seeking an extra $800 billion for "stimulus," Mr. Obama will generate a typhoon of irresponsibility. Consider what Arnold Kling says at the blog EconLog: "How many people will have meaningful input in determining the overall allocation of the billion stimulus? 10? 20? It won't be more than 1000. These people - let's say that in the end 500 technocrats will play a meaningful role in writing the bill - will have unimaginable power. Remember that what they are doing is taking our money and deciding for us how to spend it. Presumably, that is because they are wiser at spending our money than we are at spending it ourselves.

"The arithmetic is mind-boggling. If 500 people have meaningful input, and the stimulus is almost $800 billion, then on average each person is responsible for taking more than $1.5 billion of our money and trying to spend it more wisely than we would spend it ourselves."*

Absolutely no one can spend $1.5 billion of other people's money responsibly.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/01/the_stimulus_an.html

19 January 2009

Editor, Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071

Dear Editor:

The fawning coverage of Barack Obama in today's edition of your paper combines with the increasingly surreal homage that Americans now pay to this man-of-myriad-bromides to remind me of a piece of wisdom from H.L. Mencken:

"People in the mass soon grow used to anything, including even being swindled. There comes a time when the patter of the quack becomes as natural and as indubitable to their ears as the texts of Holy Writ, and when that time comes it is a dreadful job debamboozling them."*

From the likes of Bruce Springsteen to the ordinary man and woman in the street, the deification of Mr. Obama is as dangerous as it is infantile.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 335.

19 January 2009

Editor, The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

To the Editor:

Jeremy Weir Alderson says that "the No. 1 reason for imposing higher labor standards on imports isn't to improve living standards abroad but to maintain them here" (Letters, January 19). It's true that the real motive for such standards is to protect certain producers in America from having to compete with lower-cost rivals. But it's untrue that access to lower-cost sources of goods and services causes poverty in America.

The greatest source of lower-cost competition for American producers over the years is not cheap foreign workers; it's machinery and technology. Local butchers in the late 19th century could not compete with Chicago slaughterhouses that shipped their beef across the country in new-fangled refrigerated railroad cars. Farmers over the past two hundred years have consistently been displaced by mechanized farm machinery, improved fertilizers and pesticides, better seed varieties, refrigeration, and better materials for packaging produce for storage and shipment. Typists in the late 20th century were out-competed by low-cost word-processing hardware and software.

Lower-cost sources of output do not cause poverty; they alleviate it.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University

18 January 2009

Editor, Washington Post Book World
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071

Dear Editor:

Re James Q. Wilson's review of Robert Kaiser's "So Damn Much Money" ("Is Washington for Sale?" January 18): Why are people continually surprised that successful special-interest-group lobbying happens routinely in Washington? To be shocked by this reality is like being shocked that sex happens in whorehouses.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University