Guest Post - Natural Isn't Necessarily Better: Celebrating Human Achievement

by Richard Morrison

Human Achievement Hour—to be observed tomorrow, March 24, between 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm—is the Competitive Enterprise’s Institute’s annual celebration of innovation and progress.

During this hour, people around the world pay tribute to the advancements that inventors and entrepreneurs have created in every field, from health and energy to communications and transportation. These advancements allow us to live richer, fuller lives and protect us and our families from unpredictable hazards, both in everyday life and during emergencies and disasters.

Originally launched as an alternative to environmental activist campaigns like “Earth Hour”—which calls for participants to signal their concern for climate change by turning off all of their lights—Human Achievement Hour challenges people to celebrate the ability of humanity to solve problems creatively.

Some voices in the environment debate today view mankind as a plague upon an otherwise pristine and virtuous planet Earth. That perspective, afflicted with what philosophers call the “naturalistic fallacy,” calls for a smaller human population, limits on energy use, and government restrictions on deployment of valuable new technology. It elevates an anthropomorphic vision of Mother Earth above the health and safety of actual human beings.

Rather than confront environmental challenges with a vibrant, growing economy and human know-how, we hear repeated calls for lowering our expectations to brace for a resource-constrained future in which we’ll live materially poorer than our ancestors. Those conditions, we are assured, must come with strict government limits of what we can grow, use, mine, harvest, and create.
Even as a symbolic gesture, turning out our lights in response to global challenges sends the wrong message.

This overly pessimistic and profoundly depressing vision of our shared future ignores the vital human needs that depend on resource development and use of affordable energy sources, including fossil sources like oil, natural gas, and coal.

Even as a symbolic gesture, turning out our lights in response to global challenges sends the wrong message. The technological know-how, plentiful energy, and competitive economy that brought universal access to electricity to the developed world are precisely the forces that will allow all of us to prosper, flourish, and gain an increasing standard of living well into the future.

However you spend the hour tomorrow night, remember that human technology and affordable energy are making life better for billions of people around the world every day—from life expectancy and disease treatment to literacy rates and increased employment. Throwing up barriers and restrictions in the name of protecting the Earth will slow down those improvements. The costs, especially to the poorest and most vulnerable, are real.

Instead of sitting in the dark, Human Achievement Hour asks us all to celebrate the human spirit—and support a free society in whichever greater successes will be possible.

Reprinted from Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Richard Morrison is the program manager of the Center for Advancing Capitalism, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: No, Capitalism Is Not Ruining Your Christmas Market

by Bill Wirtz

Glowing Christmas lights fill the cold streets of medieval European cities with little wooden booths selling steaming hot wine and cinnamon biscuits. However, the traditional look and idyllic atmosphere seem to be threatened by the evil of modern-day capitalism. That is, at least, the common saying of visitors of these markets. But are big companies actually ruining your favorite winter experience?

All We Want for Christmas Is... Sales
Your local Christmas market is a money-making machine regardless of it selling candles or car insurance. 

Christmas market, Barcelona, 1986

First off: Christmas markets are, at least in Europe, a billion euro industry. In 2014, the largest sales were counted in Germany with almost €2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) in revenue, followed by France with €820 million ($965 million). In a more detailed analysis on Christmas markets in the UK, researchers found that in the example of the city of Manchester, an average stall at a Christmas market generated £3,500 ($4,600) per day.

They add that if you also account for the tourism factor — as large amounts of visitors are either from abroad or coming from a different city and staying overnight — you're seeing spending of £10 million ($13.3 million). Christmas markets in Brussels, Belgium, and Strasbourg, France count between 1.5 and 2 million visitors. The Christmas market on Paris' Champs-Elysées counts over 200 booths and over a staggering 15 million visitors each year.

Your local Christmas market is a money-making machine regardless of it selling candles or car insurance. Claiming that the hot wine salesman in his wooden booth isn't as interested in making a profit as Coca-Cola which is giving out free samples would mean being blinded by emotion.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... Prosperity
When presented with the choice of living under socialism or free-market capitalism, even those who preach socialism choose the latter. 

The Christmas spirit is supposed to advocate for empathy and compassion, as the biblical stories describe Jesus, a poor man, who preached charity despite receiving very little of it in return. These days, most "charity" is in the hands of the government through welfare programs. The reasons to oppose the welfare state are numerous, but outside of the inefficiency and cost of government bureaucracy, both government spending on welfare and charity fail to create value.

World Bank and UN reports celebrate a global success story: between 1990 and 2008, the world cut by half the share of the world’s poor, those living on less than $1.25 a day. The United Nations also points out that 2.6 billion people have gained access to improved drinking water while the number of hungry people has declined by 20 percent in the last 20 years. 

The origin of development is, of course, the wealth created by entrepreneurs and large businesses which have not only provided jobs in areas in which there were none before but whose reduced production costs have made high-end goods accessible to all. 

Compare this to socialism, the likes of which create starvation in Venezuela and North Korea or unclean drinking water in Cuba, not to speak of the massive injustices and infractions on people's individual liberty. When presented with the choice of living under authoritarian socialism or living under free-market capitalism, even those who preach socialism choose the latter.

Who Do We Celebrate?
Next time you see a large coffee machine retailer, think of the people whose lives were made better through these companies. 

Christmas decorations, Oxford Street, London, 1986

We are aware that the success stories of free-market capitalism improving the living conditions of the poorest of the poor through reducing living costs and improving access to quality good and services. However, they fail to be the ones who are actually celebrated around Christmas for providing these essential opportunities to people. We worship those who give handouts to the poor, but we hold those who enable poor people to rise and improve their living conditions in utter disdain.

When there is a large company selling their products on a traditional Christmas market, many see a greedy company ruining the flair of the Christmas spirit. It doesn't occur to them that millions of people are able to put food on the table and buy gifts for their children: something that prior to the emergence of free-market capitalism was a privilege reserved for the very few. All it takes to see this is to think of the millions of people oppressed by socialism, like those in Venezuela, who will, this year, spend among the worst Christmas Eves they have ever witnessed.

Next time you see a large coffee machine retailer or a booth advertising cleaning products at your local Christmas market, think of the people whose lives were made better through these companies.

The greatest gifts aren't wrapped in paper, but stats about poverty reduction.





Bill Wirtz is a Young Voices Advocate. His work has been featured in several outlets, including Newsweek, Rare, RealClear, CityAM, Le Monde and Le Figaro. He also works as a Policy Analyst for the Consumer Choice Center.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Anti-Racists Should Think Twice about Allying with Socialism

Modern racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter are embracing the historically false assumption that socialism is anti-racist.

by Marian L. Tupy

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last August, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, stated that BLM would not sit at the table with President Trump because he “is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country – be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia”.

Trump’s views and actions aside, calling capitalism evil and conflating it with racism is noteworthy. The same goes for the increasing tendency among racial justice advocates to embrace the left-wing economic agenda.

So much so that Ryan Cooper, a columnist for The Week, wrote a column titled, Is Black Lives Matter turning socialist? As Cooper approvingly noted, BLM has adopted a “hugely aggressive – and firmly leftist – economic program”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Natalie Jeffers, who cofounded BLM in the United Kingdom, urged her followers to: “Fight racism with solidarity. Fight capitalism with socialism. We must organize – dedicate ourselves to revolutionary politic power.”

The Black Lives Matter Movement, a separate British organization, was founded by Gary McFarlane, a representative of the Socialist Workers Party, who writes for the Socialist Review and the Socialist Worker, and claims that, “Capitalism is racist from the top to the bottom”. His cofounders, including Kate Hurford, Harold Wilson, and Naima Omar, have also written for those two publications.

There is, in other words, a growing assumption among racial justice advocates that more socialism would result in less racism and, even, that socialism is, in itself, anti-racist. There is, in fact, no such necessary connection between socialism and anti-racism, as a closer look at early socialist writings amply shows.

Socialists Had a Lot to Say About Race

To start with, it is important to note that the meaning of the word “race” changed over time. Today, most people think of races in terms of color, as in “black” and “white.” Historically, however, race was also a synonym for a nation or, even, a family. In his 1933 book, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill noted: “Deep in the heart of the Prussian state and race lay the antagonism to France.” The English artist Mary Granville, in turn, referred to Churchill’s family as the “Marlborough race” in her 1861 book, Autobiography and Correspondence.

Race was always a part of socialist thought.

But race, whether narrowly (black and white) or broadly (skin color, nation, and family) understood, was always a part of socialist thought. In 1894, for example, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the German economist Walther Borgius. In it, Engels noted, “We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately determines historical development, but race is in itself an economic factor.”

In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Engels elaborated on the subject of race, observing “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species.” He went on, “If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”

It is noteworthy that Engels wrote those words 16 years before Francis Galton, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine, urged humanity to take control of its own evolution by means of “good breeding” or eugenics. Speaking of which, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were both socialists and eugenicists, bemoaned the falling birthrates among so-called higher races in the New Statesman in 1913. They warned that “a new social order [would be] developed by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese”.

Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, offered his views on race in his 1952 memoir The Motorcycle Diaries, writing, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide.

Socialists Are Historically Pro-Genocide

In addition to racism, early socialist writings contained explicit calls for genocide of backward peoples. The toxic mix of those two illiberal ideas would result in at least 80 million deaths during the course of the 20th century.

In the New York Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide, writing, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” His friend and collaborator, Engels, was more explicit.

In 1849, Engels published an article in Marx’s newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In it, Engels condemned the rural populations of the Austrian Empire for failing enthusiastically to partake in the revolution of 1848. This was a seminal moment, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

“From Engels' article in 1849 down to the death of Hitler,” George Watson wrote in his 1998 book The Lost Literature of Socialism, “everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist.”

So, what did Engels write?

Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality – the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

“The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians,” he continued. “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”

Here Engels clearly foreshadows the genocides of the 20th-century totalitarianism in general and the Soviet regime in particular. In fact, Joseph Stalin loved Engels’ article and commended it to his followers in The Foundations of Leninism in 1924. He then proceeded to suppress Soviet ethnic minorities, including the Jews, Crimean Tatars, and Ukrainians.

It is unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler, who admired Stalin for his ruthlessness and called him a “genius,” was also heavily influenced by Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism,” Hitler said, “as I do not hesitate to admit.” Throughout his youth, Hitler “never shunned the company of Marxists” and believed that while the “petit bourgeois Social Democrat … will never make a National Socialist … the Communist always will.”

Hitler’s “differences with the communists”, argued Watson, “were less ideological than tactical”. Hitler embraced German nationalism so as not to “compete with Marxism on its own ground,” but explicitly acknowledged that “‘the whole of national socialism’ was based on Marx.” It is, therefore, unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

How much did the Nazis learn from the Soviets?

In his 1947 memoir Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, Hoess recalled that the Germans knew of the Soviet program of extermination of the enemies of the state through forced labor as early as 1939. “If, for example, in building a canal, the inmates of a [Soviet] camp were used up, thousands of fresh kulaks or other unreliable elements were called in who, in their turn, would be used up.” The Nazis would use the same tactic on the Jewish slave laborers in, for example, munition factories.

Following their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, wrote Watson, the Germans collected information on the immense scale of the Soviet camp system and were impressed by the “Soviet readiness to destroy whole categories of people through forced labor.”

Communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog.

After the war ended, Stalin was deeply worried about what the Germans knew with regard to the Soviet camp system and the crimes that the Soviets committed in the territories they conquered following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He sent Andrey Vyshinsky, the mastermind of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-1938), to Nuremberg to steer the war crimes tribunal away from inconvenient lines of inquiry.

Today we are familiar with the aggregate numbers of people who died as a result of the socialist experiment, but communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog. As such, the Nazi extermination of the Jews is generally condemned as an example of race hatred. The Soviet extermination of specific groups of people, in contrast, is generally seen as part of a much less toxic “class struggle.”

The Strange Separation of "Race Hate" and "Class Struggle"

The Marxist theory of history focused on class struggle and posited that feudalism was destined to be superseded by capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, was destined to give way to communism. Marx saw himself chiefly as a scientist and thought that he had discovered an immutable law of evolution of human institutions, from barbarism at the one end to communism at the other end. (Hence the idea of “scientific socialism” that Engels promoted after Marx’s death.)

Peoples stuck in feudalism, like the Slavs, “as well as Basques, Bretons and Scottish Highlanders”, could not progress straight from feudalism to communism. They would have to be exterminated – so as not to keep everyone else back! Watson noted, “They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.”

How, then, are we to think of socialism and race, and does the answer to that question have any bearing on the distinction that has been drawn between the Nazi and communist atrocities?

The best that can be said of the socialists is that their victims were more varied than those of Hitler. 

In his 1902 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought, H.G. Wells wrote, “There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the abandon of rabbits or negroes.”

“I must confess,” he continued, that “I do not see the Negro and the poor Irishman and all the emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party.”

Note the ease with which the socialist author of such best-sellers as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds(1898), conflates backward whites and backward blacks.

To Wells, both were primitive and, consequently, unsuited to be the torchbearers of socialism. That’s perfectly consonant with Marx’s theory of history, which was, by definition, universal in applicability. Creation of a socialist utopia, therefore, depended on the extermination of all races, broadly understood, who stood in the way of socialist revolution. As such, it included black “Bushmen” and white Bretons.

In contrast to Marx, Hitler’s utopia was not universal. Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), wanted to create socialism in only one country, Germany. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, for example, was partly rooted in his belief that capitalism and international Jewry were two sides of the same coin. As he once famously asked, “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?”

The old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism and socialism proper seems to be untenable.

To achieve their socialist goals, wrote Götz Aly in his 2008 book Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, the Germans confiscated gold, food, clothing, and machinery throughout the territories they conquered. They also put the conquered peoples to work in German slave labor and extermination camps, and factories.

In conclusion, the old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism (as purely racist) and socialism proper (as lacking a racial component) seems to be untenable. Both the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities (ie, the Germans) and their victims, including the Jews and the Slavs, were white. As such, Nazi atrocities make little sense on the narrow definition of racism (i.e., black versus white). They do make sense in the broader context – the perceived necessity to exterminate all peoples who stood in the way of achieving Hitler’s utopian ideal.

But, the same can be said of communist atrocities. The early socialists certainly toyed with the idea of racial inferiority of the darker races (i.e., narrow definition of racism), but ultimately embraced a program of genocide that was more encompassing. The best that can be said of the socialists, therefore, is that their victims were, in accordance with the universal aspirations of Marxism, more varied than those of Hitler. Let us hope that’s not the sort of inclusivity that Black Lives Matter on both sides of the Atlantic strives for.

Reprinted from CapX

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post - Which Fosters the Spirit of Giving: Free Markets or Socialism?

by Robert Higgs

Christmas will soon be here, and preparations for this holiday are proceeding apace. People are buying gifts for family members and friends and making preparations for great feasts at which family, friends, and other loved ones will gather to share the joy and love of the occasion. Notice how much effort and expense are going into giving to and bringing joy to others. Notice, too, how much of the spending people do during this season would be impossible except for the affluence made possible by the remaining elements of the market society that the government, to date, has failed to destroy completely.

Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

The free-market society is often criticized or condemned root and branch for its alleged dependence on the unsavory human trait of greed. Socialists have always claimed that their system would replace one dependent on greed with one based on compassion and caring for the unfortunate. Both theory and history have shown, however, that socialism cannot produce the wealth that makes possible the highly effective expression of compassion and caring. Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

In any event, the idea that the free-market system rests on greed has always been mistaken, if not an outright lie. The system rests on allowing people to pursue their self-interest, to be sure, but self-interest is quite different from greed and indeed often consists of the very opposite. People in general have an interest in, for example, earning more income, and a major reason for this desire is that they wish to have the wherewithal to give to or take care of others more effectively—their own families first of all in most cases, but hardly their own families exclusively.

The amounts of money, time, and effort that people devote to making others happier or better off—amounts vividly on display during the holiday season—belie the slander of a free market’s dependence on greed. But such transfers also occur throughout the year and amount to an enormous proportion of all the uses to which people in free-market societies put their wealth.

In contrast, the alleged compassion and caring for the unfortunate that many have supposed support socialism are scarcely to be seen. For one thing, the incentives inherent in socialism entail that the socialist society will become or remain lodged in poverty, thereby crippling its capacity for effective compassion and caring in the material realm. For another thing, socialism does not so much eliminate the greed that exists in a population as it alters the forms in which the greed can be directed and expressed.

The opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is a great blessing.
Leaders of socialist societies have a habit of living lavishly amid the squalor of the system they control and despoil—Mao, Castro, and Chavez provide ready examples. Ordinary people in socialist societies, being deprived of free-market outlets for the pursuit of their self-interest must instead strive to better themselves and those for whom they care by struggling for political power and, often, by diverting resources intended for the general public to their own enjoyment. Socialism does not build the generous character that socialist dreamers have touted; on the contrary.

So, at this time of the year, let us remind ourselves not only of the love and compassion that Christmas calls forth, but also of the systemic economic underpinnings that permit people to express their love and compassion so effectively. The love of family, friends, and others is the greatest blessing, but the opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is also a great blessing.

Republished from the Independent Institute.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review.  He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Marilyn Monroe and the Real Value of Profits

An obscure 1951 film that fell out of copyright gained some new life in the home video market simply because a then practically unknown Marilyn Monroe had a small supporting role.

DVDs of Home Town Story, written and directed by Arthur Pierson, are sold with big photos of Monroe on the cover, as though it is a “Marilyn Monroe movie.” It isn’t, but even if a few thousand people are induced to buy it for that reason, that’s a good thing, because the film has an important lesson about business and economics.

The actual marquee star of the movie (which runs a short 61 minutes, more like a TV teleplay than a feature film) is Jeffrey Lynn, who plays Blake Washburn, a small-town newspaper publisher who has just lost his seat in the state senate to the scion of a local manufacturer, John McFarland (played by veteran character actor Donald Crisp). Monroe plays a secretary at the newspaper and appears on screen for no more than five minutes.

Washburn is bitter about his campaign loss and, when he takes over the newspaper from his uncle, he embarks on an editorial crusade against big business, in particular railing against the profits made by large industrial corporations. His sometime foil in this is reporter Slim Haskins (played by Alan Hale, Jr., best known as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island), who tells his boss to tone down the rhetoric.

While I watched Home Town Story, I initially thought this would be a typical left-wing agitprop piece from the early Cold War era, where the crusading newspaper editor would be the hero and the capitalist businessman would be the villain.

I was wrong.

About halfway through the movie, the whole tone of the film changes as business owner John McFarland shows up in the newspaper’s office. He wants to talk to Washburn about his editorials and offer an alternative point of view. Here’s the dialogue from that scene (which can be watched in full on YouTube):

McFARLAND: I’m interested in profits, both for myself and the customer. My main reason for coming here was to see if I could perhaps interest you in printing something about a pet theory I have. I call it “Profits to the Customer.”

WASHBURN: What do you mean?

McFARLAND: As I say, it’s my own private little pet theory. It’s very simple, not very complicated. You see, I’m not an economist, I’m just a businessman. I have to make a profit to stay in business.

WASHBURN: Sure, we all know that.

McFARLAND: I make a profit on every electric motor I sell but the customer must make a larger profit, because if he doesn’t, he won’t buy my motors and I’m out of business.

WASHBURN (incredulous): The customer must make a profit?

McFARLAND: That’s right … Yes, the customer must make a profit. For example, you have some typesetting machines out there. The manufacturer who sold them made a profit on them. But your paper would never have bought them in the first place if they couldn’t deliver something beyond their original cost. They must continue to work for your paper to be worth more to you than you paid for them. As a customer, that’s your profit.

WASHBURN (skeptical): My profit?

McFARLAND: Yes, you sell your newspaper to a man for five cents. He gets news, advertisements, and all kinds of information for his home and business. He gets service beyond the value of his five cents. As a customer, that’s his profit. The same story for everything else: the light bulb, the refrigerator, the telephone. For this, we pay a few dollars a month. Our profits are enormous in steps alone. In case of an emergency, it’s value can’t be estimated.

SLIM HASKINS: That’s a different slant from what we’ve been printing.

WASHBURN, after a long pause: As you say, that’s just a theory. But you can’t deny that you are a big business.

McFARLAND: In your editorials, you’ve been insisting that because a thing is big, it’s bad. It takes bigness to do big things. Our industries turned out equipment for our armed forces in a remarkably short space of time. It was a big job and it was well done. It helped us to win the war and preserve our country. That’s what American industry with its bigness was able to accomplish. Was that bad, Blake?

The last fifty years, we’ve come a long way. It used to take a week to get a letter across the United States. Now we do it in one day. The difference in time alone could affect the happiness of a family. It might even mean a matter of life and death.

In my time, I’ve seen advances in industry that have added twenty years to the average span of life. My father died in the old country at the age of forty, an old man. His work was absolute drudgery, slavery, on his own farm from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. But because I live in America, I feel like a young man, and I’ll be 65 in April.

WASHBURN, irked: Why are you telling me all this?

McFARLAND: Well, I thought perhaps you might be interested in both sides of this profit question, and print something else for a change.

WASHBURN, steaming: Mr. McFarland, I don’t tell you how to run your plant, so please don’t tell me how to run my paper. I’ll print my own conception of business profits. Good day, sir.

McFARLAND: Well, I just thought I’d come in and talk – which I have.

Remember, Blake, when this country was first discovered, there was nothing here. Now look around you, everything you see is profits. Our transportation, communication, household appliances, medical equipment. Notice them sometime, Blake. They’re the real profits.

The plot soon turns to a school field trip, where Washburn’s young sister is trapped in an abandoned mine. With the help of equipment made by McFarland’s factory, and because McFarland has a private airplane he offers to Washburn to take the girl to a hospital in Capital City, the little girl’s life is saved. As a topper, as the girl is wheeled out of surgery, McFarland notices the motor operating a respirator helping the girl breathe: “Hmm,” he says quietly. “That’s one of ours.”

As a result, Washburn’s next editorial has a different approach.

“You know, Slim, seven hours ago, John McFarland with a pet theory I didn’t think was worth printing. Theories have a funny way of becoming facts.”

Curious about the writer and director of Home Town Story, and wondering where he might have come up with the ideas that inspired the film, I did a bit of research.

Arthur Pierson only directed two other feature films. Most of his work was in television, and he ended his career as an executive at Hanna-Barbera, the animation company best known for producing The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

Something early in Pierson’s career stood out, however. It turns out before he became a director and screenwriter, he was an actor. Between 1929 and 1940, he appeared in eleven Broadway plays.

In fact, in 1935, he was in the original Broadway cast of The Night of January 16th, written by Ayn Rand.

Now, you don’t suppose that Arthur Pierson, Hollywood director, got some of his ideas about business and profits from the Goddess of the Market herself, do you?

'Bootleggers and Baptists': An Interview with Adam Smith

Over on Book Reviews by Rick Sincere is a recent interview with economist Adam Smith of Johnson & Wales University.

Smith is the coauthor, with his grandfather Bruce Yandle, of Bootleggers & Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Politics, which was published by the Cato Institute in September.

The two authors gave a presentation about their book at Cato in October. Afterward, I spoke to Smith about the book and its title. Here is an excerpt:

Smith explained that the term “bootleggers and Baptists” originated during alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s, when “you had bootleggers and Baptists with aligned interests” even if they did not realize it.

Baptists, he explained, proclaimed “Down with legalized distribution of alcohol!” because they saw drinking as morally detrimental. Bootleggers, too, proclaimed “Down with legalized distribution of alcohol!” because Prohibition raised the price of illegal liquor and fed more profits to the bootleggers.

“It was a boon to the bootleggers,” Smith explained, “and the Baptists were kind of oblivious to that situation.”

Broadening the concept to include other kinds of regulations, Smith said, “what we see today in our modern political economy [are] many, many manifestations of the same kinds of strange bedfellows.”

More and more, he said, “we're seeing that those bedfellows are recognizing one another and coming together to form even more powerful would-be bootlegger/Baptist coalitions.”

There is also a relationship between “bootleggers and Baptists” and “crony capitalism,” when government grants preferential treatment to certain, well-connected businesses.

Smith said that, in the book “we call it 'bootlegger/Baptist' capitalism instead of crony capitalism.”

Read the whole thing here.

The Pope's Medieval Economics - Still and Again

With a brief respite for Thanksgiving, social media and the blogosphere have been astir with conversations about Pope Francis' new apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium ("Joy of the Gospels"), which, despite being a lengthy disputation on the Trinity and other aspects of Catholic theological dogma, has had its few passages on economics singled out for praise and criticism.

I have earlier written about how the top ranks of the Catholic hierarchy are stuck in the Middle Ages when it comes to economic thinking, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

The core problem in the current Pope's thinking is found in this passage from Evangelii Gaudium (slightly truncated):

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts..."

This has been "confirmed by the facts" so many times I am confounded by the Pope's ignorance of free-market economics, whose theoretical principles were first propounded by the Spanish Scholastics of the early Renaissance.

This Pope, like his predecessors, adheres to a medieval mode of thinking about economics in which wealth distribution is a zero-sum game: Some people are rich because other people are poor. It completely ignores how wealth can be created (making a bigger pie, not just cutting up smaller and smaller pieces to share) through human ingenuity facilitated by the rule of law, respect for property rights, and freedom of thought and information.

The rise of capitalism -- or, as I prefer to call it, free enterprise -- has historically been the most effective driver of wealth creation and lifting people out of poverty. In the past 30 years alone, a billion people who were once living in dire poverty are now middle-class and even rich (by any standard) just in China and India, where liberalized economic policies have freed them from lives that were, by all accounts, nasty, brutish, and short (if not solitary, given those countries' large populations).

As Matt Welch, writing in Reason, put it in a slightly different way:

More people have escaped poverty the past 25 years than were alive on the planet in 1800. Their "means of escape" was largely the introduction of at least some "laws of competition" in endeavors that had long been the exclusive domain of authoritarian, monopolistic governments.

To be fair, the Pope comes from Argentina, where cronyism and mercantilism have long been presented (falsely) as free enterprise. In that context, it would be easy to assume that capitalism creates poverty rather than eliminates it. The affluence and abundance of the modern world were never envisioned by the Bible, which incorrectly prophesies that "the poor will be with us always."

As we have seen in the unprecedented progress of the past 200 years, there is no inevitability to poverty.

Porn for a Cause

Each week I look forward (pardon the pun) to an email from The Jewish Daily Forward, with a list of its most recent articles. I can always depend on The Forward for quirky, unexpected news and cultural commentary that simply can't be found anywhere else.

For instance...

This week there was a story on Russian-Jewish emigre Michael Lucas, who spent his childhood under Soviet Communism and who now lives an entrepreneurial American success story. Simply put, he's an adult movie producer -- in fact, he's an award-winning gay porn producer.

The article, headlined "Pornographic Stimulus Plan," by Michael Kaminer, highlights the latest offering by Lucas Entertainment, a video entitled Men of Israel.

Kaminer says that it is claimed that the film is "the first gay adult film made in Israel with an all-Israeli cast." (That cast includes Avi Dar, Matan Shalev, Jonathan Agassi, Guy Ronen, Morr-Foxx, Naor Tal, and Ninrod Gonen.)

What's more, the Forward article continues,

Lucas claims that his motivation behind “Men of Israel” was not just titillation, but also a counterbalance to lopsided portrayals of Israel in mainstream media. “It’s free PR for Israel, and it’s much better than the PR they’re getting on the news,” he said during a tour of the company’s expansive second-floor offices, with views of the New York Times building across the street. “The reality is that Israel has only one face to people on the street, and that’s the West Bank and Gaza. All people see in the media is a country of disaster. They get images of a blown-up bus.”

By contrast, Lucas said, the images in “Men of Israel” — filmed in telegenic Tel Aviv, Haifa and desert locations by Israeli fashion photographer Ronen Akerman — amount to a pornographic stimulus campaign for gay tourism.

“Nobody goes to Israel for Golda Meir, I’m so sorry,” Lucas said in heavily Russian-accented English. “People don’t care that you have a great orchestra, and they’re not particularly interested in the Holocaust museum. Gay people, and straight people, want beautiful beaches, beautiful nature, beautiful men and women, good food, good hotels. Israel shouldn’t be mistaken about why people go there. They need me.

Will Men of Israel do for Israeli tourism what The Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand, or what Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol, is expected to do to bring more tourists to Washington, D.C.? Michael Lucas seems confident that it will; Kaminer reports that Lucas recently became an Israeli citizen.

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Gift Ideas for Black Friday

Last year, just before Thanksgiving, I wrote about the origins of "Black Friday" -- the legendary "busiest" shopping day of the year (which is not true; that happens on the Saturday before Christmas) on which retailers account books shift from red to black (another dubious claim).

This year, hopes for Black Friday are muted. Many retailers are afraid the current economic situation has made consumers wary of making large purchases, today or any other day between now and Christmas. A recent survey, reported by Reuters, suggests that the number of shoppers will be lower this year than last year during the days immediately following Thanksgiving:

Up to 128 million shoppers and would-be shoppers could be expected this holiday weekend, but the numbers represent a drop of more than 5 percent from a year ago, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Some 49 million U.S. shoppers already plan to hit stores this coming holiday weekend, prompted by pent-up demand and lured by deep discounts, according to the BIGresearch study for the National Retail Federation (NRF).

An additional 79 million would-be shoppers are playing wait-and-see, planning to suss out the weekend promotions before deciding whether to shop, the survey found.

But the 128 million people represent a drop of more than 5 percent from the 135 million people who said they would, or might shop a year ago during the Black Friday weekend, the kick-off to the holiday shopping season.

Retailers are pulling out all the stops to attract shoppers under the circumstances of the economic slowdown. For instance, Simon Malls (which include Charlottesville's Fashion Square Mall) will be opening their doors extra early this year:

Early-bird shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving is an annual tradition for holiday bargain hunters across the country. This year Simon Property Group, Inc. ... is opening its malls extra early to help consumers get an even faster jump on their holiday gift lists.

Most Simon malls will open their doors at 5:00 a.m. on Friday, November 28, the traditional start to the holiday shopping season, where consumers will be met with more retailer offers and savings and customer amenities, all under one roof.

Even on-line retailers are getting into the act, getting a jump on "Cyber Monday" (the first workday following Black Friday, when cubicle-dwellers surf the shopping sites instead of doing the work that's expected of them).

For instance, Amazon.com has a promotion called "Amazon Customers Vote," described like this:

Welcome to Amazon Customers Vote 2008, your chance to compete for our most ridiculous deals of the season. The products that get the most votes in each of six rounds will be offered at ridiculous deal prices, and the runners-up will also be offered at slightly smaller discounts. (But they'll still be sweet deals.)

* Step 1: Vote.
Browse our six rounds of great products, and vote for the ones you'd like to buy at an amazing discount.

* Step 2: Check E-mail.
Check your e-mail the day before each buying round to see if you've been randomly selected to participate in the race to buy.

* Step 3: Go!
If selected, make sure you come back and log-in early on race day. We will have many more participants than deals, so the race is on. Good luck!

Amazon has also set up a special page full of "Black Friday 2008 Deals," leading off with electronics, followed by gifts for sporty and outdoorsy types, winter apparel, home improvement bargains, and books and DVDS, among other items.

TLA Video, a specialty web site, also offers a number of quirky gift ideas for Christmas and the holiday season. (I highlighted some of those products last year, but a few of the more entertaining links are dead now.)

Those who have not yet bought, addressed, and sent out their holiday greeting cards might be interested in these choices:

Celebrate Boxed Holiday Cards

The tantalizing angel on the cover of this card gives great reason to celebrate. Each of the ten cards contained in this set feature the photo shown. Here's the copy inside and outside the card: Outside: Celebrate Inside: A healthy & happy holiday season.








Christmas Homo Boxed Holiday Cards

It's simple, but it hit us right on the funny bone. Your friends are likely to get a big kick, as well. Each of the ten cards contained in the set feature this photo of a man shouting. Here's the copy inside and outside the card: Outside: Merry Christmas! Inside: Homo!









Herald Angels Sing Boxed Holiday Cards

Now that is what I call an angel! Adorable! Each of the ten cards contained in this holiday set feature the captivating photo pictured. Here's the copy inside and outside the card: Outside: Hark! The herald angels sing Inside: Wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a joyous New Year







Santa Quits Boxed Holiday Cards

Only one thing can be inferred from this card...Santa must be a homophobe. It's a shame, because he might fit nicely in the older bear community. Send this card to your friends and give them a holiday chuckle. Each of the ten cards in this set features the photo shown. Here's the copy inside and outside the card: Outside: A Barbie for Ben and a tool belt for Jane! Inside: I quit!




Wishing Joy & Love Boxed Holiday Cards

Awww. This card carries a sweet sentiment to share with your friends and neighbors this holiday season. Each of the ten cards in this gorgeous set feature the scrumptious angel pictured. Here's the copy inside and outside the card: Outside: Joy to the World Inside: Wishing joy and love to you and yours this holiday season






For those more interested in playing cards than greeting cards, TLA Video has these provocative game decks available:





Truth or Dare Poker Card Game

Add some naughty, taboo fun to your favorite card games. The Truth or Dare Poker Card Game contains the standard 52 cards found in any deck along with probing truth questions and hilarious dares on each card. Win a game and you get to assign truths or dares to the other players of your choice. The better your poker hand, the more people you get to challenge. Truth example: What are you most ashamed to admit you own? Dare example: Perform a puppet show with dirty sweat socks.











Playgirl Playing Cards

This official poker deck features 52 different hot, buff men from Playgirl for your own personal playing enjoyment. Just don't let these studs distract you from your poker strategy and try not to drool all over the cards either...other players have to use them too.









No doubt there is someone on your gift list who likes soft skin and pleasant aromas, and there is plenty to choose from on that score:


Pear Trio Box

TLA is proud to offer this gorgeous, eye-catching gift set containing a trio of intoxicating pear-scented bath and body products from duross & langel. Fairly dripping with sweet and yummy yellow pear set within a white shea butter soap base and blended with pear nectar. Included in this set are shower gel, body cream, and soap.

Peppermint Trio Box

TLA is proud to offer this gorgeous, eye-catching gift set containing a trio of intoxicating peppermint-scented bath and body products from duross & langel. Soothe your senses and calm your soul with a unique and invigorating blend of peppermint oils. This set also includes soap, shower gel, and body cream.

Nothing makes a better stocking-stuffer than a classic Christmas DVD. It comes as no surprise that TLA Video offers a large selection. Just a few to start with:

Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July

You would have to search far and wide to find anyone who disagrees with the view that this is simply one of the worst animated Christmas movies ever made, and therefore it must be seen to be believed. TLA Video's synopsis barely skims the surface:

"Long, long ago, the North Pole was ruled by the good fairy Lady Boreal and her enemy was the wicked wizard Winterbolt. To protect Santa Claus from Winterbolt's foggy fury, Lady Boreal grants Rudolph the Reindeer a magical, glowing nose. Years later, Rudolph and his friend Frosty the Snowman are called on to save a needy circus at a special 4th of July benefit. But their big-top act turns to big-time trouble when Winterbolt appears - with a plan to steal Frosty's magic hat and extinguish Rudolph's legendary nose!"

The cast includes Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, and Shelley Winters. Yes, really.








The Judy Garland Christmas Show

If you prefer something with lasting quality rather than something that requires an airsickness bag while watching, then this Judy Garland Christmas special is for you. As long as you can overlook Judy's barely hidden state of intoxication, you will be delighted by this episode of her early-60s TV series. Judy is joined by daughter Liza Minnelli and friend Jack Jones and Mel Torme.












A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!

Now, if 45-year-old classics are not your preference, then you can't miss with tomorrow's nostalgia: Stephen Colbert premiered his Christmas special just a few days ago, and the DVD is already available for purchase. (How long did we have to wait for Rudolph and Frosty?) Includes unforgettable musical sequences in which Stephen sings with Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, Feist, Elvis Costello, John Legend, and Jon Stewart.







With 2009 just around the corner, it's time to buy a calendar for the new year. There are so many to choose from, so here's a sampling:



Wizard of Oz 2009 Calendar

Seventy years after its premiere in theaters, The Wizard of Oz™ remains one of the most beloved movie classics of all time. This calendar celebrates the seventieth anniversary of Dorothy's journey Over the Rainbow. It features a high-process cover with glittery Ruby Slippers, foil type and borders, and spot UV accents. The monthly spreads also boast spot UV as well metallic inks and vivid photos befitting the time-honored film.









Ugly Betty 2009 Calendar

Ugly Betty boasts nearly 15 million viewers per episode and has won countless awards. The show also earned eleven Emmy nominations, the most for any comedy series on any network. This calendar brings together the unique humor, original style, and edgy look of this hit show by featuring photographs of the all-star cast accompanied by images and dialogue from the show.










Desperate Housewives 2009 Calendar

Says TLA Video: "Consistently garnering nearly 19 million viewers per episode, Desperate Housewives is one of our favorite guilty pleasures (especially now that the hunky gay neighbors have moved in)! The women of Wisteria Lane are back for another smokin' hot year of gorgeous photos and bitchy dialogue."










And, for those who saw Heidi Klum on Jay Leno's show on Thanksgiving Eve ... while I could not track down the "Hollywood Fireman" calendar that the supermodel displayed, I was able to find the Sunset Strip Firemen 2009 Calendar, which should be a satisfactory substitute.







Finally, I should note that TLA Video is having a marathon sale this weekend, beginning on Thanksgiving Day and ending at 11:59 p.m. on December 2. Look for "Gift Ideas for Film Snobs" and "Perfect Gifts," among other categories.

If you haven't crossed off every name from your Xmas shopping list by now, you're just not trying!

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