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      "body": "<p>A panel of government experts gets together and decides what is healthy to eat and what isn’t. What could possibly go wrong?</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">That path has actually made diet-related chronic health issues even worse.</span></p>\n<p>Freethink Media’s <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjhJJ4jq4_o\">new video</a> on the history of the <a href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/mypyramid-problems/\">Food Pyramid</a> will make for surprising viewing for anyone who assumes official health and nutrition advice should be taken at face value.</p>\n<p>Starting in <a href=\"https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/nn/b/c/q/g/\">the late 1980s</a>, the office of the U.S. Surgeon General took the lead in waging the federal government’s war on dietary fat. This led to years of recommendations and public information campaigns that, among other things, demonized animal protein sources (that often come along with a significant amount of fat) and steered Americans towards consumption of lots of low-fat carbohydrates instead—the base of the pyramid. Many Americas will remember the 1990s as the golden age of carbs.</p>\n<p>Now, of course, further research suggests that going down that path has actually made diet-related chronic health issues like obesity and diabetes<span> </span><a href=\"https://www.healio.com/endocrinology/diabetes/news/in-the-journals/%7Bd927b791-f36e-4dc6-acdd-6a9409992c53%7D/high-protein-diet-reverses-prediabetes-in-adults-with-obesity\">even worse</a>. And the same is true for other items on the government’s food enemies list.</p>\n<p>My colleague Michelle Minton documented in her detailed 2016 study<span> </span><a href=\"https://cei.org/content/shaking-conventional-wisdom-salt\"><em>Shaking up the Conventional Wisdom on Salt</em></a><span> </span>the largely false narrative most Americans have come to believe about sodium consumption and high blood pressure. Not only does increasing salt intake not automatically lead to hypertension, over 10% of people are actually<span> </span><a href=\"https://wamu.org/story/13/05/05/uva_study_finds_salt_does_not_contribute_to_high_blood_pressure/\">inverse salt sensitive</a>, meaning that when they eat more salt, their blood pressure actually goes down.</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Refusal to make room for atypical sub-populations can lead to people getting dramatically incorrect advice.</span></p>\n<p>All of this should lead us to be skeptical of the politically-influenced process by which government agencies come up with their healthy eating guidelines. As the Freethink video points out, the original anti-fat jihad apparently started when people in the Surgeon General’s office decided that they were going to do for food what previous public reports had done for<span> </span><a href=\"https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-progress/index.html\">tobacco and smoking</a>.</p>\n<p>When stakes are high and the goal is to change the ingrained behavior of millions of people, the motivation is to put out a simple, unchanging message – everyone needs to eat less fat – rather than reporting the often contradictory findings of a succession of different studies.</p>\n<p>That refusal to countenance ambiguity and make room for atypical sub-populations can lead to people getting dramatically incorrect advice and experiencing real health problems as a result. Surely if the government is going to spend our tax money on lecturing us on what we’re supposed to be eating, we can ask that their recommendations abide by a “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere\">first, do no harm</a>” standard.</p>\n<p> <em>Reprinted from <a href=\"https://cei.org/blog/did-food-pyramid-make-us-fat\">Competitive Enterprise Institute.</a></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/did-america-get-fat-by-listening-to-government-experts/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p><em><span>“If you’re stupid enough to buy [Bitcoin], you’ll pay the price for it one day.”</span></em></p>\n<p><em><span>– Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, 2017</span></em></p>\n<p>_________________________________________________________________</p>\n<p><span>On March 10, 1876, a new invention sent an invisible electrical signal through a pair of copper wires. On the other end of those wires, the signal was converted to sound waves and Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant heard the now-famous words: “Watson – come here – I want to see you.”</span></p>\n<p><span>Later that same year, across the Atlantic, the chief engineer at the British Post Office boldly claimed that “The Americans have need for the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”</span></p>\n<p><span>Meanwhile, over in America, the President of the Western Union Telegraph Company asserted that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">New ways of doing things have a natural tendency to obfuscate the old ways.</span> Today, given the prominence of the telephone in our everyday lives, these assertions, made by some of the top executives and experts in the field of communication, seem remarkably absurd. And yet, at the time, they didn’t sound so ridiculous.</p>\n<p><span>History is replete with entrepreneurs and inventors who have pushed the envelope of innovation and invention to the very edge of human imagination and maybe a little beyond. But</span> <span>new ways of doing things have a natural tendency to obfuscate the old ways,</span> <span>and there are always individuals and groups that benefit from the status quo who are quick to dismiss, and sometimes even condemn, new contraptions and revolutionary ideas.</span></p>\n<p><strong>The Birth of Bitcoin</strong></p>\n<p><span>On January 3, 2009, an anonymous developer known as Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first 50 bitcoin and created the </span><a href=\"https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block\"><span>Bitcoin Genesis Block</span></a><span>. Since then, </span><a href=\"https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf\"><span>Bitcoin</span></a> <span>has provided the basic blueprint for hundreds of other currencies and platforms and has inspired the creation of an uncountable number of blockchain-based solutions to real-world problems.</span></p>\n<p><span>But what is Bitcoin and why would I have the audacity to compare it to something as revolutionary as the telephone?</span></p>\n<p><span>In short, Bitcoin uses </span><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography\"><span>public-key cryptography</span></a> <span>to create a</span> <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Decentralization\"><span>decentralized</span></a><span>,</span> <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Permissionless\"><span>permissionless</span></a><span>,</span> <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain\"><span>publicly-viewable blockchain</span></a> <span>that serves as an immutable ledger, keeping track of who owns bitcoin and how much, all without a central, governing authority.</span></p>\n<p><span>While this sounds complicated (and it is), don’t worry. Knowing cryptography and understanding the details of how a blockchain works are not necessary prerequisites to use and benefit from the technology any more than one needs to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car or how TCP/IP works in order to use the internet.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Why Bitcoin? Why Now?</strong></p>\n<p><span>But what use does the world have for a new type of digital money when we already perform near-instantaneous digital transactions with dollars, euros, and yuan via Paypal, Visa, and other financial institutions?</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">That system, that grotesquely bloated machine, is thankfully coming to an end.</span> There are many reasons, including the desire of some people for increased privacy and anonymity in their transactions, more autonomous control over their own digital assets, and the obsolescence of the need for third parties to provide the necessary trust factor between two parties in order to perform a transaction. These are all great reasons why so many people view cryptocurrencies as superior to government-issued, fiat currencies. But there is another reason, one that I think is the most important.</p>\n<p><span>Much of human history has been dominated by powerful,</span> <span>centralized governments who have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths through democide and war</span> <span>in the last century alone. Most of these deaths were made possible by governments’ ability to finance killing on an immense scale by monopolizing the supply of money, printing massive amounts of it, and declaring by fiat that their citizens had to use it, or else.</span></p>\n<p><span>That system, that grotesquely bloated machine, incessantly spinning its morbid motor of merciless monstrosity, is thankfully coming to an end.</span></p>\n<p><strong>The Dawn of a New Era</strong></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">People will look back on the cryptocurrency naysayers with the same incredulity as the telephone cynics of 1876.</span> The decentralization and democratization of money and banking through cryptocurrencies and platforms like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Dash threatens the very foundation that makes possible large-scale murder, draconian limitations on international trade, and heavy government regulations on markets across the globe that causes so much destruction of the achievements of yesterday while simultaneously obstructing the progress of tomorrow.</p>\n<p><span>The proverbial shots have been fired and a bloodless <em>coup</em></span> <span><em>d&#8217;état</em> of sorts, led by internet nerds, hackers, libertarians, entrepreneurs, and</span> <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin\"><span>outright geniuses</span></a> <span>is underway.</span></p>\n<p><span>Revolutions do not typically happen overnight, especially one so bold as to question the necessity a motor as powerful as centralized banking, coupled with seemingly limitless government power.</span> <span>But that motor will stop, and a new one, powered by voluntary, peer-to-peer, decentralized relationships and a greater measure of freedom will take its place.</span></p>\n<p><span>In the future, whether it be ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now,</span> <span>people will look back on the cryptocurrency naysayers of today with the same incredulity that we now have when we look back at the telephone cynics of 1876</span><span>.</span></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/bitcoin-cynics-are-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "thanks for sharing, very useful for me.\nVisit my blog @rizal",
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      "body": "<p><span>Nutrition and obesity have become a larger focus of health research in recent years. Multiple studies have identified areas, termed food deserts, that have a paucity of grocery stores or supermarkets. Some people mistakenly hypothesize that the limited supply of healthy foods in these deserts, many of them in low-income neighborhoods, is a factor in unhealthy eating patterns, and in the rise in obesity and related health problems.</span></p>\n<p><strong><span>It Makes Intuitive Sense but It&#8217;s Wrong</span></strong></p>\n<p><span>The intuitively appealing theory has driven costly policy actions. The Obama Administration established the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, intended to address the problem of food deserts by “bring[ing] grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved urban and rural communities.” Since 2011 the Healthy Food Financing Initiative has awarded </span><a href=\"http://papers.nber.org/tmp/30910-w24094.pdf#page=4\">$220 million</a> in subsidies and technical assistance.</p>\n<p><span>The Affordable Care Act’s Community Transformation Grants have spent tens of millions of dollars on efforts to address the problem of food deserts. State and local governments have enacted their own initiatives, and each year policymakers in Congress introduce </span><a href=\"https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr3104/summary\">another bill</a> that would direct the Department of Agriculture to provide grants to states. However, the connection proponents of these initiatives draw between supply-side issues such as food deserts and nutritional choices or obesity is tenuous.</p>\n<p><span><span class=\"rte-quote\">91% of nutritional inequality is driven by differences in demand.</span> In a new </span><a href=\"http://papers.nber.org/tmp/47775-w24094.pdf\">working paper</a>, Hunt Alcott of New York University, Rebecca Diamond of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and Jean-Pierre Dubé of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business analyze the relationship between food deserts and food choices. By analyzing two different types of events, the entry of new supermarkets and households moving to healthier neighborhoods, the authors “reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating.” If low-income households faced the same food and price choices available to high-income households, they estimate that nutritional inequality would only decline by nine percent.</p>\n<p><span>Instead of a supply-side explanation, such as the lack of accessible grocery stores, the authors find that 91 percent of nutritional inequality is driven by differences in demand that are explained by factors such as education, nutrition knowledge, or regional preferences. Taken with </span><a href=\"https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2013.0512\">earlier</a> studies that also failed to find a link between grocery store prevalence and dietary habits, these new findings should further increase the amount of skepticism and scrutiny brought to claims that a new initiative to combat food deserts will have an effect on obesity or nutrition. The vast majority of nutritional differences are not attributable to choice or price of the grocery options available, making it an ineffectual policy lever.</p>\n<p><span>Obesity and nutrition are not the only metrics that might be of interest to people living far from grocery stores. Making it easier for busy people to obtain groceries to feed their families could save them significant amounts of time and effort. However, public policy that directs money towards building grocery stores in areas identified by the USDA as food deserts should not be justified on the grounds of alleviating obesity or related health issues.</span></p>\n<p><strong><span>Maybe Try Fewer Government Obstacles, Not More Government Spending</span></strong></p>\n<p><span><span class=\"rte-quote\">Policies that increase the cost of labor for grocery stores would decrease the availability of grocery stores.</span> Policymakers should avoid erecting barriers that could potentially make it easier for these people to buy groceries, even if they are located relatively far away. The diffusion of affordable bike sharing in cities might make it more feasible to travel to existing stores. As a </span><a href=\"https://economics21.org/html/capital-bikeshare-does-not-need-subsidies-2738.html\">recent article</a> for E21 discussed, in Washington D.C. people can pay as little as 50 cents for short trips, and have the option of getting a membership that could lead to even lower average trip prices.</p>\n<p><span>Making delivery options more widespread and affordable for customers could also reduce the time and expense associated with buying groceries. While still in the early stages of pilot programs, delivery robots could enable grocery stores to offer delivery without having to hire a fleet of delivery employees, keeping costs down for customers. In a few years, delivery could become much more commonplace, and busy people who do not live near a grocery store could schedule a delivery instead.</span></p>\n<p><span>Policies that increase the cost of labor for supermarkets or grocery stores would decrease the availability and prevalence of grocery stores or supermarkets in accessible areas. Concerns about an increasing minimum wage played a role in Walmart abandoning plans to open up two stores in low-income D.C. areas. </span><a href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/US/2018-hourly-wages-us/story?id=52070704\">In 2018</a>, the minimum wage increased in 18 states and 19 cities. These increases and their effect on labor costs could limit expansion plans or put additional pressure on existing stores, limiting grocery options for residents.</p>\n<p><span>The new working paper is the latest, most rigorous study finding little connection between food deserts, nutritional choices, and obesity. The experience with food deserts is an example of the risks associated with allowing a simplistic explanation to guide public policy. The evidence does not support initiatives and subsidies, and the proposed solutions will not be effective. However, city officials can address the related issue of the ease of purchasing groceries by encouraging potential private sector solutions. </span></p>\n<p><em><span>Reprinted from <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://economics21.org/html/food-deserts-seeking-answers-wrong-places-2774.html\" target=\"_blank\">Economics21</a></span></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/food-deserts-dont-cause-dietary-inequality/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p>In 2007, Warren Buffett challenged finance professionals in the hedge fund industry to accept a bet that Buffett described in his<span> </span><a href=\"http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2016ltr.pdf\">2016 letter to shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway</a> (see p. 21-21):</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In Berkshire’s 2005 annual report, I argued that active investment management by professionals – in aggregate – would over a period of years underperform the returns achieved by rank amateurs who simply sat still. I explained that the massive fees levied by a variety of “helpers” would leave their clients – again in aggregate – worse off than if the amateurs simply invested in an unmanaged low-cost index fund.</p>\n<p>Subsequently, I publicly offered to wager $500,000 that no investment pro could select a set of at least five hedge funds – wildly-popular and high-fee investing vehicles – that would over an extended period match the performance of an unmanaged S&amp;P-500 index fund charging only token fees. I suggested a ten-year bet and named a low-cost Vanguard S&amp;P fund as my contender. I then sat back and waited expectantly for a parade of fund managers – who could include their own fund as one of the five – to come forth and defend their occupation. After all, these managers urged others to bet billions on their abilities. Why should they fear putting a little of their own money on the line?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Specifically, Buffett offered to bet that over a ten-year period from January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2017, the S&amp;P 500 index would outperform a portfolio of hedge funds when performance is measured on a basis<span> </span><span class=\"highlight selected\">net of fee</span>s, costs, and all expenses. Hedge fund manager Ted Seides of Protégé Partners accepted Buffett’s bet and he identified five hedge funds that the predicted would out-perform the S&amp;P 500 index over ten years.</p>\n<p>As I reported<span> </span><a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http://www.aei.org/publication/warren-buffett-wins-1m-bet-made-a-decade-ago-that-the-sp-500-stock-index-would-outperform-hedge-funds/\" target=\"_blank\">last September</a><span> </span>on<span> </span><strong>CD</strong>,<span> </span><a href=\"http://nypost.com/2017/09/09/warren-buffett-wins-1m-bet-made-with-hedgie-a-decade-ago/\">Buffett’s now-famous bet</a><span> </span>was actually settled early and ahead of schedule, because the outcome was so one-sided in favor of the S&amp;P 500 index over hedge funds:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Oracle of Omaha once again has proven that Wall Street’s pricey investments are often a lousy deal. Warren Buffett made a $1 million bet at end of 2007 <a href=\"http://nypost.com/2008/06/10/buffett-finds-rival-in-a-protege/\">with hedge fund manager Ted Seides of Protégé Partners</a>. Buffett wagered that a low-cost S&amp;P 500 index fund would perform better than a group of Protégé’s hedge funds. Buffett’s index investment bet is so far ahead that Seides concedes the match, although it doesn’t officially end until Dec. 31.</p>\n<p>The problem for Seides is his five funds through the middle of this year have been only able to gain 2.2% a year since 2008, compared with more than 7% a year for the S&amp;P 500 — a huge difference. That means Seides’ $1 million hedge fund investments have only earned $220,000 [through 2016] in the same period that Buffett’s low-fee investment gained $854,000.</p>\n<p>“For all intents and purposes, the game is over. I lost,” Seides wrote. The $1 million will go to a Buffett charity, Girls Inc. of Omaha. In conceding defeat, Seides said the high investor fees charged by hedge funds was a critical factor. Hedge funds tend to be a good deal for the people who run the funds, who pass on big bills to the investors.</p>\n<p>“Is running a hedge fund profitable? Yes. Hedge fund managers typically demand management fees of 2 percent of assets under management,” according to Capital Management Services Group (CMSG), which tracks the hedge fund industry. “Performance fees for managers can be 20 percent to 50 percent of trading profits,” CMSG adds. By contrast, the costs of an average index fund are minimal. A fund that tracks the S&amp;P 500 fund might have an expense ratio of as little as 0.02%.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Now that the ten-year betting period is officially over (December 31, 2017), Yahoo Finance reported yesterday that “<a href=\"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-won-1-million-173300916.html\">Warren Buffett has won his $1 million bet against the hedge fund industry</a>“:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)--sm Mt(0.8em)--sm\">With 2017 over, Warren Buffett has sealed his victory over hedge funds in a bet he made a decade ago. The Berkshire Hathaway chairman in 2007 bet $1 million that the S&amp;P 500 would outperform a selection of hedge funds over 10 years.</p>\n<p class=\"canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)--sm Mt(0.8em)--sm\">As of Friday, his S&amp;P 500 index fund had compounded a 7.1% annual gain over that period. The basket of funds selected by Protégé Partners, the managers with whom he made the bet, had gained 2.1%,<span> </span><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/12/30/biggest-winner-of-famed-buffett-bet-girls-inc-of-omaha/?mg=prod/accounts-wsj\">according to The Wall Street Journal</a>. Buffett agreed to give the prize money to Girls Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska, a nonprofit he has previously supported.</p>\n<p class=\"canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)--sm Mt(0.8em)--sm\">Buffett has long<span> </span><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://www.businessinsider.com/buffett-hedge-fund-managers-fees-performance-2017-2?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=referral\">taken issue with hedge funds</a>‘ promise of outperforming the market and their high fees that take away from the returns their clients earn. He has turned out to be right on both fronts. Actively managed funds have seen outflows while passive funds have gained since the financial crisis. Meanwhile, an abundance of exchange-traded funds has made it cheaper and easier for investors to buy into just about any group of stocks.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><img src=\"https://fee.org/media/26414/sphf.jpg?width=600&amp;height=327.80708364732476\" alt=\"\" /></p>\n<p>The chart above shows the annual returns on the S&amp;P 500 index and the average annual returns on a comprehensive index of thousands of hedge funds maintained by<span> </span><a href=\"https://www.barclayhedge.com/research/indices/ghs/Hedge_Fund_Index.html\">Barclay</a> over the period of Buffett’s bet: From January 2008 through December of 2017. A $100,000 investment at the beginning of 2008 would have more than doubled to about $225,586 at the end of last year, compared to only about $148,000 invested in the average hedge fund.</p>\n<p>The average annual return for the S&amp;P 500 index over that period was nearly 8.5%, or more than double the average annual return on the Barclay Hedge Fund index since January 2008 of 4%. And except for 2008, the S&amp;P 500 index outperformed the Hedge Fund index in every other year: 2009 (26.4% vs. 23.7%), 2010 (15% vs. 11%), 2011 (2% vs. -5%), 2012 (16% vs. 8.25%), 2013 (33% vs. 11%), 2014 (13.7% vs. 2.9%), 2015 (1.38% vs. 0%), 2016 (12% vs. 6%), and 2017 (21.8% vs. 10.8%).<span> </span>Not. Even. Close.</p>\n<p>At least over the most recent ten-year period, Buffett’s investment advice (also from the 2016 letter to shareholders) has convincingly prevailed (emphasis added):</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A lot of very smart people set out to do better than average in securities markets. Call them active investors. Their opposites, passive investors, will by definition do about average. In aggregate their positions will more or less approximate those of an index fund.<strong><span> </span></strong>Therefore, the balance of the universe—the active investors—must do about average as well. However, these investors will incur far greater costs. So, on balance, their aggregate results after these costs will be worse than those of the passive investors.</p>\n<p>Costs skyrocket when large annual fees, large performance fees, and active trading costs are all added to the active investor’s equation. Funds of hedge funds accentuate this cost problem because their fees are superimposed on the large fees charged by the hedge funds in which the funds of funds are invested.</p>\n<p>A number of smart people are involved in running hedge funds. But to a great extent their efforts are self-neutralizing, and their IQ will not overcome the costs they impose on investors.<strong><span> </span></strong>Investors, on average and over time, will do better with a low-cost index fund than with a group of funds of funds.<strong><br /></strong></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><strong>Related</strong>: See WSJ article “<a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/12/30/biggest-winner-of-famed-buffett-bet-girls-inc-of-omaha/\" target=\"_blank\">Biggest Winner of Famed Buffett Bet? Girls Charity</a>” and The Motley Fool’s Morgan Housel’s classic “<a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/18/two-hedge-fund-managers-walk-into-a-bar.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Two Hedge Fund Managers Walk Into a Bar…</a>“</p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http://www.aei.org/publication/warren-buffett-wins-1m-bet-made-a-decade-ago-that-the-sp-500-stock-index-would-outperform-hedge-funds-and-it-wasnt-even-close/\" target=\"_blank\">American Enterprise Institute</a></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/warren-buffett-won-a-decade-old-1m-bet/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p>The<span> </span><em>Wall Street Journal</em><span> </span><a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/fighting-opioid-addiction-massachusetts-considers-involuntary-rehab-1513170000\" target=\"_blank\">reported</a><span> </span>December 14 on a proposal by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to mandate the involuntary 72-hour detention of opioid overdose survivors rescued by first responders. This is another example of feel-good public policy that strains resources and personnel, arguably infringes the civil liberties and due process rights of those detained, and won’t work as intended.</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Lashing out with new approaches that are not empirical or data-driven will not fix the problem.</span> While mandatory rehab has been employed in the criminal justice system for years, the rationale for this has not been evidence-based. A systematic review of over 400 studies on the subject published in the <em>International Journal of Drug Policy</em> in 2016 <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4752879/\" target=\"_blank\">concluded</a>, “Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms.”</p>\n<p>Furthermore, while the precise length of time needed for successful rehab is <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://khn.org/news/rehab-for-addiction-usually-lasts-28-days-but-why/\" target=\"_blank\">uncertain</a>, 3 days is barely enough time to go through acute withdrawal. Even if the 3 days are used to plug the patient into Medication-Assisted Treatment, <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/11/5/641/968316\" target=\"_blank\">significant</a> <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/medications-to-treat-opioid-addiction/efficacy-medications-opioid-use-disorder\" target=\"_blank\">numbers</a> of MAT patients eventually drop out of these programs. <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4461059/\" target=\"_blank\">Self-motivation and self-regulation</a> play significant roles in successful rehab.</p>\n<p>The alarm and frustration of policymakers addressing the overdose crisis are understandable and justifiable. But lashing out with new approaches that are not empirical or data-driven will not fix the problem and may make matters worse.</p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://www.cato.org/blog/mandatory-3-day-rehab-just-another-feel-good-proposal-unintended-consequences\" target=\"_blank\">Cato at Liberty</a></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-proof-that-mandatory-rehab-helps-addicts/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p>In 2017, the popular jobs and recruiting website Glassdoor<span> </span><a href=\"https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/top-20-employee-benefits-perks-for-2017/\">listed</a><span> </span>some of the more generous corporate perks on offer in the workplace. Ikea offers up to four months of paid parental leave not just for HQ employees, but also to part-time workers at its retail stores. Ikea’s benefit is plainly and properly about employee retention, so the only requirement is that the full or part-time employee has already worked at the company for at least one year.</p>\n<p><strong>Companies Already Offer Awesome Benefits</strong></p>\n<p>Notable here is that Ikea is hardly alone. While it’s common on the left and right to suggest that wages are stagnant as prosperous companies and their investors capture all the gains, in the real world there’s an endless competition among businesses for the best and brightest employees. </p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Study a staggeringly rich company, and you&#8217;ll discover company benefits that will knock you over.</span> So eager is Facebook to attract and retain top workers that it offers healthcare and free housing…for its interns. Striving mightily to put its best foot forward with the human capital without which companies couldn’t prosper, Glassdoor reports that “many Facebook interns report earning more than $7,000 per month.”</p>\n<p>In finance, American Express offers generous parental leave, after which parents “are given access to a 24-hour lactation consultant.” Traveling mothers can ship their breast milk home for free. Goldman Sachs has offered “gender reassignment surgery” since 2008. </p>\n<p>San Diego-based Scripps Health doesn’t just provide healthcare. Very aware that there’s nothing more expensive than low-priced employees, the highly regarded health care system offers up health insurance for their<span> </span><em>cats and dogs</em>. Such is life – and work – in a country defined by endless prosperity, along with – yes – the wealth inequality that invariably precedes all the perks. </p>\n<p>If anyone doubts the final assertion above, they might read up on rich Americans like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sergey Brin, and then follow that up with research about the employee perks offered by Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Study a staggeringly rich company founder, and you&#8217;ll subsequently discover company benefits that will knock you over.</p>\n<p><strong>So, Naturally, Some Want Them to Be Mandatory</strong></p>\n<p>Which brings us to a recent<span> </span><em>New York Times</em><span> </span><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/opinion/american-workers-job-protections.html?_r=1\">op-ed</a><span> </span>by Moshe Marvit and Shaun Richman. Titled “A Better Way to Protect Workers,” readers can imagine that the two scholars’ faux solution for protecting workers involves endless amounts of legislation from Washington, followed by force from same. To rebut this op-ed would be to insult the intelligence of readers, and also waste their time. What’s useful to bring up is that the left still believes that what’s good in the world can be decreed by thinkers and politicians, as opposed to it springing from market-driven competition. The authors are untroubled by reality, but that’s merely a blinding glimpse of the obvious.</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Companies put in a lot of time and effort figuring out ways to attract and retain workers.</span> Still, these surely sensitive scholars brought up an interesting point; one that the <em>Times</em> chose to highlight. As Marvit and Richman see it, “You should not be fired for taking a sick day to care for your kid.” About their assertion, there’s 100 percent agreement here. Parenting is a challenge, and looking after one’s sick child should not be the path to unemployment. </p>\n<p>More important in consideration of all the work opportunity companies like Amex, Facebook, Goldman, and Scripps have on offer, is that they too would likely agree with the scholars. About the companies mentioned, there’s quite simply no doubt that the executives at each would nod along to what Marvit and Richman think about sick days taken to care for ill children. </p>\n<p>Yet here’s what Marvit and Richman don’t understand, but that’s crucial. The executives at the blue-chip companies mentioned believe that caring for one’s child is not a fire-able offense out of<span> </span><em>competitive necessity</em>. Simple feelings don&#8217;t drive their views in the way that they blur the scholarship of Marvit and Richman. Prosperous companies all, and fully cognizant that their prosperity is an effect of the productive people who show up to work each day, they would never institute policies that might cause their employees to go elsewhere. </p>\n<p>Clearly missed by Marvit and Richman is that in the real world, there’s an ongoing war of the non-shooting kind taking place for workers. This war endlessly benefits the worker simply because companies put in a lot of time and effort figuring out ways to attract and retain them. </p>\n<p><strong>Businesses Are Competitive, Government Is Not</strong></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Aversion to government force is not an aversion to people and workers.</span> Stating the obvious, successful, growing businesses<em> don’t need a law</em>. Once again cognizant that perks and benefits matter to what is precious (employees), they understand that Washington is always behind the times when it comes to just about everything. Getting right to the point, if they waited for Washington to decree positive rights, they would be out of business. So rather than wait, they come up with benefits on their own. <em>They have to</em>. Only in an unreal world populated by academics, economists, and scholars paid to spend their days “thinking,” are low-wages and flinty benefits a corporate goal. Where profits are a necessity, it’s well understood that cheap labor is <em>very expensive</em>. </p>\n<p>So yes, families matter. So do sick kids. Families are in better shape when parents can stay home to care for their unwell children. But let’s not forget why employees can do these things, all the while enjoying many other corporate perks that seemingly grow in creativity by the day. It’s all an effect of corporate prosperity. So when lefties decry corporate tax cuts or call for high levels of taxation on the very people (yes, the rich) whose unspent wealth is what makes companies possible to begin with, they’re putting a bull’s eye on the very perks they deem so necessary. </p>\n<p>It should be said that an aversion to government force and so-called positive rights dreamed up by lawmakers is not an aversion to people and workers. It’s merely an acknowledgment of reality. The reality is that everything that’s good in the workplace is an effect of profits that made the good possible. In which case the path to amazing benefits is the very corporate prosperity that so many academics, economists, and thinkers decry as the barrier to them. </p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/01/04/when_it_comes_to_employee_benefits_the_left_cant_have_it_both_ways_103082.html\" target=\"_blank\">RealClearMarkets</a></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/employee-perks-are-the-result-of-prosperity-and-competition/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p><span>Open, competitive markets have a resilient capacity to successfully coordinate the actions of billions of people around the world. With an amazing adaptability to changing circumstances, the actions and reactions of suppliers and demanders are brought into balance with each other. Yet, none of this requires government planning or control. But how does this all come about?</span></p>\n<p><span>The key to this coordinating process is often assigned to the pricing mechanism of the market economy. All the minimal information that anyone needs to bring his own actions as supplier or demander into balance with multitudes of others is provided by the changing pattern of relative prices for finished consumer goods and the four factors of production.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Types and Uses of Knowledge in Society</strong></p>\n<p><span><span class=\"rte-quote\">The medical doctor knows many things that the criminal lawyer does not.</span> Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek explained how this came about almost 75 years ago in his famous article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” first published in the</span> <em>American Economic Review</em> <span>in September 1945. He emphasized that matching the division of labor is an inescapable division of knowledge. Specialization necessarily means that each of us knows things that others do not.</span></p>\n<p><span>Each of us possesses different types of knowledge in different complementary combinations. For instance, all of us, to one degree or another, have acquired what Hayek referred to as scientific or “textbook” knowledge. This is the type of knowledge we learned in school, and while we all learned many of the same things in our classroom experiences, we focused on and acquired far more specific knowledge about some certain subject.</span> <span>Individuals select different majors at the same or different institutions of higher learning. The medical doctor knows many things that the criminal lawyer does not, just as the lawyer has a detailed knowledge of his area of the law that the biologist or the architect does not possess based on their classroom and textbook learning.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Localized Knowledge &amp; Inarticulate Knowledge</strong></p>\n<p><span>But Hayek pointed out that there is also another type of knowledge that we each possess in different ways, what he called “the localized knowledge of time and place.” This is a particular knowledge that is only learned, appreciated, and usable based on an individual working and interacting with others in a specific corner of society and the marketplace.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Little of this knowledge could be learned in the classroom.</span> The recently-graduated young employee shows up for his first day of work in the enterprise that has hired him. There is a period of getting oriented: Meeting the other employees and finding out what, exactly, they do; the nature of the way “things are done” within the firm in terms of rules and procedures; learning who are the individuals and groups of buyers and sellers that company sells to or buys from. The production processes or service activities undertaken and performed may be distinctly different from how things are done in competing firms in the same industry or from those in other markets.</p>\n<p><span>Little or none of this knowledge could be learned in the classroom or read about in any readings assigned to pass a course. Yet, such “intimate” knowledge in all these “mundane” matters are crucial for everything in each corner of the market system to run smoothly and effectively.</span></p>\n<p><span>The entrepreneur, in particular, needs to know all of these and many other details about his specialized area of the market in which he operates if profits are to be earned and losses avoided. In addition, all of these localized circumstances and situations are subject to continual change in a dynamic market setting in which things today may be different from yesterday, just as tomorrow may vary from the situation today.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Think of the auto mechanic who can “just tell” what&#8217;s wrong with an engine.</span></p>\n<p><span>Hayek later highlighted a third type of knowledge, what the chemist Michael Polanyi called “tacit” or “inarticulate” knowledge. This is knowledge that each of us possesses in various forms that concern how to do something but which we often find it difficult or “impossible” to easily put into a word form to convey with others.</span></p>\n<p><span>Think of the auto mechanic who can “just tell” from listening to and looking at an engine that is not functioning properly what is wrong with it, but he cannot easily put it into words for the car owner. Or the master sculptor who knows just the right amount of hand pressure to place upon the watered piece of clay on the wheel whose speed he is controlling with a foot pedal, but he could never precisely put it down on paper so others could readily copy the technique that he uses to produce a pleasing piece of art.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Using All the Knowledge No Planner Can Master</strong></p>\n<p><span>These diverse types of knowledge, which are possessed in different combinations in the minds of all the interconnected and interdependent individuals in a modern complex market system and social order, can never be known, Hayek argued, by any one mind or group of minds, no matter how wise and determined they may seem or try to be.</span></p>\n<p>Hayek’s point was that if we are all to benefit from what others know that we do not, but which, when brought to bear, can improve our circumstances in ways we cannot fully imagine ahead of time, then the individuals possessing all this diffused knowledge must have the liberty and market-based latitude to utilize it in ways that they understand best. Otherwise, much that is known and potentially used by many others that could improve our own circumstances will not be taken advantage of or even discovered.</p>\n<p><span>But if not under the commanding instructions of a central planner or government regulator, how will people know how, when, and for what to apply their unique bits of knowledge, which cumulatively add up to all “the knowledge in the world,” but resides in no one mind or group of minds?</span></p>\n<p><strong>Worldwide Knowledge and the Price System</strong></p>\n<p><span>Hayek’s answer was the competitive pricing system of a free market. It is not necessary for everyone to know what all the others in society possess as their unique knowledge. It is sufficient if there is an institutional mechanism through which people can convey a minimum required amount of information to others, so producers and suppliers may know what products consumers want and how intensely they desire them.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Consumers and producers “speak” to each other through prices.</span> Likewise, it is not necessary for every private enterpriser to know all the other businessmen who have a competing use for all the different types of means of production to make up their minds about how best to manufacture a product that minimizes the cost outlays to maximize the profits that might be earnable.</p>\n<p><span>Consumers and producers “speak” to each other through the prices that are offered on the market. This tells multitudes of suppliers what products are wanted by consumers and what price might be paid for them. The prices offered by rival enterprisers and accepted by labor and resource owners looking for employment tell each businessman the relative costs to be paid to hire or purchase various combinations of inputs relative to the anticipated selling price.</span></p>\n<p><span>Thus, businessmen and workers and resource owners thousands of miles away from each other on other sides of the world can make reasonable and informed decisions about how to apply their own specialized forms of knowledge in ways that they hope profitably improves their own circumstances by satisfying the wants and desires of many others; others who they will never meet or personally know and who may live far away or around the corner, nor do they need to.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Knowledge Needed for Forming Expectations</strong></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Prices need to be interpreted to successfully form expectations about the actions and reactions of others.</span> But there is a fourth type of knowledge that is equally essential for social and market participants to successfully coordinate all they do that is interdependent with the actions of others. Hayek insightfully explained the central role of market-based prices for bringing together the dispersed knowledge of the world to help bring into balance all that is done by those buying and selling in the social system of division of labor.</p>\n<p><span>But when prices change, or even stay the same, what are they telling the relevant market participants about what it suggests will be the situation tomorrow?</span></p>\n<p><span>Prices need to be interpreted to successfully form expectations about the actions and reactions of others in the marketplace in deciding how best to use one’s own specialized knowledge in effective ways for the achievement of one’s own ends.</span></p>\n<p><span>An understanding of how people actually form many of the expectations that guide and direct their interactions with others was developed in the writings of the famous German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) in his monumental work,</span> <em><span>Economy and Society</span></em> <span>(1921), in the works of the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) especially in</span> <em><span>The Phenomenology of the Social World</span></em> <span>(1932) and in a variety of his essays written in the 1950s, and in the works of Ludwig von Mises, most particularly in</span> <em><span>Human Action: A Treatise on Economics</span></em> <span>(1949, 3</span><span>rd</span> <span>revised ed., 1966) and</span> <em><span>Theory and History</span></em> <span>(1957).</span></p>\n<p><strong>Max Weber on Meaningful Action and Ideal Types</strong></p>\n<p>Weber argued that what makes “human action” distinct is that it is conscious conduct to which an individual assigns a “subjective” (a personal) meaning, and that the meaning defines what kind of action the individual is undertaking and with what end in mind. But no man is an island; he interacts and associates with others. As a result, Weber said, “social action” is conscious human conduct in which individuals “orient” their actions intentionally toward one another.</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">What makes the transfer of objects between individuals an act of “free exchange” is how the transactors view their own intentions.</span></p>\n<p><span>For instance, Weber argued that what makes the physical transfer of two objects between two individuals an act of “free exchange,” as opposed to being some compulsory transfer, is how the transactors view their own intentions and that of the other with whom they are interacting. Weber’s primary focus was developing various interpretive tools of analysis for the study of history.</span></p>\n<p><span>Thus, he argued that a central tool of history and sociology is the “ideal type.” This was meant to be a composite image of a “type” of an historical person or activity. Thus, one might construct an image, or “mental picture,” of the “typical” characteristics of a Latin American military dictator, or the qualities and characteristics of the “typical” Medieval “lord of the manor.” Or it might reflect the “typical” aspects and forms of development of the “typical” Western European city in the modern era.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Alfred Schutz and the World of Intersubjective Meanings</strong></p>\n<p><span>But it was the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz, who had studied at the University of Vienna and who was part of Ludwig von Mises’s circle of scholars in Vienna of the 1920s and early 1930s, who took Weber’s ideas and combined them with aspects of Austrian Economics to develop a theory of how expectations are formed and used by human actors in society.</span></p>\n<p><span>While we may reasonably speak about the general qualities discoverable in all human conduct – what Mises named “praxeology,” the logic of human action – Schutz emphasized that filling in the actual “content” of that general logic of action comes from the social setting into which people are born and within which they interact with others.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Regardless of which individual is playing this role in society, we anticipate each will act toward others in a generally prescribed way.</span> We are born into an existing social world, and we learn a language, customs, traditions, rules of conduct, etc., by growing up in a family, around friends, within a society of other human actors from whom we absorb the interpersonal structures of meaning that define and “objectify” the meaning of actions and objects.</p>\n<p><span>For instance, this object is a “book” and this other object is a “Halloween mask.” This object is a “knife” for carving meat, while another sharp object is a “surgeon’s scalpel” for performing a “medical operation.” This person’s “kneeling” before a woman is a “proposal of marriage,” while this other person’s “kneeling” before a “royal queen” is being “knighted” for acts of “valor” or “heroism.”</span></p>\n<p><span>The division of labor brings about not only a specialization of tasks but particular forms of standardized conduct in performing them in various social and market settings, Schutz explained.  Thus, we come to expect that anyone understood as performing a certain task in a certain way, and, perhaps, dressed in a specific manner is a “policeman,” or “fireman,” or airplane “steward,” or “bank manager,” or “server” at a restaurant, or “mailman” on their delivery rounds, or . . .</span></p>\n<p><span>Regardless of which individual is “playing this role” in society, we anticipate each will act toward any others with whom they interact in a generally prescribed way. Likewise, that person expects anyone interacting with them to act and interact in expected ways.</span></p>\n<p><span>The mailman does not expect any of us to ask him what may be the cause of a heart palpitation. Nor will the fireman expect that a person whose house is on fire is going to ask him what is on the menu for lunch in business class on a flight they are scheduled to be on later in the week. These “ideal typifications” of tasks and routinized conduct in various specialized roles in the division of labor provide essential everyday points of interpersonal orientation and expectations for planning one’s own actions.</span></p>\n<p><span>Thus, if I go into a bank I know that if I sit down with a bank manager he will be able (and is expecting to) to offer information to me for applying for a home or car loan or opening a new account. If I make an appointment with a dermatologist, I know he will be able (and he expects) to do an examination and offer a diagnosis of a skin problem I may have.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Our Personal “Ideal Types” of Each Other</strong></p>\n<p><span>Alfred Schutz also highlighted that such “ideal types” of people are along a spectrum. At one extreme are those most general characteristics of all human action, which is the basis for Ludwig von Mises’s formulation of a general logic of choice and action, “praxeology.” In the middle of this spectrum of ideal types are those just explained of “typical” roles and specialized activities often routinized in the division of labor.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">As they sit in the class and interact with me they come to formulate an image, an “ideal type,” not of all men, but of me.</span> And at the other end of this spectrum is what Schutz called the “personal ideal type.” This is not the general characteristics discoverable in any human action or the specialized “types” of actions expected from any individual performing a particular role. Instead, these are the qualities or characteristics “typifying” a particular, distinct individual. This is our “mental image” not of all men, or some men performing specialized tasks, but of this specific human being.</p>\n<p><span>I explain to my students that when they entered one of my classrooms for the first time, what could they anticipate about me? Certainly, that I am a human being and they could expect that I would demonstrate those qualities known to be true about any other person. But they also had an image in their mind, an “ideal type,” of a “college professor,” and a college professor who (hopefully!) knows what he is talking about in an introductory economics class.</span></p>\n<p><span>But as they sit in the class and interact with me they come to formulate in their minds an image, an “ideal type,” not of all men, or some men in the division of labor, but of me.</span></p>\n<p><span>We all develop and use these “personal ideal types” of others, and on the basis of which we form expectations when we interact with these specific individuals. If you laugh at Joe’s jokes, he is likely to buy you a round of drinks. If you mention sex to Bob, he usually acts embarrassed and becomes quiet. If you mention to Sally that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen,” you’re going to get a “lecture” on the place of women in modern society. If you criticize socialized medicine in Europe, George is likely to go into a rant on the “evils” of the profit motive.</span></p>\n<p><span>It should be evident that many, if not most, of the ideal types discussed by Alfred Schutz overlap with that category of tacit or inarticulate knowledge. In our interactions with others, we all form these types of mental images of those with whom we associate in various settings. But it is something we do “tacitly,” that is, without consciously thinking about it very much, if at all.</span></p>\n<p><span>And while we often know “how to interact” with someone based on our “ideal type” of them in our mind, it is not always easy to express in words to someone else how and why we see these characteristics in that other person, or how and why we “just know” most of the time that if we do or say “X” around that person we are fairly confident that it will bring about response “Y.”</span></p>\n<p><strong>Ludwig von Mises and the “Thymology” of Market Expectations</strong></p>\n<p><span>Ludwig von Mises came to call this method of understanding and interpreting others through ideal types as the subject matter of “thymology,” the study of how individuals form images of others in their minds to generate expectations for purposes of interpersonal understanding, planning, and coordinating one’s own actions with those of others.</span></p>\n<p><span>In Mises’s theory of the market process, a central actor is an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur must make informed judgments, and in doing so, Mises said, he must form expectations of individuals and groups on both the demand- and supply-sides of the market. The knowledge on the basis of which he does so is built up from the experiences he has personally had, or heard about, or learned from others in some manner concerning the likely actions and reactions of those with whom he interacts in the marketplace, and whose future actions he must anticipate the best he can.</span></p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Mises pointed out that many might consider this a rather unsatisfactory method of anticipating possible social actions.</span> Ideal types, Mises argued, enable the acting man to be what he called “the historian of the future.” Forming composite pictures of individuals from their past actions in terms of characteristics, qualities, motives, and meanings, “ideal types” enable an individual decision-maker to project himself into the future, imagine that another individual or group are confronted with a particular event or change in their circumstance, and then ask the question, “What responses would these individuals manifest in this situation?” It enables the formation of expectations concerning patterns or “types” of response for prediction of a wide variety of circumstances. No matter how imperfect, it introduces an additional source of knowledge for coordination of plans in the complex social setting of the market.</p>\n<p><span>Indeed, it is the “ideal types” of these various forms within the wider social structure of intersubjective meanings, that allows entrepreneurs and other market participants to evaluate the meaning behind competitive prices and changes in them so as to form expectations of what those prices are “saying.”</span></p>\n<p><span>Mises pointed out that many might consider this a rather unsatisfactory method of anticipating possible social actions in comparison to the claims of more detailed and determinate predictive power in the natural sciences. But he argued that given the unique qualities of human action in the social world, this, in fact, might be the best that can be hoped for, given the intentional and choice-based reality of human conduct.</span></p>\n<p><strong>Ideal Types, Expectations, and the Free Society</strong></p>\n<p><span>One other aspect of this social institution of “ideal types” for interpersonal plan coordination is that it is part of the wider “spontaneous order” of the social system. That is, the social structures of intersubjective meaning, the “ideal types” of actors and actions in various face-to-face and “role-playing” tasks in the division of labor, and the formation of expectations by people in their respective locations within the market order emerge out of the actions and interactions of multitudes of people in various societal settings at a moment and over time.</span></p>\n<p><span>They are part of the societal “glue” for coherence, cooperation, and coordination, with degrees of complexity and adaptability that defies the very notion of intentional planning by political actors asserting the need for and their ability to impose “order” on communities of human beings.</span></p>\n<p><span>Appreciation for the nature, workings, and importance of expectations formation in the marketplace of the free society demonstrates once more the superiority of the classical liberal system of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, and the absurdity of the pretense of knowledge claimed by political paternalists and social engineers.</span></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/price-is-the-only-language-that-everyone-speaks/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "<p>A fruitful discussion this morning with my Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold prompts me to observe that “export-led growth” makes no more or less sense than does, say, “yellow-things-led growth” or “rectangular-things-led growth” or “things-that-grow-in-the-ground-led growth” or “things-the-French-language-names-of-which-start-with-the-letter-‘T’-led growth.”</p>\n<p><strong>X-Led Growth Is Not a Thing</strong></p>\n<p>Economic growth occurs only when, and only as, there are increases in the amounts and qualities of goods and services available for ordinary people to consume. (Individuals are wealthy the better able they are to consume. If individuals are wealthy the better able they are to toil with as little consumption as possible, then history’s wealthiest individuals would be chattel slaves.)</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">What matters is what we receive for our consumption in exchange for what we produce.</span> Yet because in a market economy we generally increase our abilities to consume by producing greater amounts for others to consume – others who, in exchange, give to us what we wish to consume – each of us “grows” economically by producing more stuff (measured in value) for our trading partners to consume, for only then will our trading partners do for us what we ultimately seek from them – namely, give to us more stuff for <em>us</em> to consume.</p>\n<p>Some of us produce goods that are exported. If we receive, in return for our exported goods, more goods and services that we value as consumption items – more than we received in exchange for whatever it was that we previously produced –  we are made better off. We “grow” economically. But the same is true for yellow goods. Some of us produce goods that are yellow. If by producing yellow goods we receive in exchange, for our consumption, more goods and services than we received in the past when we produced (say) red goods, we “grow” economically. Ditto for switching our efforts into producing rectangular things.</p>\n<p>What matters, ultimately, is what we receive for our consumption in exchange for what we produce. If those consumption goods and services come from abroad – as, in practice, many will – fine. But there is absolutely nothing remotely special, better, or economically meaningful about “export-led growth.” All growth is production-led – but only insofar as that which is produced is exchanged for goods and services to consume.</p>\n<p><a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http://cafehayek.com/?s=%22export-led+growth%22\" target=\"_blank\">Here are links to earlier Cafe Hayek posts on “export-led growth</a>.”</p>\n<p><strong>A Note on Economies of Scale</strong></p>\n<p>In the comments section, Craig Walenta makes a valid point about economies of scale. As Adam Smith and others have recognized, the division of labor – i.e., specialization – is limited by the extent of the market. The larger the market, the deeper the division of labor – and the deeper the division of labor, the greater the total output. Because international trade expands the size of the market, international trade deepens the division of labor and, hence, increases total output.</p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">Seizing opportunities to produce at greater scale is an advantage if economies of scale are available and market-driven.</span> So I amend my point: greater opportunity to export does have a real economic advantage that, say, greater opportunity to produce yellow-colored things generally doesn’t. But this advantage is reduced, perhaps to the point of nullity, if the greater exports do not exchange for more imports. (If Henry Ford produced lots of Model-Ts on his assembly line, but refused to take any goods and services for him and his company in exchange, the lower per-unit cost of production made possible by the large-scale production would have been pointless.)</p>\n<p>And if government artificially promotes exports, it no more promotes genuine economic growth than if it were to artificially promote the production of yellow-colored things.</p>\n<p>Seizing opportunities to produce at greater scale is indeed an advantage if economies of scale are available and if they are market-driven.* And a global market has a greater number of such opportunities than does even the largest national market. Yet it must be remembered that any genuine economic growth that thereby occurs is found not in what’s being exported. The growth remains in what is<span> </span><em>imported</em>. Producing more exports for the sake of exporting more is no more a workable recipe for economic growth than is producing more yellow-colored things for the sake of producing more yellow-colored things.</p>\n<p><strong>*</strong> By “market-driven” I mean that there is a genuine consumer market for the outputs produced on a large scale. If, say, the Ford Motor Co. returned to its old policy of producing only black cars, then that policy – by taking advantage of greater economies of scale in the painting of automobiles – might well reduce Ford’s per-unit cost of producing each car. But if enough consumers would prefer to pay higher prices for cars of colors other than black, then this ‘economy of scale’ would not be market-driven.</p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http://cafehayek.com/2018/01/note-called-export-led-growth.html\" target=\"_blank\">Cafe Hayek</a></em></p>\n<p>This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the <a href=\"https://fee.org/articles/export-led-growth-is-just-a-fallacy/\">original article</a>.</p>",
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      "body": "\" nationalism is love of country combined with dislike of other countries, their peoples, or their cultures.\"\nI don't know that there need be any dislike included in the definition of nationalism.  Let's consider what the opposite of nationalism is, \"globalism\".  Globalists want there to no longer be nations.  I think they imagine that this would result in a world where everyone has the same rights liberties and freedoms as Americans enjoy but what is more likely in such a system is that everyone has the rights liberties and freedoms that Chinese people have, none.",
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