Saturday, January 17, 2015

Missing Link Graciously Supplied

Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I’m feeling poorly, as you might imagine from the events of yesterday, and I doubt I can sit here for very long. (Anyway, the little tube does say “Do not drive or operate machinery,” and a computer is a machine, right? Right?) But one of my functions on the Web is to complete skeins of reasoning others have left incomplete.

Sometimes that lapse is because the commentator at issue is unable to fill in the steps missing from his argument. That’s hardly the case with Bill Whittle:

...but all the same, quite a lot of persons would regard his connection of “good intentions” legislation to mass slaughters by totalitarian governments as fanciful. It’s not, and I’m here to tell you why.

The missing link is the black market.

Whenever a government steps into the economy to provide, prohibit, or regulate some item, whether it be toothpicks, tuitions, or taxidermy, some persons will be dissatisfied with the prescribed conditions regardless of the specifics. Some fraction of those persons will want what they want on terms other than the government’s dictates badly enough to try to skirt the law. Their efforts to do so create a black market, which our excessively enlightened age prefers to call an “underground economy.” The existence of a black market undermines the effects of the government’s decrees. The Very Important Persons in charge find their prognostications to be in error...error that’s plainly visible to the consuming public. Law enforcement is called in.

But law enforcement is a tiny fraction of the consuming public. It can’t be everywhere, watching everyone, at every instant. Moreover, the use of law enforcement to suppress “economic crimes” causes the profitability of trade in the black market to increase while it weakens public confidence in the government’s efficacy and benevolence. (It also exerts a corrupting influence on law enforcement, but that’s a subject best left for another screed.) That draws in additional suppliers and additional purchasers. The black market fraction of trade in the controlled item increases, in defiance of the State’s wishes. The progression reveals the State’s claim of economic omnipotence for what it is: a fantasy. The Very Important Persons in charge can’t have that. Efforts to eliminate the black market intensify as the “above-ground economy” stutters and weakens.

The State learns the limits of its power upon its own hide as tax revenues decline and lawlessness proliferates.


Once upon a time, a government with the noblest of intentions -- “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!” -- strove with all its might to control a single economic phenomenon. In brief, it decreed that its unbacked paper money -- assignats -- should be treated as equivalent to gold or silver. The consequences spread rapidly, compelling that government to pass wage and price controls that blanketed the entire economy of France. Hearken to Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, on what came next:

[I]t was found that the Maximum (a decree of the governing council of revolutionary France that set maximum prices and wages for all goods and services) could not be made to work well—even by the shrewdest devices. In the greater part of France it could not be enforced....To detect goods concealed by farmers and shopkeepers, a spy system was established with a reward to the informer of one-third of the value of the goods discovered. To spread terror, the Criminal Tribunal at Strassburg was ordered to destroy the dwelling of anyone found guilty of selling goods above the price set by law. The farmer often found that he could not raise his products at anything like the price required by the new law, and when he tried to hold back his crops or his cattle, alleging that he could not afford to sell them at the prices fixed by law, they were frequently taken from him by force and he was fortunate if paid even in the depreciated fiat money—fortunate, indeed, if he finally escaped with his life.

Involved in all these perplexities, the Convention tried to cut the Gordian knot. It decreed that any person selling gold or silver coin, or making any difference in any transaction between paper and specie, should be imprisoned in irons for six years—that anyone who refused to accept a payment in assignats, or accepted assignats at a discount, should pay a fine of three thousand francs, and that anyone committing this crime a second time should pay a fine of twenty thousand francs and suffer imprisonment twenty years in irons. Later, on the 8th of September, 1793, the penalty for such offences was made death, with confiscation of the criminal’s property, and so reward was offered to any person informing the authorities regarding any such criminal transaction. To reach the climax of ferocity, the Convention decreed, in May 1794, that the death penalty should be inflicted on any person convicted of “having asked, before a bargain was concluded, in what money payment was to be made.”

[Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation In France]

Yes, Gentle Reader: It really happened in enlightened, predominantly Catholic France, the birthplace of Voltaire, Pascal, and Montesquieu. It happened again in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, and in Red China under Mao Tse-tung, and it’s happening today in North Korea under Kim Jong-un. And it’s happening today in various pockets of the American economy. Consider especially the great number of persons, unable to get “above-ground” work sufficient to support their families, who resort to trading in prohibited goods, offering unlicensed services in regulated fields, or working “off the books”...often at hazard of life and freedom.


As Bill Whittle explains in the embedded video, the rise in college tuitions as a consequence of government-guaranteed student loans is the first step down a road to hell. We’re already seeing the consequences: not only are tuitions rising to consume the whole of the guaranteed funds; the “institutions of higher learning” are funding ever less serious, ever more pernicious “curricula” to satisfy the demands of vocal, politically influential pressure groups. Graduates heavily laden with student-loan debt are taking their first steps into the world of business and commerce, only to discover that potential employers no longer trust that their dearly bought credentials have any meaning. Alternative occupations, many of them already illegal, are multiplying—and the federal and state governments are imposing ever more severe regulations and ever more draconian penalties upon them.

Though certain specifics of this case of government intervention into the economy would not appear in other realms, the mechanism itself is universal. Yet the Very Important Persons determined to defend their “good intentions” against that inexorable mechanism will never admit to having erred. They will intensify their efforts and tighten their grip until no means to do so remains untried.

Will you, who voted to give them power, acknowledge the reality they have strained to ignore?

9 comments:

  1. Thanks Fran! Agree with your take on it. The other perverse incentive that these idiots (leftists) create is to keep people from earning/producing all they could. Think about the subsidies in Obamacare...what sense would it make to work enough to disqualify ones self from getting it? Self employed and hourly workers will work enough to stay just under the threshold. The result: lost productivity, lost tax revenue, and a greater outlay of "govt" money to pay for their healthcare. Employers cut employees back to less than 30 hrs to avoid that govt imposed "penalty" of having to provide healthcare. The result, a 25% reduction in productivity and wages right off the top for formerly 40 hour workers. Then they turn to the black market you speak of. All foreseeable...Praying your recovery is going great!

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  2. Good video but I don't agree with Bill's premise that the consequences are unintended (in most cases).

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  3. WHO "voted to give them power"?

    Not I. I had my name removed from the voter rolls because I have had enough of the fraud and corruption of "elections" in this country. I recognize that our "Leaders" stand behind the Blue Wall and laugh, but they can only exist as long as the Only Ones are there in front of them. I have noted where "Law Enforcement" live in my AO, and have made plans to deal with them appropriately under the very Rules of Engagement they have been using against Mere Citzens for years. Lon Horiuchi, baby! Lon Horiuchi.

    I do NOT consent.

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  4. I generally agree, except with the notion this is particularly a disease of the left. The same good intentions exist on the right as well, although the details advocated may differ (e.g. Nazis, Fascists, etc.). The common thread is coercion.

    Look at Alcohol Prohibition. It initially was innocent, even admirable: the temperance movement. But the advocates became impatient. They finally pushed their good intentions through Congress and got the Constitution amended. What happened then, is there for all to see.

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  5. PJ, the Nazis and Italian Fascists were as much a part of the Left as any Communist regime.

    Look for Seldon and Crozier's book "Socialism: The Grand Delusion" for an explanation.

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  6. PJ,

    I'm at a loss. What was innocent and admirable about prohibition? The Temperance Movement was no different from the War On Some Drugs, and had a similar result (if not quite as draconian as what we are experiencing today).

    Had they merely _encouraged_ moderation rather than abstention, it might have been admirable. That was never their intent, though, and we all have read of the consequences.

    The Left thinks it is proper to legislate morality - but only _their_ version. Where sex between children and adults is OK, but taking the life of your rapist or attempted murderer is not. I see nothing admirable in that sort of culture.

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  7. Reminds me of a large overweight man in NYC selling single cigarettes
    "untaxed", saying "enough" to the polezi and paying with his life inadvertently. But der taxes must be paid especially in progreSSive NYC because they are looking after the sheeples. Protecting them from large sodas and untaxed cigarettes!

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