Year-End Update

Before sending 2014 on its way and welcoming with hopeful anticipation the new year, here is a round-up of some essays posted in recent months:

• Will America follow Canada’s economic fight against impertinent obstructions? — on the lessons Canada (and other Commonwealth countries) can teach the United States on the inverse relationship between economic growth and state interventions, whether in the form of taxation policy, regulations, or government debt;
• Market independence or business as usual? — following Republican gains in the November U.S. mid-term elections, will the GOP adhere to constitutionally limited government of enumerated powers or will Washington politics be ‘business as usual’, pursuing bureaucratic aggrandisement, crony capitalism, and fiat money policies? This essay was published courtesy of the Institute of Economic Affairs;
• Ethan Frome’s winter of discontent — on the role of winter in Edith Wharton’s novella, infusing the family of one Massachusetts community with physical and spiritual bleakness; and
• Scrooge: a Christmas capitalist-icon — why the skinflint is the hero of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, illustrating the sources of wealth for community well-being and the distinctions between public welfare and private charity.

If any of these essays catch your fancy, please share them with your friends and colleagues. DMI needs encouragement to flourish and seek out new research and publishing opportunities!

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#DMI_Reads Update — Reading has been sporadic since the last update; but apart from dipping into the works of William Graham Sumner (Yale sociologist from the early 1900s, who wrote on politics and economics), and the fictional works of Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens (mentioned above), I began the autumn with a Downeast classic and ushered in the winter months with three fine works in political economy:

• Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896) — a lovely summer sojourn in a Maine coastal community. Curiously, Edith Wharton found Jewett’s perspective unrealistically pleasant and an incentive to write Ethan Frome;

• Roger Koppl’s From Crisis to Confidence: Macroeconomics after the Crash (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014) — an analysis of why Western growth continues to lag, despite many countries’ recovery from recessionary woes;

• Dwight Lee and Richard McKenzie’s Failure and Progress: The Bright Side of the Dismal Science (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1993) — a contemporary classic in public choice economics and capitalist theory, important for its examination of the role of present failure for future success and of the dynamic nature of the marketplace, influenced by market competition and political competition; and
• Christopher Snowdon’s Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism: Debunking Myths about the Free Market (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014) — a marvellous debunking of progressive liberal myths concerning self-interest, ‘perfect knowledge’, GDP, and levels of poverty.

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It only remains to remind you to follow DMI on Twitter and on Facebook, and to wish all my readers good health and good fortune in 2015!

Electoral High-Jinks Mar Canadian Politics

A national controversy that first reared up in late February continues to simmer in Canadian politics: Revelations that, during the federal electoral campaign in May 2011, numerous constituents across the Dominion were subjected to harassing telephone calls in the late of night and directed to non-existent polling stations on election day.

These are disconcerting developments, regardless of the political parties involved and the final outcome of the ballot results. Nevertheless, for students of public choice economics, such shenanigans are unsurprising; the gains from winning high office are great, and never more so in the age of the all-encompassing Welfare State. When the possibilities for self-enrichment and aggrandising one’s friends are so tempting, is it any wonder that our political class behaves so badly?

Click here for my full argument at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The Global Economics of Corporate Tax Cuts

With the burgeoning of the modern welfare state, taxes on corporations are widely accepted as one of the least offensive ways to raise funds to pay for them. But is this true?

Corporations — and, more accurately, their fiduciary officers — are self-interested organisations, which pass along tax burdens in the form of increased prices to consumers; where competition limits such price flexibility, costs are borne by employees or by reductions in capital accumulation.

As students of the Laffer curve theory know, too, raising taxes does not necessarily mean increased tax revenues; as the wit says, oftentimes less is more.

Moreover, in to-day’s globalised economy, nations seeking to attract businesses must compete with other countries by offering levels of taxation that are conducive for enterprises to set up shop within their borders — and to remain as satisfied tax-payers, untempted by the allure of foreign tax incentives.

Recent Canadian economic news — both in relation to arguments for higher corporation taxes and the revenue generated through lower taxes — is instructive.

Click here for my full argument at the Adam Smith Institute.