On the Record | Government Is the Cause of “Brexit-Trump Syndrome”

Please see my latest post for the Quarterly Review, ‘Government Is the Cause of “Brexit-Trump Syndrome”’:

The Powers That Be never fail to demonstrate why they have earned the enmity of the average citizen. Bound up in a cocoon of self-satisfaction and self-denial, their political coup de grâce cannot come soon enough. This self-important élite are flummoxed by the people’s revolt in Britain and America, known respectively as Brexit and the Trump movement. A recent column dispatched from the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science amply displays their continuing bewilderment.

Coining the term ‘Brexit-Trump Syndrome’, British academics Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato claim that an inability to understand economic reality explains why average working-class citizens, who suffered lost jobs and wages and failed to bounce back from the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 (despite billions spent in stimulus schemes), voted either to exit the European Union or put Donald Trump in the White House. Both described as ‘disastrous’ socio-economic choices. The implications drawn are that people were duped into voting against their financial interests. Au contraire.

To counter such continuing nostrums leading to government and economic failure, there is no better guide forward to liberty and prosperity than John Stuart Mill.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Dr Leslie Jones of the Quarterly Review.

On the Record | Education of a Quick Study Presidential Candidate

Please see my latest article for the American Thinker, ‘Education of a Quick Study Presidential Candidate’:

The Donald never ceases to amaze. Much like the developer’s ladder he climbed under the tutelage of his father, Trump has scaled the political ladder with equal speed and facility. He has risen from the no-chance dilettante candidate to the GOP’s nominee in a (current) statistical tie with his Democrat adversary for the White House. Friend and foe alike are nonplussed. But the quick-study presidential candidate would be no surprise to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Sent to the United States by the French government to study prison reform, Tocqueville encompassed the entire republican experiment, publishing his reflections as Democracy in America.

The New World’s break with aristocratic Europe fascinated him; immediacy, dynamism, and action took the place of refined, unhurried contemplation. “The democratic social state and democratic institutions lead most men to act constantly,” Tocqueville wrote; “now, the habits of mind that are appropriate to action are not always appropriate to thought.”

Critics of Trump will read into these sentiments an indictment of the Republican presidential nominee, whose early campaign was marked by cringing off-the-cuff statements and unfiltered appraisals of his opponents.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to the editors at the American Thinker.

On the Record | Paine the Economic Royalist

Please see my first article for the American Thinker, ‘Paine the Economic Royalist’:

The foibles of most public men are unearthed while they walk among us. “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” But revisionism makes history its palimpsest. Heroic pamphleteer Thomas Paine is but the latest of the Founding generation laid low by this twenty-first-century zeitgeist.

His sin? Paine was a bimetallist who believed in commodity currency -- gold or silver. Honored in his time, today’s establishment would have the New Rochelle revolutionary tarred-and-feathered for his heterodoxy.

Paine’s motivation for writing Dissertations in the mid-1780s was a Pennsylvanian banking bill and the rivalry it spawned: one bank with notes guaranteed by specie versus another with no guarantee other than legal tender laws, which he reasoned belied the currency’s worthlessness and “calculated to support fraud and oppression.”

“Nature has provided the proper materials for money, gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous,” Paine wrote; they were “the emissions of nature: paper is the emission of art.”

Read more…

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My thanks to the editors at the American Thinker.

Economic Laws Trump Political Prestidigitation

‘It is the highest impertinence and presumption ... in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the œconomy of private people,’ observed Adam Smith. ‘If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will (Wealth of Nations, II.iii.36).’

This theme is explored in two essays posted this month. The first, ‘No Crystal Ball Needed to Forecast Fundamentals of Sound Economics’, takes a look at what constitutes ‘wealth producers’ and ‘wealth destroyers’, and why government — when it goes beyond providing the basic framework of law and order, and acting as a service provider of last resort — is so often a member of the latter group and not the former.

The second essay, ‘Raising the minimum wage while debasing the currency: an illogical economic policy?’ (published courtesy of the Institute of Economic Affairs), argues that instituting minimum wage laws while engaging in quantitative easing of the money supply is a hopeless venture; each activity considered alone is less than innocuous, but pursing both at the same time is an exercise in futility as any doubtful benefits are cancelled out and nullified.

Smith recognised that ‘All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord (IV.ix.51).’ To-day, encouraged by social democrats and their Progressive ideology, governments are addicted to these systems, whether through the aforementioned minimum wage laws and currency debasement or other forms of welfare economics. But, in the end, economic laws trump political prestidigitation.
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#DMI_Reads Update — Two volumes are in the reading queue this month: The Case for Capitalism (E.P. Dutton, 1920) by Hartley Withers and Lectures on the French Revolution (Liberty Fund, 2000) by Lord Acton.

Do you know of a little-known and under-appreciated volume on the French Revolution that you’d like to recommend? Write and tell me about it. And do people still read Thomas Carlyle on the subject? I’ve looked at the first few pages of his massive tome and been daunted, but am game to have another look if anyone is willing to make an argument in its favour.

DMI 2013 Round-Up

While there have been no official DMI updates in a very long time, research has continued apace — although very slowly due to various computer malfunctions and interruptions. Nevertheless, here is a round-up of essays published this year:

• ‘If elections have consequences, then so does economics’ — A look at the Laffer Curve, when high marginal tax rates result in lower revenues, not more.


• ‘Depardieu bids French statists “Adieu!”’ — More on the Laffer Curve, when high marginal tax rates entice wealth creators to flee to more amenable tax jurisdictions.


• ‘March out the vote!’ — Does the State have the right to force individuals to vote, or does such action confuse which demands deference and precedence, citizens or their government?


• ‘The inexorable lessons of currency debasement’ — On the evils of inflating the money supply.


• ‘Median voter theorem: why mainstream parties adopt similar policies’ — Why do opposing political parties so often cling to the centre and present similar policies to the electorate? What does this mean for principled ‘ginger’ groups embedded within such larger organisations?

Several projects-in-hand will continue in the new year: One example is the paradox interwoven in F.A. Hayek’s economics and politics; another involves the phenomenon of ‘liberal Toryism’ — the dynamism between classical liberal laisser-faire economics and the traditional Tory belief in ‘limited paternalism through the State’, ideas which have overtones in the work of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, and find continuing expression in the 21-st century through various British and American theorists — more to come!

Another experiment in the coming months will be #DMI_Reads, where I will ‘tweet’ my current reading lists and ask for feedback and complementary book recommendations.

As always, remember to follow DMI on Twitter, on Facebook, and (here) on its dedicated page.

All best wishes for 2014!