URLs du Jour

2021-12-20

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Our Amazon Product du Jour features a great Thomas Jefferson quote … which is unfortunately bogus. That doesn't make it untrue, though.

  • Mister, we could use a man like Frédéric Bastiat again. Because he said stuff like this. (in French, but I assume the translation is accurate):

    When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

    Which was brought to mind by an NRPlus article by Jerry Bowyer: Against the Thiel Tax.

    ‘Build Back Better,” the federal spending plan recently passed by the House, has a provision in it that is clearly a piece of political theater. Among other things, the bill sets out to change the rules surrounding Roth IRAs, including a strong retrospective element, which seems to have been inspired by one particular person for whom the Left has — how to put it — very little affection: Peter Thiel.

    […]

    Earlier this year, private IRS tax information on some of the nation’s billionaires — think Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Peter Thiel — was leaked to the liberal news site ProPublica. According to the reports, Thiel had the foresight to put roughly $1,700 worth of his early ownership shares in PayPal into his Roth IRA in 1999. At the time, the shares were valued at pennies — if that. Later, PayPal exploded in value. Thiel then did something similar with other early-stage stocks such as Palantir and Facebook. The extremely high returns on those high-risk and eventual high-reward investments left him with a Roth worth billions.

    Of course, the whole thing was audited by the IRS. That’s how there was so much information to leak to a politically hostile media outlet. According to ProPublica, this audit happened during the Obama administration, which wasn’t known for having a politically balanced IRS. (Remember all those Tea Party groups with charitable-status applications caught in bureaucratic purgatory until after the election?) And yet, after the audit, Thiel was apparently not found to owe any additional taxes.

    That’s because what he did was legal. There were no limits under the rules governing Roth accounts as to how successful an investor was allowed to be. It didn’t matter if Thiel had succeeded beyond the wildest nightmares of the tax takers, because it’s the law that matters, not whether an individual taxpayer outplays the IRS on the IRS’s own rules. No taxpayer is obligated to pay more than the law requires, whether the government likes it or not.

    It's outrageous, is what it is. Fortunately, BBB seems dead for now.


  • Mister, as long as I'm wishing, we could also use a man like Freddie Hayek again. Particularly relevant to the above, Barry Brownstein wonders (in a two-part article): Are We Near the End of the Road to Serfdom? Part 1 and Part 2. I'm not quite as pessimistic as Barry; we're far freer, both in the US and worldwide, than we were in the 1940s when Hayek wrote TRtS. But the road is always there, and there will always be the folks who want to take us down it.

    “Nothing,” Hayek explains, “distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.”

    Individuals are free to pursue their personal goals when the coercive power of government is restricted under the Rule of Law. Hayek explains:

    Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. Though this ideal can never be perfectly achieved, since legislators as well as those to whom the administration of the law is entrusted are fallible men, the essential point, that the discretion left to the executive organs wielding coercive power should be reduced as much as possible, is clear enough. While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action. Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts. [emphasis added]

    Widespread respect for the Rule of Law among citizens is easier to strengthen and store during prosperous times. The metaphor of storing or eating our seed corn is applicable not only to physical assets and money, but also to ideas. During economic downturns or difficult times, the level of fear goes up. Demands for expedient responses put pressure on the Rule of Law; respect for this vital principle of a free and prosperous society dwindles. The frightened want what they claim they are entitled to, and some politicians are all too willing to pander those claims. 

    The "Thiel Tax" is certainly an example of what Hayek was talking about.

    But also…


  • "Comrade Lysenko, I have Anthony Fauci on line 2." Phillip W. Magness and James R. Harrigan write on recent history: Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science.

    From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call the three of the scientists in attendance “fringe epidemiologists,” in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency. They were “fringe epidemiologists” because they had the temerity to ask whether the lockdowns of 2020 were effective. Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence.

    They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.

    So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins was clearly in no mood to replace his own possible ignorance with any kind of knowledge. He was pretty sure he knew all he had to know; and this is one of the most dangerous positions a scientist can take.

    The GBD had to be rebuked, and instead of countering it with data, they turned to publications in their ideological line: the Nation and WIRED.

    I admit, I was skeptical, but not nearly skeptical enough of Fauci et. al. back in 2020.


  • Let 'em in. Jeff Jacoby has a radical notion: Restore the original immigration policy: an open door. I'm not quite there yet, but I like his argument:

    THE FRAMERS of the Constitution gave the federal government no authority to restrict peaceful immigration. For the first century or so of US history, most foreigners wishing to move to the United States were legally free to do so. The Constitution delegates many specific powers to the federal government, but a general right to bar or expel immigrants is conspicuously not among them. During the national debate over the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 — which (among other provisions) allowed President John Adams to unilaterally deport immigrants he deemed dangerous — James Madison and the Virginia General Assembly denounced the laws for investing the president with "a power nowhere delegated to the federal government."

    Not until 1882 was there a significant federal law curbing immigration: the unabashedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act, which effectively slammed the door on immigration from China. Instead of striking down the law as unconstitutional, the Supreme Court upheld it on the grounds that the right to exclude foreigners for any reason was an "incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States." That decision — by the same court that a few years later endorsed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson — erased a core human right that the authors of the Constitution had never intended to curtail: freedom of immigration.

    I have to admit, it would be pretty cool if the Supremes started knocking down stuff the government does because it's not explicitly authorized in the Constitution.


  • Nobody reads syllabi. An amusing NYT article: Professor Put Clues to a Cash Prize in His Syllabus. No One Noticed.

    Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wanted to test whether any of his students fully read the syllabus for his music seminar.

    Of the more than 70 students enrolled in the class, none apparently did.

    Professor Wilson said he knows this because on the second page of the three-page syllabus he included the location and combination to a locker, inside of which was a $50 cash prize.

    “Free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five,” read the passage in the syllabus. But when the semester ended on Dec. 8, students went home and the cash was unclaimed.

    Among the college profs with whom I'm acquainted, it's a common complaint that their students don't read the course materials. Professor Wilson literally put his money on it. Impressive.


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:47 PM EDT