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Must Everything Be Made of Corn? – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Must Everything Be Made of Corn? – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The New Renaissance Hat
Jeffrey A. Tucker
July 27, 2017
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This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education on November 28, 2016.

I’ve finished Thanksgiving leftovers and I’m digging into a store-bought blueberry pie, because few people have time to make such a pie from scratch. Crust should be made from flour and lard (which comes from pig), in my view, but when you buy from the store, the crust is almost always made from “shortening” which is a vegetable product.

Meaning: corn.

Then there is the pie filling. Usually at home, you would use sugar from cane to sweeten the berries. But when you buy from the store, the berries are sweetened from a syrup made also from  corn.

So here you have two ingredients in the making of this pie that are radically dissimilar: sugar cane and a pig. Hard to think of anything in common between the two. They have both been displaced as ingredients by one thing: corn.

Once you realize this – that the crust and the berries are living within the same core food group of corn – your mind stops playing tricks on you. There is a sense in which the whole thing, despite all looks and extraneous flavors, is a corn pie.

Suddenly, you can taste exactly that.

Now, it is time for the after dinner drink, perhaps a Margarita sweetened with lime juice. You look at the ingredients of that juice bottle.

Corn again! You are going to drink corn.

So you go for a chocolate but then take a look at the wrapper: corn!

So you decide to go for a drive in your gasoline-powered car. What’s in the tank? Thanks to the mandated additive of ethanol, there is corn here too.

By the time you get to the movie theater and consider popcorn, you remember that you had corn in your crust, corn in your berries, corn in your cocktail, and corn in your gas tank. Who needs corn popped in corn oil covered with butter-flavored corn?

So, instead of popcorn, and since most candy consists of different shapes of corn, you decide to settle for just a soda.

What’s in it? High-fructose corn syrup!

It’s too much! You feel like you’re trapped in a Twilight Zone episode: like your night is going to end in one of those cornfield chase scenes you see in horror movies.

Why does the whole of American life sometimes seem to be taken over by corn?

To be sure, corn is a miracle food. But is it really so miraculous that everything we use should be made out of it?

The Politics of Corn

Only if the market brings about this result. But it’s not the market speaking. It’s a deeply distorted market. The power of the corn lobby is legendary. And mixed with that is the power of the sugar lobby, which keeps out imported sugar that would sell for half as much as we pay at the store, thereby incentivizing producers to seek out a substitute in corn, which turns out to make us fatter, thereby panicking do-gooders who try to ban products and limit consumption, so that our bad health will stop driving up health-insurance rates.

Remarkably, all of this has happened only since the 1970s, before which there was no such thing as high-fructose corn syrup, to say nothing of corn-based gasoline. It’s one intervention piled on top of another one.

Foreign peoples find all of this mystifying. Indeed it is, until you look more deeply and see just how important the corn states are in winning elections. It turns out that the main and most valuable products generated by all this strange corn-based activity are political careers.

It’s for this reason that we have corn coming out of our ears.

Christmas Corn

Don’t despair: we’ve got Christmas to look forward to, with corn-candied apples, corn-sweetened eggnog, ham from corn-fed pigs glazed with corn, perhaps a roast from a corn-fed cow, and that old favorite, mulled cider on the stove filling the house with the traditional and evocative smell of corn.

After you have decorated your tree with strings of popcorn and candy canes made with corn syrup, don’t forget to forget to leave Santa cookies, baked with corn oil and corn sugar, because, as everyone knows, nothing says the holidays – or any day! – like corn.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author. Read the original article.

This Crazy 100-Year-Old Law Makes Almost Everything More Expensive – Article by George C. Leef

This Crazy 100-Year-Old Law Makes Almost Everything More Expensive – Article by George C. Leef

The New Renaissance HatGeorge C. Leef
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It’s time to repeal the absurd, costly “Jones Act”

The 2016 presidential campaign so far has featured almost no discussion of downsizing the federal government. Americans would benefit enormously if we could get rid of costly old laws that interfere with freedom and prosperity, and future generations would benefit even more.

I keep hoping that someone will manage to put this question squarely to the candidates in either party: “What laws would you seek to repeal if you were the president?”

There are so many laws that ought to be repealed, including countless special interest statutes that benefit a tiny group while imposing costs on a vastly greater number of Americans. But if candidates need an idea of where to start, one such law is the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also called the “Jones Act.”

The Act requires that all shipments between American ports to be done exclusively on American ships. As Daniel Pearson explains,

Its stated purpose was to maintain a strong U.S. merchant marine industry. Drafters of the legislation hoped that the merchant fleet would remain healthy and robust if all shipments from one U.S. port to another were required to be carried on U.S.-built and U.S.-flagged vessels.

The theory behind the law is musty, antiquated mercantilism — the notion that the nation will be stronger if we protect “our” industries against foreign competition.

Imagine how strong we would be if there had been a Jones Act for automobile transportation. Would Americans be better off today if the Detroit automakers had remained an oligopoly by keeping out all of those Hondas, BMWs, and Hyundais? Obviously not — yet this logic has handicapped US shipping for 96 years.

A recent op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser nicely explain the absurd consequences of this law. The writer just wants to buy a cabinet, but “although the cabinet was made in Taiwan, it could not be off-loaded in Hawaii, but rather had to be shipped to the West Coast, then loaded onto an American ship for the costly backward journey to Hawaii.” Tons of time, fuel, and expense wasted, all thanks to the Jones Act.

We get a more comprehensive view of its costs from a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last September. The report, titled “International Food Assistance: Cargo Preference Increases Food Aid Shipping Costs,” shows the heavy cost of the law. The GAO, known for its non-partisan, straight-shooting approach, found that the Jones Act increased the cost of shipping food aid by 23 percent.

What does that mean? Between 2011 and 2014, the taxpayers had to fork over an extra $45 million to ship food for USAID. With Washington’s prodigious spending, we’ve gotten used to the idea that amounts under a billion are too small to bother with, but that is the wrong way to look at things. Even if we didn’t have a constantly increasing national debt, we ought to root out every needless federal expenditure.

Treading very delicately, the GAO states that, because the Jones Act “serves statutory policy goals,” Congress should merely tweak it so that aid agencies can find less costly shipping. But the federal government has no constitutional authority to be in the business of international aid, and carving out a special exemption for this would simply help the government avoid the consequences that it is inflicting on everyone else. Congress should simply repeal the protectionist law entirely.

The Jones Act also distorts our energy market and leads to higher prices than otherwise. Writing at The Federalist, trade attorney Scott Lincicome points out that, due to the law’s restrictions, only thirteen ships can legally move crude oil between US ports, and those ships are “booked solid.” As a result, shipping American crude from Texas to Philadelphia costs more than three times as much as it would cost to send it all the way to Canada on a foreign vessel.

One of the Act’s few congressional opponents is Arizona Senator John McCain, who pointed out in this testimony that Hawaiian cattlemen who want to sell livestock on the mainland “have actually resorted to flying the cattle on 747 jumbo jets to work around the restrictions of the Jones Act. Their only alternative is to ship the cattle to Canada because all livestock carriers in the world are foreign-owned.”

Hawaii is especially hard hit by the Jones Act, but other states and territories that depend heavily on water-borne shipping also suffer. Consider Puerto Rico: a 2012 study by the New York Fed found that it cost about $3,063 to ship a 20-foot container from an east coast US port to Puerto Rico, but shipping the same container to a foreign destination, such as Jamaica, would cost only about $1,687. Because it is an American territory, the poor island pays almost twice as much to import American products.

For nearly a century, we’ve paid more at the pump, more for goods, more in taxes, and even more to do charitable aid, all because of this ancient special interest law.

All that the Jones Act accomplishes is to guarantee a market for costly, unionized American shipping. It is similar in purpose to the Davis-Bacon Act, which guarantees a market for high-cost unionized construction (as I explain here).

Such special interest laws are never good for the country as a whole, but they are passed and maintained because their lobbyists are crafty, knowledgeable, and highly motivated, while the voting public is mostly ignorant.

It takes a spotlight and presidential leadership to get rid of them. Will any of this year’s crop take up the challenge?

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Eminent Domain for Private Gain Is Terrible and Cruel — Even When It “Works” – Article by George C. Leef

Eminent Domain for Private Gain Is Terrible and Cruel — Even When It “Works” – Article by George C. Leef

The New Renaissance HatGeorge C. Leef
August 18, 2015

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Despite a “success” story, eminent domain for economic development is a bad policy

Ilya Somin’s excellent new book The Grasping Hand on the infamous case of Kelo v. New London recently drew a negative response from a professor who defends the use of eminent domain for “economic development.”

In his letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Wayne State University professor John Mogk took issue with Somin’s book and with Ed Glaeser’s favorable WSJ review. Mogk claims that they did not adequately weigh what he regards as a successful use of eminent domain to promote economic growth in Poletown, Detroit.

The New London redevelopment project that cost Suzette Kelo her little pink house was, Mogk admits, a fiasco. But, he says, we shouldn’t paint all eminent domain cases with that brush. He wants to buttress the case that the public welfare can be enhanced by using eminent domain to obtain land for projects that are supposed to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Mogk believes that the apparent success of Poletown saves the day for eminent domain enthusiasts.

Here are three reasons for believing that he is mistaken.

First, as a policy matter, we either give the green light to property seizures for any “public purpose” conceived by politicians, or we prohibit them and limit eminent domain just to seizures for a clear public use. (That’s the language in the Constitution.)

We cannot have a rule that says, “Eminent domain may be used for economic development plans, but only when it actually produces net benefits.”

No one can know ahead of time whether a plan will “work” (which is to say, produce at least some of the promised gains) or utterly fail. In Kelo, the City of New London’s grand redevelopment plan fell through completely. Where neat, modest houses once stood, you now see only rubble and weeds. Nobody knew that would be the outcome when the plan was conceived.

Consider this analogy: The law forbids warrantless searches by the police, but suppose that, in some illegal searches, important evidence of criminal activity is found. Should we conclude that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement can be discarded because there are some instances where we get good results from warrantless searches?

I don’t think that conclusion follows. And neither should we allow property seizures whenever authorities want to, just because those seizures sometimes have “good results.”

Second, Professor Mogk’s Poletown example isn’t as telling as he thinks. Perhaps it is true, as he writes, that most of the inhabitants were content with their buyouts. What I don’t think anyone can deny, however, is that for some of the residents, especially elderly people, the forced relocation was extremely disruptive and painful.

Outsiders like Mogk and the bigwigs at General Motors (who wanted the land for a new Cadillac plant) may have thought that Poletown was “declining,” but to the people who called it home, living there was their best option.

The right to quietly enjoy their property was taken away from them so that others might be more prosperous — GM stockholders and UAW workers, in particular.

We have to oppose the collectivistic philosophy that says it is permissible to use coercion against some individuals as long as those in power think they might thereby create a net utilitarian gain for more politically powerful (and usually much richer) interests.

Third, all that these economic development eminent domain takings can ever do is to redistribute where economic activity takes place. It cannot create any overall gain.

Let us suppose that the GM management was correct in forecasting an increase in demand for luxury cars. (It appears that they overestimated that demand, at least for their own vehicles, since the plant never employed nearly as many workers as they had said it would.) Free market competition to satisfy that demand would have led to increased output without Detroit confiscating land for a new GM plant.

If it hadn’t been able to resort to coercion to get the land, GM would probably have found other ways of increasing Cadillac production, but even if it couldn’t have done so, other auto-makers would have built more luxury cars. Auto jobs would have been created somewhere, and car buyers would have benefited without property owners losing.

Instead of proving that eminent domain can be a good economic development tool, the Poletown example is just another illustration of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. Demolishing Poletown to build a new auto factory brought about visible benefits for some people, but only at the expense of benefits for others that would have otherwise occurred.

No, not every eminent domain seizure for economic development purposes is as pointless and utterly destructive as Kelo, but we still ought to stick with this rule: Government should protect property rights, not violate them. The government should do those few order-keeping functions appropriate to it and leave the allocation of resources and planning of production to people who risk their own money and cannot take what isn’t theirs.

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Internet Gambling Ban: A Winner for Sheldon Adelson, A Losing Bet for the Rest of Us – Article by Ron Paul

Internet Gambling Ban: A Winner for Sheldon Adelson, A Losing Bet for the Rest of Us – Article by Ron Paul

The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
November 16, 2014
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Most Americans, regardless of ideology, oppose “crony capitalism” or “cronyism.” Cronyism is where politicians write laws aimed at helping their favored business beneficiaries. Despite public opposition to cronyism, politicians still seek to use the legislative process to help special interests.For example, Congress may soon vote on legislation outlawing Internet gambling. It is an open secret, at least inside the Beltway, that this legislation is being considered as a favor to billionaire casino owner, Sheldon Adelson. Mr. Adelson, who is perhaps best known for using his enormous wealth to advance a pro-war foreign policy, is now using his political influence to turn his online competitors into criminals.Supporters of an Internet gambling ban publicly deny they are motivated by a desire to curry favor with a wealthy donor. Instead, they give a number of high-minded reasons for wanting to ban this activity. Some claim that legalizing online gambling will enrich criminals and even terrorists! But criminalizing online casinos will not eliminate the demand for online casinos. Instead, passage of this legislation will likely guarantee that the online gambling market is controlled by criminals. Thus, it is those who support outlawing online gambling who may be aiding criminals and terrorists.

A federal online gambling ban would overturn laws in three states that allow online gambling. It would also end the ongoing debate over legalizing online gambling in many other states. Yet some have claimed that Congress must pass this law in order to protect states rights! Their argument is that citizens of states that ban Internet gambling may easily get around those laws by accessing online casinos operating in states where online gambling is legalized.

Even if the argument had merit that allowing states to legalize online gambling undermines laws in other states, it would not justify federal legislation on the issue. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given any authority to regulate activities such as online gambling. Arguing that “states rights” justifies creating new federal crimes turns the Tenth Amendment, which was intended to limit federal power, on its head.

Many supporters of an Internet gambling ban sincerely believe that gambling is an immoral and destructive activity that should be outlawed. However, the proposed legislation is not at all about the morality of gambling. It is about whether Americans who do gamble should have the choice to do so online, or be forced to visit brick-and-mortar casinos.

Even if there was some moral distinction between gambling online or in a physical casino, prohibiting behavior that does not involve force or fraud has no place in a free society. It is no more appropriate for gambling opponents to use force to stop people from playing poker online than it would be for me to use force to stop people from reading pro-war, neocon writers.

Giving government new powers over the Internet to prevent online gambling will inevitably threaten all of our liberties. Federal bureaucrats will use this new authority to expand their surveillance of the Internet activities of Americans who have no interest in gambling, just as they used the new powers granted by the PATRIOT Act to justify mass surveillance.

The proposed ban on Internet gambling is a blatantly unconstitutional infringement on our liberties that will likely expand the surveillance state. Worst of all, it is all being done for the benefit of one powerful billionaire. Anyone who thinks banning online gambling will not diminish our freedoms while enriching criminals is making a losing bet.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Independence from ACTA Day – July 4, 2012 – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Independence from ACTA Day – July 4, 2012 – Video by G. Stolyarov II

July 4 now has a new meaning: it is the day European pro-liberty activists helped humankind declare independence from the powerful special interests that attempted to impose censorship, online surveillance, and draconian stifling of creativity via the misnamed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Following the rejection of ACTA in the European Union Parliament by a vote of 478 to 39, ACTA is effectively dead. A great threat to human civilization is averted.

Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational discourse on this issue.

Support these video-creation efforts by donating at The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com/index.html

References:
– “ACTA: The War on Progress, Freedom, and Human Civilization” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “Victory! ACTA Suffers Final, Humiliating Defeat in European Parliament” – Rick Falkvinge
– “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” – Wikipedia