Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.
– Walter Russell Mead (via Instapundit)
I’m a bit reluctant to post anything that mentions Ayn Rand, for fear of triggering some very heated and off-topic discussion…but recent trends in the political and business spheres have reminded me of a line in Atlas Shrugged which was spoken by Henry Rearden’s mother:
All business is just dirty politics and all politics is just dirty business.
Ruth McClung is running for Congress in Arizona’s 7th District. She seems like an interesting person–physics degree, works in rocketry at an engineering company, worked her way through college, enjoys rock climbing, an amateur painter whose work has been displayed in local galleries.
Views on specific issues aside, it’s great to see so much true diversity among some of the new people running for office. Too many of the old crowd are made in the same mold…typically lawyers, who have spent their entire careers in public office, government “service,” or in pseudo-private positions (lobbyists, attorneys focusing on regulatory issues) which are closely connected to their governmental experience..or activists and “community organizers,” types of activity which are really just other kinds of lobbying…and many them appear to have little intellectual or emotional depth and no real interests in life other than the acquisition of personal political power and influence.
For years and years I have been quoting Hayek as saying:
Capitalism depends upon values which it did not create and cannot replace.
I am sure I read something by him that was very close to this at some point. I thought it was from The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, but when I looked in there, I found the concept but not the pithy summary.
The sentence comes pretty close to summing up my whole political philosophy, and I did not originate it.
Does anyone know where I got it?
For years, I have struggled to explain to people why high marginal tax rates on the “wealthy” create disincentives to work that make the entire society more poor.
I finally figured out a way to explain the problem in terms that everyone can relate to: High marginal taxes function as anti-overtime. Call it undertime.
Many people seem incapable of grasping the idea. They seem to see issues of taxation only in terms of relative wealth. They can only see that people with an upper middle-class income have plenty and that therefore if you take proportionally more of their income, they will still have enough. This comment on a post about taxes creating disincentives [h/t Instapundit] represents a common view:
Your point is well taken, I think the Bush tax-cuts should be extended, and I can see why this woman may be considering her options…..BUT, if the people in your example have a mortgage, 2 kids, etc., and the wife can even consider not working, they may be in an economic pinch, but they are not suffering very much.
What Clair and other like her miss is that this isn’t an argument about fairness or who suffers. It is an argument about how tax policy affects the overall production, and thus material wealth of the entire society.