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 Richmans' Trade and Taxes Blog

There Is Less Inequality Now Than Ever Before in History
Raymond Richman, 2/12/2019

There is less inequality today than at any time in our history. There is less wealth inequality now and there is less income inequality now than at any time in our history. Those who argue that wealth is more unequal now or that income is more unequal now are using a very narrow definition of wealth and income. They exclude, for example all public goods like public education, public parks, museums, swimming pools, beaches, police and fire departments, international security, water and sewage, streets, legal courts, etc. They do not include ownership of real estate and personal property including autos, boats, clothing, and recreational vehicles. They do not include hospitals, churches, colleges and universities, clubs, voluntary associations, etc. They do not include recreation and entertainment.Baseball, football, soccer, hockey games and other mass entertainments such as movies and television exist for the masses not billionaires. ...

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There Is Less Inequality Now Than Ever Before in History
Raymond Richman, 2/12/2019

There is less inequality today than at any time in our history. There is less wealth inequality now and there is less income inequality now than at any time in our history. Those who argue that wealth is more unequal now or that income is more unequal now are using a very narrow definition of wealth and income. They exclude, for example all public goods like public education, public parks, museums, swimming pools, beaches, police and fire departments, international security, water and sewage, streets, legal courts, etc. They do not include ownership of real estate and personal property including autos, boats, clothing, and recreational vehicles. They do not include hospitals, churches, colleges and universities, clubs, voluntary associations, etc. They do not include recreation and entertainment.Baseball, football, soccer, hockey games and other mass entertainments such as movies and television exist for the masses not billionaires. ...

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Unpaid Family Leave - A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
Howard Richman, 2/11/2019

In his State of the Union speech last week, President Trump came out for paid family leave. He said:

 I am also proud to be the first President to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave — so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.

I'm assuming that he would support a mandate that would require employers to pay parents for time that they would not work. That very mandate has been a disaster in many parts of the world, including South Korea whose birth rate per woman has fallen to 1.17 in 2016, compared to 1.80 per woman in the United States.

Seemingly innocuous laws can have terrible unintended consequences.  In South Korea this government mandate that was designed to help married women, ended up hurting them. Employers don't like to pay people who don't work. So, given a choice, they hire single women, not married women. So South Korean women on career paths stopped getting married. The same could happen in the United States. ...

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National Capitalism, Rather than Mixed Economy or Socialism, Best Describes Economic System
Raymond Richman, 2/11/2019

Norman S. B. Gras, Professor of Business History at Harvard in 1940, described  FDR’s New Deal as an example of "national capitalism" similar to that in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in an article published in the Harvard Business Review. National capitalism is "a system of business based upon private enterprise publicly controlled." Because Nazism and Fascism used totalitarian methods and ruthlessly killed so many people, the term “national capitalism” should be used instead of fascism to accommodate economic systems that are more democratic and avoid the use of brute force. Gras’s description of the system as national capitalism ought to have been widely adopted by economists and business majors as well as the general public.

Economists are fond of describing economic systems as “capitalist”, “socialist”, “free enterprise”, “private enterprise”, etc. but they tend to avoid calling a system “fascist”, which is to be expected because of the odious character of the Hitler regime and Mussolini’s alliance with Germany. They avoid calling attention to the Japanese economy at all although historically it was equally odious and the Japanese government still plays a substantial role in directing and controlling the economy. The post-WWII American domination of the world has eliminated most attempts to distinguish between economic systems although the Cuban and North Korean economy are often represented as “communist”   

Look about you. There are hundreds of thousands of objects in the room you find yourself, where you live, where you work, where you travel, for sale in retail stores and on line and throughout the world. Who invented these objects? Who manufactured them? Whom are they made for? Nearly all of them were invented and produced by private persons without government assistance. Socialists tend to criticize capitalism as greedy. But as Adam Smith noted in the 18^th century, everyone acting in his own interest in a capitalist economy ends up acting in the interest of all....

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