Mark Steyn makes an excellent point against increasing the federal government (something the current administration wholeheartedly supports)

Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

A very good reason to support libertarian ideals at the national level. By it’s very nature, national legislation can be unwieldy and difficult to manage. Better to leave it to the states where it’s less cumbersome.

As is well known, China has been opening up it’s markets. Recently, there was a clash:

About 30 000 Chinese steelworkers clashed with police in a protest over plans to merge their mill with another company and beat the company’s general manager to death, a human rights monitor said on Saturday.

Perhaps the biggest reason to support free markets is that it creates a demand for the most basic and vital right: the right to property. This current example highlights what happens when markets begin to show people a right to property and then have it abused. People are much more likely to defend their other rights once they have established a right to property.

I’ve never found prognostications that China will overtake the US now that it’s opened up it’s market very compelling. I basis this primarily in the knowledge that in order for China to become a credible threat it must respect the basic rights of it’s people. If and when this occurs, China may surpass the US, but such concession to the free markets will make them our ally and not our enemy. In other words nothing to worry about.

One final thing, a capitalist is someone that defends property rights. I view property right as the most basic and fundamental right we can have in a free society. Therefore I happily embrace being a capitalist. The only question is how someone that enjoys freedom can not claim to be a capitalist.

From Freakonomics blog:

A new N.B.E.R. working paper finds a link between health insurance and obesity, and suggests that the better insured you are, the fatter you’re likely to be. We already knew that people with health insurance consume more healthcare resources than the uninsured; it appears they’re consuming more calories, too.

Eat it universal health care.

He’s all up in universal health care’s grill.

Health-care expert John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis says there are “literally hundreds of studies from over the past 40 years that show preventive medical services usually increase medical spending … Contrary to popular belief, checkups for children and adults do not save the health care system money.”

If the policy elite really wanted cost-cutting competition, they would deregulate medicine. No one has ever found a better way to stimulate competition than freedom.

I whole heatedly believe that if you are interested in reducing the cost of health care you reduce the regulation. I just want to point out the irony that the state forces health care to be come absorbent in cost, via regulation, and then argues that the high cost is the justification for state intervention.

Liberal bigotry rears it’s ugly head.

When the financial house of cards started falling, politicians rushed in to hold it up, using your tax dollars as supports.

Their argument was that if the banks fell, the credit market would fall with them, and credit as we know it would disappear.

Well, the old banks are still lumbering around, filled with the lifeblood of public money, money they refuse to lend, in direct opposition to the purpose of public support.

To fill this financing gap, an increasing number of borrowers are turning to “peer to peer” networks that connect individual borrowers directly to lenders, cutting out the banking middleman. These networks have now financed nearly a half a billion dollars in lending. This is still a long way from the $931 billion in loans and leases that Bank of America had on its balance sheet in 2008, but it’s growing rapidly. Peer-to-peer lenders describe themselves as a solution to many of the banking sector’s current weaknesses, from the lack of small-business finance to the evils of payday lending (which now serves as financing of last resort for those shut out of formal banking altogether).

If we had only let the banks fail, we could have moved to this next generation of peer-to-peer financing. The market will eventually move to this more efficient model, just as soon as the government stops bailing out its Most Valuable Constituents under the guise of “saving the global economy.”

If economic history has taught us anything its that where there is demand, there will be a supply, because there is profit to be made.

It honestly infuriates me that this new type of financing is being stifled by government market intervention. Banks had their chance, and they failed.

The infrastructure is already in place to move to this new model, and the benefits of this model are immense.

The wisdom of crowds is a well known phenomenon; betting markets for the presidential election were incredibly accurate at predicting the winner. Our world class stock market depends on the wisdom of crowds, and by cutting out the banks it would work even better.

Right now, just a few investment bankers move around billions of other peoples’ dollars. If one makes a mistake, billions can be lost, putting the economy in jeopardy. By spreading the investors out we can avoid such costly mistakes.

Currently, our government wastes billions to oversee the investment banks. If the power was moved to the individual, much less oversight would be required. It is not necessary to keep track of what one person does with his or her money.

When people are free to make it in the world, they will make things better, not because they are nice, but because it is profitable.

Many economists and pundits blame our current financial mess on capitalism run amok. However, what is often lost is the fact that we haven’t had a properly functioning capitalist system since 1971, the year the US government bailed out Lockheed Martin.

Before 1971, “ … excessive greed, recklessness and foolish speculation were punished by the market.” If an early American cowboy left his herd to pursue a shaky investment deal, he most likely ended up ruined, stuck on a construction crew in some dusty outpost while he tried to scrape together enough money to start again. Meanwhile, the conservative cowboy who stuck with his herd, growing it carefully and cautiously, prospered — and perhaps picked up a few of Cowboy #1’s cattle at a steep discount.

After 1971, all of that changed.

While the United States government had intervened on other occasions to encourage young industries, its involvement had been modest and usually resulted in the delivery of a valuable public good. The Lockheed bailout was different; it was the first government bailout of an individual, private corporation. It also flew in the face of capitalism’s crucial auto-correcting mechanism. Ritholtz quotes the economist Allan Meltzer: “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin — it just doesn’t work.” A generation of American cowboys had learned that if their business venture failed, their very own red, white, and blue knight would come riding in.

The author also points to Detroit and the Chrysler bailout of 1980:

Ritholtz walks his reader through the bailouts of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s and stops briefly at the 1980 Chrysler bailout to play “What If” as in “What if the government hadn’t butted its nose into the private sector?” He hypothesizes that the failure of Chrysler might have served as a wakeup call to General Motors, Ford, and the United Auto Works (UAW) union, resulting in more fuel-efficient cars and more sustainable labor contracts. Chrysler’s assets may have attracted investors, Korean manufacturers perhaps, and the company may have reemerged as a smarter, slimmer corporation. “It is quite reasonable to conclude that the bailout of Chrysler in 1980 prevented significant market forces from doing their best to reboot the entire U.S. auto sector.”

I hope our legislators take this into account as they try to “correct” the health and energy markets.

According to this report:

For teenagers, the summer job market has not been so bleak in generations. During what should be the start of the bustling summer job season, the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds who want work is 24%–the worst since 1965.

One of the explanations given:

But Lopez Eastlick says there is another major factor: rising minimum wage requirements. Minimum wage increases raise the bar for entry-level employment. From 1997 until 2007, the minimum wage stood at $5.15. Congress raised it to $5.85 in 2007, to $6.55 last year, and in July it is scheduled to increase again to $7.25.

In June 2006, 7 million teens were working. Since the wage hikes and recession kicked in, 1.4 million of those jobs have disappeared. For African-American teens, the job market is even worse–their unemployment rate is 38%.

The irony of course being that a large justification for increasing minimum wage was to help minorities, and now we find that such policy is in part driving up unemployment for African American teens. Those who could do basic math knew this was the inevitable outcome to raising the minimum wage, but those on the left incapable of math were oblivious to this outcome and supported a policy that hurts those they are trying to help.