The economics and history of cronyism

by David Henderson.

“When you leave the honey jar open, expect ants.”
—anonymous

When I speak of the benefits of economic freedom and free markets, many people in my audiences do not think of those terms the way I think of them. In the question-and-answer sessions that follow my talks, it seems people often think they are taking issue with free markets when they are actually rejecting cronyism—a term that encompasses government favoritism, special privileges, and special interests.

For example, people will object to the Wall Street bailouts carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations. As do I, because those bailouts violate free-market principles. They will object to government regulation that makes it difficult for small food producers to produce and sell food not inspected and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As do I.

As we shall see, cronyism has been around for a long time and is a bipartisan problem that has thrived under Democratic and Republican presidents and congresses. Cronyism not only picks winners based on political connections rather than on the extent to which they serve consumers, but also is destructive of wealth, sometimes highly so.

This is not a comprehensive overview of cronyism. No short study could be. Rather, it provides a perspective of cronyism: what it is, what’s wrong with it, some examples of it, why it happens, and how to reduce it.

WHAT IS CRONYISM?

What is the difference between free markets and cronyism? In free markets, buyers and sellers are free to agree on price; no government agency restricts who can buy or sell, and no one is told how or what to produce.[1] In contrast, under cronyism the government rigs the market for the benefit of government officials’ cronies. This takes various forms. Governments sometimes grant monopolies to one firm or limit the number of firms that can compete. For example, most U.S. municipalities allow only one cable company to operate in their area even though there is no technological reason more could not exist. The same is true for most other utilities.

Governments sometimes use quotas or tariffs to limit imports with the goal of protecting the wealth and jobs of domestic producers who compete with those imports. President George W. Bush did this in 2002, for example, when he imposed tariffs ranging from 8 to 30 percent on some types of imported steel.[2] Governments sometimes subsidize favored producers, as the Obama administration did with the politically connected solar-energy firm Solyndra. Governments may use antitrust laws to prevent companies from cutting prices so that other, less-efficient companies can prosper: For example, beginning in 1958, the U.S. government prevented Safeway from cutting prices for a quarter of a century.[3]

The entities governments help with special regulations or subsidies are not always businesses; sometimes they are unions. The federal government’s National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) complained against Boeing in April 2011, for example. In response to a complaint from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the NLRB sought to require Boeing to produce its 787 Dreamliner in Washington State rather than in Boeing’s chosen location of South Carolina. According to the NLRB, by saying that “it would remove or had removed work from the [Puget Sound and Portland] Unit because employees had struck” and by threatening that “the Unit would lose additional work in the event of future strikes,”[4] Boeing was making “coercive” statements to its employees. As a matter of fact, it was not. Boeing was simply telling the employees some likely consequences of the union’s actions.

The Boeing-IAM case is not as simple as most of the press implied. It turns out there was a prior case of cronyism. The government of South Carolina promised Boeing “$900 million in tax relief and other incentives” in exchange for moving production to South Carolina.[5] Such is the tangled world of cronyism.

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War Is Good for the Economy - Isn't It?

David Henderson.

Antiwar.com, March 6, 2006

A common theme that has emerged in critiques of my "Wartime Economist" columns on Antiwar.com is that war is good for an economy. One respondent wrote:

"Why did [Franklin D.] Roosevelt want the war [World War II] so badly? He wanted it for the same reason every American president since that time has wanted a war, and that is to prevent the US economy from slipping deeper and deeper into economic depression. Counting the Cold War, the United States has been in a continual state of war for the past 60 years, and there is no end in sight. Without war, I do not believe our economy can survive."

The people who write me to this effect seem to hate that "fact." They would prefer that war not be a plus for an economy – but, nevertheless, they think it is. This belief has led many of these people to feel hopeless because they think that, on top of all the other difficulties of opposing war, they are opposing something that makes Americans better off. If I thought that, I would feel hopeless too. Fortunately, it's not true. The actual fact is that any war, even a war that is justified, has substantial costs.

Imagine an economy whose government spends 2 percent of its GDP on its military. (On average, the world's governments spend just under 2 percent of their countries' GDP on the military, and the U.S. government spends about 4 percent.) Then, imagine that the government suddenly gets into a war and raises military spending to 7 percent of national income. How does that affect people in that country? Whether the government finances the war effort with taxes or debt or by printing money is not very important. What matters much more is that the government now takes an additional 5 percent of the real output of that economy to wage its war. The government buys tanks, trucks, fuel, clothing, parachutes, bullets, guns, airplanes, and all the other paraphernalia of war. In addition, the government hires laborers away from other uses, or it drafts them. All of the capital and labor that go to produce the "outputs" of war is capital and labor that cannot be used in their previous uses. Thus, there is a cost of all these resources used in war – what economists call the "opportunity cost." "Opportunity cost" means the value of the highest-valued opportunity foregone. The opportunity cost of resources spent on war is the value of these resources in what they would have been used for had the government not gone to war.

Take World War II. The government spent a good deal more than 7 percent of GDP on the war, and, in fact, in 1944, the peak of the U.S. government's World War II spending (as a percent of gross national product), the government spent about 45 percent of gross national product on the war. (Gross national product, not gross domestic product, was the widely used measure back then. For the U.S. economy, the difference between the two measures is close to rounding error.) Where did the resources come from to make the hundreds of thousands of trucks and jeeps and the tens of thousands of tanks and airplanes? Much of the capital and labor would have been producing cars and trucks for the domestic economy. In fact, the assembly lines in Detroit, which had churned out 3.6 million cars in 1941, were retooled to produce the vehicles of war. By 1942, auto production was down to under 1 million. For the years 1943 to 1945, auto production was so low that Wikipedia does not even report it. During the period from late 1942 to the 1945, in other words, almost the whole of U.S. participation in the war, production of civilian cars was essentially shut down.

Consider fuel. Because the government wanted to buy fuel at an artificially low price, it imposed price controls on gasoline and put itself first in line. Then it issued ration cards to Americans, dramatically reducing the amount that normal Americans could buy at the controlled prices. In his autobiography, the late David Brinkley tells how he was unable to continue a serious romance during World War II because he couldn't legally buy gasoline to drive to the city where his lady friend lived. Even railroad seats were rationed, writes Brinkley, with priority given to military personnel. In the government's eyes, letting congressmen and other high-level government officials have all the gasoline they wanted, with the rare "X" stickers, was so important to the war effort that the amount available to them was not rationed at all. A young congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson took advantage of this, driving home to his district in Texas from Washington almost every weekend.

In short, the resources used for the war effort were not available to the typical American and his or her previous normal pursuits.

So imagine that somehow the United States had avoided entering World War II. I don't want to talk about the consequences for the world – that is controversial and, more important, completely separable from the issue of the war's effect on the U.S. economy. Millions of cars would have been produced; people would have been able to travel much more widely; and there would have been no rationing of meat, tires, nylons, eggs, butter, and sugar. In short, by the standard measures of prosperity, Americans would have been much more prosperous. And David Brinkley would have been able to pursue his true love. I mention this last consequence not to emphasize the trivia, but, in fact, to do the opposite – to emphasize one of millions of stories of the large human cost that befell even Americans whom the U.S. government did not put at risk of dying.

But I certainly shouldn't leave the issue of human cost without mentioning the ultimate cost – the 407,000 Americans who lost their lives because of the war. As one of my students, a U.S. military officer, put it in a classroom discussion, the war was not good for their economy, to put it mildly.

To many of you, what I wrote above may sound strange. Isn't World War II, in fact, the big counterexample to all that I'm saying? Didn't World War II bring us out of the Great Depression, as the vast majority of Americans and a simple majority of economists, appear to believe? If we go merely with labels and definitions and forget what they're supposed to stand for, then yes. The Great Depression is typically defined as the period from 1929 to 1941, and America entered the war in 1941. But if we go with the idea that depressions are supposed to measure something about the real amount of goods and services available to people, then no. A complete exposition of this is the topic of my next column on Antiwar.com. Stay tuned.

Tear Down These Walls

David Henderson.

Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia's or Egypt's? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the "nature of India" that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

This is a famous quote from University of Chicago economist and Nobel prize winner Robert Lucas. It's so well done that I used it in my bio of Lucas in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

I've been in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a week now, visiting my daughter. Normally, when I visit a relatively poor country, I enjoy the people, do my fun things, and go home. I'm doing all that here and am having a specially good time with my daughter and her boyfriend.

But something has switched for me and I think a large part of the reason is the way Bryan Caplan's thinking on immigration has changed my thinking. As an immigrant myself who, at one time, faced a deportation order from the U.S. government, and as an economist who thought he understood the importance of resources going to their highest-valued use, I've always favored a huge relaxation of the U.S. government's restrictions on immigration. At the same time, though, I've worried about whether the new immigrants would vote away the system that attracted them to the United States in the first place. My solution has been a 20-year residency requirement before one can become a citizen. I still favor that solution.

So I can't point to a particular policy view of mine that has changed. It's more that Bryan Caplan has changed my view of the urgency of immigration reform. It's like the Robert Lucas quote above: Now that I've started thinking about immigration, it's hard to think about anything else, within economic policy, at least. It is pretty clearly the most pro-growth measure the U.S. government could take and the biggest anti-poverty measure.

I've met a lot of fine people in Thailand, mainly young Thais, and I can picture so many of them moving to the United States and tripling their income within a short time by producing the Thai meals and massages that are priced so low here. And, of course, many of those Thais who moved would move to more-professional jobs and would also enrich the Americans they deal with.

It also helps that on this trip I read Robert Guest's Borderless Economics. That book filled in some of the empirical space in my thinking about the benefits of immigration for immigrants themselves, the people of the countries to which they immigrate, and the people of the countries from which they immigrate. So if it seems "politically impossible"* to "tear down these walls" right now, I think Americans would be surprised, mainly pleasantly, by how much more vibrant an already-vibrant United States would become with three or four times the current annual number of new immigrants.

* I put "politically impossible" in quotation marks because that is the title of thefamous monograph (pdf) by my old friend and anti-Apartheid warrior, William H. Hutt.

HT to Bryan Caplan.

How I Fought Envy. David Henderson

Via Francisco Capella.

Extract:

Then, in my late teens, I started to learn economics. I started to understand that the vast majority of income in a relatively free society is earned. It's true that a small number of wealthy people did get their money by fraud or dishonesty. More common, especially in societies with lots of government controls, were people who got wealthy by using political pull. But I started to see that the typical high-income person in a relatively free society gets his or her income the old-fashioned way--byearning it.

My friend Clancy and I asked him how he had come to be a Marxist. Immediately, his eyes lit up. He talked passionately about growing up with very few possessions, but because he was smart, being hired as a teenager to teach the dumb kids of wealthy parents. He told us of his intense resentment of the fact that he was smart and had nothing, while they were dumb and had a lot. "That," he said, "is how I became a Marxist. I hated the rich." We were shocked. We had thought that virtually all intellectuals came to their views via their intellect, not via their resentments. Herberg must have read our faces, because he added that his route to Marxism was a very common one. "The number of people who became Marxists by reading Marx," I still remember him saying, "can be counted on the fingers of one hand."

Read full story.

Lecturas interesantes, 24 de febrero de 2011

Schools and Socialization by David Henderson

"I wasn't always the victim either. I inflicted my share of cruelty. My 8th grade teacher, Miss Boas, treated most of us badly, hitting us with a stick when she had a bad day and we gave wrong answers. But the one person she singled out for special abuse was Esther. Esther was a plain looking girl without a lot of self-confidence, but probably within the normal range. When Esther gave a wrong answer, Miss Boas would sometimes hit her especially hard with her stick and a few times came down the aisle, pulled Esther out of her seat and shook her violently. As I tell this story, I sincerely regret that I didn't do something to block Miss Boas, to prevent her from treating Esther that way. I sometimes pictured sticking out my foot to trip Miss Boas as she went down the aisle. I didn't have the guts. But I did way worse, as did many of the kids in my class; we piled on Esther. We would say her name with dripping sarcastic cruelty, the way we had learned from Miss Boas. Who says schools don't teach values? Miss Boas taught us well. By the end of that year, Esther was almost a basket case.

If these stories were told by a few of my friends and me, that would be bad enough. But they are widespread. Everyone has them. Next time you go to a parents' evening at school, pay attention to how some of the parents--usually the working-class parents, I have noticed--conduct themselves around teachers. You will often see the same fear and concentration-camp caution that those parents learned as children".

En español de google translator:

"No siempre fui la víctima tampoco. Infligido mi parte de la crueldad. Mi profesor de octavo grado, la señorita Boas, tratado la mayoría de nosotros mal, golpeando con un palo cuando tenía un mal día y nos dio respuestas incorrectas. Pero el una persona que destacó por abuso especial Esther. Esther era una chica normal buscando sin mucha confianza en sí mismo, pero probablemente dentro del rango normal. Cuando Esther dio una respuesta equivocada, señorita Boas a veces la golpeó especialmente duro con su bastón y un par de veces llegó hasta el altar, Esther sacó de su asiento y sacudió violentamente. Como les digo a esta historia, lamento sinceramente que yo no hacía algo para bloquear la señorita Boas, para impedir que el tratamiento de Esther de esa manera. A veces en la foto que salen mis pies para disparar Miss Boas mientras iba por el pasillo que no tenía las agallas, pero me fue peor manera, al igual que muchos de los niños de mi clase;.. nos amontonamos en Esther Diríamos. su nombre con el goteo de la crueldad sarcástica, la forma había aprendido de la señorita Boas. ¿Quién dice que las escuelas no enseñan valores? Miss Boas nos enseñó bien. A finales de ese año, Esther fue casi un caso perdido.

Si estas historias fueron contadas por algunos de mis amigos y yo, que sería bastante malo. Pero ellos están muy extendidas. Todo el mundo los tiene. La próxima vez que vaya a una velada de padres en la escuela, prestar atención a cómo algunos de los padres - por lo general los padres de clase trabajadora, me he dado cuenta - se comporten en todo los profesores. Es frecuente encontrar que el mismo miedo y la precaución de campo de concentración que los padres se enteraron que los niños ".

***

La falsedad de los universales humanos por Greg Laden.

"En definitiva, los universales humanos son reales y el concepto es útil, aún cuando no son lo que muchas personas suponen que son... no son rasgos determinados genéricamente. Nunca fueron rasgos simplistas y genéticamente determinados de la cultura humana, o totalmente inútiles desde el punto de vista de la antropología. La frase “Universal humano” sólo se comprende bien en ciertos contextos, aunque el hecho de que parezca entenderse en contextos más amplios resulta problemático. Al tratar aquí el concepto de un modo más complejo, no intento debilitarlo. Principalmente, como con la mayoría de falsedades, he intentado exponer algunas peculiaridades interesantes. En este sentido, el concepto de “universal humano” es una herramienta razonablemente útil".

Falsehoods: Human Universals by Greg Laden

"So, human universals are real and the concept is useful, yet they are not what many people assume they are ... they are not generically determined traits. They never were thought of as either simplistic genetically determined features of human culture or utterly invalid, by any camp in anthropology. The phrase "Human Universal" is a dog whistle only in limited contexts, though it is probably seen as one more widely, which is problematic. And here, by complexifying the concept, I'm not trying to weaken it, nor am I trying to slip it past any perceived PC police. Mainly, like with most of the Falsehoods, I have tried to expose some of the interesting inner workings of the topic at hand. In this sense, the concept of "human universal" is a reasonably useful tool functioning in a way somewhere between pick=axe and well placed dynamite".

***

Más comercio, menos hambre por Pascal Lamy

El comercio es la correa de transmisión a través de la cual la oferta se ajusta a la demanda. Permite que los alimentos viajen de tierras de plenitud a tierras de escasez. Y permite a los países que pueden producir alimentos de manera eficiente enviarlos a aquellos que enfrentan limitaciones de recursos que entorpecen la producción alimenticia.

Por ejemplo, el acceso a suministros internacionales de alimentos le permitió a Arabia Saudita abandonar su programa de 30 años de subsidios para la producción doméstica de trigo. Dada la carga financiera del programa y, más importante aún, el costo de la escasez de agua, los sauditas decidieron eliminar los subsidios por completo para 2016.

Cuando la correa de transmisión del comercio internacional que es la base de este tipo de decisiones se desajusta, el resultado es una turbulencia en el mercado. Es por este motivo que Indonesia, uno de los principales productores de arroz y maíz del mundo, recientemente decidió reducir las barreras comerciales a las importaciones agrícolas.

Hoy, el comercio de productos agrícolas está expuesto a una distorsión mucho mayor que el comercio de otros productos. Los subsidios que distorsionan el comercio, los altos aranceles a las importaciones y las restricciones a las exportaciones actúan como arena en los engranajes de la correa de transmisión y hacen que llevar alimentos al mercado –y, por ende, a la mesa familiar- resulte más difícil y costoso.

[...]

La mayoría de la gente se sorprende cuando se entera de lo poco voluminosos que verdaderamente son los mercados de granos internacionales. Sólo el 7% de la producción mundial de arroz se comercia internacionalmente, mientras que apenas el 18% de la producción de trigo y el 13% de la de maíz se exporta. Las limitaciones adicionales al comercio son una amenaza seria para los países importadores netos de alimentos, donde los gobiernos temen que este tipo de medidas puedan derivar en inanición.

Aquellos que imponen estas restricciones siguen una lógica común: no quieren que sus propias poblaciones sufran hambre. Entonces la pregunta es la siguiente: ¿qué políticas alternativas pueden permitirles cumplir con este objetivo? La respuesta a ese interrogante consiste en más producción global de alimentos, más redes de seguridad social y más seguras, más ayuda alimenticia y, posiblemente, mayores reservas de alimentos.

[...]

Un acuerdo en Doha también reduciría los aranceles, aunque con ciertas “flexibilidades”, aumentando así el acceso de los consumidores a los alimentos. A nivel global, se producirían más alimentos donde se los pueda producir más eficientemente, creando así un terreno de juego internacional más equitativo y parejo.

Para ser claros: cuando se trata de afrontar la seguridad alimenticia, el comercio es parte de la solución, no parte del problema.

***

The making of ¨Aly Herscovitz¨-The blook por Eugenia Codina-Miró

Un momento ilustrativo de la diversidad idiomática ocurrió una mañana en que mi chat de gmail me indicó que Xavier Pericay quería hablar conmigo. Estaba traduciendo un texto del francés al español y había encontrado la palabra alemana feldgrau, me preguntó, en catalán, que si yo sabía lo que quería decir. Ni idea. Así que me levanté y me fui a la máquina del café de la que escogí un cappuccino (italiano) para la ocasion. Al momento apareció un colega, Gert, holandés y profesor de alemán en un instituto de enseñanza media. Le pregunté lo que signficaba feldgrau y cuando me lo estaba contando apareció Dieter, otro compañero de trabajo, éste de madre holandesa y padre alemán. Entre los dos me explicaron, en holandés, que feldgrau quería decir literalmente “gris del campo (de batalla)" y que era el color del uniforme del ejército alemán hasta la II Guerra Mundial. Y que se usaba como sinónimo de ejército alemán. Así que, después de darles las gracias en holandés, me volví al gmail a decirle al catalán que estaba traduciendo un texto del francés al español lo que me acababan de contar mis colegas holandeses (germanófilos).

[...]

Asumo que mis compañeros de cuitas me permiten hablar en nombre de ellos, cuando afirmo que gracias a Aly fuimos, los cinco, redescubriendo nuestros propios prejuicios y lagunas en nuestro conocimiento de la historia del europea del siglo XX. Para algunos fue el descubrimiento de la dimensión humana del Holocausto, para otros el papel tan poco airoso de Francia en los hechos, pero también el descubrimiento de la gran cultura alemana del siglo XX, de la extensión de la lengua alemana, algo sólo comparable hoy en día al inglés americano y a la cultura estadounidense. A los biógrafos de Pla, Aly les ha dado ocasión de conocer mejor al hombre solitario y al escritor ejerciendo su oficio. El periodista, maestro de periodistas, aún tiene cosas que enseñar. Estos aspectos toman especial relevancia en la segunda y tercera parte del blook, aún inéditas al escribir estas líneas.

A mí, personalmente, Aly me ha dado tres cosas muy importantes: me dio la oportunidad de trabajar con un grupo de grandes profesionales del periodismo, de contar mi experiencia en Europa vista por sus ojos y, al fin y al cabo, de conocerla a ella. Después de entrar en la Europa antigua, culta y cruel que la asesinó, no me queda ninguna duda: todos somos Aly.

***

Entrevista a Víctor Beker.

P: ¿Por qué es peligrosa la inflación?

R: Es como cualquier droga, uno se vuelve adicto porque la forma de poder mantener la cohesión social es a través de una inflación creciente. Nosotros ya tuvimos en el pasado un 25% anual, de ahí pasamos al 50%, al 150% anual... Y un día nos encontramos con una inflación del 200% mensual.

En Argentina esto es especialmente preocupante, porque cuando los agentes económicos tienen experiencia de inflación se desprenden del dinero cada vez más rápido, y por tanto los precios crecen más. Llega un momento en que la gente sale a comprar algo todos los días, porque el dinero es como una papa caliente.

El mayor peligro es que a tasas de inflación muy altas todo el sistema económico se desorganiza, se produce fuga de capitales y se desarticula el sistema financiero y fiscal. Esto no es teoría, es lo que pasó aquí en 1989. Fue un descalabro que trajo alto desempleo, saqueos en los supermercados y llevó al país al borde de una guerra civil.

[...]

P: Pero así la gente consume más, se crean puestos de trabajo... ¿Eso no es bueno?

R: Ése es el problema, la gente se pregunta por qué vamos a preocuparnos si las cosas van bien. Los economistas tenemos mala fama porque traemos las malas noticias. Advertimos de que ciertas políticas a corto plazo parecen buenas, pero a largo van a resultar un boomerang.

En los años 90, gracias a la convertibilidad con el dólar para nosotros veranear en España o Estados Unidos era más barato que hacerlo en Argentina. Eso en algún momento tenía que estallar, pero a quienes lo decíamos nos miraban como a pájaros de mal agüero. Ahora ocurre lo mismo: si se mantiene este esquema tendremos hiperinflación en el futuro.

***

Los controles de precios siguen estando de moda por Juan Ramón Rallo

Bueno, ya lo decía Mises: si ellos siguen repitiendo sus mentiras, nosotros tendremos que seguir repitiendo la verdad. Los precios máximos se implantan, supuestamente, para lograr que un producto que se ha vuelto temporalmente más escaso de lo normal se encuentre al alcance de todo el mundo, incluyendo los menos pudientes. El problema es que el resultado es justo el opuesto: los precios máximos generan un desabastecimiento generalizado de los bienes afectados que, si se mantienen aquellos en el tiempo, termina por convertirse en estructural.

A corto plazo, colocar el precio de un bien por debajo de aquel al que se habría vendido en un mercado libre incrementa su demanda y reduce su oferta. Hay muchos más consumidores interesados en adquirirlo que oferentes en venderlo; y entre los consumidores incluimos a los importadores, lo que previsiblemente llevará a una restricción del comercio internacional o al establecimiento de cuotas a la exportación. Peores son, con todo, los efectos a largo plazo: las reducciones impuestas de precios reducen artificialmente la rentabilidad de la producción y comercialización de los bienes en cuestión; los empresarios encargados de fabricarlos abandonarán los sectores implicados, por cuanto su rentabilidad se verá artificialmente reducida, y se instalarán en otros donde no haya controles, lo cual agravará los problemas de escasez y carestía de los productos protegidos.

[...]

El producto de los precios mínimos es justo el contrario que el de los precios máximos: la sobreabundancia de la mercancía ofrecida; hay más gente que quiere vender que gente que quiere comprar. Dicho de otra manera: como los precios se sitúan por encima de la utilidad marginal de los agentes, los productores eficientes no pueden desplazar a los ineficientes a base de reducir sus márgenes de ganancia bajando los precios, de modo que se acumulan excesos invendibles y es imposible discriminar qué productor debe dejar de producir.

El proceso es, por consiguiente, justo el contrario del que vimos con los precios máximos: los oferentes ineficientes no liberan sus factores productivos para que se dirijan a otras líneas donde sean más valorados. De hecho, si se llega a aplicar una política de precios garantizados –de modo que el Estado adquiera todas las mercancías al precio mínimo establecido–, la producción puede incluso aumentar, captando recursos del resto de la economía y cortocircuitando la elaboración de otros bienes y servicios más necesarios.

El caso del paro es evidente: los precios/salarios mínimos fijados por los sindicatos por encima de la productividad marginal de muchos trabajadores impiden que los empresarios los contraten. Si, además, el gobierno subvenciona el paro a través de los subsidios al desempleo (precios garantizados), lo que tenemos es que muchos agentes, en lugar de buscar ocupación en otras partes de la economía, se concentran en dedicarse al paro, que crece y crece a costa del resto de la economía.

En definitiva, los controles de precios, en tanto regulan centralizadamente uno de los elementos básicos que permiten la coordinación en una economía de mercado, destruyen la estructura productiva y la condenan a un persistente caos. Al cabo, un control de precios absoluto y total es lo que prevalece en el socialismo, sobre cuyo criminal fracaso ya tenemos suficientes evidencias: no funciona ni a gran ni a pequeña escala. Ojalá Sarkozy y los políticos y sindicatos españoles aprendieran algo de economía y no antepusieran sus sectarios intereses a los de los consumidores y trabajadores, a quienes tanto perjudican con sus absurdas regulaciones.

***

El Estado, esquema Ponzi por Gabriela Calderón de Burgos

¿De dónde sacaría la idea el señor Ponzi? Se podría decir que del canciller alemán Otto von Bismarck, artífice del primer sistema de seguridad social estatal (1889). El plan de Bismarck descansaba en captar dinero de los trabajadores para financiar las pensiones de los jubilados. La intención era buena, y se hizo en un momento en que la edad de jubilación era superior a la esperanza de vida, por lo que se financiaba el retiro de un número muy reducido de personas.

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Deberíamos adoptar un sistema que restablezca el nexo entre el esfuerzo individual durante toda una vida de trabajo y la pensión recibida. Un sistema que permita a los trabajadores decidir cuándo jubilarse y a quién confiar la administración de sus ahorros. Es profundamente injusto que solo los trabajadores de ingresos más altos puedan contratar un fondo para su jubilación, mientras los de ingresos más bajos siguen cautivos del monopolio estatal.