Author: VD

Mailvox: The Hazlitt international trade challenge

Ampontan posed a free trade-related challenge:

When you can offer a serious critique of Chapter 11 of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Easy Lesson without using buzzwords like “bizarre”, I might begin to take this argument seriously.

I find it rather difficult to resist a direct and substantive intellectual challenge, particularly when it stems from an intelligent and knowledgeable source. Throw in the fact that Hazlitt is an economist for whom I have a good deal of respect – his demolition of Keynes’s General Theory is still one of the most thorough available – so this was practically perfect Voxbait. After reading the chapter through twice, I’ve decided that I’m not going to address the entirety of it in a single post, but will instead address Hazlitt’s core argument in a detailed manner which will not necessarily conclude the case, but should suffice to convince doubters that the anti-free trade argument at least merits being taken seriously by libertarians and Austrians alike.

(Note to self: do not use “bizarre” or other buzzwords in the process.)

Hazlitt writes: An American manufacturer of woolen sweaters goes to Congress or to the State Department and tells the committee or officials concerned that it would be a national disaster for them to remove or reduce the tariff on British sweaters. He now sells his sweaters for $30 each, but English manufacturers could sell their sweaters of the same quality for $25. A duty of $5, therefore, is needed to keep him in business. He is not thinking of himself, of course, but of the thousand men and women he employs, and of the people to whom their spending in turn gives employment. Throw them out of work, and you create unemployment and a fall in purchasing power, which would spread in ever-widening circles. And if he can prove that he really would be forced out of business if the tariff were removed or reduced, his argument against that action is regarded by Congress as conclusive.

But the fallacy comes from looking merely at this manufacturer and his employees, or merely at the American sweater industry. It comes from noticing only the results that are immediately seen, and neglecting the results that are not seen because they are prevented from coming into existence.

The lobbyists for tariff protection are continually putting forward arguments that are not factually correct. But let us assume that the facts in this case are precisely as the sweater manufacturer has stated them. Let us assume that a tariff of $5 a sweater is necessary for him to stay in business and provide employment at sweater-making for his workers.

We have deliberately chosen the most unfavorable example of any for the removal of a tariff. We have not taken an argument for the imposition of a new tariff in order to bring a new industry into existence, but an argument for the retention of a tariff that has already brought an industry into existence, and cannot be repealed without hurting somebody.

The tariff is repealed; the manufacturer goes out of business; a thousand workers are laid off; the particular tradesmen whom they patronized are hurt. This is the immediate result that is seen. But there are also results which, while much more difficult to trace, are no less immediate and no less real. For now sweaters that formerly cost retail $30 apiece can be bought for $25. Consumers can now buy the same quality of sweater for less money, or a much better one for the same money. If they buy the same quality of sweater, they not only get the sweater, but they have $5 left over, which they would not have had under the previous conditions, to buy something else. With the $25 that they pay for the imported sweater they help employment—as the American manufacturer no doubt predicted — in the sweater industry in England. With the $5 left over they help employment in any number of other industries in the United States.

But the results do not end there. By buying English sweaters they furnish the English with dollars to buy American goods here. This, in fact (if I may here disregard such complications as fluctuating exchange rates, loans, credits, etc.) is the only way in which the British can eventually make use of these dollars. Because we have permitted the British to sell more to us, they are now able to buy more from us. They are, in fact, eventually forced to buy more from us if their dollar balances are not to remain perpetually unused. So as a result of letting in more British goods, we must export more American goods. And though fewer people are now employed in the American sweater industry, more people are employed—and much more efficiently employed—in, say, the American washing-machine or aircraft-building business. American employment on net balance has not gone down, but American and British production on net balance has gone up. Labor in each country is more fully employed in doing just those things that it does best, instead of being forced to do things that it does inefficiently or badly. Consumers in both countries are better off. They are able to buy what they want where they can get it cheapest. American consumers are better provided with sweaters, and British consumers are better provided with washing machines and aircraft.

I count seven unwarranted assumptions on Hazlitt’s part that render his primary argument in support of free trade incorrect and therefore invalid. They are as follows:

1. Hazlitt assumes that manufacturers are the primary beneficiaries from barriers to trade and therefore the leading advocates of them. This may have once been true, but it is clearly no longer the case. Economics in One Lesson was published in 1946, when the U.S. balance of trade ran a 35 percent surplus and trade amounted to 6.8 percent of GDP. Free trade was operating to the benefit of most American manufacturers and workers alike; since the industrial infrastructures of Europe and Asia were in ruins, few American sectors were at a competitive disadvantage. Like Ricardo, Hazlitt clearly never imagined a scenario when jobs would not be lost to foreign manufacturing competitors, but to the new foreign factories established by the former domestic manufacturers. The additional profit provided by a $5 tariff is now of less interest to the domestic manufacturer than the opportunity to set up a factory in Bangladesh, make the sweater at a lower cost, then import it and sell it for $25. If we leave out the distribution channel which is the same for both foreign and domestic manufacturers and assume a profit margin of 50 percent, we can compare the profit margins of the various alternatives. At the 50 percent profit margin, we know that the manufacturer’s domestic costs were $15 and his profit was $15 with the protection of the $5 tariff. But Bangladesh has a wage rate that is one-thirtieth that of the USA, so if labor is one-third the cost of production and international shipping is 10 percent of the manufacturing cost, his new production and delivery cost will be $11.17. This reduction of $3.83 in costs means the offshored manufacturer can now afford to sell the imported sweater for 22.34 and still make the same 50 percent profit margin he did before; without tariffs he can compete on price with the $25 English sweaters and actually increase his profit margin by nearly six percent. At the old $30 price, his profit margin has risen to 63 percent, thereby creating a serious incentive to move production to Bangladesh even in the absence of any price pressure from the English sweater makers. Either way, the consumers benefit, the manufacturer benefits, and only the thousands of workers, who lost their $5/sweater jobs, suffer.

So, the $5 tariff not only protects the domestic manufacturer from the English competitor, but more importantly, protects the worker from the domestic manufacturer as it would reduce his potential profit margin from 63 percent to 46 percent. With the tariff in place, the domestic manufacturer has no reason to go to all the trouble and expense to relocate his factory to Bangladesh simply to lose four percent from his profit margin. It is also worth nothing that since Hazlitt was implying a profit margin much lower than the 50 percent I utilized for the purposes of comparison, the difference between going offshore and not going offshore might not be an additional 13 percent profit, but the difference between the survival of the business and its failure. Hazlitt’s error here is the result of the failure of the theory of comparative advantage to account for the international mobility of capital.

2. Hazlitt asserts that the $5 left over from the reduced import price of the sweater will go to help employment in any number of other industries in the United States. It may. Or it may not. Again, Hazlitt was writing when imports accounted for a trivial 2.9 percent of GDP. They now account for 15.8 percent, so that $5 is five times more likely to go towards helping employment in industries outside the United States than it was in 1946. Statistically speaking, what would be $5 of the tariff going towards U.S. employment must be reduced to $4.25. This error can also be traced back to Ricardo’s assumptions, although it is not one of the seven that Fletcher lists.

3. Hazlitt erroneously assumes that the British will buy more from the USA because they will be forced to buy more American goods due to their possession of dollars. This is untrue because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and is often utilized for trade between foreign countries; the British are no more forced to buy American goods due to their possession of dollars than the Thebans were forced to buy from Athenian goods due to their possession of silver talents.

4. Hazlitt assumes that foreign dollar balances cannot remain perpetually unused. (By “unused” he means unspent in the USA). But there are $610 billion in Eurodollars in foreign banks that will never be used, which is more than the entire amount of annual U.S. exports as recently as 1990! Furthermore, the U.S. has been running a continuous and growing balance of trade deficit in goods since 1976. The $9 billion that went overseas has not only not returned to be spent here, but has increased to $646 billion.

35 years and counting is a long time to wait for this postulated inevitable return, and is unlikely to do any good for the worker who lost his job more than three decades ago.

5. Hazlitt assumes that an American worker who loses his job in one sector will automatically find it in another sector. This is Ricardo’s sixth false assumption identified by Fletcher: “Production factors move easily between domestic industries.” There is no reason to assume that the loss of a job in one sector will create any additional demand in another sector, indeed, to the extent there is worker mobility between industries, all the loss of the job in the one sector will do is create downward pressure on wages in the other sector. There is a hidden and implicit appeal to James Mill here, (or alternatively, to Keynes’s critical formulation of Say’s Law), in the idea that supply somehow magically creates demand. While this can be true in a technological sense, as there was no demand for CD players prior to their invention, it is not an economic law as the excess supply of U.S. housing or the dead inventory stock of any business will demonstrate.

6. Hazlitt assumes that American employment on net balance will not go down and that American and British production on net balance will go up. This is not necessrily true, being an erroneous conclusion based on the previous false assumption. The American worker may well remain unemployed on a permanent basis, as have one-quarter of the once-employed male workers since 1948.

7. Hazlitt assumes that consumers in both countries are better off because they are able to buy what they want where they can get it cheapest. But this is a false assumption because most consumers are also workers or are dependent upon workers. The consumer who is employed can better afford the $30 sweater than the unemployed consumer can the $25 one. Free trade does work to the minor advantage of some Americans as well as to its foreign beneficiaries, but at an inordinately heavy short-term cost to around 25 percent of Americans and a severe long-term cost to the entire American economy.

I shall leave it to Ampontan to determine whether this response justifies taking the argument seriously in the future. I freely admit that I have not yet addressed the entire chapter, only one-third of it, but I expect to do so in another post or two in the reasonably near future.

What a joke

It is epically stupid for conservatives to even think about lining up behind their own Magic Negro:

CAIN: I support the 2nd amendment.

B: So what’s the answer on gun control?

C: The answer is I support, strongly support, the 2nd amendment. I don’t support onerous legislation that’s going to restrict people’s rights in order to be able to protect themselves as guaranteed by the 2nd amendment.

B: Should states or local government be allowed to control guns, the gun situation, or should…

C: Yes

B: Yes?

C: Yes.

B: So the answer is yes?

C: The answer is yes, that should be a state’s decision.

So, Cain isn’t just a former Fed official, he’s a former Fed official who isn’t bright enough to understand that unalienable rights can’t be abrogated by the state and local government any more than they can be limited by the federal government. Or that Republicans aren’t any more enthusiastic about having their guns seized by the state government than they are about having them seized by the federal government.

I’ll give Herman Cain a chance if I interview him. I don’t do debates when I interview someone, the whole point is to hear their thoughts not to critique them. But at this point, I’d be astonished if he had the balls to even appear on the podcast. He appears to be imploding his own candidacy almost as effectively as Newt Gingrich did.

Vegetarian changes his diet

But remains a complete wanker:

So I started eating meat again… Yes, this from the guy who once said that meat eaters are bad people. I guess that must make me a bad person. Well, unlike many other carnivores, I’m at least cognizant of the fact that I’m exploiting animals for my own well-being. While I have made the move to a diet that contains meat, I am not completely at peace with it. I am fully aware and respectful of the fact that the meat on my plate comes at at price, that being the life of another animal.

But I have my reasons. My decision to eat meat again was driven by health concerns. I was a vegetarian for over ten years and I did so primarily for ethical reasons. It was in the last several years of being a vegetarian, however, that I grew increasingly concerned about my health. An increasing number of studies started to point at the importance of meat protein and animal fat—not to mention the perils of soy (which was a staple for me). Moreover, my performance at the gym was stalling. My energy levels were consistently low and I was making very little gains. This was an indication to me that something wasn’t right….

Now just because I’m eating meat again doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole about it. Like I said earlier, I am still concerned about the well-being of animals. It’s for this reason that I’m striving to be the conscious carnivore. I only eat meat from grass-fed animals that have been allowed to graze in pasture and the eggs I eat come from free-range chickens. Yes, my grocery bills are two to three times as much as they used to be, but it’s a price I’m happy to pay. I feel better knowing that the meat on my plate came from an animal that actually lived a reasonably good life.

Mr. Dvorsky doesn’t have to be an asshole about eating meat because he is already an asshole. The only thing that has really changed besides his dietary decisions is that he has now become a hypocritical and self-serving one. The fact that he is hyperconscious of what he believes to be the ethical costs of his meat diet does not make him less culpable than those who eat meat without thinking twice about it, it makes him more culpable and therefore an objectively worse person than those he formerly described as “bad people”.

The moral: never trust anyone who calls himself “an ethicist”. There is a high probability you are dealing with an amoral sociopath who is only simulating normal humanity and can rationalize any behavior on his own part.

WND column

Free Trade Harms America

One of the more onerous aspects of being a superintelligence is the way in which many critics have a tendency to erroneously assume one is operating at the same level of near ignorance that they are. In response to the inaugural Voxic Shock podcast, in which I interviewed economist Ian Fletcher about his book, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work,” a number of free-trade champions actually attempted to appeal to David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which utilizes an example of trade between two countries in two products to argue that trade is intrinsically beneficial to a national economy.

I am never sure whether to be more amused or insulted when I am met with a critical response of this kind. Possessing a B.S. in economics, having published a book on economics and the current economic depression and being one of the millions of college-educated Americans who have passed an Econ 101 class, I am, as it happens, familiar with the theory. Furthermore, I have actually read Ricardo’s 1817 book, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” which contains the theory and what passes for the reasoning behind it. This does not appear to be the case with most of the free-trade enthusiasts who appeal to it.

Note to the column: This column contains the promised empirical evidence that Felix was demanding. On a related note, if you have not yet heard my interview with Ian Fletcher on the subject of international trade, it is on the Voxic Shock #1 podcast. And further to the subject, a critique of Hazlitt’s chapter 11 will be posted tomorrow.

The Warrior Lives: Remembering Rosenberg

I was a fan of Joel Rosenberg’s work long before I ever met him, but I eventually came to admire him more as a man than as an author. I wasn’t a close friend of his, more the friend of a friend, but I did have the good fortune to get to know him over the last 15 years. It was a privilege for an SF/F fan, but more than that, it was a genuine pleasure. Growing up in Minnesota, which at the time felt rather like the cold side of the back of beyond, I had no idea that there were Real Live Writers living there, never being much inclined to read the author bios at the back. Like many a teenage boy in the Eighties, I had dabbled in role-playing games such as AD&D, Gamma World, and Traveller in the Time Before Girls, and so The Guardians of the Flame were a real revelation to me. Rosenberg’s novels were gritty long before grit became fashionable; he made a distinct impression on a young reader by killing off a major character practically at the beginning of the first novel, then went himself one better by killing off the lead character in only the fourth book in the series. I can’t recall being more shocked while reading fiction any time before or since. Karl Cullinane is dead? But… but what about the series?

Continued at The Black Gate

Mailvox: the double whammy

This may be well be my favorite critical email ever received, as KW manages to not only highlight several of my assertions about the more militant atheists, but to underline, italicize, and bold them as well:

I have been reading assorted texts on the internet and I came across a post that you made a long while back entitled “The socially autistic atheist”. I was particularly interested in your articles because I happen to be both an atheist and an aspie.

It seems to me that the purpose of these articles is to use an ad hominem attack against atheists by calling them “socially autistic” or saying that they have “autistic psychopathy”. You never refute or even address the arguments that these “socially autistic atheists” have in regard to religion or god. In essence, I believe that you are just being a giant asshat troll.

In a previous article you wrote this: Here’s an object lesson that perhaps might be capable of penetrating the skulls of even the most autistically psychopathic. (1) Do you dislike being described as a socially autistic asshole? (2) Would you like it any more if that description was scientifically proven to describe you accurately? (3) Would you consider it polite and/or socially acceptable for me to insist on always describing you to others as an autistic psychopath were this proven to be an accurate description of you?

I assume that this was a reaction to certain aspie atheists spreading the idea that belief in god is a delusion, or that people who believe in god are deluded. well to answer your questions:
1. No of course not. I think that an important distinction to make is that it is an attack on WHO I AM rather than an attack on WHAT I BELIEVE.
2. You are asking a question about a hypothetical scientific description where that hypothetical scientific description would not be scientific. It would however be a logical fallacy (an appeal to authority in this case).I’ll go ahead and say no.
3. No, and I would likely react violently to such discrimination.

Whenever an atheist says that god is a delusion, that is not an attack on any person. It is an attack on an idea. Unlike when you call me a “autistic psychopath”, which is very clearly an attack on who I am as a person. There is no moral equivalence for these statements. TL;DR you are a despicable person who resorts to fighting your intellectual opponents with ad hominem attacks.

I would have expected that you would have already been shamed into making an apology about statements such as this. You are not an expert on autism and you should shut your stupid fucking mouth in my opinion.

With disgust and contempt,
[KW]

Naturally, I replied with all the kindness and moderation for which I am so justly known, considering that the poor lad has about the same chance of ever landing a girlfriend that I have of being named the premier of China. Let’s face it, I couldn’t not respond. I mean, how could I possibly resist the irony of being lectured on the niceties of correct social conventions by an atheist… an atheist with Asperger’s.

My dear boy,

I absolutely believe your claim to be both an atheist and an aspie. Only someone so intellectually handicapped would be so spectacularly stupid as to claim “You never refute or even address the arguments that these “socially autistic atheists” have in regard to religion or god.”

The fact that I have written and published an entire book on the subject that does precisely what you claim I have never done would appear to be sufficient to invalidate your assertion. You can even download a powerpoint slideshow that summarizes some of the more commonly heard arguments from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris should you be so inclined. So, congratulations. In ten years of writing controversial op/ed columns and being the recipient of the most vehement forms of criticism from the Council on American-Islamic Relations to godless Sciencebloggers, you have managed to write the single most ignorant email I have ever received. You do Asperger proud.

In respect of your handicap, I shall refrain from pointing out the additional errors you have committed in your response to my questions, although I do invite you to contemplate the moral basis for what you claim is a lack of moral equivalence between the various statements.

With no little amusement,
Vox

And now it’s time for the moral of the story. If you happen to suffer from atheism, Asperger’s Syndrome, or autism, the chances are exceedingly high that your ideas concerning what is and what is not socially acceptable behavior are not going to be in accordance with the societal norms of the neurotypical majority. Therefore, your offers to help others better understand proper social etiquette, however kindly intended they might be, are virtually guaranteed to go badly awry.

Mailvox: Beware the bank runs

Item: The unofficial Problem Bank List is now in excess of 1,000 institutions, 1,002 to be precise, with $417.4 billion in claimed assets. Based on the FDIC reports, I estimate that only $255 billion of those assets actually exist.

Item: One of the Dread Ilk writes of his recent experience with his bank. “I went in to my local [bank] yesterday to withdraw 5k. The fellow behind the counter looks at the number on my withdrawal slip… then whispers to the lady at the next teller station, who rolls her eyes and shakes her head, as if withdrawing that much was a horrible trial.

“I only have $1400!” I hear him say.

They both then departed for the back and came back a minute later with some bills.

“I’m sorry,” my intrepid teller says, “We can only manage $4000.”

He then has me re-write my withdrawal slip… and gives me $4000, of which just over half is hundreds. The rest was scraped together from 50s and 20s.

I said “Huh. You guys are in bank-run territory now, aren’t you?”

He looks up, “Uh… I guess.”

Action Item: If you are living in the USA, you may wish to consider keeping a bit more cash on hand than usual.

There is no God particle

I am not exactly surprised to learn that the optimistic rumors out of Switzerland were unwarranted:

The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle — the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today. Researchers were cautious, however, warning that it would take months to verify the finding. Their caution was wise.

Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago’s Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab’s brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing. “We do not see the signal,” Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab, told FoxNews.com. “If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.”

As a general scientific rule, if you have a reasonable model that doesn’t quite fit the data and are forced to concoct epicycles and hypothetical substances or particles in order to properly align the model with the observable data, you can pretty much count on eventually having to junk the model. This is why I suspect that the Higgs boson will not be found, the reports that dark matter has finally been found will turn out to be false, and the theory of evolution by natural selection will eventually be abandoned in despair.

Of course, as we’ve seen in economics, Max Planck was an optimist. It will take at least two generations of dead scientists before the scientific mainstream will be ready to admit what has been obvious for years to those whose careers don’t depend upon the survival of the model. Look how long it has taken science to discover that it is carbohydrates, not fat, that makes you gain weight, even though anyone can discern those results by simply paying attention to what happens when they vary their diet for a month.

Debt, not equity

Aligning Compensation Incentives in Higher Education: Is Higher Education Debt or Equity?

It’s debt. You can’t sell a degree or use it as collateral. So, it’s debt… or more precisely, it’s a set of wildly overpriced consumer services that is marketed as a product and is usually paid for with a particularly onerous form of debt. So, however you want to describe it, “equity” isn’t a reasonable way to do so. Sweet Black’s, but how I despise lawyers. They are very seldom anywhere nearly as clever as they would like to believe themselves to be.

George Will fails to follow the logic

This is what happens when you mindlessly assume that free trade is intrinsically beneficial in all circumstances:

Since 1974, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) has provided 104, and then 156, weeks of myriad financial aid, partly concurrent with the 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, to people, including farmers and government workers, and firms, even whole communities, that can more or less plausibly claim to have lost their jobs or been otherwise injured because of foreign competition. Even if the injury is just the loss of unfair advantages conferred, at the expense of other Americans, by government protectionism. And even if the injury results not from imports but from outsourcing jobs. TAA benefited 50,000 people at a cost of $500 million in 2002. In 2010, it cost $975 million for 234,000 people. Its purpose is to purchase support for free-trade policies that allow Americans to benefit from foreign goods and services, and from domestic goods and services with lower prices because of competition from imports…. It is unjust to treat some workers as more entitled than others to protection from the vicissitudes of economic dynamism.

Consider a hypothetical Ralph, who operated Ralph’s Diner until Applebee’s and Olive Garden opened competitors in the neighborhood. With economies of scale and national advertising budgets, those two franchises could offer more choices at better prices, so Ralph’s Diner went out of business. Should he and his employees be entitled to extra taxpayer subventions because they are casualties of competition?

Why should someone be entitled to such welfare just because he or she is affected negatively by competition that comes from abroad rather than down the street? Because national trade policy permits foreign competition? But national economic policy permits — indeed encourages, even enforces — domestic competition.

In 2001, when approximately 80,000 people worked in 7,500 music stores, the iPod was invented. Largely because of that and other technological changes, today only about 20,000 people work in 2,500 music stores. Should those 60,000 people be entitled to extra welfare because they are “victims” of technology? Does it matter if the 60,000 have found work in new jobs — perhaps making or selling electronic devices?

In 2008, Americans bought 1.4 billion books made of paper and 200 million e-books. Soon they will buy more e-books than paper books, and half the nation’s bookstores will be gone. Should the stores’ former employees be entitled to special assistance beyond unemployment compensation?

Will has omitted to take three salient facts into account. First, he fails to note that 234,000 people receiving benefits from the program – up from only 50,000 – do not have any jobs. Therefore, it makes no sense to ask if the 60,000 people who no longer work in music stores have now found work in making or selling electronic devices, especially when none of those electronic devices are made in the USA. It’s a bizarre and uncharacteristically inept attempt at a rhetorical point.

Second, the reason that one could make a case for compensating those who lose their jobs to foreign competition rather than to domestic competition is because a) the former is a direct result of federal trade policy whereas the latter is not, and, b) whereas the worker who loses a job to a domestic competitor can reasonably move elsewhere domestically to find another job, potentially with that very competitor, the worker who loses a job to an overseas competitor cannot.

Third, the advance of technology tends to create new jobs even as it destroys old ones. (This is not always true, an assumption that needs to be examined at some other time.) So the loss of a job in one sector is counterbalanced by the addition of a job in another. However, the loss of a job to overseas competition is a net loss for the national economy and it is not counterbalanced by the addition of a job.

The oxymoronic aspect of free trade in a modern economic system is this. It makes no sense to even attempt managing any aspect of a national economy if national employment is to be left to the vagaries of international competition. This is why “free trade” is not, as many on the right believe it to be, a step towards freedom, it is rather an significant step towards global tyranny and the destruction of the United States Constitution.

Now, I am not defending the Trade Adjustment Assistance program or any other form of welfare or government income redistribution plan. I am simply pointing out that it is totally absurd for George Will and other free traders to complain about the cost of free trade-related welfare to a nation rendered bankrupt, at least in part, by the government’s international free trade policies.

Given that the federal government used to fund itself through the use of tariffs on international trade, it is most strange to argue that direct income taxes and payroll taxes on its citizens are either more liberating or more to the material benefit of those very citizens.