Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

The Willy Sutton Objection

Posted on by
Reply

Facebook has joined with Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit against Apple over how to charge—and who gets to make the charge—for apps installed on Apple’s iPhones. Facebook is doing so to further its feud with Apple over Apple’s decision to give iPhone users tools with which to protect their private information.

Facebook isn’t alone in the beef.

Apple has said starting early next year its iOS 14 operating system will give iPhone and iPad users the option to no longer share personal information that many developers rely on to tailor ads. When users open an app, they will see a message asking permission to track what other apps and websites they visit, their location, and other behaviors.
Apple’s plan has drawn criticism from a range of businesses and trade groups…saying that Apple’s plan was anticompetitive.

Because people moving to protect their private information from snooping and private enterprises moving to protect their products from being used as tools for the snooping is somehow anticompetitive.

It’s an objection that Willy Sutton would have loved: how anticompetitive of those banks to obstruct his business model?

Clarity

Posted on by
Reply

Walter Russell Meade, with whom I agree far more often than not, had a piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. He titled his piece Can Biden Find Clarity on China and Russia? and he closed it with this:

The global governance issues that many on Team Biden care most about cannot be addressed without the hard-nosed geopolitics that many Democrats reject. The president-elect’s foreign policy will stand or fall on his ability to manage that paradox.

I think the answers to the question, and the fixing of the paradox, stem from Biden’s own words:

The PRC isn’t “a patch on our jeans.”
“[T]hey’re not bad folks, folks.”

Biden’s position on the PRC seems pretty clear to me.

The widow of a Moscow mayor sent Hunter Biden $3.5 million.
On Russia generally, Biden has this: “He [Romney] acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on [and] Russia is still our major adversary. I don’t know where he has been.”

Biden’s Russia position, which remains unchanged in deed, his current words notwithstanding—and the Russian hooks in his family—are equally clear.

Student Loans

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section had a thought.

There are some degrees that are worth borrowing money for, but many aren’t. Parents and students, do your homework.

Indeed. Lenders need to do their due diligence homework much more diligently, too. Two ways to incentivize (to coin a term) the lenders: get Government out of the business of making student loans and out of the business of guaranteeing others’ loans to students.

The other way is to require the school being borrowed for to attend to be the primary lender—ideally, the sole lender.

Why Great Britain Must Fully Separate

Posted on by
Reply

…itself from the European Union.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel…stressed that the EU would not compromise on its core principles.

Neither should they. On the other hand, Great Britain cannot compromise on its core principles.

While both sides want a deal, they have fundamentally different views of what it entails. The EU fears Britain will slash social and environmental standards and pump state money into UK industries, becoming a low-regulation economic rival on the bloc’s doorstep….

On the other hand,

The UK government sees Brexit as about sovereignty and “taking back control” of the country’s laws, borders, and waters. It claims the EU is making demands it has not placed on other non-EU countries and is trying to bind Britain to the bloc’s rules indefinitely.

Great Britain and the EU are talking past each other on post-Brexit trade arrangements, and this is borne of fundamental principles that are intrinsically incompatible with each other. That conflict demonstrates pretty conclusively why Great Britain had to leave the European Union, which the nation has already done, and why a no-deal exit at the end of this month is best for Great Britain.

The People’s Republic of China and Private Economies

Posted on by
Reply

The government of the People’s Republic of China does not trust the people over whom it reigns. This is illustrated by its broad distrust of those folks’ private enterprise.

Xi Jinping, long distrustful of the private sector, is moving assertively to bring it to heel.

And

The government is installing more Communist Party officials inside private firms, starving some of credit and demanding executives tailor their businesses to achieve state goals.

And

The push is driven by a deepening conviction within the country’s leadership that markets and private entrepreneurs, while important to China’s rise, are unpredictable and not to be fully trusted.

Bringing the PRC into the World Trade Organization, engaging with the nation economically—even helping the nation economically—in order to enhance freedom and prosperity for the ordinary folks of the PRC was worth the try those 50 years, more or less, ago.

It’s clear now, though, and it’s been clear for some decades, that the government men of the PRC have no intention of enhancing that freedom of prosperity. Those men intend only to enhance their power domestically, to dominate neighboring nations, and to set the global world order, replacing not just us, but the West altogether.

Yet this is the PRC that Joe Biden wants us to cozy up to.