Mikiel de Bary

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Politicians and their advisors still remain ignorant of what will be needed to achieve economic recovery after the next crash.

These essays by @GGReisman explain why knee-jerk policy responses will again only delay recovery:

https://t.co/a57U2LuAlh
&
https://t.co/QVIJosmwMy

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Yup.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Few phrases expose communist confusion more than 'state capitalism.'

Capitalism is private ownership, voluntary exchange, and property rights. If the state owns, controls, directs, allocates, or dictates production, that's the opposite of capitalism.

Calling state control 'state capitalism' is like calling government censorship 'state free speech.'

The term exists to blame capitalism for the results of abandoning it.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@BullTheoryio Now do Fort Knox.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

“…socialist opposition to capitalism should be portrayed as exactly what it is–a movement to return the world to the Dark Ages and a system of feudal privilege.” — @GGReisman in his Capitalism
Read the full article. Then read his *Capitalism*. Then read it again.

[Capitalism Magazine @CapitalismMag]

https://t.co/ZrWNYMyb34

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Surprised me!

(Read the comments too.)

[Handre @Handre]

The Chicken Tax of 1963 is one of America's most absurd exercises in economic protectionism, disguised as retaliation but functioning as pure corporate welfare for Detroit's Big Three automakers.

You probably think this story begins with chickens. It doesn't. It begins with Volkswagen Beetles flooding American driveways in the late 1950s, terrifying Ford and General Motors executives who watched their market share evaporate to superior German engineering sold at lower prices. American consumers had discovered something revolutionary: foreign manufacturers could build better vehicles for less money.

The chicken angle emerged when West Germany and France imposed tariffs on American poultry exports in 1961. President Johnson's administration, pressured heavily by United Auto Workers lobbyists and Detroit executives, saw an opening. In 1963, they slapped a 25% tariff on imported pickup trucks and commercial vans, ostensibly as retaliation for European chicken tariffs.

The chicken dispute resolved itself within a few years. The truck tariffs remained permanent.

You live with the consequences today, sixty years later. Walk into any Toyota dealership and try to buy a Japanese-built pickup truck. You can't. The Chicken Tax killed that possibility before you were born. Toyota builds the Tacoma in Texas and Mexico to avoid the tariff. Nissan builds the Frontier in Mississippi. Honda doesn't even attempt to compete in the full-size pickup market.

Ford's F-150 has dominated American truck sales for decades, not through superior innovation but through government protection from Japanese and European competition. Detroit convinced politicians to shield them from the creative destruction that would have forced them to improve their products or lose customers to better alternatives.

The numbers tell the story. In 1963, import trucks held roughly 4% of the American market. Today, after sixty years of protection, domestic manufacturers still control about 80% of pickup sales. Tariffs predictably protect inefficient producers within industries at the expense of consumers and efficient competitors. Every American who bought an overpriced, lower-quality domestic truck since 1963 paid this hidden tax.

Free market economists understood this outcome from day one. Tariffs don't protect industries; they protect inefficient producers within industries at the expense of consumers and efficient competitors.

The policy persists because concentrated benefits flow to visible constituencies while dispersed costs remain invisible to consumers. Ford executives know exactly how much the Chicken Tax increases their profits. You never calculated how much extra you paid for your last truck because foreign alternatives were banned before you could compare them.

Consider the irony. American consumers, given free choice, preferred foreign vehicles that offered better value. The government responded by eliminating that choice to protect domestic companies from their own mediocrity. This violated every principle of market economics while enriching politically connected corporations.

Sixty years later, you still can't buy the truck you actually want at the price foreign manufacturers would charge. The Chicken Tax remains, chickens forgotten, protecting Ford's profits while denying you Toyota's quality.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@sunnylohmann AI says the movie of a book, “Is Paris Burning?”, about Nazis and Paris, was politically restricted by de Gaulle.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@sunnylohmann Fortunately every billion of this spending will be strictly accounted for and not disappear, right?

Right?

[Capitalism Magazine @CapitalismMag]

The Campaign Against ICE

On the methods and purposes of the Democrat campaign of violence against U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).

https://t.co/LrH7IaA2Fc

/2

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@CapitalismMag @X I suspect an incompetent algorithm made a mistake in n interpreting your words.

I was blocked once by a radio talk personality years ago. I was a fan and never said a discouraging word in any reply to his account. I’m still blocked, and haven’t a clue how to get back in.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Hayek: “The Italy of the sixteenth century has been called the country of the worst money and the best monetary theory.”

Is the US the country of the best money (which is not saying much) and the worst monetary theory (central banks and expansionist policy are the cat’s meow)?

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

A very convincing account confirming what I’ve pretty much figured all along. Good job.

[Capitalism Magazine @CapitalismMag]

A Neighbor’s Journey Through January 6th

https://t.co/vsiMsAzsCS

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@sunnylohmann No one likes to dwell on the impossible.

Also, says AI Gemini,
“…Politicians run on job creation. Announcing mass layoffs driven by government-funded AI is politically toxic and draws immediate backlash from voting blocs.”

[Sunny Lohmann @sunnylohmann]

If Tech Bros were on our side we’d be hearing about how the 2 million government employees are going to get displaced by AI and our bureaucracy will become so un-corrupt and efficient. Funny we are not hearing that.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@CapitalismMag No objection to lowering the top tax bracket, with or without lowering it for other brackets. Bring it on!

But, as you know, the “lost” taxes, under the present money and credit system, will be retrieved by currency debasement, which is equally immoral.

Got to cut the spending!

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@overton_news I hate the swamp. Might have to sit out the next election.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Another “mixed economy” nightmare.

Everyone is supposed to just move along.

[Sunny Lohmann @sunnylohmann]

Is this what we are calling free market capitalism now?

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

Accurate.

[Handre @Handre]

The Bretton Woods "gold standard" was the most sophisticated monetary fraud in human history, masquerading as sound money while institutionalizing permanent inflation.

Nixon didn't break the gold standard in 1971. He simply admitted what had been true since 1944: the dollar was a fiat currency backed by political promises, not gold. Under Bretton Woods, only foreign central banks could redeem dollars for gold at $35 per ounce, while American citizens faced legal prosecution for owning monetary gold. This was a dollar standard with gold window dressing, not a gold standard.

The Federal Reserve printed dollars with reckless abandon throughout the 1950s and 1960s, knowing full well that domestic prices would rise while foreign governments accumulated increasingly worthless paper. By 1971, the U.S. held 8,100 tons of gold against dollar liabilities exceeding $80 billion. Simple arithmetic: if every foreign central bank had demanded redemption simultaneously, each dollar would have been backed by roughly 3 cents worth of gold.

Free market economists warned this charade would collapse under its own contradictions. How can you maintain a fixed exchange rate while inflating the money supply? You can't. Charles de Gaulle figured this out in 1965, converting France's dollar reserves into gold and calling the system an "exorbitant privilege" for American money printers. Other nations quickly followed suit, draining Fort Knox and forcing Nixon's hand.

An entire generation learned to associate "gold standard" with this bastardized hybrid system. When modern economists dismiss gold-backed money as unworkable, they're really dismissing a system that never existed in the first place.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@DaveDax1776 @Handre It’s difficult to rule out your interpretation.

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

@DutchRojas All you point out is true but inevitably develops under Big Regulation.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

“The only thing worse than no tanks in Red Square are burning tanks in Red Square.”

A European diplomat in Moscow captures how fast Putin’s authority is collapsing inside Russia, writes Mark Galeotti in The Times. 1/

[Mikiel de Bary @mdebary]

OMG, I missed this “Nobel Prize for Bernanke” news in 2022. What a travesty for a prestigious prize of any sort to go to a central banker!

[Handre @Handre]

What would you have thought if Madoff were not arrested after his Ponzi scheme crashed, but rather invited to speak at various events and on TV shows, then years later given the Nobel for his work?

Interestingly enough, this is exactly what happened to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the Fed architects of the housing bubble. Bernanke and Greenspan destroyed millions of lives through artificially low rates that inflated the greatest asset bubble in history. They turned homeownership into a casino.

Their "solution"? Print $3 trillion more to bail out their banker friends while regular families lost everything.

They should be in jail, not celebrated as economic geniuses. But not in this 🤡🌎