Samuel Barbour

Community college economics instructor. Opera fan, haiku lover. he/him pronouns

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Noahpinion So, have you become, well, not a "conservative," but rather a conservative as he should be?

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

So I guess all there is left to do is trash the planet and grind the poor into dust.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

There was once a that socialism would work better than capitalism. This was mostly wrong and post-1989 it seemed like we'd agree on market economies plus a welfare state.

But an injection of green degrowth has birthed "socialism will wreck the economy — in a good way!"

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@MichaelRStrain The next Democratic administration will run austerity policy, cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, ending welfare programs, and saying "we can't afford them."

And we can't raise taxes because it would hurt economic growth.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@David_Charts2 @MichaelRStrain Nobody outside of the top 0.1% calls themselves rich, especially when it comes to taxes. They "work hard" for what they have and raising taxes on them is "punishing success."

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Francriccardo You've been doing the "markets good, government bad" dance this whole time.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

Cochrane is smarter and has infinitely more prestige than me - but I can't believe he thinks it's really that simple. Like property rights, liberty, and their adjudication are all totally obvious and if we'd all just be sensible we'd have broadly shared prosperity.

[John Cochrane @JohnHCochrane]

Growth is not a strategy. Growth is what happens when free people are left alone to pursue their desires, constrained by respect for others property and liberty. I don’t live to fulfill some dreamers coercive “strategy”

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@onmyowntimenow @Francriccardo ...the only legitimate government is that which defends individual private interest; but because each individual is different, all government is illegitimate except to the rulers; thus legitimate government can only ever support the present status quo.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@onmyowntimenow @Francriccardo The "regulatory suffocation of free enterprise" is not a matter of public policy, it has nothing whatever to do with wealth creation or the mitigation of poverty.

You make yourself a rhetorical ouroboros...

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@onmyowntimenow @Francriccardo That's not a question, you're just nursing grievances. Businesses fail all the time, for lots of different reasons. I'd wager a lot of people blame the government for what was their own fault.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@AbrahamVelaDib @JohnHCochrane From Ricardo's Principles, Chapter 7. Sure sounds like he's talking about economic growth to me.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@onmyowntimenow @Francriccardo No, you just don't know how to admit you're wrong. You ascribe your successes to your virtue and your failures on the faults of others. That's all you're doing.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@AbrahamVelaDib @JohnHCochrane The whole point of a country orienting production towards its comparative advantage is to increase its real GDP per capita, which is, last I checked, the definition of economic growth.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@thomasjweiss @Albulipe1 @JohnHCochrane Yes - but Smith recognizes that a vast misfortune on the other side of the world means less to an individual than a minor disturbance to themselves. Hence, we cannot rely on charitable feelings alone to provide for the welfare of others generally.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@AbrahamVelaDib @JohnHCochrane On the contrary - Ricardo's argument for free trade relies on an appeal to distributional justice in order to advance the interests of economic growth.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Francriccardo That's a popular opinion. Wrong, unfortunately.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Albulipe1 @thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane I mean, we assume communism would never work because there's no room for individual motivations, right? And yet the Soviets built a space program competitive with ours in the US.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Albulipe1 @thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane Society would fall apart, obviously. And I suppose that would be proof positive my view of human society is terribly wrong, wouldn't it?

But suppose there is some truth to the idea that people want to serve others?

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@Albulipe1 @thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane There are lots of charitable organizations that serve the general public and are funded by private donations. The famous Carnegie Libraries, for example.

A public organization is accountable to the public - not so for private philanthropy.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@JohnHCochrane @thomasjweiss True. Lots of people are able to meet their needs without working - retirees, housewives, and so on. I suppose I should have said the punishment for running out of money is homelessness.

But when one is faced with working or running out of money, homelessness is what they fear.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane In my experience, "liberty" almost always is referred to in the negative sense, "freedom from," usually from government interference.

In the US the punishment for not working is homelessness, a condition under which there is no security of food or shelter.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane Perhaps the counterargument is simply that, if any provisioning of public goods beyond the protection of property rights and personal liberty is socialism, you end up in a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, with no way out.

[Samuel Barbour @ssbarbour]

@thomasjweiss @JohnHCochrane ...which would mean construction jobs, and service jobs, and so on. By making it the decision of private wealth to establish services, we limit ourselves.

But I know, I know. What I'm talking about is socialism, and which Cochrane has expounded against at length.