Is the NHS really the envy of the world?

Wikipedia has produced a list of countries by life expectancy that puts Britain's NHS in perspective.

Apparently, the 'best healthcare system in the world' only ranks 19 overall, that's rank 15 for men with a life expectancy of 81 years and a lowly rank of 22 for women with a life expectancy of 83 years.

Overall rank	Country	Overall life expectancy	Male rank	Male life expectancy	Female rank	Female life expectancy
2	Singapore	83	5	80	4	85
19	United Kingdom	81	15	79	22	83

Furthermore, Wikipedia's list of countries by total health expenditure purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita shows that Singapore spends only 4.5% GDP per capita to achieve overall world rank 2 in life expectancy, while Britain spends more than double that, at 9.6% GDP per capita, to achieve a lowly overall world rank 19.

Rank	Country	Total health expenditure per capita PPP Int.$	Total health expenditure % of GDP
16	United Kingdom	3,433	9.6
28	Singapore	2,592	4.5

Hmmmmm... I wonder what accounts for these differences?

Could it be the free market?

Well, sort of. You see, while Singapore funds its single payer healthcare system through taxation, as does the UK, provision is by the free market.

So! next time someone, possibly a healthcare worker, complains of 'creeping privatization', and that this means the existing provision, with the existing costs, PLUS the addition of profits for fat-cat capitalists at the expense of the sick and disabled, mention Singapore. Just make sure you are wearing padded clothing and ear defenders lol.

The EPA Legally Controls All Water, Food Production and Private Property

Source: beforeitsnews





The EPA Legally Controls All Water, Food Production and Private Property

Mike and Chantel Sacket, from Priest Lake, Idaho, were preparing an 0.63 acre plot of land for the construction of their new home when an order by the EPA was issued to remove piles of fill material and replant the vegetation that they had removed from their property. The couple paid $23,000 for their property.

The order from the EPA was issued after the couple had gone through the process of acquiring all of the necessary permits to begin construction. Failure to comply with the EPA order would have resulted in a daily fine of up to $37,500.

The Idaho couple sued, in an attempt to prove that their land did not meet the criteria for being declared a wetland by the EPA, however, the lower court refused to hear the case. Fortunately, the Supreme Court sided with Mike and Chantel as well as several other property owners who had been the victims of EPA tyranny. The details of the case are provided here.

What seemed like a victory for property owners against the EPA may prove to be short-lived. The EPA is back and they are back with a renewed vengeance. Under the Clean Water Restoration Act, the EPA is in control of all “navigable waters.” On the surface, the term “navigable waters” would seem to provide some measure of protection to the public from invasive EPA enforcement by placing some reasonable limitations on the EPA’s regulatory power. Alas, that is proving not to be the case.

The Clean Water Restoration Act goes far beyond the original intent of the law which was the protection of waterfowl and the conservation of wetlands. The proverbial fly in the ointment has its roots in the recent removal of the term “navigable waters”.

Under the new guidelines, if you use well water, the EPA has jurisdiction over your property and can even forcibly evict you and your family. If it rained overnight, or you have runoff from a recent snowfall, and there is any resulting puddles on your property, this can result in the loss of the free use of your property. You are also subject to eviction from your land if your property resides above an underground water aquifer.
A Thinly Veiled Excuse

Illegal to conserve. What ever happened to Agenda 21’s conservation movement?

In reality, this law has nothing to with preserving water and is simply a thinly veiled excuse to separate as many Americans from their land as possible. This strategy is straight out of the Agenda 21 playbook and it is being used to attack private property rights throughout the West. This strategy dovetails nicely with something I recently wrote about with regard to the fact that many state governments in the West are prohibiting the trapping and use of rainwater and the reuse of farm irrigation water. The last thing the Federal government wants is to allow Americans the right to fully control their property and to experience any kind of water independence.

The underlying intent of these policies is to attack America by lashing out at the food producers of America. The Wetlands legislation is being used to force the food producers of this country off of their land as the EPA begins to assess farmers $37,500 dollar, per day, fines for having any kind of standing water on their properties. The EPA is all to happy to provide relief for farmers and ranchers and acquire their land to help these victims of federal tyranny to get out from underneath their fines.

Most rural communities understand what is happening to them, but these events are receiving almost no attention except for the exceptional news blurb. The most dramatic reporting on this event occurred in the past week on FOX News in which Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on FOX and recounted many of the claims which I have identified here.

A number of other water issues have been the subject of recent Congressional oversight and subsequent legislation. Some legislators have been highly critical of recent regulatory initiatives which have abused the personal property rights of individual farmers, ranchers and homeowners. As of this date, despite some scant interest in EPA abuses, Congress has failed to act against the EPA for Fifth Amendment violations of property rights.
The True Intentions of the EPA

There is one person who has almost more water than God, but he is not and he never will be regulated by the EPA and his name is T. Boon Pickens.

Pickens could be found guilty of diverting rainwater to a house of prostitution and he will never run afoul of the EPA and its enforcement army from the Army Corps of Engineers, because Pickens is part of the plot to hand off the nation’s water supply to private corporate interests which will be beyond the reach of the EPA.

America is the victim of a three pronged attack which is designed to control all water: (1) Through the Clean Water Act, the EPA controls all water; (2) As a result of controlling all water, the EPA will come to naturally control all food production; (3) Since all property has some degree of water on it, the EPA is, in effect, the draconian landlord over everyone’s property.
Rules for Thee but Not for Me

That one person which is not impacted by EPA regulations and that person controls as much water as he wants. That infamous corporate raider and robber baron of the oil industry, T. Boone Pickens, is leading the charge to unscrupulously enrich himself as he leads the global depopulation efforts to create a series of artificially contrived water shortages. Pickens was one of the first to rush to capitalize on the impending water shortage by his insidious acquisition of the largest underground aquifer in the US, the Ogallala Aquifer, containing a quadrillion gallons of water, This massive underground reservoir extends from Texas to South Dakota.

In Roberts County, TX., Pickens has purchased nearly 70,000 acres, as well as the water rights to personally remove up to half of the Ogallala Aquifer of which he plans to sell back to nearby residents in order to enrich himself. Much of this aquifer extends into prime farm land located in America’s bread basket. One man, T. Boone Pickens, is acquiring the ability to turn the American heartland into a dust bowl. Pickens will soon have the political power to charge so much for water, that farmers will be forced to abandon their farms and ranches in a Hunger Games rendition in which government sponsored interests will eventually become the sole purveyor of the nation’s food and water supply as the anti-humanist, Pickens, makes more money from water than he ever did with oil.

In order to acquire the water and expand his control over the Ogallala Aquifer, Pickens needed more political power. In 2006, Pickens bought off the Texas State Legislature for $1.2 billion. This purchase of water-related law making power has allowed Pickens the ability to do accomplish four goals: (1) He created an eight-acre town and an accompanying local government, and subsequently made his tiny municipality into a powerful Water Supply District; (2) As such, Pickens automatically acquired the right to issue tax-free bonds and thereby, giving himself the lucrative benefit of borrowing at a tremendous discount; (3) Now operating as a public entity, Pickens is armed with the power of eminent domain which will allow him to expand his water acquisition potential in which he bullies local residents, along the aquifer, to sell their properties for pennies on the dollar; (4) Pickens used his 1.2 billion dollar bribe money to get the Texas legislature to pay for a 250 foot wide water pipeline corridor all the way to Dallas where Pickens will make an estimated yearly profit of $165 million at taxpayer expense. Pickens has become the poster child for the phrase “crony capitalism.”

According to Business Week, Pickens is now the number one owner of water in the United States. He will soon possess the ability to create a water less wasteland through the heartland of America and who is going to stop him, Obama or the corrupt Texas State Legislature?

Pickens isn’t content with his new found power over Texas water supplies. Pickens is in the process of greatly expanding his control over water as he petitioned congress and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to expand his private/public water district’s power of eminent domain and right-of-way, so that he can operate across state lines as well. If this is fully granted, Pickens will control all water between Texas and South Dakota. Pickens is also in the process of doubling down as he has added his previous wind projects to the water district by proposing a vast $12-billion wind farm, to sit on the same land he is acquiring for his water pipeline. The cost of the water pipeline is estimated at $1.5 billion, which is being financed at taxpayers’ expense through bonds and low interest loans.

Pickens told Business Week that he is only planning on selling surplus water, but according to the United Nations research and scientific studies report, nearly two-thirds of the entire population inhabiting the planet will face severe, life-threatening water shortages by the year 2025. So, Mr. Pickens, what surplus could you be talking about? And you only thought you had to worry about Obama collapsing the economy through his socialist policies.

Every bit of the Pickens plan violates the both the spirit and the letter of the law with regard to the EPA’s claimed right regulate all water. Pickens is not, and will not meet any EPA resistance.
Pickens Is Not Alone

The former CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, does not believe that the common man has an inherent right to water. Brabeck stated in an interview for a documentaryWe Feed The World, that he believes water should only be something only the wealthy have access to. This is the same Nestle and Peter Brabeck which Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory episode “Blue Gold” featured in Ventura’s show about this rogue corporation. In the Ventura program, he exposed Nestle for bribing public officials in order to be able to take out massive amounts of water from the Great Lakes and sell it to countries such as China.

Of course it has been well-chronicled that the Bush family is moving to acquire massive amounts of water in South America including the continent’s larger underground water aquifer. The Bush family has built an expansive ranch on 100,000+ acres with the labor provided by the Army Corps of Engineers in another example of crony capitalism.
Conclusion

It is quite clear that while the EPA is moving towards the control of water, food and property rights, thus paving the way for globalist crony capitalists to obtain control over the nations water, and food supply as well as usher in a society which has no private property rights.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the globalists are buying up our water rights and are planning to sell it back to us at exorbitant rates. In this Hunger Games scenario, the elite will one day control all water, food and property rights and can therefore, hold humanity hostage in servitude to the whims of the global elite.

The Keynesian Circular Flow of Nonsense

Source: thelibertarianalliance

by Keir Martland

To all with an A-level in Economics, the Keynesian circular flow of income will be familiar. It is a representation of the macroeconomy, including the household, the firm, the global economy, the banks, and the government.

Injections are often represented on this diagram by a green arrow and they include consumption, investment, government spending, and exports while leakages are often represented by a red arrow and they include savings, taxes, and imports. While consumption is sometimes not included in the list of injections, injections are defined as expenditures on aggregate production, that is, money flowing into firms. On the other hand, leakages are defined as non-expenditures on aggregate production.

Keynes believed that the higher the levels of spending on aggregate production in the form of consumption, investment, government spending, and exports, and the lower the levels of non-expenditure on aggregate production in the form of savings, taxes, and imports, the better off the macroeconomy is.

Keynes, it can be seen from the above, then, was of the belief that saving, for instance, was a bad thing, to put it plainly. Since savings are just sat in the bank and are not doing anything productive, what really is the point of them? In a recession, especially, savings represent a leakage in that they are not being spent on consumer goods. Consumption, Keynesians might argue, drives the economy; when goods and services are consumed, firms are better off and can employ more workers and these workers now have wages which they can spend on goods and services, the producers of which can now afford to employ more workers, ad infinitum. Why on earth, then, would anyone save money when saving simply represents a restraint on the expansion of firms? Since saving is not investment or consumption or government spending or exports, it is a no-no.

One problem with this view of savings is that it is not up to John Maynard Keynes to tell savers that their savings are not also an investment. What is an investment, after all? A very general definition of investment is that it is the act of not consuming today in the expectation of a reward in the future. Applied to economics, investment is the acquisition of a good which will ‘pay for itself’, so to speak. A hairdresser invests in a pair of scissors only because she expects the income derived from the scissors to be more than the initial cost. What, then, of the saver? Does he not first acquire his money and then put it to some non-consumption use in the expectation of a reward in the future? The answer is: of course he does. If the saver did not expect such a reward, that is, if he did not expect to be better off as a result, then he would not save. Yet, this does not rule out the possibility that the saver could be wrong, that is, that he could actually make a loss (perhaps due to inflation). Nor does the reward have to be monetary. Indeed, even if the expected reward for not consuming was purely psychic, then the saver would still be making an investment. For saving is not simply keeping resources idle without reason. Every actor, and saving is an action carried out by an actor, has an end, and he would not act unless the end was perceived to be an improvement in some sense over his present situation. So, I repeat, it is not up to the Keynesians to tell savers that they are not also, by saving, making an investment.

Yet there is another, more fundamental problem with the Keynesian view of savings. Where does the money for investment come from in the first place? According to the Keynesian view, investment is a Good Thing, and Amen to that. Investment, though, as I have just said, is the act of not consuming – that is, saving, albeit temporarily – in the expectation of a reward. To invest, one must first save. That is, to accumulate the capital with which to buy a factory, one must first have not spent this capital on consumption. But, saving is bad. So, how, if saving is to be minimised and consumption maximised, is investment ever to take place? Perhaps one answer could be that the investor might borrow the funds with which to buy the factory. Even so, these funds, to the extent that they represent the freeing up of resources by actors in the economy and not the printing of additional loanable funds through credit expansion, would not have existed had not someone else saved. Also, what happens once the investor has borrowed these funds? Must he not refrain from consumption in order to pay them back? In a future article I shall deal with credit expansion and why this does not relieve us of the task of saving and why much of the present economic malaise is actually due to it.

Turning to government spending, in what sense is government spending ‘good’? That is, how can government spending create anything of value? The Keynesian view of government spending is that, as it generates activity, or boosts aggregate production, it reduces unemployment of factors of production. This is why the Alphabet Agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt must be regarded as sound by Keynesian standards; they employed previously unemployed factors of production in some activity and thus boosted aggregate production.

The absurdity of this position may be more obvious. For the Keynesians, the aim is only to increase aggregate production (and aggregate demand). Production of what? That really does not matter. The production of waste is just as valuable as the production of goods. In this way, what is produced is likely to be of no value at all to consumers.

However, there is another flaw: just as investment must follow saving, government spending must follow taxation. Taxation, according to the Keynesian, is a leakage. Once again, the aim of the Keynesian economist is to maximise injections and minimise leakages. How would this work? Must we eliminate all taxes and yet simultaneously increase government spending to infinity? This is nothing but the logical conclusion of the Keynesian fiscal policy recommendations. We see that today most governments are actually making some progress towards this, with most of them running budget deficits, but none of them have actually gone so far as to run a deficit of infinity. Why is this? If governments are benevolent agencies which merely wish to increase the general welfare and which also have the power to minimise Keynesian leakages and maximise Keynesian injections, then why is there still poverty in the world? Why, in fact, do governments tend to run into problems when they run deficits? Surely, if Keynesian economics were true, a fiscal stimulus would boost aggregate production and thus increase real incomes. And so, what we ought to expect, if we accept Keynesian economics as true, is that the bigger the deficit the faster the rate of economic growth. I needn’t point out that this is not so.

Then we have to consider the opportunity cost of government spending. Everything has a cost and if something doesn’t have a monetary cost then at the very least it has opportunity cost, i.e. what was given up for it. Even if government spending does lead to the production of something identified as a good by a consumer, the money the government spent was forcibly taken from a citizen. How might he have spent the money? He would have put the money to its most highly valued end, at least in his own eyes. By taxing and then spending, the government is necessarily removing money, time, and other resources from more highly valued ends to lesser valued ends. The result of this can only be relative impoverishment. Government spending may well be an injection, but it is an injection of less value to consumers than the use which would have been made had not the government taxed.

Lastly, Keynesian economics strikes me as rather mercantilist in that it suggests that imports make us poorer. This is because Keynes’ circular flow of income shows imports to be a leakage, or a non-expenditure on aggregate production. This is true, in a sense. It is true that a firm or household which imports goods exchanges money for goods and does not contribute funds to the production of goods in the domestic economy. The mistake is the assumption that this will necessarily make the domestic economy shrink.

In fact, the opposite is true. Given that any actor will purchase the most highly valued good, at least in his eyes, and that goods are considered valuable because they are cheaper and of higher quality than less valuable ones, if actors in the domestic economy import goods then they are doing so because the equivalent goods in the domestic economy are either of an inferior quality or simply do not exist. Now suppose that a Keynesian, only wanting to minimise leakages, were to impose import tariffs or to ban all imports (Keynes argued for protection in the 1930s) . What would be the result? The result would be that more highly valued goods would now become either more expensive or simply unavailable and the actors would now turn to inferior substitute goods in the domestic market. Firms and households would now be worse off, since they can now get less for their money, so to speak. All else remaining constant, if a firm is worse off, it will have to either lower wages or lay off workers. Is this good for the domestic economy?

Rather than one being ‘good’ and another ‘bad’, one an injection and the other a leakage, exports and imports are simply two sides of the same coin. When a firm exports goods, it imports money, and vice versa. If an economy were to refrain from importing goods then the effect, all else remaining constant, would be a reduced demand for this economy’s goods in foreign markets. By importing goods from other countries, we give them the money with which they can import our goods. We cannot have the one without the other.

So, the circular flow of income is, I think, a very pretty diagram which does a good job of illustrating just how a domestic economy works. If the diagram were in black and white and if the terms leakage and injection were kept away from it, then that would be one way of improving it. Only by avoiding the Keynesian colouring of the circular flow of income can we avoid the palpable falsehoods that follow from it.

Asset Ownership and Our System of Deepening Debt-Serfdom

Source: informationclearinghouse

Debt-serfs who make the difficult and risky transition to small-scale business owners find they have simply moved to another class of serfdom.

By Charles Hugh Smith

January 21, 2015 "ICH" - "Of Two Minds" -    The core dynamic of debt-serfdom is that debt-serfs must borrow money to buy essentials while the wealthy borrow to invest in productive assets.

This is not merely a random result of free-market capitalism; it is the structure of cartel-capitalism in which highly profitable goods and services must be paid for with highly profitable debt.

This need to borrow to pay for essentials is already evident in student loans, vehicles and housing.

The cost of these essentials is so high that few debt-serfs can borrow enough to pay for these essentials and then have enough borrowing power left to buy productive assets.

Those few who do attempt to buy productive assets face regulatory hurdles and costs that limit their ability to own or launch small-scale profitable enterprises.
The net result is a system in which the vast majority of productive assets are owned by the few who then have the means to exploit the many.

This core dynamic of cartel capitalism is not new, as longtime correspondent Bart D. recently observed. This was the core dynamic at the root of Ireland's catastrophic potato famine of the 1840s: wealthy English owned the productive assets (land) and limited the opportunities for enterprises that boosted Irish self-sufficiency and competed with the assets owned by English financiers and landed gentry.

Here is Bart's commentary:

"I recently picked up a copy of a novel dealing with the topic of the Irish Potato famine of 1845-6 from a second hand book store run by charity. Author is Liam O’Flaherty and it was written in 1937. It was re-released in 2002. My edition was printed in the 1970’s, so it’s had a following over the years.

FamineI recommend this book HIGHLY as an insight into how families, communities, governments and economics will/are functioning in impoverished situations now and in the future. I know this because I was astonished (not using that word lightly here) at the similarity in the description of life and government/business portrayed in O’Flaherty’s book in 1845 and that which I have observed closely over many years in remote Australian Aboriginal communities from 1994 to 2012.

Especially fascinating to learn that the English Government provided ‘relief’ loans to Ireland at market interest with a condition that they could not be used to do anything productive. Basically they set up a scheme to pay a small proportion of each community to build roads, but not a cent could be spent on developing alternate Irish-owned industries or businesses for fear it would upset the rich English industrialists.

The English imported cheap American corn meal which everyone was forced to buy with the English Gov. financed wages (closing the loop of giving with one hand, taking with the other and adding in a profit to boot) after the Irish had to export all their own grain and livestock to England to pay the land rents.

The model of resource ownership described in the novel--English landlords owned all the Irish peasant farmer land and set rent at a level that ensured the farmers remained a hairs breadth ahead of destitution even under the best of circumstances--will be, I think, what our own future will look like. Unfortunately".

It’s very well written and engaging for the reader, but hard to read because of its infuriating and tragic subject material. No happy endings here.

One branch of my family (Scots-Irish, County Down) immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1840s, undoubtedly as a result of the potato famine. This history of exploitation and financial tyranny is not entirely abstract to me, and neither is the current American variation of the debt-serf model.

Those of us with experience in starting and operating small enterprises know that dozens of restrictive regulations and administrative costs limit debt-serfs' attempts to invest in small-scale productive ventures. We also know that the Federal Reserve's free funds for financiers enables hedge funds to invest $500 million in the latest software fad, while small-scale entrepreneurs have no equivalent conduit to near-zero cost funding.

Globalized cartels eliminate local pricing power by importing cheap goods from somewhere else. In less globalized circumstances, local producers retain some pricing power (and thus some profitability) because they can produce goods without the cost of shipping from overseas.

But the power of cartels buying millions of units at a time and the low cost of container shipping means cartels can eliminate the pricing power of local small-scale producers virtually everywhere.

Even low-income regions in developing nations cannot compete with global cartels in manufactured goods and agricultural/meat produce.

This is not a random result of free enterprise; it is the direct result of central banks' free funds for financiers that lowers the costs of borrowing and thus production for cartels.

Debt-serfs may legally start home businesses in some locales, but as soon as they become successful enough to compete with vested interests, their fixed costs are increased by regulatory and administrative rules. The resulting erosion of profitability and the lack of access to cheap credit limit their ability to expand without taking on burdensome levels of costly debt or selling their souls to vulture capitalists.

At that point, debt-serfs who make the difficult and risky transition to small-scale business owners find they have simply moved to another class of serfdom, one in which the serfs own an enterprise but cannot expand their capital. As a result, small enterprise ends up being just another version of serfdom, i.e. barely getting by or borrowing more just to survive.

Consider the evidence of the erosion of American small business: Economic Death Spiral: More American Businesses Dying Than Starting.


The net result is a system in which the vast majority of productive assets are owned by the few who then have the means to exploit the many.

No, really, markets do sort themselves out

Source: adamsmith.org

Written by Tim Worstall 

You’ll recall the terrified bleating from the usual suspects over the way that the supermarkets were sitting on all that land that could be used? As we recall said bleating the first set of allegations were that they had the land banks to make sure that other supermarket chains couldn’t build stores in an area. Our reaction to that was, well, issue more planning chittys then.

 More recently the story moved on to how the supermarkets were sitting on all that land that should be used for housing instead. To which our reaction was, well, issue more planning chittys then. We’re really not short of land to build on in this country, we’re only short of land someone is allowed to build upon.

And what is happening now?

Britain’s supermarkets are building on just 6pc of the land they control across the UK, underlining the problem they face with undeveloped sites as the industry battles tumbling sales.

New figures show that the pipeline of new grocery stores in the UK is 46.61m sq ft, the equivalent of more than 1,000 acres. However, just 2.8m sq ft of these new stores are actually under construction.

Building work on stores has fallen by 20pc compared to a year ago as the “big four” supermarket chains – Tesco, Asda, J Sainsbury and Wm Morrison – suffer from tumbling sales and profits.

This means that 43.81m sq ft of land across the country is sitting unutilised by grocery retailers according to property agent CBRE. This land is either subject to a proposal for a new food store, or planning permission has already been granted.

The supermarkets simply do not want to build more stores on that land that they own. That land will, therefore, in the fullness of time (given the time and effort it will take to change said planning chittys, this system is not known for its efficiency) be developed to some other purpose, most likely that housing that was being called for.

And all being done without a politician or a bureaucrat making a plan, without considering social usefulness and entirely cocking a snook at the desires of our betters in the Great and the Good.

We the peasantry have decided that we’re not all that interested in more supermarkets. So, therefore, there won’t be that many more supermarkets. Markets really do just sort themselves out, we get supplied with what we actually want for that’s what we spend our money on, what we want.

Well, markets do sort themselves out if they’re allowed to. Who’s willing to bet on the campaigns against those now won’t be supermarket sites being turned into the housing that people insist we need?

Ideas can mean the difference between wealth and poverty

Source: adamsmith.org

Written by Sam Bowman 

Adam Smith never said that “The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations”, as some people who have never read him think. It is hard to think of a less Smithian view – he was the opposite of that quote’s patrician and patronising voice, and had a deep compassion for people who had been unlucky in life.

But there is some evidence that disadvantaged people underinvest their savings at a huge cost to themselves. This seems to be true even when there are no social constraints or market failures that might cause this to happen.

One reason for this may simply be that poor people do not realise that the investment opportunities exist, or do not really consider that they might benefit from them. Consider those bright young students from deprived backgrounds who have never even considered applying to university, just because nobody in their families ever has either. Your experience of the world shapes how you react to various opportunities that you get.

To test this hypothesis, a group of researchers at Oxford performed a controlled trial in remote Ethiopian villages, where they showed one of several one-hour documentaries about poor Ethiopian farmers who had expanded a business, improved their farming practices or broken cultural norms by, say, marrying for love. “Individuals succeeded largely through their own efforts and by drawing on assistance from community members and available resources, not through outside government or NGO intervention.”

The trial involved a placebo group (shown a comedy movie) and a control group (shown nothing at all) and it seems to have been a success. Six months after the screenings, the documentary group’s savings rate had risen significantly above the control group’s and had also begun to access credit at a higher rate. (These are some of the poorest people in the world, so the absolute amounts – a few pounds – may seem very small to our eyes.)

School enrolment was up by 15 percent in the documentary group, although it was also up by 10 percent in the placebo group so the effect is unclear, and spending on school expenses was up by 17% (compared to no change in the placebo group).

Overall, the results seem to show that showing extremely poor people examples of people like them who had made something of themselves inspired them to invest in themselves and their families.

It’s just one study, but it hints at something bigger. Incentives matter, of course, but you have to be aware of the existence of an incentive for it to work on you. Even if you’re aware of it, you might discount (or exaggerate) its significance according to your experiences. In a complex world, each of us uses a different pair of glasses to focus on what matters and filter out what doesn’t. And no pair is perfect.

There is no obvious public policy lesson from any of this, except perhaps that people don’t always react predictably to incentives. Incentives matter – but so do ideas.

Voluntary Exchange vs. Government Mandates

Source: mises.org

JANUARY 7, 2015Patrick Barron

The basic unit of all economic activity is the uncoerced, free exchange of one economic good for another. Moreover, the decision to engage in exchange is based upon the ordinally ranked subjective preferences of each party to the exchange. To achieve maximum satisfaction from the exchange, each party must have full ownership and control of the good that he wishes to exchange and may dispose of his property without interference from a third party, such as government.

The exchange will take place when each party values the good to be received more than the good that he gives up. The expected — but by no means guaranteed — result is a total higher satisfaction for both parties. Any subsequent satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the exchange must accrue completely to the parties involved. The expected higher satisfaction that one or each expects may not be dependent upon harming a third party in the process.

Third Parties Cannot Create Value by Forcing Exchange

Several observations can be deduced from the above explanation. It is not possible for a third party to direct this exchange in order to create a more satisfactory outcome. No third party has ownership of the goods to be exchanged; therefore, no third party can hold a legitimate subjective preference upon which to base an evaluation as to the higher satisfaction to be gained. Furthermore, the higher satisfaction of any exchange cannot be quantified in any cardinal way, for each party's subjective preference is ordinal only.

This rules out all utilitarian measurements of satisfaction upon which interventions may be based. Each exchange is an economic world unto itself. Compiling statistics of the number and dollar amounts of many exchanges is meaningless for other than historical purposes, both because the dollars involved are not representative of the preferences and satisfactions of others not involved in the exchange, and because the volume and dollar amounts of future exchanges are independent of past exchanges.

One Example: The Case of Ethanol

Let us examine a recent, typical exchange that violates our definition of a true exchange yet is justified by government interventionists today: subsidized, protected, and mandated use of ethanol.

The use of ethanol is coerced; i.e., the government requires its mixture into gasoline. Government does not own the ethanol, so it cannot possibly hold a valid subjective preference. The parties forced to buy ethanol actually receive some dissatisfaction. Had they desired to purchase ethanol, no mandate would have been required.

Because those engaging in the forced exchange did not desire the ethanol in the first place, including the dollar value of ethanol sales in statistics purporting to measure the societal value of goods exchanged in our economy is meaningless. Yet the government includes all mandated exchanges as a source of “value” in its own calculations.

This is just one egregious example of many such measurements that are included in our GDP statistics purporting to convince us that we have "never had it so good."

Another Example: The Soviet Economy

Our flawed view that governments can improve satisfaction caused us to misjudge the military threat of the Soviet Union for decades. Our CIA placed western dollar values on Soviet production data to arrive at the conclusion that its economy was growing faster than that of the US and would surpass US GDP at some point in the not too distant future. Except for very small exceptions, all economic production resources in the Soviet Union were owned by the state. This does not necessarily mean that it was possible for the state to hold valid subjective preferences, for those who occupied important offices in the state held them at the sufferance of what can only be described as gang lords, who themselves held office very tentatively.

State ownership is not real ownership. Those in positions of power with responsibility over resources hold their offices for a given period of time and have little or no ability to pass their office on to their heirs. Thus, the resources eventually succumb to the law of the tragedy of the commons and are plundered to extinction. Nevertheless the squandering of the Soviet Union's commonly held resources was tallied by our CIA as meeting legitimate demand.

Professor Yuri Maltsev saw first-hand the total destruction of the Soviet economy. In Requiem for Marx, he gives a heartbreaking portrayal of the suffering of the Russian populace through state directed, irrational central planning that did not come close to meeting the people's legitimate needs, while our CIA continued to crank out bogus statistics of the supposed strength of the Soviet economy upon which the Reagan administration based its unprecedented peacetime military expansion.

Peaceful Exchange Allowed, Violent Exchange Redressed

With the proviso that no exchange may harm another, as explained so well in Dr. Thomas Patrick Burke's book No Harm: Ethical Principles for a Free Market, we are led to the conclusion that no outside agency can create greater economic satisfaction than can a free and uncoerced exchange. The statistics that support such interventions are meaningless, because they cannot reflect the satisfaction obtained from true ordinally held subjective preferences. Once this understanding is acknowledged and embraced, the consequences for the improvement of our total satisfaction are tremendous. Our economy can be unshackled from government directed economic exchanges and regulations.

Image Source: iStockphoto.

Could You Eat Healthily on $3.37 a Day?

Source: lewrockwell.com

By Joseph Mercola

Mercola.com

January 6, 2015

By Dr. Mercola

While food assistance varies from state to state, a typical family using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps, will have about $3.37 per person, per day, with which to buy food.

Many families run out of food stamps after the first two weeks of the month and rely on food banks to fill in the gaps. On a budget this tight, fruits and vegetables are often purchased only if there’s money to spare, and often there isn’t.

In the documentary film Food Stamped, in which the filmmakers attempt to eat a healthy diet on a food-stamp budget, they visit food stamp enrollment clinics and tag along with low-income shoppers who tend to opt for the cheapest, most filling foods, such as white bread, factory-farmed ground beef, and ramen noodles.

In interviews with members of Congress who also took the food stamp challenge, even the elected officials – when forced to eat on meager budgets themselves – likewise fell prey to the allure of cheap convenience foods.

But while cost is one of the most often-cited obstacles to eating a healthy diet, there are low-cost superfoods available that contribute priceless benefits to your health. Further, research from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that eating a healthy diet costs only $1.50 more per day…

Healthiest Diets Cost About $1.50 More a Day Than Least Healthy Diets

Researchers from HSPH conducted a meta-analysis of 27 studies, evaluating the differences in prices per serving and prices per calorie for different types of food. Eating a healthier diet (defined as rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, and nuts) was found to be significantly more expensive than an unhealthy diet (rich in processed foods, meats, and refined grains).

However, the difference between buying food for the most healthy diet pattern or the least healthy diet pattern came out to about $1.50 per day. Part of what makes the processed food diet cheaper is the fact that the US government is actively supporting a diet that consists of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), soybean oil, corn oil, and grain-fed cattle, a direct result of their flawed farm subsidy system.

The junk foods are made even cheaper through the use of unhealthy filler ingredients and preservatives that prevent spoiling, with the end result being that the very worst foods for your health are often significantly cheaper to buy. The HSPH researchers reported that US food policies focus on:

“‘Inexpensive, high volume’ commodities, which has led to ‘a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing capabilities that favor sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit.'”

Adding to the problem, many on the most limited food budgets, such as those who receive food assistance dollars, live in “food deserts” – areas without grocery stores, and perhaps only a convenience store or a fast-food restaurant where they can purchase their food.

So while it’s certainly possible to eat healthy on a limited budget, this first requires that you understand what constitutes a healthy meal, and then that you have access to such foods, which is not always the case.

And as for cost, an extra $1.50 a day is a major hurdle for many, but for others for whom the cost can be readily absorbed, the extra investment will yield great returns for your family’s health. The researchers explained:

“While healthier diets did cost more, the difference was smaller than many people might have expected. Over the course of a year, $1.50/day more for eating a healthy diet would increase food costs for one person by about $550 per year.

This would represent a real burden for some families, and we need policies to help offset these costs. On the other hand, this price difference is very small in comparison to the economic costs of diet-related chronic diseases, which would be dramatically reduced by healthy diets.”