March 26^th

Today George Will instructs us all in economics, at least in his version of economics. Does anyone believe that this will be “fair and balanced?” Neither do I.

Will quotes at length from, “Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey and LeBron James Can Teach You about Economics.” This book was written by an editor of Forbes magazine, John Tamny. That may suggest to you the direction the book takes. Unfortunately it will be very hard for you to read this splendid book for yourself because it hasn’t been released to the public yet. The available date is about the middle of next month; meanwhile advanced copies have been made available to those expected to comment favorably on the book’s content. George Will has complied; he quotes many passages and agrees with all of them.

We find that “Most of the persons on the original list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982 were off the list in 2013.” I hope that doesn’t mean that a high percentage of former Forbes folks are now on food stamps. At this writing the poorest of the current Forbes 400 is worth 1.79 thousand million dollars.  If in another twenty years it takes 3 thousand million dollars to make the list I’ll bet the current list’s bottom feeders will still not need direct government assistance!

We learn about John D. Rockefeller who, surely out of the goodness of his heart, lowered the price of Kerosene to six cents a gallon in spite of the fact that he already had a monopoly. He may have gotten that monopoly by lowering the price to drive potential competitors out of the market. Rockefeller had plenty of other income sources which would have enabled him to do exactly that; in fact he was notorious for slicing prices to drive competitors out of his markets.

An interesting factoid presented without question, or citation, is this Tamny assertion, “When the wealth gap widens the lifestyle gap shrinks.” Will swallows this nonsense? What a fantastic statement; presumably folks at the bottom of the economic ladder find their circumstances much improved now that the top 1% are making  multimillion dollar salaries. Mr. Suh who now plays football for the Miami Dolphins recently signed a 60 million dollar guaranteed contract. (The total contract was for well over 100 million dollars.) Isn’t that wonderful for everybody? I wonder if Will or this editor of Forbes has, within the last ten years, ever had coffee with anyone on food stamps, you know say a full time Walmart employee.

Will should know that our Gini index (a measure of income inequality) is now at .41 compared with Sweden’s .24; that’s simply embarrassing and more embarrassing is Will’s apparent commitment to push it still higher. He seems unacquainted with, or purposefully ignoring, Gunnar Myrdal an architect of Sweden’s third way. The Stockholm School which Myrdal helped to found sought a middle way between Communism and Capitalism. The result was a Nobel Prize for Myrdal and the current economic situation in Sweden. The Swedes do not have to rely on improving the wealth of some so that many others can get larger crumbs from their table.