Frrrreeeeeddoommmm
If you want someone from
Connecticut to get all riled up, drive extra slow in the passing lane.
Connecticutians are very particular about that. The right lane is for
traveling, the left lane is for passing. If you’re in the left lane for any
other reason than passing, you are a jerk.
So if you really want to ruin someone’s day, drive in the left lane at about 50 miles per hour. They will be grumpy for three days straight, I assure you.
I was telling this story to one
of my South Carolina friends—how upset people from Connecticut get about this,
and how people from South Carolina basically drive however the hell they
want—and he said ruefully, “Freedom…”
He’s a guy who perhaps likes lots
of rules to organize society, and perhaps he’d rather live in a world where
some law governs how you conduct yourself in every aspect of your life,
including how you drive. I tell you what, after growing up in Connecticut and
then spending the last six years in the South, I’m enjoying the freedom, even
if it means I occasionally get stuck behind some idiot.
These days I’m very skeptical of
anyone who calls him- or herself a utopian, a person who subscribes to the idea
that you can somehow nudge people into doing this or coerce them into doing
that and create this ideal society where nothing
bad ever happens.
Remember the movie Minority Report? You can
create a world without crime, but what would that world look like? It would be
horrifying. You can make the argument that there is actually an optimal level
of crime. I would rather have a little crime than the oppressive law
enforcement it would take to get zero crime.
Bill De Blasio recently lowered
NYC speed limits to 25 miles per hour in an effort to lower traffic fatalities
to zero. He called it Vision Zero. Have traffic fatalities been reduced?
Actually, I haven’t checked. But there are tradeoffs with everything. People
get to where they’re going much slower, which has an economic impact—that
nobody talks about.
There will always be car
accidents. There will always be deaths from drug overdoses. There will always
be crime. People will suffer and die because of stupid stuff and because they
are stupid. The world is not a perfect place—in fact, I prefer it to be a bit
untidy.
Economic
Frrrreeeeeddoommmm
There have been some startling
developments in the past few months. Like, did you hear the talk about getting
rid of $100 bills?
It’s not just C-notes. 500EUR
notes in Europe, 1,000CHF notes in Switzerland—everywhere people are talking
about getting rid of large-denomination bills, because… some people use them to
evade taxes or to commit crimes. You don’t pay your drug dealer with a credit
card. So the thought is, get rid of the large-denomination bills and crime goes
away.
This is scary. Part of economic freedom
is the ability to transact anonymously.
Take the extreme example where cash is eliminated altogether. Everything goes
on a credit or debit card. Your whole purchasing history is stored on the
Internet. Well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide,
right?
Part of freedom (including
economic freedom) is the ability to do bad things. Do you want to eliminate the
option for people to do bad things, or do you want to give people the choice to do the right
thing? All morality is meaningless if people are given no choice of whether to
behave or misbehave. This is a deep philosophical issue.
Again, some people think a
perfect world is a world without crime, but that’s not true. A perfect world is
where people have the ability to commit crimes, but don’t.
But this talk about
large-denomination bills is really gaining momentum, and honestly, I think it
is at least half responsible for the run up in gold prices over the last couple
of months.
Think about it—in a world without
cash, gold (and silver) becomes the currency of anonymity.
You can see how this
will play out: they ban cash, people start using gold… well, now we have to
make it illegal to hold gold, because gold is the money of the underworld.
How much will gold be worth then?
This also speaks to the need to
hold gold in physical form, not in “paper” form. I’m not one of these people
who distrusts securitized gold or gold futures, but if it ever becomes illegal,
holding ETFs or futures will do you no good whatsoever.
I actually think it’s best to
hold physical gold as well as “trading gold.”
Unintended
Consequences
I read an article that all the
anti-terrorism rules placed on the banking industry have turned out to be
completely counterproductive. When dirty money was in the banking system, it
could be tracked. Now that people have turned to cash and barter, it can’t be
tracked, and we are actually less safe.
This trend toward pushing people
outside the banking system is a very dangerous one. When people are
underbanked, their social mobility is limited, to say the least. They work
under the table, they don’t pay taxes, and they can’t contribute to Social
Security. Whenever I make large deposits in my bank, it feels like I am going
through airport security. Everything I do is viewed suspiciously.
The upshot here is that no matter
how much social engineering you perform, you will never get people to behave,
and the rules only make things worse for the people who actually obey them.
Every law passed to fix something
over here creates unintended consequences over there. Then new laws are passed
to counteract the old, bad laws, which increases complexity, which increases
the need to pay people to understand the complexity, which creates a deadweight
loss. And people wonder why we grow at only 2%.
One of these days I will run for
public office, maybe. I will campaign on a platform of doing nothing.
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