Links to the References in the “Mock the Spending” Videos
Believe it or not, almost all of the “Mock the Spending” videos are our attempt to explain some of the simple realities of free markets that have made the U.S. the envy of the world. These are summarized below. Also, see the table below for links to the references shown at the end of each video. You or your students can read from the original sources what makes a free economy so successful.
Competition and nothing else is what should run the economy. The economy has to be based on something. If it’s not based on merit only, then it will be based on something else. If bureaucrats are the deciders, then it is your relationship to the bureaucrats that is the currency of the land.
See: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Central planning has never worked well. In the economy, consequential information is held not in one place but instead is held by thousands of individuals who in acting in their own self-interest direct markets eventually in directions that reflect the truths that are divided among the partipants. Broad strokes that interfere with that pricing model produce unintended and inefficient consequences.
See: Thomas Sowell
When governments interfere with the free market, they create booms and busts. Government spending in reaction to booms and busts usually worsen the situation.
See F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
Deciding to take more money (i.e. cost) is diffuse and remote but deciding who to give it to (benefit) is concentrated and local. Those who represent us are far away from us in Washington. Not coincidentally, so are the lobbyists who with their very presence try to influence the representative who is supposed to be representing you.
Government action that allows inefficiencies to continue interferes with the normal market mechanisms for resolving inefficiencies through competition. This includes bailouts to any players who through miscalculation or poor day-to-day management are not profitable.
** UPDATE **
A very big thank you to Gerard Schneyer who assembled the quotes that go with each video and the links to the source of the quote.
1) The Cash For Clunkers program was like….
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
F.A. Hayek
http://cafehayek.com/2009/08/just-say-no-to-unintended-consequences.html
2) Watching Congress increase spending like….
Once legislators really understand that they can tax people, get money, and then spend it—getting accolades.. and little “Legislator of the Year” plaques—spending even more is almost too great a temptation to resist. The Appropriations Chairman always has the most plaques.
Curt Leonard
http://www.jamesmadison.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf
3) The Hank Paulson Bail Out
I would blame… the politicians… who pushed the lenders and the banks and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into lending and buying mortgages based on people who didn’t meet standards that evolved in the marketplace and which had worked.
Thomas Sowell
http://reason.com/archives/2009/05/20/the-housing-boom-and-bust
4) Supporting a political party without reservation…
To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.
5) If your spouse wastes all your money…
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, &c. The result would be an Encyclopaedia of Error.
–Lord Acton
http://www.archive.org/stream/letterstomarygla00acto/letterstomarygla00acto_djvu.txt
6) If you believe the government can improve the economy…
There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
Dr. Milton Friedman quoted by John Stossel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZpDjxIPpFc&#t=11m44s
7) Centralized planning is like…
Although government is often called “society”… there is no concrete institution called “society,” and what is called “social” planning are in fact government orders over-riding the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of other people.
Thomas Sowell
http://ourdinnertable.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/five-excellent-paragraphs-from-thomas-sowell/
8) RE: To Steve Foley of “We Know” and the debt ceiling
Quick shout out to Steve Foley at the Minority Report Network and the “We Know” facebook page who sent us this idea.
9) A successful agenda-driven politician is…
Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.
Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310466514522309.html
10) Watching the spending in congress is like…
[T]he federal government… can waste money like no other entity ever seen on Planet Earth. Fiscal restraint has of course been a problem for decades, but the spending that has occurred under congresses controlled by Democrats since 2007 has taken this country to the edge of a fiscal and economic precipice.
Tom Blumer
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/its-the-spending-stupid/
11) Central planning can be described as…
Central planners in the days of the Soviet Union had to set over 24 million prices. Nobody is capable of setting and changing 24 million prices in a way that will direct resources and output in an efficient manner.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/amateurs-outdoing-professionals.html
12) Central planning is like…
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Optional-Essays-HOOVER-PUBLICATION/dp/0817992626
13) The mortgage crisis is like…
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
F.A. Hayek
http://mises.org/daily/3940
14) The federal stimulus is like…
Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they preempt.
Thomas Sowell
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2010/07/27/how_smart_are_we
15) Government regulations are like…
Across America, regulatory policies are actively inhibiting the economic activity that produces revenues for the government. The only way to change that is to lift the burden of regulation.
J.E. Dyer
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/07/06/we-have-a-regulation-problem-not-a-revenue-problem/
16) Listening to politicians lecture businessmen…
Today, in the Twenty-First Century… the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages.
George Reisman
Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pepperdine University
[Link]
17) The government spending money is like..
Supporting failed programs is moral vanity.
Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/261532/impervious-evidence-mona-charen
18) Noteworthy recent cuts in federal spending
Despite repeated warnings by most mainstream economists that cutting government spending at the conclusion of WW 2 would bring back the Great Depression, the Congress dramatically lowered government spending between 1945 and 1950.
Dom Armentano
Professor Emeritus at the University of Hartford (CT)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/armentano-d/armentano25.1.html
19) The government bailouts are like…
The unintended consequences of each market intervention are economic distortions, which generate further interventions to correct them.
Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. on H.A. Hayek
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-nd-gd.html
20) Watching congress debate entitlement spending…
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
Various (Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexander Fraser Tytler)
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
21) The government’s approach to regulation…
[T]he sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.
The Alabama Constitution as quoted by
Ezra Taft Benson in The Proper Role of Government
http://www.zionsbest.com/proper_role.html
22) Special interests engage politicians instead of voters…
Interest groups tend to lobby the government to redistribute money to them because people face concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.
Wallace Forman
http://www.commentarius.org/?tag=concentrated-benefits-and-diffuse-costs
23) The big spenders in congress…
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
Mark Twain, Notebook, 1902.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Tax.html
24) Congress passing bills into law and a misprint in a health book
Without prudent regulation… the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will result in unintended and devastating consequences to manufacturers of children’s products that pose little to no risk of lead exposure to children.
Petition, Handmade Toy Alliance (HTA)
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/economicimpactsofcpsia/
25) The mortgage crisis was like…
Mortgage lending took that “reckless and unsustainable turn” because of regulation – regulation driven by liberals and progressives, not free-market “deregulators.” Pushed hard by politicians and community activists, the regulators systematically and deliberately altered financially sound lending practices.
Stan Liebowitz
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_S6MsT275m3Ybbsm3TdxIxN
26) A politician who has had a modern education in history
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.phnet.fi/public/mamaa1/mencken.htm
27) The mortgage crisis is like…
Anyone who has spent any time mentoring or working with poor families is familar with the maddening sensation of watching someone you care about make a devastating decision that no middle class person in their right mind would ever assent to.
Megan Mcardle writing as Jane Galt
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005450.html
28) Embracing central planning and trying to comprehend Jersey Shore…
People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together… [F]or the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.
Thomas Sowell
http://freedomkeys.com/pricecontrols7.htm
29) When an administration says that it won’t raise my taxes…
The power to tax involves the power to destroy.
Chief Justice John Marshall
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-power-to-tax-is-the-power-to-destroy/
30) Congress spending money is like…
The individual legislator must remember that the elixir for all that ills is economic growth. And economic growth is spurred by low taxes, limited regulation, equitable justice, and the ability to raise capital.
Curt Leonard
http://www.jamesmadison.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf
31) When you are in a congressional hearing…
There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture
out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/twainlife/twain.html
On p. 208 you can read this quote in context.
32) Centralized planning is just like…
…Friedrich Hayek explained how societies, like markets, develop organically into what he called “spontaneous orders.” No single person possesses anything close to the invisible collective knowledge held by the society as a whole.
Jonah Goldberg
http://old.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200408200923.asp
33) Congress spending money is…
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Robert Heinlein
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
34) Being Barney Frank
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
Ayn Rand
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6136
35) Congressional spending reminds me of…
Government spending is a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs… Since the tax burden is spread among millions of taxpayers, the additional tax burden created by each new program is difficult for people to quantify….
Carrie Lukas
http://www.iwf.org/files/208b234094c08b442dfd810d3b28c305.pdf
36) Centralized planning is like…
Perhaps the most important point of all is that government officials operate in a fog … it is important to remember that the information that government has is often no better than what is available to private individuals.
Arnold Kling
http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11990
37) Being in congress is kind of like…
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
Available at http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=138
38) Raising taxes to fix the deficit…
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Winston Churchill
http://www.safehaven.com/article/20767/standing-in-a-bucket-trying-to-pull-yourself-up-by-the-handle
39) Collecting taxes is like…
If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good. … wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and … the thing that makes you rich doesn’t make me poor…”
P.J. O’Rourke in Eat the Rich
http://solohq.solopassion.com/Articles/Cresswell/Loving_Wealth.shtml
40) Congress is very much like…
There is nothing quite so depressing as waking up to face a day when you know that you are going to have to deal with a government office or bureaucrat.
Neal Boortz
41) Centralized planning is like…
Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.
Yiddish Proverb
42) Central planning is like a box of chocolates…
But the knowledge that has consequences in the world includes vast amounts of knowledge that I call mundane knowledge and probably no one on earth has 1% of that knowledge. Yet that knowledge is consequential, and it includes knowledge that is in no way intellectually challenging but is nevertheless crucial.
Thomas Sowell
http://bejohngalt.com/2010/02/thomas-sowell-intellectuals-leading-us-off-the-cliff/
43) What young people know about congress, part 1
44) What young people know about congress, part 2
45) The Debt Baby: Introduction
Today, 40 cents of every dollar the federal government spends is borrowed — much of it from foreign nations whose interests are not our own. The national debt exceeds $14 trillion, which translates to roughly $50,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
Ted Cruz
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/271265/time-leadership-spending-ted-cruz
46) The Debt Baby: Scary Ceiling
Today, 40 cents of every dollar the federal government spends is borrowed — much of it from foreign nations whose interests are not our own. The national debt exceeds $14 trillion, which translates to roughly $50,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
Ted Cruz
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/271265/time-leadership-spending-ted-cruz
47) How congress decides what to buy for us.
Government spending is a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs… Since the tax burden is spread among millions of taxpayers, the additional tax burden created by each new program is difficult for people to quantify….
Carrie Lukas
http://www.iwf.org/files/208b234094c08b442dfd810d3b28c305.pdf
Here is the original, lame table with links I created, on the odd chance that someone linked to it.
Thanks, looks great, I appreciate the plug there. Keep up the great work.
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