Re: Dickens on the Laffer Curve
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) writes: >Taking the example of Stalin's war on the peasantry in general and the >Ukraine in particular, we see that massive confiscations of income at marginal >rates >well in excess of 100% certainly detered economic activity, to put it rather >mildly. Mancur Olson claims in his book Power and Prosperity that the marginal income tax rate was effectively zero. The effective taxes were near 100% of what a typical worker in any given position could produce, but workers producing more than expected kept all the unexpected wealth. That created stronger incentives on each person to work hard than in the west, strong incentives to prevent others from working hard, and some incentives for each industry to deceive the system about what a typical worker can produce. There were few problems with the total amount of economic activity under Stalin. The problems were with the goals which that activity satisfied. -- -- Peter McCluskey | Everyone complains about the laws of physics, but no www.bayesianinvestor.com| one does anything about them. - from Schild's Ladder
Re: Laffer Curve
In a message dated 4/22/05 9:55:30 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > istribution. The real question, according to > McCloskey, is not why does Germany have only 75% of US per capital > GDP, but why > does Bangledesh have only 5% of US per capital GDP. People in the countries > with the top 10 or 15 per capita incomes in the world are fabulously > wealthy even I believe that the reasons the Bangledeshi have been looted is explained largely by this image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v387/elkgrovedan/Beetle_Bailey.gif> compared to half a century ago, to say nothing about compared to before 1700. > People living in the poorest parts of the world, by contrast, are still > poor by pre-1700 standards. Sadly, as suggested in Carrol Quigley's epic history tome, Tragedy and Hope: The History of Our World, despotism has persisted in China for nearly 5000 years, though strains of free market are enriching a select few today. Perhaps those on the subcontinent will see the light? The Beetle Bailey cartoon offers a surprisingly good insight. I've never heard any refer to China as a subcontinent, only India. It's funny, during the 1970s people commonly attributed the excellent rates of economic grown in Taiwan and Hong Kong to the "Confusion work ethic" while completely ignoring the poverty of the hundreds of millions of Chinese right next door in Communist China. I've worried about the fate of Hong Kong ever since Britain gave it to the communists. One of my brothers, the Director or International Taxation for Cisco Systems, assures me that Hong Kong has been doing just fine and that the communists have pretty much kept their hands of off the goose that lays the golden eggs. [Metaphor mine, not his.] The Chinese communists seemed to have taken seriously some lessons from their own early experiment with political liberalization in the late 1970s and the Soviet example. In the Chinese case, people who could speak out but not engage in generalized economic activity spent much of their energy simply speaking out against the communists. In the case of the Soviets, people who could speak out and vote but not engage in liberalized economic activity spoke out against the communists and then voted the communists out of power. The Chinese communists in the 1990s seemed to take care to allow some economic liberalization but not political liberalization, with the result that people turned their energies on enriching themselves rather than criticizing the communists. (It's also possible that the Chinese communists took a lesson from the early Soviet Union's NEP, characterized by Bukharin's famous admonition to "enrich yourself," which resurrected the Russian economy after war and War Communism killed it.) I doubt that we'll see free markets in China, since we don't really see free markets anywhere in the world today. I've heard though that in the late 1990s the Chinese communists started reneging on the 99-year farm leases, so I don't know if they'll be able to resist the temptation to use their power to try to control everything. Still, the last I heard, the Chinese economy was still experiencing growth in real per capital GDP exclusive of military spending, so maybe the of Soviet collapse still provides a sufficiently strong lesson in what not to do if you want to stay in power. David
Re: Dickens on the Laffer Curve
Since the postmodern left took over history from the New Left, the history profession could use a bit of that old document bias. David In a message dated 4/22/05 10:19:21 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Yes. It suffers a bit from the historians' "If you don't have a document, it didn't happen" bias, but it's good. Anton Sherwood wrote: > Speaking of Communism, is "The Black Book" worth having? > I saw several copies yesterday at a secondhand store in San Leandro, > marked about $8 if memory serves. > > -- > Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
Re: Dickens on the Laffer Curve
Yes. It suffers a bit from the historians' "If you don't have a document, it didn't happen" bias, but it's good. Anton Sherwood wrote: Speaking of Communism, is "The Black Book" worth having? I saw several copies yesterday at a secondhand store in San Leandro, marked about $8 if memory serves. -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/ -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://econlog.econlib.org "[M]uch of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle. But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's development? Yes, from the many useless studies that show a correlation between the behavior of parents and the behavior of their biological children and conclude that parenting shapes the child, as if there were no such thing as heredity." --Steven Pinker, *The Blank Slate*
Re: Laffer Curve
Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED]: >istribution. The real question, according to > McCloskey, is not why does Germany have only 75% of US per capital > GDP, but why > does Bangledesh have only 5% of US per capital GDP. People in the countries > with the top 10 or 15 per capita incomes in the world are fabulously > wealthy even I believe that the reasons the Bangledeshi have been looted is explained largely by this image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v387/elkgrovedan/Beetle_Bailey.gif> compared to half a century ago, to say nothing about compared to before 1700. > People living in the poorest parts of the world, by contrast, are still > poor by pre-1700 standards.Sadly, as suggested in Carrol Quigley's epic history tome, Tragedy and Hope: The History of Our World, despotism has persisted in China for nearly 5000 years, though strains of free market are enriching a select few today. Perhaps those on the subcontinent will see the light? >
