Your Economic Reputation

During a recent Congressional testimony, John Durham was accused of having a sullied reputation because of his association with President Trump.  His full response is the closing statement of today’s podcast.  For now, I will summarize the part that gives its name to today’s podcast, “I’m perfectly comfortable with my reputation.” Are you comfortable with your economic reputation?  How are you using your freedom to produce and distribute goods and services to your neighbors to show you love them?  As I wrote in my little book Economics and the Christian Worldview, “If you love your neighbor, you will supply her with products and services she demands.  If you love yourself, you will make a profit while doing so.” Trying to make everyone happy is a fool’s errand.  We all must make decisions in life that determine our economic contribution to those around us.    Lies, Damned Lies, and Bidenomics Economist Ronald Coase said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”  Advisors to President Biden actually wrote a speech about how GOOD Bidenomics is.  A reader of the Wall Street Journal wrote in the comments section: “Let’s go Brandenomics” Thomas Carlyle called Economics the Dismal Science, probably in response to Robert Malthus writing in 1798, that we would run out of food and starve.  He was wrong, and every Malthusian since him has been wrong, which has led to my favorite question to ask of groups: Complete the sentence, “Life was better on earth before we ran out of:” There is no answer.  We’ve never run out of anything, but that does not stop current day Malthusians from trying to convince us we’re going to. But economics is not dismal.  It is powerful.  It is a set of rules - I would argue - that are handed down from God.  He gave us the freedom to use our mental acuity to do math and read two-dimensional graphs, so we can have the social science we call Economics.  But, as I’ve often said, “There’s nothing created good by God, that some human has not used for his own cause.  Freedom can be mis-used.  Such is today’s Bidenomics. One of my favorite economics writers is Greg Ip at the WSJ.  He wrote recently, about President Biden, “In a memo released this week, his political strategists Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon write that Biden “faced an immediate economic crisis when he took office” in January 2021.  Actually, he didn’t.” End of quote from Greg Ip.   Absolute Economic Truth “All truth is relative” is an absolute statement.  So there has to be some truth out there, let’s go find some.  In the post enlightenment era, relativism has taken over.  They are trying to define freedom as doing whatever you want.  A person is supposedly free to say, “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body.”  And we’re supposed to not only accept it, but praise it.  Carl Trueman tracks the history of that foolish claim, back to Rousseau in his very good book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.  I published a podcast, summarizing that idea, titled Expressive Individualism, it’s podcast #151.  The simple point is this: We can’t all have our own truth, nor our own economics.  There HAVE TO BE objective measures. During a rally with union members in Philadelphia recently, President Biden said it was “time to end the trickle-down economics theory.”  Yes, I suppose it is, because according to Thomas Sowell it does not exist.  He offered a reward to anyone who could cite the author of the theory.  He got no takers.  It doesn’t exist.  It’s simply a straw-man created by opponents of economic growth. During the pandemic, I built a golf course in the pasture behind our house.  It’s not very sophisticated.  And the rules vary from day to day, depending on who is playing.  I guess you could call it a “relativism set of rules.”  When a grandson is having a bad day, I even let him pick up his ball and throw it.  We don’t even keep score.  But, it’s our own golf course in our own pasture.