Francisco Azuero's List: Rentas

• The authors, political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of  the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic  struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s  were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but  rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored  the very rich.

• Natural resources create corruption, as groups compete for who controls the tap.  That is exactly what happened in Greece when it got access to huge Euro-loans  and subsidies. The natural entrepreneurship of Greeks was channeled in the wrong  direction — in a competition for government funds and contracts.
• To be sure, it wasn’t all squandered. Greece had a real modernization spurt in  the 1990s. But after 2002, it put its feet up, thinking it had arrived, and too  much “Euro-oil” from the European Union went back to financing a corrupt,  patrimonial system whereby politicians dispensed government jobs and projects to  localities in return for votes.
• This reinforced a huge welfare state, where young people dreamed of a cushy  government job and everyone from cabdrivers to truckers to pharmacists to  lawyers was allowed to erect barriers to entry that artificially inflated  prices.

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• The Government Accountability Office discovered that Solyndra had been  permitted to bypass required steps in the government loan guarantee process. The  Energy Department’s inspector general criticized the department for not  maintaining e-mails that discussed how the loan guarantee winners were chosen.  

  • otro Agro Ingreso Seguro?

• Late last month, Solyndra announced that it was ceasing operations, laying  off its 1,100 employees. The Department of Energy placed the wrong bet,  potentially losing the taxpayers half-a-billion dollars.

• All of this is not to say that the government shouldn’t be doing what it can  to promote clean energy. It is to say that the government isn’t very good when  it tries to directly create private-sector jobs.

• In 2009, Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School published a useful book  called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” He found that for each instance in which  the government has successfully promoted entrepreneurial activity, there is a  pile of instances in which it failed.

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• Adam Smith, Cobden believed in a market theory of wages.[19] He maintained that eliminating the tariffs would lead to  more imports
• Cobden turned to the Tories, decried them for legislating only for themselves,  demanded that they give up their "feudal privileges," get out of their  "mercantile age," and asserted that "If you had the abundance of capital  employed on your farms, and cultivated the soil with the same skill that the  manufacturers conduct their business, you would not have population enough to  cultivate the land."[21] The speech reduced  Peel to silence. He crumpled up his notes, turned to his political ally Sidney  Herbert and sighed, "You must answer this for I cannot."[22]
• advanced by Stigler, that the repeal was the natural result of the political  eclipse of the aristocracy and the emergence of the manufacturing classes
• Indeed, Schonhardt-Bailey points out that that the vast majority of members in  the 1841–1846 parliament were from the landed classes

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• He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest  lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is  fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a  multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the  majority truly mobilizes against them.
• To put it another way, says Fukuyama, America’s collection of minority  special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever,  while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than  ever
• The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube  Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises  with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.

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• Many of these market-oriented writers emphasize that being pro-market is not the  same as being pro-business
• Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago published an influential book, “A  Capitalism for the People,” that took aim at crony capitalism