Author Archives: Tom Mullen

A recession by any other name

The Biden administration says two straight quarters of negative GDP is much ado about nothing. Like accusations of Hero’s lost chastity in Shakespeare’s play, Biden’s economy is falsely accused of being in recession, the president’s spokespeople say.

Biden’s defenders in the media concur. The Hill informs us that two straight quarters of negative GDP defines a recession in many countries but, contrary to public opinion, not in the United States. Here, there is no recession until the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee – the “experts” – declare one.

The committee looks at a broad range of economic indicators to determine whether the economy is in recession. While declining GDP is one factor, it is not the only factor. And the chief reason the NBER has not declared a recession, according to the Biden administration and others, is the “red hot jobs market.”

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman helpfully tweeted a chart showing the relative number of jobs “added” to the economy during the presidencies of Presidents Trump and Biden.

It is true that unemployment is near historic, pre-pandemic lows at 3.6%. And although that doesn’t count the vast number of people who have left the workforce due to retirement or discouragement, the administration can still point to over 2.7 million jobs created in 2022, according to the BLS jobs report.

But arguing there is no recession because new jobs are being created rather misses the point.

Jobs are not an end in itself. The purpose of creating jobs is to produce products. One would only want to create more jobs if it would lead to producing more products. Creating more jobs to produce the same or less products wastes scarce resources.

Just imagine a manager triumphantly reporting to the owner of a company that, although production decreased in the last two quarters, the lower output was accompanied by higher payroll costs. He’d be fired immediately; perhaps referred for a mental health evaluation.

What makes a company profitable is to satisfy demand for its product with as few employees and other costs as possible. The wealth of an economy is no different. As fewer employees are needed to produce each product, more are available to produce others.

Not only does this contribute to greater wealth for the economy as a whole, but it also represents higher worker productivity and thereby higher wages.

This is why tax incentives to corporations tied to the number of jobs they’ll create is economically idiotic. While in most cases, companies will take the tax breaks and only create the jobs they need, leaving the politicians and their constituents to complain the jobs never materialized, it is really the complaining that is erroneous. Had the company created more jobs than necessary to produce its products, it would by definition be wasting resources and thereby making the population poorer in the aggregate.

It is also important to remember that what is produced matters as much as how much. A population does not become wealthier merely because the total amount of goods produced rises. It only becomes wealthier if more of what consumers value is produced.

Value can only be determined if consumers are free to refuse to purchase the increased output. Only by freely choosing whether to purchase at all and at what maximum price can the value of the new output can be determined.

This is why output resulting from government spending is at best of unknown and often of no value whatsoever. Since taxpayers have neither the opportunity to decline to purchase nor to set their own maximum price, there is no mechanism to determine the value of this output.

That government spending, currently at massive levels, is counted in GDP and GDP is still declining accentuates the fact that Americans are getting poorer in the aggregate. Not only are they producing less, but a significant percentage of what they are producing – like missiles sent to Ukraine – provide no value to American consumers.

Government bureaucrats can arbitrarily define the word “recession” any way they wish. But creating less wealth by any other name would smell as foul.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

We are at war and I don’t mean in Ukraine Part 2: “Our Democracy”

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“Every revolution starts in the minds of the people” says the tagline of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. This was most directly inspired by a statement written by John Adams in 1818:

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”

There are many other ways to say this. One is, “Ideas matter.” My 2015 book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? was about precisely this. Ideas.

As I wrote last week, we are at war. It is being fought in the political and media sphere, meaning it is, for the moment, a war of ideas.

That’s not to say our enemies are not willing to enforce their ideas with violence. To a certain extent, they are doing so already. If you are an employer in the healthcare industry, for example, you must require your employees to be vaccinated. It is the “law,” as written by an executive branch agency called the Department of Health and Human Services, which along with myriad other executive branch regulatory agencies make most of the laws U.S. citizens live under.

So much for the legislative power being delegated to Congress.

Many under the spell of progressive brainwashing might ask, “But how is this violence?” It is important to remember that every law, regulation, or other government edict is a threat of violence. That’s not “extremism;” it’s the truth. Anyone who doubts that should simply choose not to obey one.

Pick the most insignificant amongst them, like a traffic ticket. Sure, the first response to your disobedience might merely be a letter demanding some money. But ignore the letters long enough, fail to show up for the inevitable court date, and men with guns will eventually arrive at your door to take you away or kill you if you resist.

This is the nature of government. To deny it is to depart from reality.

Deep down, everyone knows this, and our enemies know we know this. That is why it is so important for them to obtain, at the very least, our tacit consent. Thus, the massive propaganda drive in the media, the deplatforming of dissidents, and the scapegoating of “extremists.”

They need to control the way people think because they cannot overcome the whole population by force. Neither can they completely brainwash the entire population. They only need to do what they have succeeded in doing so far, which is to recruit a significant minority of the population to actively propagandize for them and rely on another significant minority of the population to “go along to get along.”

That leaves the last significant minority of the population, those willing to actively resist, to battle the government, the media, corrupted business interests, and most of their fellow citizens.

Needless to say, with this monumental task in front of them, it is important that the resistors have the right ideas. At the very least, they must avoid the enemy’s false premises. Otherwise, like an army that has been lured into advancing in the center without protecting its flank, the resistance ends up right where its enemies want them.

Our enemies have succeeded in poisoning the resistance with many false premises which need to be rejected or we will find ourselves, like the Romans at Cannae or Washington at Brandywine, rushing headlong forward only to be surrounded and destroyed.

One false premise accepted by virtually everyone is that the United States is “a democracy.” Calling the American system of government “a democracy” is like looking at a birthday cake and calling it “an egg.”

Yes, democracy is one of the ingredients in the U.S. Constitution, but it is not the only or even the main ingredient. It is more accurate to say there are a few democratic elements in the Constitution and the rest is designed to protect us from democracy.

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We Are at War Table of Contents

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

We are at war and I don’t mean in Ukraine

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Everyone knows there is something wrong. America and much of the world is now firmly into its third year of unrelenting “emergencies,” real and imagined, that forbid them from returning to the quiet comfort of their previous lives. For twenty-eight months they have been told they must sacrifice their personal interests for the government-media complex defined “greater good.”

It started with “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” a reasonable-sounding request in the face of a supposedly novel respiratory virus. One hundred years of science had already confirmed quarantining asymptomatic people is ineffective, but it was only going to be fifteen days.

It is only now, after the fifteen days turned into fifteen months or more in some places, after mask and vaccine mandates were enforced long after it was obvious both are ineffective, after the demand for sacrifice seamlessly metamorphized from “flattening the curve” to “slowing the spread” to “defending Ukraine” to “climate change emergency,” that a critical mass of people have finally realized they are being had.

If it were just your money they were after, it would be bad enough. And make no mistake, they do want that. Trillions have been fleeced from the many and handed to the few during this long con. But it isn’t just your money the perpetrators are after. Neither is it merely your freedom, although there is no “life” beyond biological existence without it.

No, the architects of this dystopia aren’t satisfied to loot your wealth and crush your liberty. Even controlling your physical movements isn’t enough. They want to control your thoughts, what many people would call your “soul.”

It’s not as if they make any secret of this. What else can the obsession with stamping out “misinformation” mean? They do not want you exposed to information contrary to their ends because you may think the wrong thoughts.

You may question whether the vaccines really are “safe and effective,” whether the war in Ukraine really is any of your concern (or “unprovoked,” for that matter), whether there really is a “climate change emergency” that demands you make enormous sacrifices to solve, or whether those sacrifices would really make a difference if there were.

There are only two possible reasons why information questioning any of the above narratives would need to be kept from you. Either the claims being made aren’t true and would not hold up to challenges or you are incapable of discerning truth from falsehood. If the former is true, there are criminal trials that need to be held. If the latter, then why this anguished cry about dangers to “our democracy?”

The question is constantly raised whether the architects of this assault on civilization are evil or merely misguided and incompetent. Does it matter? Is there even a clear distinction between the two? Was Vladimir Lenin evil or merely misguided? Did he not believe he was acting in the best interests of his fellow man and merely had to “break a few (million) eggs to make an omelet?” Can we not say the same for Stalin, Hitler, or Mao?

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We Are at War Table of Contents

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Schizophrenic Empire Stumbles into Saudi

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In 2020, candidate Joe Biden made it as clear as Joe Biden can make anything that the days of looking past the atrocities committed by the Saudi Arabian government would be over should he be elected. An October 2, 2020 post on his campaign website read,

“Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

Less than two years later, President Biden is scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia in hopes of persuading the kingdom he disparaged as a candidate to increase oil production. Biden is suffering the worst approval ratings of any president in recent memory due to runaway inflation, in part the result of his own energy policies.

The trip follows Biden’s attempt to bully U.S. oil producers into boosting production, something they rightly pointed out is being strangled by the president’s own policies in the short term and economically unviable in the long term given a sitting U.S. president who has vowed to put them out of business.

Meanwhile, the president’s supporters are demanding Biden try to keep his campaign promises regarding Saudi Arabia. In an article in Foreign Policy, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy demands Biden procure real concessions from the kingdom on human rights abuses. His screed is emblematic of the departure from reality that pervades Washington on all issues, foreign and domestic.

Remember, Biden is not traveling to Saudi to offer the kingdom help. He is asking for help from them. What leverage does Murphy believe the president holds over a government that not long ago wouldn’t even answer his phone calls?

Murphy claims, “Over and over again, the Saudi government acts in ways that are directly contrary to U.S. security interests.” But he gives no examples of legitimate security interests that have anything to do with Saudi Arabia. The bulk of the complaints against the kingdom relate to its human rights abuses, which, however deserving of condemnation, do not threaten the security of American citizens in any way.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

SCOTUS Has Provided a Roadmap to Civility and Peace

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The recent SCOTUS decisions on vaccine mandates, gun regulation, abortion, and the EPA are flawed from a strict constructionist perspective. Rather than striking down 20th century theories underpinning decisions which unconstitutionally expanded the powers of the executive branch and the federal government in general, respectively, the Court instead tried to set limits to the ways in which those doctrines could be applied.

Still, insofar as these decisions represent a change in direction, rather than the last word on these issues, they may provide a roadmap out of the political acrimony that is tearing American society apart.

The legislative power

In ruling against President Biden’s vaccine mandates and the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan,” the Court makes reference to a long-ignored principle called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which posits that Congress has no authority under the Constitution to delegate its legislative power to the executive.

In other words, when the Constitution says, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives,” it means no legislative powers are vested in the executive.

Strictly applied, this principle would mean striking down the New Deal, root and branch. Although there were examples of limited rulemaking by executive branch regulatory agencies prior to the 1930s, it was FDR’s coup that created and empowered to legislate the myriad “alphabet soup agencies” within the federal government.

Rather than such a radical change, the Court merely set limits to how far beyond legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president regulatory agencies can go in making legally enforceable rules themselves.

The “glass half empty” way to look at this is that the Court has further established that the executive branch can legislate – just “not too much.” The opposite view, as expressed by constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman, is that these precedents represent the first indications of the Court turning away from 84 years of bad precedent and back towards a constitutionally limited government.

(For my discussions on this subject with Gutzman, see Episodes 1, 28, and 94 of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom).

The significance of this question cannot be understated. Garet Garret called the New Deal a “revolution” for good reason – it effectively transformed the U.S. government from its previous republican form to a new, soft form of fascism, with an executive branch issuing fiat commands instead of a legislature representing a diverse constituency writing laws.

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Instead of rioting over Roe, Democrats should bring a case on immigration

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Roe vs. Wade came as a shock, even to people who believe the power to regulate abortion is reserved to the states. Lost in the triumphant celebrations of the decision on one side and the abject horror and hysteria on the other is the fact states like my own (New York) are now less restricted in liberalization of their abortion laws.

The 1973 decision didn’t just strike down state laws prohibiting abortion. It wrote new ones, something no court, state or federal, has any legitimate power to do. This is the other edge of the sword in allowing federal judges to override state law. They have taken the power away from the states forever.

The Court did two things in its Roe decision. First, it implicitly affirmed the Incorporation Doctrine, the legal theory that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” most of the first ten amendments to the Constitution to apply against the states. I recently had the opportunity to discuss this with constitutional scholar and historian Kevin Gutzman on an episode of my podcast (neither of us believe the doctrine is valid).

The Incorporation Doctrine was necessary to arrive at the original Roe decision. It provides the basis for a federal court to strike down state laws. Without this doctrine, the Bill of Rights is only applicable to the federal government, leaving protection of individual rights to the bills of rights in the state constitutions.

Second, the Court narrowed interpretation of the Incorporation Doctrine to those rights specifically enumerated in the Constitution or “rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” The Court did not find any evidence of an American tradition of a right to abortion, but rather a tradition of precisely the opposite: the longstanding tradition of states prohibiting abortion before Roe.

Note that this is not a finding that no right to abortion should exist. It is merely a finding that protecting this right, if it does exist, is not a power delegated to the federal government.

Neither is regulating immigration, according to James Madison, the man who wrote the words of the Constitution. In his Virginia Resolution of 1798, in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, he wrote,

That the General Assembly doth particularly protest against the palpable and alarming infractions of the constitution, in the two late cases of the “alien and sedition acts,” passed at the last session of Congress; the first of which exercises a power no where delegated to the federal government;

Like Roe vs. Wade, the federal government’s power to regulate immigration was simply “discovered” by the Supreme Court in a decision at least as spurious as Roe. There are no words in the Constitution indicating this power is delegated to the federal government.

Proponents sometimes point to the naturalization power as somehow implying a power to regulate immigration. But this is ridiculous. Naturalization concerns only the power to determine who becomes a citizen of the United States. It has nothing to do with regulating who can or cannot cross the borders of any of the states.

Others point to the 1808 clause as meaning the federal government was delegated the power after 1808. While this argument is slightly more plausible, both it and the naturalization clause were written by Madison himself, who nevertheless stated regulating immigration was a power “no where delegated.”

Jefferson added in his own Kentucky Resolution of the same year that the 1808 clause was added merely out of “abundant caution,” not a grant of this new power after 1808.

As there has been no subsequent amendment to the Constitution delegating this power to the federal government, it must remain with the states.

While the Incorporation Doctrine would not apply as this is not a dispute regarding the federal Bill of Rights, it is noteworthy that at the time of the decision, there was no tradition or history of the federal government regulating immigration. On the contrary, the case in which the Court concluded this was a federal power concerned a dispute over the way the California State immigration officers were regulating immigration.

If there has been a federal power as contentious as regulating abortion, it has been regulation of immigration. Cities run by liberal politicians have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” in defiance of federal immigration laws. States like Florida and Texas, run by conservative politicians, have taken to shipping “undocumented immigrants” sent to their states either back to their point of entry or to Washington, D.C. in protest.

This is no way to conduct civil society.

The rancor over immigration is the predictable result of the federal government exercising authority never delegated to it by the states. The Post Office may be abysmal, but it doesn’t inspire the hatred federal immigration enforcement does because it is recognized as a power the states agreed to delegate to the federal government.

If either Democrats or Republicans brought a case on immigration, it would test the Court’s conviction to its constitutional principles. Immigration checks all the boxes of the Court’s own reasoning for a power improperly usurped by the federal government through a previous SCOTUS decision. In Dobbs, the Court wrote, “This Court cannot bring about the permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settlement and telling the people to move on.”

In the cases of both abortion and immigration, that is precisely what the Court did. Overturning Chy Lung vs. Freeman would right precisely the same wrong.

It is not as if federal regulation of immigration is working now. Under both liberal and conservative presidents, the process to immigrate legally has been woefully deficient, resulting in millions of immigrants entering the country illegally or (more often) staying long past their visas expire. There is every reason to believe the states would do a better job at this and could also tailor their immigration laws to be as strict or lenient as they wish.

To those who find the consequentialist arguments of Chy Lung vs. Freeman compelling, there is an opportunity to offer an amendment to the Constitution to properly delegate this power to the federal government. This would not simply be a dead-on-arrival letter. It would give Americans across the political spectrum a chance for input on the language of such an amendment and the limits, or lack thereof, on the power.

If no amendment agreeable to the requisite number of states can be written, then the process of trying will have proven this is a power which must be reserved to the states. If an amendment can be ratified, then the federal government can go on sucking at regulating immigration, just as it does at delivering the mail, without risking a civil war.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Tom Mullen’s First Inaugural Address (Excerpt on Regulation)

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…There has been a lot of speculation in the media about how I will direct the various regulatory agencies as far as lifting burdensome regulations or imposing new ones. I have here in my hand a copy of the U.S. Constitution – the only “deal” ever made between the people of the various states regarding a federal government with any constitutional validity – and it says, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

Now, for many decades, there have been various agencies in the executive branch of the government exercising this legislative power in defiance of the Constitution. We call it “regulation” instead of “legislation” so as to deceive ourselves and others that what the EPA, SEC, or FDA does is not legislating and therefore constitutional. But any government agent writing rules that either prohibit or compel behavior with the force of law is legislating.

If we truly believe government only draws it just powers from the consent of the governed, then surely, we can see that this is a problem. The only place anyone ever consented to the federal government having any power at all was in ratification of the Constitution and its various amendments. And that consent was only obtained with great effort and solemn assurances that the government would not exceed the powers delegated to it.

Nowhere in the Constitution is the president or any member of the executive branch delegated power to legislate. Neither can the Congress simply delegate this power to the executive through legislation. Any alteration in the distribution of powers in the Constitution must be made by constitutional amendment. The sole power granted the executive concerning the legislative process is the veto, which itself can be overridden by Congress with sufficient support among its members.

Therefore, any regulation written by an employee of the executive branch, or anyone else, that is not subsequently passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, and signed into law by the president, represents rule without the consent of the governed.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

No, Mussolini didn’t define fascism as the “merger of state and corporate power”

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I hear it all the time. “Mussolini defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power.” It has been suggested that modern American corporations like Disney, Meta (Facebook) or Alphabet (Google) acting in ways that align with the federal government’s wishes constitute fascism, based on this “merger of power” definition.

Here is the problem. Not only did Mussolini never define fascism that way, but he said almost precisely the opposite. “Merger” implies cooperation, partnership, or a meeting of the minds between equals. Fascism bore no resemblance to this. Mussolini’s actual words were, “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others.”

What was a fascist “corporation?”

When Mussolini used the word, “corporation,” he didn’t refer to a single company like Disney or Alphabet. Rather, each corporation was a cartel formed from all companies in a particular economic sector. Mussolini divided the economy into twenty-two such “corporations,” which were run by members of the Fascist Party appointed by Mussolini himself. As John Gunther wrote in Inside Europe,

“Every corporation contains three supervising delegates of the Fascist party; each corporation is headed by a member of the cabinet or an under-secretary, appointed by Mussolini. The deputies, moreover, are “voted” into he chamber from an approved list chosen by the Grand Fascist Council; electors are privileged simply to say Yes or No to the whole list. Mussolini’s two general “elections” have been grossly dull affairs.

The state, being supreme, regulates economy for its exclusive benefit. Fascism may be, spiritually, “an attempt to make Romans out of Italians,” but physically it made Italy a prison.”[1]

This was not a “merger” of powers. It was the state exercising absolute power over the economy. It was autocratic rule over private businesses by the government.

So, why is this misquote and misunderstanding of fascism so popular? Because it coincides with a general tendency towards the “anti-capitalist mentality” Von Mises described and which is again ascendant across the political spectrum in America.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

[1] Gunther, John. Inside Europe. Harper and Brothers, New York and London, 1938. Pg. 252

Which Presidents Increased Spending the Fastest?

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“Can you believe this spending with a REPUBLICAN in the White House????”

I’ve heard it my entire adult life, starting during the Reagan years. I’m not sure how many times Republicans have to increase spending twice as fast as their Democratic predecessors before people get used to the idea that this is what Republican presidents do, regardless of which party controls Congress.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The Republican Party was born out of the ashes of the Whigs, whose stated goal was to expand the range of things the federal government spent money on. Before the Civil War, most roads were privately owned. Not just privately built; privately owned. Taxpayers didn’t contribute a cent towards them.

Not only did the Republican Party Sovietize the road system, they did the same with railroads and all sorts of other areas of life. Before FDR, it was Republicans who established most new federal departments.

Today, the government has Sovietized the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and other treatments, a precedent established under the last Republican president.

When you consider the actual records of Republican presidents from Lincoln through Trump, it turns out that Harding and Coolidge were the real “RINOs.”

In the post-WWII era, spending almost always goes up (not counting the obvious decrease right after the war – which led to an economic boom, btw). But I decided to take a look at how fast it went up during the various presidential administrations starting with JFK/LBJ. I used the following methodology:

Measure the increase in yearly federal spending for each president as a percentage of the spending in the last year of his predecessor. For example, spending was $590 billion in the last year of the Carter Administration. It was $1.06 trillion in the last year of the Reagan administration, an increase of $473.4 billion or 80.1%. That comes in at just over 10% per year on average.

You’ll never guess who grew spending at the slowest rate since 1951. Certainly not the Gipper. Nor was it either Bush. No, as a percentage of spending during his predecessor’s last year in office, the president who grew the budget at the slowest rate was Barack Obama.

I broke it all down on Episode 85 of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. I provide documentation of the outlays and receipts on the show notes page. A summary table is provide below.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/

A few notes:

All spending increases are aggregated for the full term of the presidency and then averaged. Example: to calculate President Obama’s spending increases, 2008 spending is subtracted from the spending during the last year of his presidency (2016) to arrive at an increase of $870 billion over eight years. That total is divided by 2008 spending of $2.9 trillion to arrive at the 29.2% aggregate spending increase. Spending increases for each presidency is calculated in similar fashion.

I combined the presidencies of Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon/Ford as Kennedy and Nixon both served partial terms which were completed by members of their own parties.

Calculations are made for the Trump years 2017-2020 and 2017-2019.

Spending is not adjusted for inflation. All spending is in billions

Of course, regardless of how quickly or slowly it increases, federal spending is always destructive. It’s important to remember the government has failed at every major spending initiative it has undertaken in my lifetime, whether it is military or domestic policy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Department of Education, the War on Drugs, Covid – it’s always all pain and no gain when it comes to the government. And the price just keeps going up.

Still, it is remarkable that spending goes up so much faster when a Republican is in the White House. The excuse is often made for Reagan that he had a Democratic Congress. But the Republicans controlled the Senate for 6 of Reagan’s 8 years in office, so that claim isn’t even true. The Democrats did have both houses of Congress during George H.W. Bush’s 4 years, but spending didn’t go up as fast during those years. Oops.

The other excuse often brought up in defense of profligate Republican presidents is that Congress “has the purse strings.” This is technically true, but when one looks at the spending proposed by the presidents in question and compares it to what Congress eventually appropriated, there is never much difference.

When an opposition party controls Congress, there is always some demagoguing over financially inconsequential components of the president’s proposal. See “funding Big Bird.” But in general, the executive branch proposes the spending and Congress rubber stamps it. And let’s not forget, no spending can occur without the president’s signature.

There is also some evidence that the combination of a Democratic president and Republican Congress may slow spending increases the most, but comparing spending increases during the first two years Presidents Clinton and Obama were in office (with Democratic Congresses) to spending increases over the remainder of their terms hardly provides conclusive proof.

The record does show that spending seems to grow relatively slowly with a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And since gridlock in Washington is always good, to the extent we get it, for all sorts of non-fiscal reasons, let’s hope for a Republican landslide in this year’s midterms.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why We Can’t Stand Prosperity

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“They can’t stand prosperity.” My father used to say it about his beloved Buffalo Bills during periods in the 1970s when they were competitive but couldn’t quite break into the ranks of the elite contenders. He was referring to the team’s maddening habit of ceasing to do what had previously been successful and “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

What he said of the Bills applies to Americans in general.

There is no mystery to why the United States in a matter of decades grew from a few agrarian colonies to the richest, most powerful nation in history, surpassing competitors with over a millennium head start. It was capitalism. Period.

That’s what “the land of opportunity” meant, back when America was so styled. The opportunity was economic opportunity. The million-plus wave of immigrants who came here in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries weren’t pursuing abstract notions of liberty. They were coming because there was an opportunity to make a materially better life for themselves and their families. That opportunity existed solely because America was economically freer – more “capitalist” – than the countries they left.

While America may be the most prominent example of capitalism’s success, it is by no means the only one. Indeed, history is replete with examples of economic freedom emerging, bringing with it unprecedented prosperity, and eventually being strangled by the re-emergence of state meddling.

Murray Rothbard documents this phenomenon occurring repeatedly throughout Europe in the pre-colonial period. More recently we’ve seen it in Asia, with the rise of the “Asian Tigers” in the 1990s, culminating in the rise of prosperity in China. During the same years, both Scandinavia and Canada dramatically cut taxes, regulations, and government spending to save their economies from becoming what Venezuela is today.

Throughout history, countries that freed their economies from mercantilist or socialist controls, even if not completely, have seen a dramatic reduction in poverty and rise in living standards. Nowhere is the opposite true.

Yet, in almost every case, including America, people just “can’t stand prosperity.” There is always and everywhere an instinct to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Even among Americans today who by no means consider themselves socialist, there is an inherent resistance to allowing the conditions that has made the lives they lead possible.

Why?

Ludwig Von Mises wrote an entire book exploring the reasons for the “anti-capitalistic mentality.” I believe his insights were correct, especially in in terms of academia’s resentment towards the way free markets reward less educated, “vulgar” businessmen with more wealth than they enjoy themselves.

Walter Block has done research with fellow academics indicating there is an evolved preference in humans to prefer what he calls the “direct benevolence” associated with socialism over the “indirect benevolence” of the market economy.

Then, there is the plain, old human failing called, “envy.” The market economy results in the most prosperity for the most people, but it doesn’t distribute that prosperity equally. In fact, it doesn’t “distribute” prosperity at all. It allows each individual to keep the fruits of his labor and dispose of them as he sees fit. Some people are able to produce more than others and therefore accumulate more wealth.

There are some people who simply cannot abide this. Forget that no system has ever produced economic equality, least of all socialist systems, but the fact that no one even seems to be trying to correct this unjust inequality, in the envious person’s eyes, makes him resentful of the capitalist system that allowed the rich person to accumulate so much more than he.

While the above explanations certainly provide part of the answer, I do not believe they address the primary reason so many people are resistant to economic freedom. We use reason to overcome our passions and even our evolved instincts every day. But there is one instinct, one emotion that I believe transcends all the rest in motivating us to be suspicious of freedom.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?