You hold in your hands one of the most subversive economics treatises since Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, or John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. While Marx desired to undermine the social order of free markets, property rights, and minimal government, John Tamny wants to restore what was in place before the past century’s Great Depression and two world wars. Indeed, he would strengthen the freedom-enhancing and prosperity-creating institutions and practices that flourished before these twentieth-century calamities. While Keynes wanted government to steer the economy—as a driver does an automobile (an utterly illusory goal)—through manipulations of money, interest rates, taxes, and government spending, Tamny wishes to do the opposite: slash tax rates, radically simplify the tax code, let markets set interest rates (the Federal Reserve would ultimately be consigned to the Smithsonian), institute a gold standard to stabilize our money, end government bailouts of all kinds, and cut government to the minimalist role originally envisioned by our Founders.
There are many people who share Tamny’s goals. However, he sets about his liberty revolution by unleashing a most potent weapon: this book. Tamny makes the supposedly complex, arcane, equation-dense subject of economics—a discipline that allegedly can only be mastered by a handful of brilliant high priests like Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke—into something everyone can fully understand. In spirit, Tamny does for economics what the Gutenberg printing press did for the Bible, making a previously inaccessible subject open to all. Equally important, he does to economists what Toto did to the Wizard of Oz: pulling aside the curtain to expose the fraud that has become modern economics.
Tamny understands what all too many don’t these days: We improve our standard of living by trading with one another. For instance, say you want to bake and sell cakes. You have to trade to get the ingredients, such as eggs, sugar, flour, and cream; the necessary pieces of equipment, such as an oven and a refrigerator; utensils, such as measuring spoons and cups, and on and on. Billions of such transactions take place every day. We’d still be living in caves if we didn’t trade with one another.
Barter, however, is hopelessly cumbersome. Money makes trading products, services, and financial instruments infinitely easier. Money is a claim on these things, just as a coat-check ticket at a restaurant is a claim on the coat you “deposited.” With money, investing becomes feasible on a massive scale, and it’s only through investing that we make the advances that increase the standard of living for all. Unstable money impedes trade and investment.
On subject after subject Tamny delightfully demolishes the destructive accepted wisdom of today. A few examples:
• Governments don’t create wealth. Too often they get in the way of its creation. They can seize it, spend it, and redistribute it, but they can’t produce real resources.
• Budget deficits aren’t the real problem, the level of government spending is. Whether these outlays are financed by taxes, borrowing, or central banks’ creating reserves out of thin air, the result is the same: Resources are taken away from the people who created them. The inevitable result is the waste and inefficient use of those resources, and we are the poorer for it. Milton Friedman famously said that he preferred a trillion-dollar budget that came with a big deficit than a two-trillion-dollar budget that was in balance.
• Trade is good whether transacted in our hometown, within our country, or overseas. Economists’ and politicians’ obsession with the international balance of payments is a monumentally destructive waste of time. All that counts is that trade balances globally. If you buy a pair of socks from China and the Chinese merchant then buys a share of stock in the United States, economists will fret about a trade deficit and capital account deficit, even though you got your socks and the Chinese seller got a financial asset in return. Each party gained something from the transaction.
• Saving is good. Capital creation through savings by individuals and profits from business is essential. Keynesians have the notion that savings go into a black hole and do nothing for the economy. Preposterous, Tamny rightly rejoins. Capital creators are the heroes who enable the rest of us to earn more and to get access to products like the iPod, which we could never have conceived of before entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs offered them to us in the marketplace.
• Progress requires destroying the old to make way for the new. Buggies and automobiles are an obvious example. Those of us who grew up in the world of print media have witnessed first-hand with the internet what Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction.” But the internet has also enabled millions of people to interact with one another instantly and become content creators. Journalism, information accessibility, and debate are flourishing as never before. This is the very essence of democracy.
Innovation is messy. People must experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t. As Tamny points out, we’ve had more than two thousand different auto manufacturers in the United States. This shows that the idea that the economy—if guided by the wise in government—will avoid ups and downs and booms and recessions is nonsense. Turbulence is part and parcel of progress. When governments don’t let capital go where the opportunities are, we end up less well off.
Tamny takes on many other shibboleths, pointing out, for example, that abolishing the estate tax—the purported purpose of which is to make sure that the wealth of the rich doesn’t stay concentrated—would be a highly effective tool for income redistribution. Another of his counterintuitive insights is that outsourcing is good for workers.
Here’s one that will raise hackles: Pursuing energy independence is destructive. If people outside the United States can provide energy more cheaply than we can, we should let them do so. That way we can focus our scarce capital on cutting-edge opportunities. Britain gave up trying to be “food independent” in the early 1840s, when it abolished its tariffs on food imports, the so-called Corn Laws. Workers loved the availability of cheaper food, and Britain went on to become the mightiest nation in the world, helping the Allies win the twentieth century’s two world wars, despite being dependent on food imports to survive.
Tamny’s book also, thankfully, gets matters right on exactly what inflation and deflation are. Hint: Inflation isn’t the Consumer Price Index going up. Nor are falling prices necessarily bad if they’re the result of productivity.
Commerce isn’t another form of warfare, Tamny correctly avers. Rather, commerce creates conditions for peace by breaking down barriers between peoples (you may not love your neighbor, but you sure would like to sell to him), making us all richer.
The book also puts doom-and-gloom predictors in proper perspective. No one can predict the details of a particular disaster, because there’s no way to know for sure what the relevant players will do. Take the financial crisis of 2008–2009. The housing bubble created by the Federal Reserve’s weak-dollar policy had already burst, and the economy was painfully adjusting to the fallout. What turned this U.S. disaster into a globe-girdling calamity were the steps taken by Washington policymakers. In early 2008 the U.S. Treasury Department and the Fed bailed out the creditors of Bear Stearns, a large but hardly critical Wall Street investment house. Then came the government takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Everyone then expected that Lehman Brothers, a far more consequential outfit than Bear Stearns, would receive similar treatment. Instead, it was allowed to file for bankruptcy. Washington, days later, reversed course again, taking over mammoth AIG. Markets were left with no idea what authorities would do next, and panic set in. In the months that followed no one knew which institutions would be saved and which would go under. The notorious Troubled Asset Relief Program, whereby the federal government forced equity investments on banks, whether they were weak or strong, added to the confusion. More mistakes followed, leaving us with a punk economy that still can’t get out of second gear and a government that has amassed massive, growth-suffocating powers. No one could have foreseen those particulars. As Tamny points out, had Bear been allowed to fail without government intervention, Lehman would have scrambled to effect its own rescue, probably through a fire sale-like merger with another bank.
What makes this book so special is that it avoids all the mind-numbing jargon of traditional economics books. You won’t find such pretentious or just plain wrong-headed economic axioms as “the marginal propensity to consume,” “the paradox of thrift” (a particularly pernicious Keynesian nostrum that savings can be bad for economic growth), “the marginal product theory of the single firm,” “nonoptimality of competitive laissez-faire pricing,” “the law of diminishing marginal utility,” “the acceleration principle,” “the marginal propensity to save,” “the law of increasing (relative) demand,” or “the law of marginal-physical-product.”
Tamny doesn’t suffer from science envy, as most economists do. Economists are obsessed with mathematical formulas and equations because they give their discipline the supposed prestige of a hard science. Equations render the illusion of pin-point precision, which is entirely absent from most of human behavior.
As an example, look at this question posed in the classic college textbook so many of us groaned under, Paul Samuelson’s Economics (eighth edition): “If C = a + bY = 200 + 2/3 Y and I = Ī = 100, solve Y = C + I = 200 + 2/3 Y + 100 to get Y* = 900. Increase Ī by 10 and verify that Y* goes up by 30. What is the multiplier? Why? (Note: Y is NNP in billions of $).”
And to think this guy landed a Nobel prize for stuff like that!
What makes Tamny’s book worthy of becoming a classic that will be referred to for a long time to come is its brilliant use of stories to illustrate points. People are always interested in well-told tales about others and the lessons to be learned from their experiences. Here you’ll read about Jerry Jones and his seemingly crazy decision decades ago to buy the Dallas Cowboys, a move that today looks blindingly obvious but was originally ridiculed by experts and sophisticated investment bankers. Tamny’s subjects are numerous and include Paris Hilton, Larry King, the late Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today), Michael Bloomberg, J. K. Rowling, Patrick Soon-Shiong (who became a billionaire through his breakthroughs in fighting cancer), and Bill Rasmussen (founder of ESPN). Tamny’s illustrative arsenal is full of enlightening references to sports, movies, and the TV series Downton Abbey. He discusses failures as well, because there are lessons to be learned from them, both about people who rebounded from failure and about those who did not.
The discipline of economics is not a hard science like physics, chemistry, biology, or engineering. Tamny rightfully and brilliantly recognizes that economics concerns the ways in which people strive, as Abraham Lincoln put it, to improve their lot in life. What enables this innate desire to flourish and what stands in the way of its being fulfilled is the fruitful, legitimate focus of economics. Visit virtually any poor country in the world and you’ll quickly see that it has considerable entrepreneurial energy, as people trade in stalls and on street corners. Why doesn’t such activity translate into vigorous economic growth? Because government-made barriers, such as obstacles to setting up a legal business, onerous taxation, the lack of basic property rights, and rampantly unstable currencies stand in the way. The proper role of government is to create a conducive environment in which commerce among consenting adults can take place and to then stand aside. Prosperity is certain to follow.
Sadly, this basic insight is ignored or hobbled by all too many credentialed economists and political leaders. The International Monetary Fund, for instance, is notorious for its anti-growth prescriptions of currency devaluation and higher taxes. Look around the world today and you’ll find governments everywhere that have erected extremely harmful structural barriers to the practice of commerce. Japan, for example, is doubling its national sales tax and boosting its payroll levies from the already nose-bleed level of 30 percent to an even more catastrophic 37 percent. Is it any wonder the world’s third-largest economy has stagnated for twenty years and is now falling into recession?
By breaking the mold of what modern economics has become and by explaining in an engaging way what economics truly is, Tamny has done humanity an inestimable service.
Read this book. Absorb its basic lessons. And then promote it in every way you can. You don’t have to agree with every particular in it to know that Popular Economics will rank with George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty and Knowledge and Power, Warren Brookes’s The Economy in Mind, Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Works, and a handful of other books as a signal contribution to the cause of liberty and to a beneficent, opportunity-rich civilization for all.