by Joe Kernen
33 Ricardo was, like me, a onetime stockbroker, but—unlike me—he got really rich doing it. When he retired from the stock exchange to write books such as The Principles of Political Economy, he was worth somewhere north of half a million pounds—somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in today’s dollars.
34 One historian I found—Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman— described guilds as protecting the artisan “not only from external competition, but also from the competition of his fellow-members [thus leading to] the destruction of all initiative. No one was permitted to harm others by methods which enabled him to produce more quickly and more cheaply than they. Technical progress took on the appearance of disloyalty.”
35 Just in case you think this is an artifact of the past, Davis-Bacon is still in place eighty years later: It was an explicit part of the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus bill), even for projects funded only “in part” by the federal government.
36 Probably as a direct corollary, unionized industries produce 2 percent to 3 percent less job growth annually than nonunionized ones.
37 And the one with the longest and best-known connection with organized crime in America. It would be easy to classify unions as “good” or “bad” based on their association with criminals, but I’m not sure that the economic cost of “good” unions is any less than that of “bad” ones.
38 A lot more: At the federal level, the average government employee earns 45 percent more than the average private-sector worker with similar duties and qualifications; in Ohio, they earn 34 percent more in total compensation, including wages, benefits, and pension; in Michigan it’s 47 percent.
39 It is no coincidence that until the 1960s, government employees weren’t even allowed to unionize.
40 Public employees who are forbidden to strike, like most police and firefighters, get an even better deal: They are usually allowed to demand “interest arbitration,” in which a third party settles contract disputes, thereby letting local politicians off the hook for the most expensive settlements.
41 Ever since former governor Palin coined the word, I have been using it on Squawk Box to combine “refutation” and “repudiation”—simultaneously dismantling and denouncing a position. In November 2010, the Oxford American Dictionary picked it as the word of the year.
42 Or as virtually every Progressive calls it, “carbon.” The transformation of carbon dioxide—a colorless, tasteless, and quite harmless gas—into “carbon,” with all its echoes of the dirty stuff that is dug out of the ground and coats the lungs with dust, is one of the greatest PR triumphs since the days of P. T. Barnum.
43 The formal name for the statute signed by President Obama on July 21, 2010, is “An Act to Promote the Financial Stability of the United States by Improving Accountability and Transparency in the Financial System, to End ‘Too Big to Fail,’ to Protect the American Taxpayer by Ending Bailouts, to Protect Consumers from Abusive Financial Services Practices, and for Other Purposes.” Washington doesn’t do concise.
44 This is the same logic that allows homeowners to deduct the interest on mortgages from their income tax.
45 In all fairness, by August 2010, Congressman Frank was actually calling for the abolition of Fannie and Freddie and even admitting that maybe “everyone shouldn’t be a homeowner.” Better a few trillion dollars late than never, I guess.
46 For more on scarcity, see chapter 2.