Robert Higgs: Don’t Rely on a Quack Doctor

A wonderful must read parable from Austrian economist Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute Blog (hat tip Mises Blog)

A man goes to his doctor for a routine checkup. The doctor performs a perfunctory examination and informs him that unless he receives an experimental treatment the doctor has devised, he will soon become disabled. “What’s it cost, Doc?” the man asks. “Well, unfortunately it’s not cheap, Mr. Smith, and I can’t tell you exactly how much the total cost will be until the entire treatment has been completed, but unless you get this treatment, you will soon be in big trouble.”

The man agrees to undergo the treatment. He has to sell some of his possessions and go deeply into debt to pay for it, but, relying on the doctor’s advice, he believes that the alternative to getting the treatment would be catastrophic.

After the treatment, however, the man actually feels worse than before. So he visits his doctor and is startled when the doctor reports that he has relapsed and must undergo the same treatment again or he will probably die. As before, the doctor cannot say in advance how much the treatment will cost.

So, the man sells more of his possessions and goes even further into debt to finance the treatment. To his surprise, shortly after its completion, he feels even worse, and the doctor informs him that he has relapsed again and will have to undergo the treatment again lest he die shortly.

The man sells his remaining possessions, exhausts his capacity to borrow, begs money from his relatives, and has the treatment a third time. After its completion, he feels horrible. Once more, the doctor reports that his condition has not been improved and therefore he will have to undergo a fourth round of treatment.

This time, however, the man is completely broke, so he resigns himself to his imminent demise, puts his personal affairs in order, spends as much time as possible with close friends and family members, and waits to die.

But he doesn’t. Indeed, after a year, he is still alive and feels much better than he did immediately after his treatments. To everyone’s astonishment, he returns to work, feels fine, and considers himself lucky to have had a spontaneous recovery from a disease that threatened to take his life.

Having repaired his financial condition after ten years of normal, happy, healthy working life, the man’s curiosity gets the best of him and he visits a different doctor, an old Austrian, who examines him thoroughly and reports: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you; nor do I see any indication that anything was seriously wrong with you before you began the treatments. You appear to have been misdiagnosed and treated for no good reason, and the treatments made you sick. When the treatments stopped, you returned to your previous, normal, healthy condition.”

(The foregoing is a parable about government intervention in the economy.)

Video: Should Governments Regulate and Intervene to Correct "Market Failures?"

In the following video, Professor Steve Horwitz at the Foundation for Economic Education explains the dynamics of regulations and interventions in the marketplace

"What regulation and intervention do is prevent markets from discovering new ways of solving existing problems and new ways of solving new problems. When regulation erects barriers to entry or other kinds of limits on market behavior, it cuts short this discovery process, and that leads to inefficiency and waste of resources." 

Ben Bernanke Wants You to Beg For More Stimulus

From Marketwatch.com (bold emphasis mine)

The nation's weak labor market was "a national crisis" that required attention from the White House and Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday. "We've had close to 10% unemployment now for a number of years, and of the people who are unemployed, about 45% have been unemployed for six months or more. This is unheard of," Bernanke said in a question-and-answer session following a speech in Cleveland. He called for policies "that could help them find work, train for work and retain their skills." Bernanke also urged policy makers to consider "strong housing policies to help the housing market recover." Better housing policies would "clearly be very useful," and would allow the low mortgage rates stemming from easy Fed policy to have more effect and help the economy recover.

Ben Bernanke, as well as the US government, has been applying ‘strong policies’ even prior to this crisis which has essentially led to the current bubble bust conditions… through cheap credit, tax policies which skewed financing towards borrowing than equity, administrative policies via mortgage subsidies which encouraged speculation and bank capital regulation which rewarded securitization that spawned the shadow banking system

Additionally, the policy response to the current crisis has been for the Fed to buy $600 billion worth of mortgage securities in QE 1.0

The current Operation Twist has also partly been designed for this. Yet this innovative measure, will likely be another futile exercise, and at worst, with possible unintended effects.

Bloomberg’s chart of the day commentary,

The Federal Reserve’s effort to reduce borrowing costs is unlikely to help the housing market enough to bolster the economy, according to Andrew Milligan, Standard Life Investments Ltd.’s head of global strategy.

“Mortgage refinancing remains little different” from last year even though the Fed’s plan to buy longer-term debt and sell shorter-term securities sent rates on home loans to record lows, Milligan wrote two days ago in a report.

The CHART OF THE DAY compares the Mortgage Bankers Association Refinancing Index with the average rate on 30-year refinancings, as compiled by Bankrate.com. The index’s reading for the week ended Sept. 16 was about the same as last November, while the 30-year rate dropped to 4.10 percent this month, the lowest in eight years of data and down from last year’s 4.75 percent average.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing too little to aid refinancings, according to Edinburgh-based Milligan. The mortgage-finance firms have operated under U.S. conservatorship for the past three years after loan defaults pushed them close to collapse. The lack of support is among “structural impediments to the housing market” that will limit the effectiveness of the Fed’s so-called Operation Twist, he wrote.

It’s not really about doing “too little” but rather after having done soooo sooo much with hardly any impact means that these policies have not met their targets (policy failure) and are not neutral too.

On the contrary, these policies may have lasting negative consequences.

As Professor Steve Horwitz observes (bold emphasis)

if we look at the loanable funds market, we might get a handle on the situation. If this program is designed to increase investment by driving down rates, it's not going to work if that demand for loanable funds curve is highly inelastic. Borrowers are just not going respond to the lower interest rate if they have major concerns about the future…

In other words, we shouldn't be twisting yield curves to increase the quantity of loanable funds demanded, we should be adopting a better policy regime so that the demand for loanable funds increases.

And ‘concerns about the future’ are likely to have been exactly prompted by these political interventions that has only heightened “regime uncertainty” or as per Professor Robert Higgs,

widespread inability to form confident expectations about future private property rights in all of their dimensions

Bottom line: All the measures thrown have only forestalled the necessary adjustments in the marketplace. The market’s function of discoordination and coordination has been obstructed by increasing concerns over future private property rights via various interventionist policies.

And this also reveals how the law of economics (or price controls) can’t be rescinded by political policies. And measures designed to mitigate effects of prior bubble policies, represent as band aid solutions that only defers on the day reckoning. Notice that when political intervention has been withheld, exactly the same set of problems resurfaces.

However for Mr. Bernanke, who seem to have been hobbled by mounting political opposition, appear to be using the markets as leverage. He would have you beg for more short term patches ["a national crisis" that required attention from the White House and Congress] before giving it to you. Fear signifies as the best tool to justify political intervention.

US Unemployment: It’s Partly About Skills-Jobs Mismatch

It isn’t true that unemployment in the US is all about the lack of opportunities.

Instead a big part of this, aside from regulatory uncertainties, is the mismatch of required skills relative to the available jobs.

According to the Wall Street Journal,(all bold emphasis mine)

Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.

The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can't qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work like the food servers that Pilot Flying J seeks for its truck stops....

Matching people with available jobs is always difficult after a recession as the economy remakes itself. But Labor Department data suggest the disconnect is particularly acute this time around. Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn't appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas, such as business services, education and health care....

Longer-term trends are at play. For one, the U.S. education system hasn't been producing enough people with the highly specialized skills that many companies, particularly in manufacturing, require to keep driving productivity gains. "There are a lot of people who are unemployed, but those aren't necessarily the people employers are looking for," says David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the transition to the information age, the shape of investment and hiring would pronouncedly be different as it will involve more specialized “local knowledge” skills and deepened division of labor.

Government intervention (stimulus, unemployment benefits, bailouts, obamacare) has kept the labor market from the adjustment process that should have met these “new” realities. Thus, additional government interventions won’t help.

And the recent resignation of the head of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Obama, Mrs. Christina Romer, appear to be a revelation of the failed Keynesian policies of the Obama regime.