Limits on fees lead banks to charge the poor more for other services—or to stop offering them at all

See Durbin’s Debit-Card Price Controls Hit the Poor Hardest by Todd J. Zywicki and Julian Morris. In the WSJ. Mr. Zywicki is executive director of the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Mr. Morris is the vice president of research at the Reason Foundation. Excerpts:

"Sen. Richard Durbin’s 11th-hour addition to Dodd-Frank imposed price controls on the service fees banks with more than $10 billion in assets can charge merchants who process debit-card payments. As implemented by the Federal Reserve in 2011, the amendment ended up cutting these interchange fees in half—from 51 cents to 24 cents per transaction, on average—costing banks $8 billion to $14 billion annually."

Mr. Durbin asserted at the time that “every single Main Street business” would benefit from lower costs, and that they would pass those savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices at the register. But as we (with co-author Geoffrey Manne ) demonstrate in a new report for the International Center for Law and Economics, it hasn’t worked that way. While big-box retailers and their shareholders have managed to pocket more than $40 billion in cost savings so far, most Main Street businesses and the poorest American households have suffered.

First, costs for most retailers haven’t fallen. A 2014 study by the Richmond Fed found that only 11% of merchants surveyed had seen their card-acceptance costs fall as a result of the Durbin Amendment. Three times as many merchants—mostly small businesses and those making small-ticket sales—reported increased costs. Contrary to Mr. Durbin’s promises, only 1% of merchants reported that they had reduced their prices, while 20% raised them.

Second, Mr. Durbin’s theory ignored that banks would have to recoup their lost revenue in other places. Since the amendment’s enactment, banks have slashed access to free checking (which has fallen from 76% to 38% of accounts since 2008), doubled monthly maintenance fees on other accounts, raised other monthly fees, and increased the mandatory minimum balance to qualify for free checking from $109 in 2008 to $670 last year. In addition, affected banks have almost completely eliminated rewards on debit cards, amounting to an effective 1% price increase on all goods and services for consumers who previously used these “cash back” rewards cards. All told, according to a study by the Boston Fed, banks have recouped roughly 30% of their lost interchange revenue by charging customers higher fees.

Wealthy households have largely avoided the Durbin Amendment’s sting by shifting purchases to rewards-rich credit cards and raising their monthly balances to hang on to free checking. Lower-income families, by contrast, are either paying hundreds of dollars in new bank fees or have been driven out of bank accounts entirely, turning instead to check cashers, pawnbrokers and other financial providers that cater—at higher cost—to unbanked consumers. All told, we estimate that the Durbin Amendment has saddled lower-income consumers with $1 billion to $3 billion per year in higher out-of-pocket costs—with little or no relief in the form of lower retail prices.

Retailers and their lobbyists nevertheless continue to point to a 2013 study by economist Robert Shapiro that claims that merchants would pass most of their cost savings on to shoppers. But this assumption is based on a woefully incomplete analysis and is contradicted by the actual experience reported in the Richmond Fed study.

Mr. Shapiro also claims that Sen. Durbin’s price controls would create 37,500 additional retail jobs through increased consumer spending and retailer reinvestment of savings in the first year alone. Besides being implausible on its face, his back-of-the-envelope calculation inexcusably ignores the effect of sucking $40 billion out of the retail banking system, which has contributed to the elimination of thousands of the industry’s jobs. Mr. Shapiro also ignores the billions of dollars in higher bank fees consumers are paying and the adverse effect of eliminating debit card rewards—both of which leave American families with less money to spend.

Moreover, he ignores that many small businesses saw their costs increase and consequently raised prices or laid off workers. According to the Richmond Fed study, a majority of fast-food restaurants and grocery stores saw their debit costs increase—an outcome that is especially painful for lower-income families, which spend a higher percentage of their income putting food on the table than do wealthier households."

It is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity

See A Climate of Science Deception by Patrick J. Michaels and Ryan Maue of Cato.

"Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin caused quite a stir yesterday in an interview with Mary Kissel of The Wall Street Journal when he stated Federal scientists purposefully misled the public about climate change. He recounted that the 2014 National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts in the United States emphasized a dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane power beginning in 1980. However, this conveniently chosen segment of the historical record does not tell the entire story—the narrative that hurricanes are right now getting more frequent and intense due to climate change just does not stand up to scrutiny.

The offending figure is on Page 42 of the document (reproduced here). It is in Chapter 2 of the report, which is called “Our Changing Climate.”



These are graphs of something called the Power Dissipation Index (PDI) for Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific hurricanes. Note that the data begins in 1970 and ends in 2009. The text explains the beginning date by saying “there is considerable uncertainty in the record prior to the satellite era (early 1970s).”

This is true, but phenomenally disingenuous. Another hurricane scientist, conspicuously absent from the author list, is Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center, who developed the Center’s historical hurricane archive, known as HURDAT2. According to Landsea, the problem in the early record (which should be obvious) is that some storms will be missed, not the other way around! In his words, in a 2013 article in Monthly Weather Review, “Some storms were missed, and many intensities are too low in the pre-aircraft reconnaissance era (before 1944 in the western half of the basin) and in the pre-satellite era (before 1972 for the entire basin).

Therefore, prior to 1972, any history is likely to underestimate the PDI rather than overestimate it.
One of us (Maue) calculated the PDI using the HURDAT2 data back to 1920, shown below:

We have included the trend line from the National Assessment. It’s also noteworthy to see what happened after 2009. The accompanying text says “Adapted from Kossin et al. 2007,” meaning they added two more years. Why didn’t they add through 2013, the year before publication of the Assessment? One potential reason is a close look at the chart (which goes through 2016) would have destroyed the narrative.

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the Assessment on May 6, 2014, it said, “The report, a key deliverable of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, is the most comprehensive and authoritative report ever generated about climate changes that are happening now in the United States…[emphasis added].”

The President’s Action Plan eventually resulted in the Clean Power Plan, arguably the most expensive environmental regulation ever promulgated. The flamboyant, cherry-picked misrepresentation of the hurricane data record was indeed a “deliverable.”

A more “comprehensive” and “authoritative” report would have noted that periodic changes in the north-south gradient of temperature in the Atlantic Ocean (known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO) are related to hurricane activity. The trendline in the Assessment begins in a “negative” AMO period, which is associated with suppressed hurricane activity, and ends during a very positive phase which is associated with enhanced hurricanes. A more accurate representation should have begun in 1950, which would have represented a complete AMO cycle. Of course, there wouldn’t be any trend, as expected. Instead, the Assessment cherry picked data to tell a story, and the concocted cheap excuse as to why it did it is risible.

Let’s just quote NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory updated overview of current research as of April 13, 2017: “It is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” Now, that is an entirely different story than we have been told."

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

By James Taylor in Forbes. He is president of the Spark of Freedom Foundation.

"It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. "In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”

Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”

The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.”

The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate."

Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.

One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.

People who look behind the self-serving statements by global warming alarmists about an alleged “consensus” have always known that no such alarmist consensus exists among scientists. Now that we have access to hard surveys of scientists themselves, it is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus."

The entire effect in Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale" is completely unrealistic, because she’s drawn details from too many oppressive regimes and collaged them all together

See No, 'The Handmaid’s Tale' Is Not 'Unexpectedly Timely' by Megan McArdle. Excerpts:

"My quarrel is not with the politics of "The Handmaid's Tale," nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area"

"Fictional dystopia is sort of the photonegative of the movies produced by actual totalitarian regimes. Masses of people wearing identical creepy clothes, forming into precise lines, chanting the same things. Yes, in regimes like North Korea and Hitler’s Germany, those mass rallies occurred. The men marched and the girls danced in eerily infinite lines. But afterward, most of them went home to the banal, the ordinary, and the familiar -- altered by political fear and economic shortages, but not wholly transformed into something unrecognizably inhuman.

In interviews since its publication, Atwood has emphasized that all the details in the book were based on things that really happened in the world (or at least, are recounted in tales; the “handmaids” of the book, concubines given to elite men of Gilead’s theocracy in order to bear them the children their barren wives could not, is based on the story of Rachel and Jacob in the Book of Genesis). One sees the historical referents when reading, and yet the entire effect is completely unrealistic, because she’s drawn details from too many oppressive regimes and collaged them all together. Thus a regime that is clearly supposed to be some sort of fundamentalist Protestant theocracy is enthusiastically adopting extramarital sex, infanticide and Tibetan prayer wheels. This makes for some dramatic imagery, but not for what Mary McCarthy, in her review of the book, called “the essential element of a cautionary tale”: “…recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock.” Dystopian regimes in real life have common features, yes, but they are not actually interchangeable; indeed, they are surprisingly specific.

Reading accounts of those actual regimes, I’m always surprised at how culturally embedded they remained, even as they proclaimed that they were enacting a new world order in which everything would be different.

People still got married and settled into family domesticity under communist regimes that were supposed to be sweeping away all the vestiges of private lives in favor of creating “new Soviet man” or his many cousins; people in theocratic states still had considerable variance in the level of religious observance; theoretically internationalist ideologies fell back on nationalist sentiment to motivate the masses. All of which is to say: The Taliban certainly existed, but it could not exist in America, because it would have no popular base from which to launch its attacks, no historic practice of burqa-wearing to ratify bringing them back.

Nor could such a movement gain power here along the lines that Atwood outlines. I’ve seen her praised for actually thinking through the mechanism by which her fictional state might emerge, and kudos for the effort, but we must also acknowledge that, as written, it doesn’t really make all that much sense. The inciting event is a lightly fictionalized version of the Reichstag fire, but a careful student of history would note that a decade after the Reichstag fire, most of German society still looked pretty much like it had in 1925. No, I’m not excusing Nazi atrocities in any way shape or form, nor discounting the sweeping changes that Hitler did make. But they didn’t gut-renovate the economy, wipe out all religions that competed with the state, and completely reorganize society in the space of a few years; they left much of the economy and the culture alone. For structural reasons -- she needs her handmaid to remember the world before as an adult, and yet still be young enough to be fertile -- Atwood needs changes that are both unrealistically sweeping and ludicrously fast. She is not illustrating how Trump will transform America.

America hasn’t had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump. The closest modern equivalent, the statewide hegemony of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, doesn’t look very much like The Handmaid’s Tale, and hasn’t the faintest prayer of co-opting the rest of the nation’s fractured religious traditionalists, many of whom do not even consider the Mormons to be Christian. And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the one where Trump had the greatest trouble.

But these are, as I say, not necessarily flaws with the novel; dystopia’s job is to illustrate the conflict between the individual and society by heightening it into its starkest contrast, not to paint it in photorealistic fashion. However, if one can forgive a speculative novelist for taking great liberties with reality, one cannot offer the same to gushing critics who are now arguing that Trump’s election has somehow made the story more relevant.

First, these critics seem to have failed to notice that Trump has been unable to usher in even the far more limited changes he promised, such as dramatically restricting immigration, reshaping NATO, and bringing foreign governments to heel. He hasn’t got control of Congress, or the courts, and has nothing like the mass movements behind him that brought other dystopian governments to power, whether fascist, communist or theocratic.

Moreover, even such a mass movement is not necessarily enough. Think of the most famous examples of these sorts of regimes: Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban. Those revolutions were born out of catastrophe, either colonialism or war. They moved into power vacuums as weak institutions were failing. Bad as our current political moment is, “congressional gridlock” and “declining wages for unskilled men” are not in the same class as the disasters that launched the careers of history’s worst tyrants.

Meanwhile, the culture is moving the other way. Women are gaining more economic power relative to men; the nation is becoming less religious. "The Handmaid’s Tale" is becoming less plausible a future with each passing year, no matter how hard feminists insist that there is only a brief and slippery slope between overturning Roe v. Wade and forcing women into state-sanctioned breeding programs."

Pope Francis Has Forgotten the Church’s Own Grand Libertarian Legacy

By Jeffrey A. Tucker of FEE. Excerpts:

"Well, it’s a pretty big deal when the Pope attacks libertarianism by name. It’s even more interesting when my Spanish-language publisher believes that the Pope, in an academic paper, was attacking language used by me in particular, by implication but without citation.

In a choice passage, the Pope says that libertarianism “deceptively proposes a ‘beautiful life’.” The 2nd edition of my book Beautiful Anarchy (Una Bella Anarquia: Como Crear Tu Propia Civilizacion en La Era Digital) just came out in Spanish (the Pope’s native language), with solid sales. It’s not a stretch that my book has been targeted, but you decide (you can download the English version here). 

When the Church anathematized views in the Middle Ages, the Popes were careful specifically to cite the works in question, so that there would be no confusion about the views being condemned (see the Catechism of the Council of Trent, for example). Not so any longer. We are left to guess the identity of the interlocutor, and the Pope is thus free to mischaracterize.

Moreover, I only wish that the Pope’s criticism had some substantive content to grapple with. Libertarians are always up for a good challenge. Sadly, the statement mostly amounts to caricature.

Here is the full context of what Pope Francis said:

    Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, “living well”, a “good life” in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a “beautiful life”.

    If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of “self-causation”. Thus libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of “common” implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of “good” deprives freedom of its essence.

    The radicalization of individualism in libertarian and therefore anti-social terms leads to the conclusion that everyone has the “right” to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority. Bonds would have to be cut inasmuch as they would limit freedom. By mistakenly matching the concept of “bond” to that of “constraint”, one ends up confusing what may condition freedom – the constraints – with the essence of created freedom, that is, bonds or relations, family and interpersonal, with the excluded and marginalized, with the common good, and finally with God.

Wow, this Sounds Grim

An ideology that asserts these things would indeed be terrible. It’s hard to imagine that such an ideology could ever become “fashionable” at all. But of course the Pope only gets away with claiming such things because he defines libertarianism in a way that makes it incredibly easy to attack – which is a solid indicator that the opposed position has been mis-rendered.

And sure enough, what the Pope claims libertarians believe is not only untrue; in some respects, it is actually the opposite of what libertarians believe.

Let me offer my own definition of libertarianism. It is the political theory that freedom and peace serve the common good better than violence and state control, thus suggesting a normative rule: societies and individuals must be left unmolested in their associations and commercial dealings so long as they are not threatening others.

I’m almost certain that most thinkers in the liberal tradition would be happy with that definition.

Is that view strange or exotic, dangerous or radical, to the point that the rise of such thoughts really do constitute a dangerous invasion of culture?

I don’t think so. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, wrote essentially this in the Summa Theologica (2;96:2):

    Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.

Libertarianism is not an arcane, peculiar, oddball view of politics.

The Summa was written in the 13th century. His stand for limiting the state, and his championing of human freedom (however inconsistently), marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy, law, and theology. It pointed the way out of the feudal period and toward the emergence of the modern world. The ideas now called “libertarian” were essential building blocks of the political developments that took place over the following 600 years.

Libertarianism is not an arcane, peculiar, oddball view of politics; it is a distillation of the wisdom of a mighty tradition encompassing the experiences of many cultures and the highest thought of the most serious thinkers from the late Middle Ages to the present.

"the term “libertarianism” was a postwar usage that was made necessary because the term liberalism seemed to have been corrupted. That generation made a judgement to bail from the word liberalism if only to distinguish what they believed from what the partisans of state power believed.
Dean Russell in 1955 was among the first to suggest the replacement, a new synonym:

    Many of us call ourselves “liberals.” And it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.”"

"when we are talking about libertarianism we are talking about the successor and the living embodiment of liberalism in the classical tradition. Understood in this way, it doesn’t seem so bizarre."
"Catholicism’s role in modern history has been to serve as a benefactor of the liberal cause. From the time of St. Thomas and his successors, the Catholic Church began a long move from its Constantinian tendencies in the first millennium, gradually dispensing with the aspiration to unify Church and state and toward an embrace of the emergent liberal tradition. It occurred first in the realms of banking, when the Church served as a defender of the Medici banking cause against the reactionary forces that tried to stop the dawn of modern commercial life. It liberalized its rule against usury, for example, and defended the rights of property and commercial trade between nations.
The end of slavery was perhaps the greatest triumph of liberalism before the 20th century, and here the Catholic Church had been a force for human rights and justice long before others caught on.

The writings of Bartolomé de las Casas from 1547, for example, continue to inspire with their moral passion against the atrocities against human rights perpetrated by many states. None of the ancient philosophers dared imagine a world of universal equality for all persons, but the Catholic Church did, based on the conviction that all individuals are made in the image and likeness of God and are thereby deserving of certain rights.

The late scholastic tradition of Catholic social thought, centered in Spain, has been frequently credited with giving birth to economic science itself. This was because these scholars were not only moral idealists; they were imminently practical men who sought to understand how the real world works, all in the interests of understanding how people can have better lives. They gradually discovered that the interests of the individual person and the common good were not in conflict but could both be realized through liberalization of all spheres of society."

"the long ethos of Catholicism has been toward favoring exactly what the Pope just denounced: the view that a presumption for liberty over coercion should be the prevailing norm in political life.
It is for this reason that the Catholic Church positioned itself against socialism at the very dawn of idea in the modern world. In 1878, forty years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Pope Leo XIII wrote in Quod Apostolici Muneris that the socialists were plotting to “leave nothing untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been wisely decreed for the health and beauty of life.”

Above all, he wrote, the socialists were wrong to “assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life.”"

"Catholicism “holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven.”"
"Vatican II further affirmed that seeking a better life through liberty is at the very core of the human experience. This aspiration requires certain institutional conditions, such as the right of private property. The inspirational and beautiful document Gaudium et Spes (1965), traditionally seen as a masterpiece of exposition that sums up the spirit of the Council, said the following:

    Private property or some ownership of external goods confers on everyone a sphere wholly necessary for the autonomy of the person and the family, and it should be regarded as an extension of human freedom. Lastly, since it adds incentives for carrying on one's function and charge, it constitutes one of the conditions for civil liberties."

"The seeking of the good of all does not require the violation of individual rights and interests.
This concern over the "common destination" of goods seems to be at the core Pope Francis’s concern is the idea that libertarianism pushes the rights and interests of individuals against the common good. This is a frustrating point to make because it has been the major project of the liberal tradition (from the Scottish Enlightenment to the present) to argue that these are not inconsistent, that one need not be set against the other. The seeking of the good of all does not require the violation of individual rights and interests, and the assertion of individual rights and interests need not conflict with the good of all.

Consider the words of the man who is widely considered the leading libertarian genius of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises. In his 1927 book Liberalism, he argued that only liberalism seeks the good of all, as opposed to the interests of one special interest or another.

    With the advent of liberalism came the demand for the abolition of all special privileges. The society of caste and status had to make way for a new order in which there were to be only citizens with equal rights. What was under attack was no longer only the particular privileges of the different castes, but the very existence of all privileges. Liberalism tore down the barriers of rank and status and liberated man from the restrictions with which the old order had surrounded him…."

"The liberals maintained that with the elimination of all the artificial distinctions of caste and status, the abolition of all privileges, and the establishment of equality before the law, nothing else stands in the way of the peaceful cooperation of all members of society, because then their rightly understood, long-run interests coincide."

"It is a fact of human life that every single individual is different. You could say that it was designed to be that way. The great discovery of liberalism was to observe that it is possible for individuals to pursue their interests in a way that does not sever community attachments but rather strengthens them. That this is true is ever more obvious in our times. Technology has made it so. Curated lives have coincided with ever more community connection across groups and nations."
"It is the great burden of the liberal tradition to forever explain that the path toward community runs through the pursuit of individual interests in voluntary cooperation with others."
"To be sure, liberalism cannot and does not promise the salvation of souls; that is the domain of the great religions. Liberalism does not seek to displace the role of religion in society. It only seeks to provide the best possible conditions for the flourishing of human society in a material sense through the building of freedom as the essential framework for the good of all.

As Mises says, liberalism  “promises nothing that exceeds what can be accomplished in society and through society. It seeks to give men only one thing, the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield them from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: that is its aim.”"

How necessary is Donald Trump’s wall? Donald Trump wants to build a border wall now, but the number of people crossing illegally from Mexico peaked long ago

From The Economist.

"DONALD TRUMP launched his presidential campaign with a promise to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border in order to stem the tide of undocumented immigration. In fact, those flows were already in steep decline long before he introduced the proposal. The number of apprehensions of people attempting to cross illegally peaked in 2000, when America′s Border Patrol made more than 1.6m arrests, over 98% of which were of Mexicans. Over the course of George W. Bush′s administration, this number dropped to around 1m annually. During Barack Obama′s presidency, the rate fell even more precipitously, averaging just 400,000 a year. Moreover, in 2016, only 47% of the apprehensions involved Mexicans.
Counting arrests does not necessarily yield a reliable estimate of the number of border-crossers who evade detection. The authorities′ rate of success at catching illegal immigrants can vary, and they may wind up detaining the same people multiple times. Nonetheless, the Pew Hispanic Centre estimates that the total who do make it through has fallen as well, to less than a third of its maximum level.

The causes of this decline are open to debate. In the early 2000s, Republican politicians from border states lobbied the federal government to build a fence. In response, Congress authorised the construction of 700 miles (1,125 km) of fencing in 2006, covering about a third of the total distance from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Now, nearly a decade after the fence was built, arrests have dwindled almost everywhere—both in areas separated from Mexico by existing fences and in those where the Rio Grande forms a natural obstacle. The only region that has seen an uptick in arrests is the Rio Grande Valley, which contains fencing on part but not all of its slice of the border. Whether the fence is responsible for this trend is contested: the end of America′s housing boom, which created large numbers of construction jobs filled by Mexican immigrants, probably also played an important role.

Mr Trump has no doubts about the efficacy of physical barriers. On January 25th he signed an executive order calling for the construction of a border wall, which could rise some 40 feet (12 metres) high and stretch across 1,000 miles. It seems less likely that he can fulfil his vow to make Mexico pay for the project. The country′s government has scoffed at this notion, and Enrique Peña Nieto, its president, announced the next day that he would cancel a planned visit to Washington."

Innovation stagnates under socialist systems, but capitalism has created more life-transforming innovations than any other economic system (with focus on the washing machine)

By Chelsea Follett of Human Progress.

"Has anything changed the world more than the internet? South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang thinks so. He would argue that one invention – an engine of liberation – has had a far more powerful effect on daily lives. He means the washing machine, of course, which the late Hans Rosling called the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. It freed women from the chore of laundry – or at least from spending one full day a week every week doing it.

As a result, Americans now lose less than two hours a week to the task, and today a greater proportion of poor US households own washing machines than average American households did back in the 1970s. While washing machines are far from being the only reason that women’s options have multiplied in the West, they have certainly helped. “Without the washing machine,” claims Chang, “the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.”
  Source: Econweb and BLS

The change is ongoing. Thanks to economic growth and rapidly declining global poverty, more women own or have access to washing machines than ever before. Even so, one 2013 study estimated that, in 2010, 46.9 per cent of households worldwide owned one. That means the market for washing machines has significant room to grow – and that there is a vast amount of latent human potential still out there, yet to be unleashed.

Take China, home to the greatest escape from poverty of all time, when economic liberalization freed hundreds of millions from penury. The economy (measured in 2014 US  dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power) grew 31-fold between 1978, when the country abandoned communist economic policies, and 2016.

In 1981, less than 10 per cent of urban Chinese households had a washing machine (as approximated by the number of sets per hundred households). But by 2011, 97.05 per cent did. In 1985, less than 5 per cent of rural Chinese households had a washing machine, partly because of the expense, but also because they lacked access to electricity. By 2011, 62.57 per cent owned a machine. Thus possession of a washing machine is a useful indicator, not only of China’s tremendous progress, but of the narrowing gap between rural and urban areas. Source: Laili Wang, Xuemei Ding, Rui Huang and Xiongying Wu, “Choices and using of washing machines in Chinese households,” International Journal of Consumer Studies (38) 2014, pp. 104-109.

It’s a slightly different story in India, where liberalizing economic reforms didn’t begin until 1992, rather later than in China. From 1992 to 2016, India’s economy grew four-fold. Only 11 per cent of Indian households owned a washing machine in 2016.

As with China, urban households are better off, with machine ownership now topping 20 per cent in the most populous cities. That means many women still do the laundry by hand, pounding and scrubbing for hours, in some cases with no running water. Nonetheless, movement is in the right direction. As India’s economy grows and poverty declines, more women will be able to ditch the dirty washing.

We have come a long way since Bendix Home Appliances patented the first automatic washing machine for domestic use in 1937. As a Bendix ad in Life magazine put it in 1950, “washday slavery became obsolete in just 13 years” for American women. In 2007, Panasonic launched laundry machines with a sterilization mechanism designed specifically to address Chinese consumers’ priorities and successfully increased its market share in the country.

It is important to note what is at the root of this progress. Not only has competition and the profit motive incentivized the washing machine’s invention, it is the capitalist drive that is ensuring ongoing marketing to new customers in developing countries. Innovation stagnates under socialist systems, but capitalism has created more life-transforming innovations than any other economic system and sown the greatest rise in living standards in history.

Africa remains the continent with the worst record on economic freedom, as well as being the poorest continent with the least access to time-saving technologies. But even in Africa, the vicious cycle is breaking and capitalism is slowly helping to alleviate poverty. Washing machine ownership might be low, but most Africans are optimistic about their economic future and possibilities.

Thus today, washing machines are still doing the work they were doing 80 years ago – which isn’t just cleaning clothes. These juddering boxes are life-transforming technologies that allow women to put their time and labor to more constructive use. And as ownership sweeps across the world, we can also track the progress of economic freedom."