Jim Rogers, Andrew Schiff, and some economic ignoramus named Doug Henwood talk about TBTF and taxes.

Listening to this Doug Henwood fellow on taxes is truly unbearable. Have fun.

This is an entertaining discussion but it is pretty boisterous and a lot of cogent points get lost. The group talks about the Too Big To Fail policy as “socialism for the rich,” which is a legitimate given the policy of bailing out big, insolvent financial institutions. There is no dispute with any of this.

Socialism for the rich should be rejected, but Schiff makes a valid point that, insofar as bailing out financial institutions was intended to keep credit flowing liberally to borrowers whose credit-worthiness was otherwise inadequate, the TBTF policy was “socialism for the poor” as well. American consumers are addicted to debt and low interest rates.

Rogers and Schiff are apparently opposed to socialism in principle, but Henwood is only against “socialism for the rich.” He likes other forms of economic interference, such as that which distorts interest rates, or that which taxes the rich.

Henwood thinks it is perfectly justified to say that higher taxes can possibly help economic growth. This is untrue, and the economic case against it is probably irrefutable. I will summarize:

If economic actors exchange property voluntarily, then it is implied that both actors are better off than they would be in absence of this trade. If both did not expect to benefit from the trade, they would not take part. The matter is quite different in the case of taxation. With taxation, the producer’s supply of goods is reduced against his will to a level below what it would be absent the taxation. In addition to this reduction of present goods, the supply of future goods is reduced as well. For taxation is not unsystematic and random, but systematic and expected to continue in one form or another. Therefore, it implies a reduced rate of return on investment and produces an added incentive to engage in fewer acts of production in the future than one otherwise would. Overall incentive to be a taxpayer decreases, and incentive to become a tax-consumer increases.

This is always true. But Mr. Henwood would disregard economic science and make his inferences based on a shallow analysis of empirical data. Of the US, he says the Clinton years saw a period of great economic growth, and tax rates were higher than they are now. So, he infers, higher tax rates contribute to economic growth.

This doesn’t make any sense. If Henwood were an economist, I would call him a crank. But he is not an economist, he is an English major. He does not have a background in economics, but he likes to write about it. There is no evidence that he is capable of applying formal theory to reality and interpreting it.

In addition to being completely fallacious, the above argument for higher taxes is only credible on the most superficial analysis. If Austrian business cycle theory is correct, then one could easily argue that the much-heralded ‘growth’ of the Clinton years was just phony wealth created by economic bubbles brought about by artificially low interest rates.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, short-term rates were 11.4 percent. When Bush I lost to Clinton in 1992, the rate was 3.4 percent. Rates moves upwards over the course of the Clinton years, and in 2000 the average Treasury bill rate was 5.8. The manipulation of interest rates created economic dislocations — the dot-com bubble, among other things — and the inevitable crash.

Doug Henwood doesn’t know what he is talking about.