Immigration criteria that don’t rig elections will protect freedom



Immigration criteria bring in people who favor big government







Immigration criteria favor big government for at least 2 generations




Hispanics and Asian Americans favor big government [4]



American Muslims favor big government [5]

Immigration criteria threaten citizens’ freedom


Immigrant fraction per state in 1994 shows effect of immigration criteria

Immigrant fraction per state in 1994

Immigrant fraction per state in 2012 shows effect of immigration criteria

Immigrant fraction per state in 2012 [3]

Immigration criteria swing the vote, rigging elections

Demography is destiny
The past: California
The present: Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia
The future, near term: Arizona, North Carolina
The future, long term: Georgia, Texas [6]



Trade restraint begins at home, to protect big business

U.S. Chamber of Commerce proposals in 1934 show that trade restraint begins at home[1:113-114]

Trade restraint was a response to innovators

…starting with the early 1900s and continuing through the 1920s, American business underwent quite radical changes in the development of major new industries and new methods of manufacture and product distribution.[1:16]

…Schumpeter concluded that price competition is not the most significant factor to which firms have to respond. In his view, “it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization… competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.” [1:17]

Trade restraint was pilot-tested during World War I

Businessmen, recalling the managed harmony of the war years, confronted the intensely competitive 1920s with hopes of realizing a more durable and predictable setting in which to conduct business. Firms that viewed the processes of change as threats to their positions began organizing resistance.[1:18]

The systemwide benefits of maintaining openness in competition—with no legal restrictions on freedom of entry into the marketplace or on the terms and conditions for which parties could contract with one another—were being rejected by business organizations more concerned with the survival of individual firms and industries.[1:18]

As a consequence, business leaders expressed an increasing desire for the maintenance of conditions of equilibrium that would help preserve the positions of existing firms.[1:16]

Trade restraint moved big business from competing economically to competing politically

One finds industry leaders and trade groups railing constantly against the “price cutter,” the “cutthroat” competitor, and the entrepreneurial interloper who dared to “invade the territory” of an established competitor. Such efforts invariably began with voluntary methods of “self-restraint.” When voluntary approaches failed to produce the desired stability, many businessmen—mindful of the advantages experienced under the War Industries Board—sought to effectuate this spirit of “cooperation” through politically backed programs designed to fashion a greater degree of centralized business decision-making. Characterizing their proposals as “industrial self-regulation,” business spokesmen and trade associations worked to secure for themselves a diluted competitive environment that would not be threatening to their interests. Such political efforts to control trade practices led, ultimately, to the enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act…[1:19] The purpose of such legislation… was to repress and stabilize competitive conditions-to ossify industries and restrain those influences that represented the threat of change.[1:121]

[I]ndustrial concentration is not the inevitable outgrowth of economic and technical forces, nor the product of spontaneous generation or natural selection. In this era of big government, concentration is often the result of unwise, manmade, discriminatory, privilege-creating governmental action. Defense contracts, R and D support, patent policy, tax privileges, stockpiling arrangements, tariffs and quotas, subsidies, etc., have far from a neutral effect on our industrial structure. In all these institutional arrangements, government plays a crucial, if not decisive, role. Government, working through and in alliance with “private enterprise,” becomes the keystone in an edifice of neomercantilism and industrial feudalism. In the process, the institutional fabric of society is transformed from economic capitalism to political capitalism.[1:212]

  1. Shaffer, Butler D. In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938. Bucknell University Press, 1997.


Cleaner environment is achieved when people get freer and wealthier

Suspended particulate matter (μg/m3) vs. GDP per capita, London and Delhi shows cleaner environment when people get wealthier

Suspended particulate matter (μg/m3) vs. GDP per capita (2011 USD)
London 1700-2015 and Delhi 1997-2015 [1]

Cleaner environment is achieved after people get free enough


That is, more people and more wealth have correlated with more (rather than less) resources and a cleaner environment…[2]

Cleaner environment has only come where there’s not too much socialism

In many cases, the overriding political imperative in socialist economies was increased industrial output, with little attention paid to accompanying air or water pollution…

When the Chernobyl accident occurred in the Soviet Union and the nuclear cloud was headed for Bulgaria the top government officials secreted themselves away in special shelters with ample supplies of food and water. Bulgarian citizens, however were not even informed that the disruption had happened and continued to eat contaminated fruit and vegetables.[3]

Cleaner environment is achieved after people get wealthy enough

The functional forms seem to reflect the relative costs and benefits that individuals and countries attach to addressing certain environmental problems at different stages of economic development. Water and sanitation, with relatively low costs and high private and social benefits are among the earliest environmental problems to be addressed. Local air pollution, which imposes external costs locally, but is relatively costly to abate, tends to be addressed when countries reach a middle income level. This is because air pollution problems tend to become more severe in middle income economies, which are often energy intensive and industrialized, and because the benefits are greater and more affordable.[4]


GDP per capita at max level of pollution measurement shows cleaner environment when people get wealthier[5]

Even cleaner environment is achieved as people get even wealthier

Per capita air emissions of particulates less than 10 μm in diameter vs. per capita income for each individual state in the United States in 1990 shows cleaner environment when people get wealthier


Visually, the dominant feature across the set of figures is the greater variability of emission levels at low income levels. …the estimated variance for all pollutants decreased as income increased. The… curves… generally indicate a linear relationship between per capita emissions for the different classes of pollutants and per capita income, with a small number of high emitting outliers among the low-income states.[6]

  1. Ritchie, Hannah. “What the history of London’s air pollution can tell us about the future of today’s growing megacities.Our World in Data, 20 June 2017, Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
  2. Simon, Julian L. “More people, greater wealth, more resources, healthier environment.” Economic Affairs 14.3 (Apr. 1994): 22-29.
  3. Hill, Peter J. “Environmental Problems under Socialism.” Cato Journal 12.2 (1992): 321-335.
  4. Shafik, Nemat. “Economic development and environmental quality: an econometric analysis.” Oxford Economic Papers 46.4 (1994): 757-774.
  5. Grossman, Gene M., and Alan B. Krueger. “Economic growth and the environment.” The quarterly journal of economics 110.2 (1995): 353-377.
  6. Carson, Richard T., Yongil Jeon, and Donald R. McCubbin. “The relationship between air pollution emissions and income: US data.” Environment and Development Economics 2.4 (1997): 433-450.

Off-label prescribing shows that less regulation means more clinical benefits



Off-label prescribing provides the majority of therapeutic uses of drugs





Off-label prescribing brings new therapies and tailored therapies

Viagra (sildenafil citrate) was initially intended to treat angina…


















Unconstitutional filibuster/cloture keeps government big

Senate action on cloture motions, 1917-2016, shows the ascendance of unconstitutional filibuster/cloture

Senate action on cloture motions [1]

Unconstitutional filibuster/cloture violates the Constitution’s core practical purpose, and plain text

…the core purpose of the new Constitution was to jettison the Articles and the “[g]reat inconveniences had… been experienced in Congress from the article of confederation requiring nine votes in certain cases.”

Delegates… fixed representation in the House according to population, while giving each state an “equal voice” in the Senate.

Article I, Section 3 specifies that the Vice President shall serve as President of the Senate, “but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.” Put simply, Article I, Section 3 shows that the Framers meant for final Senate action on proposed matters to hinge on the vote of a legislative majority, with the Vice President’s vote to determine whether an aye-voting or nay-voting majority exists in the event that the Senators themselves are “equally divided.”

Article I, Section 7 states that “[e]very Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate… shall…. be presented to the President. The critical term in this clause is “passed,” which Americans understood at the time of the framing… to hinge on “the act of a majority of a quorum” in the absence of “specific limitations… found in the Federal Constitution” itself. This understanding finds support in established practice at the time of the framing, Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828, and the two English legal dictionaries that existed in 1787.

…the Constitution specifies five and only five instances in which the chambers of Congress are to act by supermajority vote. This list… demonstrated understanding—noted by Joseph Story nearly two-hundred years ago—that “departure from the general rule, of the right of the majority to govern, ought not to be allowed but upon the most urgent occasions.”

…Article II’s unitary textual treatment of judicial-branch and executive-branch nominees counsels against countenancing a different treatment of the two groups with regard to permissible forms of senatorial “consent,”…

…Article VI requires Senators… to take an oath to support the Constitution, and so they must honor the limits it imposes.

Unconstitutional filibuster/cloture was confirmed illegal during ratification

In Federalist No. 22, Hamilton decried… “If a pertinacious minority can controul the opinion of a majority… the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater…”

Federalist No. 54 assured the ratifying community that “[u]nder the proposed Constitution, the federal actswill depend merely on the majority of votes in the Federal Legislature

In Federalist No. 58, Madison… concluded that… supermajority voting rules would invite “an interested minority [to] take advantage of [such rules] to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal or … to extort unreasonable indulgences.” “It would no longer be the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority.”

Federalist No. 58 spoke of the risks of supermajority voting rules “[i]n all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed.”

Federalist No. 75… found fault with “all provisions which require more than the majority of any body to its resolutions.”

Unconstitutional filibuster/cloture was Progressively slipped into place

…the earliest Senates permitted a majority of members to halt debate on any pending matter pursuant to what was called the “Previous Question Rule.”

…the Senate abandoned the Previous Question Rule in 1806… instead for a system that in effect required unanimous consent to end debate on pending matters.

A true filibuster—pursuant to which dissenters openly take and hold the Senate floor—threatens to saddle dissenters with opprobrium by exposing their actions for all to see, making vivid their willingness to throw a wrench in the workings of the upper chamber. …the need to filibuster in this way had exactly this deterrent effect.

…senators utilitized speech-based delays only in exceptional cases for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

…targeted use of obstructionist speechmaking triggered ameliorative reforms, including the Senate’s replacement in 1917 of its unanimous-consent policy with a rule that authorized cloture by a vote of two-thirds of the members in attendance.

…during most of the twentieth century, filibusters focused on civil rights bills, which were bitterly denounced by southern segregationists. …the high water mark of obstructionist speechifying came when southern Senators occupied the floor for seventy-four days in an effort to block passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

…in 1975 the Senate adopted its current rule, which requires sixty votes to end debate, regardless of the number of Senators present. In addition, during this same time frame, the chamber embraced a “two-track” system… in which delays in acting on one matter would not block the Senate from moving forward with other business… The modern stealth system leads to no floor debate.”

Unconstitutional filibuster/cloture keeps unconstitutional big government ratchet-locked in place

One effect of these changes is that the use of Rule XXII to block action by Senate majorities has soared to unprecedented heights in recent years—indeed, to dizzying heights. As a result, “almost all significant legislation” now needs the support of sixty Senators…

…the Cloture Rule… has come to contravene the fundamental principle of legislative majoritarianism established by our founding charter.[2]

  1. Senate Action on Cloture Accessed 28 Jan. 2017.
  2. Coenen, Dan T. “The Filibuster and the Framing: Why the Cloture Rule is Unconstitutional and What to Do About It.” Boston College Law Review 55.1 (2014): 39-92.



US Consumer Price Index for 1800-2016,[1]
scaled so 1913 CPI = 100


Money control by government people is not natural

Money is a government monopoly.




Money control by government people is unstable and does us outsized harm





Money control won’t be given up easily by Progressive government people








Trade strengthens plants, so people’s productivity increases and prices fall

Nonexporter plants and exporter plants vs. labor productivity, showing that trade strengthens plants

Figure 2A. When labor productivity is higher, plants export more.

Trade strengthens plants a few plants at a time and a few products at a time

…exporters are in the minority; they tend to be more productive and larger, yet they usually export only a small fraction of their output.

…of the roughly 200,000 plants in the Census, only 21 percent report exporting anything.

Even the plants that do export sell mostly at home. Around two-thirds of the exporters sell less than 10 percent of their output abroad. More than half of exports come from these plants.

Fewer than 5 percent of the exporting plants (which also account for about 5 percent of exporters’ total output) export more than 50 percent of their production.

Trade strengthens plants by leaving them larger and more productive

How can we reconcile the low level of export participation and export intensity by individual plants with the fact that 14 percent of gross U.S. manufacturing production is exported? The major reason… is that the plants that export are much bigger, shipping on average 5.6 times more than nonexporters. Even excluding their exports, plants that export ship 4.8 times as much to the U.S. market than their nonexporting counterparts.

…plants… differ substantially in measured productivity. A substantial number of plants have productivity either less than a fourth or more than four times the average.

Plants that export appear to be more productive.

…Figure 2A brings out the striking association between [productivity and export performance]. The exporters’ productivity distribution is a substantial shift to the right of the nonexporters’ distribution.

…exporters have a 33-percent advantage in labor productivity overall, and a 15-percent advantage relative to nonexporters within the same 4-digit industry.

When trade strengthens plants, prices get lower

…greater efficiency not only raises the probability of exporting, it will also likely result in a lower domestic price. Even though, as we showed above, more efficient plants tend to be further ahead of their rivals, so can charge a higher markup, these rivals, nonetheless, tend to be more efficient themselves, forcing the plant to set a lower price.

Although foreign markets are small in plants’ revenues, the international economy nonetheless plays an important role in determining which producers are in business and which are good enough to export.

Trade strengthens plants because people shift to high-productivity plants

Lower trade barriers… tend to nudge out low-productivity plants while enabling the highly productive to sell more abroad.

Even though the number of U.S. plants fall there is little net job destruction (but substantial job turnover).

Aggregate productivity rises as employment shifts from low-productivity plants driven out by import competition to high-productivity plants turning toward export markets.[1]

  1. Bernard, Andrew B., et al. “Plants and productivity in international trade.” The American Economic Review 93.4 (2003): 1268-1290.

Tax cuts work, stimulus fails, debtor stimulus fails big

GDP output responses to hypothetical 1% impulse personal income tax cuts based on post-WWII data.

Tax cuts provide GDP increases that are
rapid, large, and long-lived

  • Hypothetical response if average personal income tax rate was cut 1% and then immediately raised back up.
  • Based on quarterly post-WWII US data.
  • Two alternative factoring-out sequences were used to remove the effects in the data from simultaneous corporate tax cuts.
  • Dashed lines are 95% confidence intervals.[1]

Capital gains tax cuts increase output quite a lot,
personal income tax cuts increase output just a little,
sales tax cuts reduce output

We find that the average values of the capital, labor, and consumption tax multipliers are 2.74, 1.39, and 0.62, respectively. That is, a one dollar decline in tax revenue from a cut in the tax rate on capital income stimulates output by approximately two dollars and seventy four cents on average.

The capital tax multiplier ranges from a low of 2.54 to a maximum value of 3.08. The range for the labor tax multiplier is 1.27 to 1.56. The consumption tax multiplier varies least… 60 to 0.65.[2]

Government stimulus spending reduces output

…the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4–0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6–0.7 over 2 years. If the change in defense spending is “permanent”… the multipliers are higher by 0.1–0.2.

These multipliers are all significantly less than 1… [3]

Debtor-government stimulus spending kills output

When debt levels are high, increases in government expenditures may act as a signal that fiscal tightening will be required in the near future. Moreover, as recent events in southern Europe and Ireland illustrate, these adjustments may need to be sudden and large. The anticipation of such adjustment could have a contractionary effect that would tend to offset whatever short-term expansionary impact government consumption may have.

Under these conditions, fiscal stimulus may therefore be counter-productive.

…we built a sample of country-episodes where the ratio of the total debt of the central government exceeded 60% of GDP. Our estimate for the impact multiplier is close to zero, and we estimate a long run multiplier of -3.[4]

  1. Mertens, Karel, and Morten O. Ravn. “The dynamic effects of personal and corporate income tax changes in the United States.” The American Economic Review 103.4 (2013): 1212-1247.
  2. Sims, Eric, and Jonathan Wolff. “The State-Dependent Effects of Tax Shocks.” (2016).
  3. Barro, Robert J., and Charles J. Redlick. “Macroeconomic Effects From Government Purchases and Taxes.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126.1 (2011): 51-102.
  4. Ilzetzki, Ethan, Enrique G. Mendoza, and Carlos A. Végh. “How big (small?) are fiscal multipliers?” Journal of Monetary Economics 60.2 (2013): 239-254.


[1, Cover]

Property rights were secured by elites, then by individuals

All of human history has had but three social orders.




Property rights are ownership of yourself and your labor



