Liberty, Justice and the General Welfare
Trey Garrison is adorable. Somewhere in life, he imprinted the notion that if it's legal, it's meritorious, and if it's illegal, even more so because the law just interferes with free markets. The notion that laws and regulations create the conditions necessary for free markets to operate most efficiently is beyond his ken.
Today, Garrison defends the oil companies against Ed Housewright, who thinks that pay raises like ExxonMobil's CEO's 34 percent hike to $22.4 million "fuels the public's disdain of oil companies." On his own blog, Garrison gets ugly:
"Exxon Mobil has posted record shattering profits for itself and earned solid outstanding profits for its shareholder, while continuing to hire and pay employees far above the industry median at all levels, so if the board thinks Rex Tillerson deserves $22.4 million in compensation, it's none of your business, Ed Housewright."I'm reminded of the line author Ring Lardner gave to one of his characters as a sure-fire conversation-ender: "Shut up he explained." Garrison is not going to change. Somewhere along the line he imprinted the notion that free markets are an end in themselves and not also a means to prosperity. Liberty is just one of the guiding principles on which our nation was founded.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."Garrison has taken the "liberty" part to heart, using it to trump the notions of "justice" and "general welfare". His philosophy was probably influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the shapers of the "Chicago School" of economics. If so, he may be interested to learn that one of the founders of this free-market theory, Richard Posner, now a federal judge of the 7th Circuit, is not so sure anymore that the free market isn't, in fact, broken. In Slate, Eliot Spitzer reviews a recent legal opinion by Posner:
"The two issues Judge Posner examined - setting CEO compensation at major companies and determining the fees to be paid to mutual fund-management companies on the base of trillions of dollars of mutual-fund investments - are central to the governance of our financial system. It is remarkable that a leader in Chicago School thought would acknowledge that the market is so broken that it can't be properly trusted on those two critical issues. Yet that is exactly what Judge Posner has concluded."It turns out that we all have an interest in how the free market works and when, just possibly, it's broken, an interest in fixing it. So, how boards of directors police compensation practices (or fail to) in publicly traded companies is everyone's business. At least everyone who cares about liberty, justice, and the general welfare. And if that's not good enough for Trey Garrison, consider this. Anyone with a pension plan or 401K plan or other portfolio holding stock index funds, and that's millions of us, is a part owner of ExxonMobil. Count me in on that. That makes what the CEO makes quite literally our business.
By the way, in another post, Trey Garrison is promoting the anti-tax rallies taking place all across Texas today. In it, he snidely uses the title Stasi for the United States Department of Homeland Security. Stasi was the name of the secret police organization of East Germany. Sometimes, Trey Garrison's adorability wears thin.
4 comments:
"His philosophy was probably influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the shapers of the "Chicago School" of economics."
I think you are giving him way too much credit for thoughtfulness here. Most libertarians, especially those of the "you're not the boss of me" variety such as Garrison, are motivated not by philosophy but by simple selfishness and obnoxious adolescent bravado.
Now, now, you're guilty of too much armchair psychoanalysis. I try to avoid making assumptions about what motivates people and concentrate instead on their behavior. That's out there for all to see.
More Austrian than Chicago.
Fun quiz here:
http://mises.org/quiz.aspx
Austria? LOL. I should have known. You drank the Kool-Aid of a group that thinks Milton Friedman is a socialist.
INTERVIEWER: Some of those debates became very, very heated. I think [Ludwig] von Mises once stormed out.
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, he did. Yes, in the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian -- people like Lionel Robbins, like George Stigler, like Frank Knight, like myself -- Mises got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists," and walked right out of the room.
Post a Comment