Category Archives: Milton Friedman

Hillary Clinton :Take from Rich and give to Poor

December 22, 2010 – 9:44 pm

HALT: Halting Arkansas Liberals with Truth

Back in 2004 at a democratic fundraiser, Senator Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters – some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend – to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress.


“Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

In April of 2010 President Obama went off the teleprompter in his speech to a Quincy, Illinois audience about Wall Street reform and noted, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

In Milton Friedman’s series FREE TO CHOOSE there is an episode called, “Created Equal.” Basically Friedman says that we have equality before God because we are human beings with dignity. Also in the USA we all have equality of rights under the law. However, there are those who want to try to make the equality of outcome an issue and that has always been met with disastrous consequences.

This is how the late comedian Steve Allen put it in the introduction to the 30 minute episode by Milton Friedman:

Hello there, as they used to say in television. I am Steve Allen. If you don’t know that, it is not going to be a big deal anyway. Millions of people are willing to spend money to be entertained. You spend a few dollars on a record, a theater concert ticket, and Michael Jackson becomes a millionaire. I think that is a nice arrangement for you as well as for Michael Jackson, and for me too. Of course, you also have some special talents, whatever the job. If you do it well, you make life better for yourself, your family, and your neighbors.

With a free market, our income is dependent on how much training we might have had, how well we do our job, and the scarcity of what we have to offer. Lucky for me there weren’t too many other Steve Allens around. But equal opportunity __ that is the American dream. That is a market economy as Milton Friedman explained earlier in the series.

Over the years I have asked Milton for advice in understanding a number of aspects involved in economics and politics. He is a great teacher and, of course, a defender of freedom and individual rights. On the other hand, there are people who think Michael Jackson and others who earn astronomical incomes, should be prevented from doing so. They think it would be better off if income/wealth were shared, more or less, evenly. As a bare, abstract idea, there is something appealing about that. Michael obviously doesn’t need to earn fifty or one hundred million a year, and there are certainly those who have practically no money at all. So, as I say, there have been philosophers over the centuries who have tried to diminish poverty by limiting the income at the top end of the scale. The problem with that admittedly charming idea is that it has never worked.

The Pilgrims tried a form of socialism over 300 years ago. Unfortunately for their fair minded plans, they prospered only after they were allowed to keep for themselves all the food they grew, and to use it or sell it as they saw fit.

Now to turn back the clock to the early days of the communist revolution in Russia, the basic aim again was the share the wealth. But again it didn’t work. It had to be enforced with harsh laws, machine guns and barbed wire. In terms of pure economics, it was a failure. The end result was near poverty for all.

So what human kind has been so long struggling to achieve is a fair system that will permit those with special gifts of abilities to accumulate a good deal of money without, at the same time, turning a blind eye to the sufferings of the poor. No system can work if there isn’t an accumulation of wealth. It just happens that the free market system is better in that regard that the alternatives. In the ongoing debate on this issue, it is by no means necessary to argue that the free market system is perfect. It isn’t. It is simply better than the other alternatives because it is the system that provides us many more choices, certainly much more freedom, and continued prosperity.

(Steve Allen in this 9 minute video introduces Milton Friedman’s episode “Created Equal”)

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I would like to profile some State Legislators and I wanted to start off with my good friend Ann Clemmer who represents Bryant so well. Jill and I have sent our 4 kids to Bryant schools. Ann has sent her three daughters through the Bryant Schools  and I have had a chance to watch her up close and she is a lady of her word. (Below taken from Ann Clemmer’s facebook page)

State Representative Ann Clemmer District 29
First elected 2008 and re-elected 2010.

Hometown:
Bryant
Political Views:
Conservative
Religious Views:
Christian
Activities:
Gardening, reading, watching Bryant Hornet Sports,
Interests:
politics and faith issues and the family I am blessed to be a part of.
Favorite Music:
pop and rock oldies, but I listen to country, and current pop, christian music.
Favorite Movies:
When Harry Met Sally, Schindler’s List, Remember the Titans, Cinderella Man, Lord of the Rings Trilogy,
Favorite Books:
Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, Teacher Man,
Favorite TV Shows:
That 70s Show, Gilmore Girls, West Wing, Everybody Loves Raymond
Favorite Quotations:
“all that is necessary for evil to exist is for good men to do nothing” Edmund Burke
“to whom much is given, much is required” Luke 12:48
About Me:
After all these years of teaching government, I finally decided to run for office. I can no longer sit on the sidelines and offer commentary, without stepping up to offer myself to the voters as a candidate for office. I’m a wife to a wonderful husband, mother of three great and almost grown daughters. I was very happy with my life before deciding to enter politics as a candidate, but especially with term limits in the state legislature, more qualified people need to get out of their comfort zones to make our state a better place for the next generation.

Work Info

Employer:
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Position:
Instructor
Time Period:
August 1992 to present
Location:
Little Rock, AR
Description:
I am a member of a fantastic department where going into the office is a treat everyday. I am sad to be losing a dear colleague to a school closer to his home. We will miss you next year, Bill.

Education Info

Grad School:
College:
High School:
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Hillary Clinton, Taxes | Comments (0)

Pat Lynch: Criticizes Social Security Privatization

December 21, 2010 – 8:42 pm

HALT: Halting Arkansas Liberals with Truth

(Milton Friedman: The People did not want the Social Security Program)


Pat Lynch in his September 3, 2010 article in the Democrat Gazette article  notes that “Congressman John Boozman’s plan to privatize Social Security is similar to what President Bush proposed in 2005 and what Congressman Paul Ryan is advocating for this year.” Lynch uses this article to show how stupid this is for the financial future of the country. However, I will show how the free market could do a much better job than the government has in the past and will in the future.

In the October 27, 2010 Wall Street Journal in the article “Private Social Security Accounts: Still a Good Idea,” William Shipman lays out the facts:

Suppose a senior citizen — let’s call him “Joe the Plumber” — who retired at the end of 2009, at age 66, had been able to set up a personal account when he entered the work force in 1965, at the age of 21. Suppose that, paying into his personal account what he and his employer would have paid into Social Security, Joe was foolish enough to invest his entire portfolio in the stock market for all 45 years of his working career. How would he have fared in the recent financial crisis?

While working, Joe had earned the average income for full-time male workers. His wife Mary, also age 66, had earned the average income for full-time female workers. They invested together in an indexed portfolio of 90% large-cap stocks and 10% small-cap stocks, which earned the returns reported each year since 1965.

By the time of their retirement in 2009, Joe and Mary would have accumulated account funds, after administrative costs, of $855,175. Indeed, they would have been millionaires a few years earlier, but the financial crisis lost them 37% in 2008. They were unfortunate to retire just one year after the worst 10-year stock market performance since 1926. Yet their account, having earned a 6.75% return annually from 1965 to 2009, would still pay them about 75% more than Social Security would have.

What’s more, this model assumes that in retirement Joe and Mary switch to a lower-risk, conservative portfolio that averages a return of just 3%. Of course for young workers today, Social Security promises even lower returns of only 1.5% or less, given the actuarial value of all promised benefits. For many, the promised returns are zero or negative. And if Congress raises taxes or cuts benefits in order to close financial gaps — as everyone who rejects personal accounts effectively advocates — the eventual returns for young workers will be even lower.

It is a mathematical fact that the least expensive way to provide for an almost certain future liability is to save and invest in capital markets prior to the onset of the liability. That’s why state and local pension funds, corporate pension plans, federal employee retirement plans and Chile’s successful Social Security personal accounts (since copied by other countries) do so. It is sound practice.

And it’s why Mr. Obama is wrong to assert that personal Social Security accounts are “ill-conceived,” and why each of us should have the liberty to opt into one.

My father, Everette Hatcher Jr.,  has only once seen a presidential candidate.It was 1964 and it was the first time in his life that he was truly excited about a presidential candidate that did not play politics and said how it was. He drove down to downtown Memphis and heard Barry Goldwater speak at a train station.
My father later told me that he really was disappointed that the only  politician he ever got excited about lost by the largest landslide in the history of the nation up to that point.
One of the key issues in which the press mocked him on was his view to make Social Security voluntary and he also said that Social Security taxes would cost more than income taxes in most American households one day.  That day has come. I wish Goldwater’s idea had become law in 1964 which was less than three decades into Social Security. The next ten years the baby boomers will cause the amount of retirees on Social Security to go from 35 million to 70 million. If nothing is done now the system will eventually cause our taxes to climb from 15% to even higher levels. Barry knew what he was talking about.
By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)

Inner city kids suffer the most when there is no School Choice: Charter Series pt 2

December 20, 2010 – 12:41 pm

(Milton Friedman shows in this 9 minute video below how inner city parents have lost their freedom to choose concerning schools and they have suffered because of it)


The Arkansas Times has always been on the warpath when the subject of school choice comes up. Paul Hewitt in the Ark Times April 22, 2010 wrote:
In Arkansas we call privately operated charter schools “open enrollment schools.” In reality, are these schools truly open enrollment? Does every child have an equal opportunity to enroll? The first ingredient is that the child must have a parent who truly cares and monitors his or her education. 

Liberals condemn Charter and Voucher programs, but it seems it is undeniable that parents  are a key part of the success of schools. The conservative Milton Friedman went even further when he noted that  when parents lose control over the school then the education suffers:

To go back to the beginning, it all started with the fine idea that every child should have a chance to learn his three R’s. Sometimes in June when it gets hot, the kids come out in the yard to do their lessons, all 15 of them, ages 5 to 13, along with their teacher. This is the last one-room schoolhouse still operating in the state of Vermont. That is the way it used to be. Parental control, parents choosing the teacher, parents monitoring the schooling, parents even getting together and chipping in to paint the schoolhouse as they did here just a few weeks ago. Parental concern is still here as much in the slums of the big cities as in Bucolic, Vermont. But control by parents over the schooling of their children is today the exception, not the rule.

Increasingly, schools have come under the control of centralized administration, professional educators deciding what shall be taught, who shall do the teaching, and even what children shall go to what school. The people who lose most from this system are the poor and the disadvantaged in the large cities. They are simply stuck. They have no alternative.

Of course, if you are well off you do have a choice. You can send your child to a private school or you can move to an area where the public schools are excellent, as the parents of many of these students have done. These students are graduating from Weston High School in one of Boston’s wealthier suburbs. Their parents pay taxes instead of tuition and they certainly get better value for their money than do the parents in Hyde Park. That is partly because they have kept a good deal of control over the local schools, and in the process, they have managed to retain many of the virtues of the one-room schoolhouse.

 
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Vouchers | Comments (0)

Mark Pryor supported Failed Stimulus

December 15, 2010 – 1:07 pm

HALT: Halting Arkansas Liberals with Truth

(Paul Ryan outlines what has happened since the stimulus has been passed)

Will Rogers has a great quote that I love. He noted, “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago”(Paula McSpadden Love, The Will Rogers Book, (1972) p. 20.)

Senator Mark Pryor voted for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which was signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009. Both Pryor and Obama thought the economy could be jump started by more government spending. On January 10, 2009 President Obama claimed that the Stimulus would bring unemployment under 8% and create 4.1 million jobs.

NOTICE TO LIBERALS: Did the economy get stimulated by the Stimulus Bill? The verdict came in with the unemployment figures. Unemployment had gone from 8.1% (Feb 2009) to 9.8% (Nov 2010). The stimulus had failed just like every other stimulus that had ever been attempted by any government anywhere.

It is my view that the stimulus bill did nothing to stimulate the economy. Also how can President Obama claim that economists on “the right” approve of the stimulus when not one Republican voted for it? In 2009 The Cato Institute ran an ad in leading newspapers through out the country that seems to contradict this very claim and had it signed by 300 leading economists (several Nobel Prize Winners included) : “Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
Now that the Democrats have lost their large majorities we have an opportunity  to duplicate the same political environment that existed the last three years of the Clinton presidency when we actually had three balanced budgets in his last three years (surplus of 69 billion in 98, 76 billion in 99, 46 billion in 2000). The Tea Party Republicans should help in that regard too.  Futhermore, President Obama faces real problems with China who is balking at buying up American currency and Treasury bonds at the pace it takes to sustain the current deficit of 1.35 trillion.
Deep down President Obama really does believe that more government is the answer. Back in 1980 I read a book called FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and in it he said, “We’ve become increasing dependent on government. We’ve surrendered power to government, nobody has taken it from us. It’s our doing. The results, monumental government spending. Much of it wasted, little of it going to the people whom we would like to see helped. Burdensome taxes, high inflation, a welfare system under which neither those who receive help nor those who pay for it are satisfied. Trying to do good with other people’s money simply has not worked.” (The Free to Choose Film Series can be viewed at http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/ ).

I believe in returning social programs to private charities and churches where they would be privately funded. We can longer afford to allow government to interfere in our lives. Just imagine the expansion of private business and investment that will occur when our taxes are reduced dramatically because over half of our budget expenditures have been eliminated.

Politicians like Mark Pryor and President Obama need to realize that only jobs created by the private sector will stimulate the economy, and taking resources out of the private economy and putting them into temporary government jobs will only cause the debt to go up along with eventually our interest rates and inflation. Milton Friedman said it best: “There is no free lunch!!!”

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in President Obama | Comments (0)

Max Brantley, Pat Lynch, Gene Lyons and other Liberals refuted here!

December 13, 2010 – 5:45 pm

HALT: Halting Arkansas Liberals with Truth

Opening Post December 13, 2010 11:36 am

My name is Everette Hatcher III.  I am a businessman in Little Rock and have been living in Bryant since 1993. My wife Jill and I have four kids (Rett 24, Hunter 22, Murphey 16, and Wilson 14). I have been a Razorback season ticket holder since 1984 and I have attempting to take my son Wilson to see all the southeastern conference schools play football. He still has not seen Vandy, Kentucky and Alabama play. However, this year he got to knock Ole Miss off his list and last year Georgia and the year before Florida. He has seen LSU and Miss St play many times.

I have been a political junkie since 1972 when I watched my first Democratic and Republican National Conventions. I especially was captivated by the 1976 run by Ronald Reagan.

See for yourself what you can expect from this blog by reading my opening post below.

Do you ever find yourself looking through the local political news and you find a local liberal attacking principles that made this country great? Max Brantley, Pat Lynch, Gene Lyons and many other liberal commentators are constantly commenting on politics. Many of these liberals have comment sections on their blogs and they invite discussion. I want to provide at least a thought a day from the conservative perspective. Let me give you an example.

So many points brought up by liberals sound so good at first but really are easy to answer logically. Take the example below.

I remember like yesterday when I saw Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show. Donahue had thrown up one of those liberal accusations against the free enterprise system. Below is the exchange that I saw that day:

Phil Donahue: When you see around the globe, the mal-distribution of wealth, a desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries. When you see so few “haves” and so many “have-nots.” When you see the greed and the concentration of power. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea to run on?

Milton Friedman: Well first of all tell me is there some society you know that doesn’t run on Greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who is greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about – the only cases in recorded history – are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.

If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system…

Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewarded virtue? You think a Hitler rewarded virtue? You think – excuse me – if you’ll pardon me – do you think American Presidents reward virtue ?

Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout ?

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest ? You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us ? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that.

By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (1)