Tag Archives: Incentives

Does the death penalty discourage crime?

ECM sent this essay which explores whether capital punishment deters crime.

Excerpt:

“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”

A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”

Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).

The studies all concluded that between 3 and 18 innocent lives were saved by each execution of a convicted killer.

British tax and benefit system favors single parents over married couples

ECM found this article by Carolyn Moynihan on MercatorNet.

Excerpt:

An analysis of 98 couples with different earnings and numbers of children carried out by the charity Care showed that 76 of the couples would be better off if they split up and claimed welfare benefits that average £8007. Increasingly it is middle-income families where both parents work that suffer this “couple penalty”.

[…]Many do stay single — but they have children anyway, which entitles them to tax credits that take account of only one working adult per household.

Last year Labour MP Frank Field calculated that a single mother on the minimum wage with two children under eleven would get a weekly income of £487 if she worked 16 hours a week. A two-parent family with one earner would have to put in 116 hours of work on the same pay to get the same money.

It would be a poor sort of marriage that could break under the “pressure” of the partners receiving less in the way of tax breaks than the solo mum down the road (who has other disadvantages, to be sure) — as the Daily Mail suggests — but the messages being sent out are certainly not supportive of marriage as the best environment for children growing up.

The Conservative Party has promised to give back tax breaks to married couples.

This is how big government discourages marriage. The left-wing parties get elected by promising to help the poor. They help the poor by confiscating the wealth from married couples and giving it to single mothers. People see this wealth redistribution, and they stop marrying in order to get more money for doing less work. The children suffer from being raised without a father. This is called “compassion”.

Christians! Stop being ignorant! If you want to do some good in the world, do it with your own money. Don’t give it to a secular government who will try to solve the problem without any awareness of the moral law or human nature. Secular-left elites can’t solve social problems because they have no wisdom. Solve the problem yourself!

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)