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These people and their miniature worlds are so tiny. I'm crushing their heads! Be sure to hit the video at the end.

Megan McArdle asks us to take a moment to marvel at the kitchen wonders some of us (humans) enjoy today.

The rest of this link post is brought to you by Don Boudreaux (directly or via hat tips).

On the 69th anniversary of inexcusable brutality, Boudreaux asks us to remember and remember how conservatives felt about it at the time.

I relate very, VERY much to Sheldon Richman's sentiments in this post.

George Will rightfully takes to task those who would paint inverting corporations as unpatriotic. I love the conclusion:

This illustrates the grandstanding frivolity of the political class. It legislates into existence incentives for what it considers perverse behavior, and then waxes indignant when businesses respond sensibly to the incentives.

Matt Zwolinski has five important moral (and economic) points about payday lending.

The free market is filled with something even better than tolerance--indifference.

Here Boudreaux offers not just a strong argument against cronyistic policies like the Ex-Im Bank but also a strong argument against the minimum wage. To wit: why is it consumers' job (or in the case of the minimum wage, employers of low-wage employees' job) to compensate the "victims" of foreign subsidies (low wages)?

Just how dangerous is it to be a cop? Daniel Bier answers. (SPOILER ALERT: not very).

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The Internet is controlled by 14 people who hold 7 secret physical keys. This sorta takes the mysterious fun out of it.

Tyrannical central planning looks dimmer every time you look at it.

Sumner points out the obvious culprit behind the high and growing rates of youth unemployment.

Dovetailing unfortunately with the prior link whereby union workers tend to gain from minimum wage laws at the expense of low-wage (largely youth) workers, is how NYC's mayor and teachers' unions are fighting proven successful methods of teaching disadvantaged youths.

Jonathan Mahler is fantasizing about the lawsuit that will kill the NCAA. Mark Cuban is promoting an idea that I believe would improve NCAA basketball, NBA basketball, and most importantly the wellbeing of the men who play basketball. Not to mention that it would likely be have negative side effects for the NCAA itself.

Two more on sports: Baseball umpires show bias (all the more reason machines should replace/complement their work); Grantland has a good overview on the work left to be done in bringing analytics to sports.

Landsburg has some good thoughts on the Arizona Senate's attempt to allow a certain type of discrimination.

Turnabout is fair play for the CFPB.

Here are two strong reasons to not believe the conventional wisdom that middle-class incomes have been stagnant for the past few decades. The first shows how amazingly more affordable housing is today, and that is before we take into account how much better it is today in quality. The second debunks the myth that wage growth and productivity growth have separated from one another.

Lastly, an interview with "the bogeyman".

A Little Whine

Me: "Look what just came in the mail!"

Me: "Wow! $100 off a case of wine. I really like wine. I'll put this to good use."

William Jennings Bryan: "I'm sorry, but you cannot use that voucher."

Me: "Why? Is it a fraud?"

WJB: "No, it is entirely legitimate."

Me: "Excellent! I think I'll start shopping right away."

WJB: "That will do you no good."

Me: "Is the Internet down?"

WJB: "No, the Internet is working fine. But the wine cannot be shipped to you."

Me: "Why? Is there some act of God preventing delivery of packages to my area?"

WJB: "No, the shipping companies are operating. They just cannot deliver wine to individuals in Oklahoma."

Me: "Why are they picking on Okies?"

WJB: "They are not. They would love to deliver the wine to you."

Me: "Is Zagat picking on Okies?"

WJB: "Oh, no. They would love to sell the wine to you."

Me: "Then who is behind this?"

WJB: "Okies. Well, Oklahoma law to be precise."

Me: "But wait, isn't Oklahoma part of America? Or did we get swept up by a twister and delivered to Oz?"

WJB: "Of course you're still in America. In fact there are several states that prohibit the direct distribution of alcohol to individuals who do not have a distributor's license."

Me: "Prohibit? I thought alcohol prohibition ended decades ago."

WJB: "Sadly at the federal level it did. But the states were reserved the right to limit it as they saw fit."

Me: "And the way they see fit is to prevent anyone without a license from having wine delivered to their address? That doesn't sound very consumer friendly. Why would they want to create a monopsony/monopoly situation?"

WJB: "It's great for the distributors. Plus, it's for your own good."

Me: "How is it for my own good?"

WJB: "How would you know the wine being delivered is wine without a licensed distributor verifying it by having it delivered to and promptly delivered out of his warehouse?"

Me: "Well, I could trust the people at Zagat and then when it arrives I could taste it."

WJB: "Oh simple citizen, imagine the chaos if every Larry, Moe, and Curly were having things shipped to their home for direct consumption. We must have licensed professionals as part of the process."

Me: "But we do have thousands of things via Amazon . . ."

WJB: "And what if your children were to go on this Internet and order wine? They could be dead drunk before you knew what happened."

Me: "Like if they got into the wine I have in my house that I purchased at an Oklahoma liquor store but not a grocery store because that is illegal in Oklahoma and not that I purchased on a Sunday because that is illegal and then they drank it all up . . . Do I need a state-licensed person perhaps to have a key to my liquor cabinet to make sure only authorized people consume my wine?"

WJB: "Interesting idea . . ."

Me: "Sigh . . ."

Go On, Take the Money and Run

Almost three years later, I along with tens of thousands of Americans have now received back the money we had on deposit with FullTilt.com. Collectively we had about $80 million that we were using to play online poker. Suddenly on April 15th, 2011 (Black Friday) those funds were no longer available and the website and computer programs used to play poker and transact into and out of player accounts were shut down by our friends in the U.S. Federal Government. Of course, it was for our own good . . . Wish you'd stop bein' so good to me, Cap'n.

It is my understanding that playing real-money online poker has never been illegal--not before passage of the UIGEA, not between its passage then enforcement and the actions taken on Black Friday, and not after including when the DOJ said, "Oops, my bad!"

But my understanding does not matter here. Let us not have a failure to communicate when we say, "Consenting adults playing poker with their own money SHOULD NEVER BE ILLEGAL!" Alas, we do not live in a world of free markets and free minds. And so when the Attorney General of NY took action on Black Friday, he pushed online poker from the shadows and fully into the black market. Throughout this entire affair online poker has always been available to U.S. players. But as the government took a firmer hardline stance against it, the providers (Party Poker who abruptly exited the U.S. market in 2006, FullTilt, PokerStars, Bodog/Bovada, et al.) and facilitators (various third-party money transfer services) some of whom remained in the market became less transparent and less trustworthy. However, FullTilt never failed to fulfill any withdrawal requests I made including one made a few weeks before Black Friday. It remains unclear how at risk player funds were before government action versus how government action created a liquidity risk.

The fight goes on. There is strong, widespread support for poker including lobbying by the aforementioned via link Poker Players Alliance (PPA). And there is the fledgling coalition against it led by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. No fear mongering is beyond the pale for Sheldon's group--"Online gambling funds terrorists!" "It's going to target the elderly and college-aged children, CHILDREN!"

This recent NPR piece shows where the trend is going along with the position the prohibitions are staking. From the story, Sheldon states, "I'm morally against it and I think it will kill the entire industry." Sorry Sheldon, you can't be both the Baptist and the Bootlegger at the same time. Framing it as a moral stand is transparently pathetic. But at least that would be an argument, begging the question that government should enforce your morality positions. That it threatens your business model is never an argument against innovation or for prohibition.

And so we grind on.

Highly linkable

What happens when you combine hundreds of images of a sunset into one image? Magic.

Here and here are a couple of takes on photos of the year.

I want to go to there.

It is actually logical, but reprehensible, that part and parcel of the NCAA's enforcement includes limiting universities' abilities to provide additional tutoring.

Here is Landsburg's latest puzzle. It seems simple enough. Once you've attempted, go to the solution--I got it wrong and stumbled initially to see how the solution was true.

The free market is this era's Galileo.

The world needs radicals like the late, great Nelson Mandela. In fact it needs them to be even more radical.

So you're telling me they help write the rules that they will later be forced to follow? Like I said at Cafe Hayek, which deserves a hat tip for the link: "So many people delude themselves into believing that regulation is some benevolent construct created from pure knowledge, guided by thoughtful reason, immune to bad intentions, and protected from unintended consequences. If only the sausage factory were so."

Cass Sunstein says we need Moneyball-like metrics for non-profits. I agree and would take it further. We pay them to solve problems. Not to fail by trying to hit an arbitrary size of administrative expense.

A degree in English does not necessarily mean you can speak the language of business or economics. And here are two more from John Cochrane on why there is hope for healthcare after Obamacare completely fails.

Finally, 2013 saw yet another great economist pass on to that higher utility curve in the sky. Walter Oi is remembered quite well here by Steven Landsburg.

The Regulator's Dilemma

Imagine two rooms: one is a group of consumers and one is a group of producers. For now the rooms are completely isolated from one another. As they are labeled, these two groups will interact in trade.

Now imagine a regulator whose job is to, well, to do something. The regulator has imperfect information but is guided by a few beliefs about the job to be done. The first is a belief that the job exists somewhere along the dimension of necessity, which extends from anti-necessary to necessary. At the extreme of necessary the regulatory job is required for a good outcome. Anti-necessary is not the same as unnecessary; rather it means the job of regulation is in fact destructive—that the execution of the regulatory job brings a clear net harm.

The second belief is about where the need exists. Is it the consumers or the producers who need "help"? Let's call this dimension need.

The third belief is that he as the regulator will do a good job of fulfilling the regulatory mission. Let's call this dimension effectiveness. This dimension obviously extends from positive to negative meaning he does a good job or a bad job regulating.

The regulator has limited resources in addition to imperfect information. He must make tradeoffs. The interaction of where his beliefs land on the three-dimensional grid of necessity, need, and effectiveness will determine how he approaches the job of regulator (of course, it may not just be his beliefs that guide that decision, but he is a good proxy for the fact that something guides those beliefs).

For example he can concentrate his efforts on the group of consumers. In this case he surveys the room of consumers with the underlying belief that 'there are people in this room who can't be trusted to make good decisions even if there is no fraud involved. I must protect those idiots from themselves.' Call this option 1.

Alternatively he can concentrate on the producers thinking 'there are people in this room who can't be trusted to act ethically. I must stop those crooks.' Call this option 2.

And of course there is the more likely option that he divides his efforts between both groups. Call this option 3.

Here are my thoughts:

• We unfortunately tend to view the job of regulation and regulators as highly necessary and highly effective. This means they punch hard and with impunity. The only thing left to decide is where they punch.
• Option 1 can be a realistic point of view or it can be a disgusting point of view. People do make poor choices—all the time, every day. But the magnitude of those poor choices matters. So does the incentive arrangement—who is in the best position to benefit from a good choice and hurt but learn from a bad choice. At the extreme this point of view relies on a paternalistic philosophy that assumes the best way to make decisions is through a poorly incentivized and poorly informed regulator. Free market processes are highly superior to a regulator if option 1 is our focus for regulation.
• Option 2 is the best case that can be made for regulation. There will be fraud and with it real blood. But again the role of the regulator can and should be limited here. The regulator can be a blunt and poor instrument for discovering and preventing fraud in all its forms including unintentional harm. Liability law via common law and contract law (both emergent processes) can be equal or better regulators than a pure regulator himself.
• Option 3 is where most regulation tends to land from the SEC to the FDA. And think about how the more dynamic real world plays out. The rooms aren’t actually isolated from one another nor are the groups mutually exclusive. Everyone is in one big room wearing multiple labels. The imperfectly informed regulator is going to look for the help of the relatively informed producers to help guide his attempts at helping consumers. He is asking people, some of whom are crooks and many of whom have ulterior motives, to structure and enforce option 1. He will also look to define fraud from the point of view of the “victim”. The relatively injured consumers (who will self-select among those who have suffered a harm—happy people don’t complain) will help guide the regulator. He is asking people, some of whom are notoriously making bad decisions but not bearing the full burden of those choices, to structure and enforce option 2. This is a formula for regulation that is anti-necessary, ineffective at all the wrong times, and fulfilling mythical needs.

Highly linkable

NFL overtime is broken. Fortunately, Brian Burke is here to fix it.

Be happy because, well, Cause it's getting better; Growing stronger, warm and wilder; Getting better everyday! (be sure not to miss the second link, Fool!).

But I had the best of intentions; I didn't mean for that to happen.

The real reason Henry Ford raised his worker's wages--standard high school history is lies and garbage.

Something to be thankful for.

The Pope has a lot to learn about economics. Reviewing the extensive Library of Economics and Liberty would be a good start. Here is a recent piece by Bob Murphy to get him started.

Highly linkable

The more I read about pirates the less I think the Jack Sparrow saga is based on true events. (HT: Tyler Cowen)

What do you mean the cost of health care is going up?!?

But surely there aren't simple, compromise solutions that while they may not be first best, are second best and far and away better than the Obamamess?

Finally, here is a great summary of what market "efficiency" is really all about. One of many money quotes:

Efficiency implies that professional managers should do no better than monkeys with darts. This prediction too bears out in the data. It too could have come out the other way. It should have come out the other way! In any other field of human endeavor, seasoned professionals systematically outperform amateurs.

We need more teacher pay inequality

A recent conversation with a relative who I am quite sure is a very good teacher got me thinking about the conventional wisdom regarding teacher pay--specifically, that teachers are underpaid.

While I feel strongly about this particular teacher's abilities, I do not feel as strongly that she is "underpaid" despite being in a position of relative low pay when considering hours and effort that go into her job. Likewise, I don't think she herself necessarily believes she is "underpaid", though that would be a common and understandable instinctive feeling. If I have to guess, I would say she is indeed underpaid, but as you will see that is not a guess I can arrive at lightly nor can I have much confidence in it.

Here are my thoughts:

A status of being low paid is only meaningful in a relative sense. However, a status of underpaid is also a relative status, but the two are not congruent. Underpaid is a deeper sense of relative--kind of a second derivative in a manner of thinking. To be low paid simply means having a lower absolute level of income in some comparison. To make that comparison more meaningful one should seek a good apples-to-apples arrangement. Obviously comparing a $40,000 a year job to a 10,000 Euro per month job doesn't tell us much. We get more information in comparing a $20 per statutory hour job with a $30 per statutory hour job, but we don't get a whole lot more. Most professionals including many teachers put in time beyond the standard work day.

Suppose we could get a standardized denominator of effort hours (we can't just use hours because an hour spent scanning people in at the local gym is not the same as an hour spent fighting a fire). How meaningful would that comparison of pay then be? The answer is "a lot more meaningful but still significantly short of deep economic significance". Certainly that information would help guide a lot of career decisions, but it still doesn't tell us if someone is underpaid. To get that comparison, we need to know if a particular person should make more. The person should make more (technically speaking, command a greater share of society's resources) if the value of her teaching (resource she creates) is worth more than the total pay she receives (resources she uses). Our best bet to know this answer (and this is a loose use of the term know since we actually can only hope to have a really good guess) is through a market process--and you thought I was going to say government omniscience.

Notice that the market answer is usually the standard to judge the righteousness of outcomes not because we define optimal resource allocation as the outcome the market creates but because we believe (with really good reason) that under the right conditions the market will elicit optimal resource allocations. Those right conditions are when markets are deep, cheap, and esteemed (lots of knowledgeable buyers and sellers with low transactions costs where property rights are firm, clear, and respected). We need a substantial degree of all of these to describe a market as a free market. The free market is not God. The free market is our way of discovering how a benevolent, omniscient dictator (a god-like super creature) would allocate resources.

But the education market is not conducted under very favorable conditions to elicit good allocations. Transactions costs are high and knowledge is expensive. Government separates buyer and seller insulating sellers from the discipline the market would otherwise provide*. We can probably expect a few outcomes from this as it relates to teacher pay. Pay differentials will become compressed where bad teachers are overpaid and good teachers are underpaid. Resource allocation communication and decisions will be further polluted pushing good teachers out of the profession or encouraging them to shirk while inducing bad teachers to enter the profession.

Because of this, I am led to believe that my relative is indeed likely underpaid (I have a lot of inside information about how good a teacher she is). However, (and now isn't this ironic?) for the same reason I believe she is underpaid, I cannot have much confidence in this judgment. That is at the heart of the problem with heavily government-influenced markets--they obfuscate knowledge inhibiting the communication process the market wants to provide.


*Nature abhors a vacuum and the market abhors bad resource allocation. In this sense the market naturally works toward being a free market. It is because of this positive feedback loop, a virtuous cycle, that markets are so powerfully good.

Did we really expect Big Bird to be good at running the world's largest health insurer?

In 2009 in the midst of an economic and financial crisis, the President of the United States chose to direct his administration's efforts toward solving the problems of health insurance as he saw them. For some reason he believed massively increasing third-party payment (a condition that we have no evidence and no theory to suggest should work) was the key solution along with price controls, production quotas, and government-provided alternatives. There were lots of reasons to believe this would not work out well, but the generally overlooked one was the world's largest mega-conglomerate has a horrible track record of getting from intentions to effective and efficient execution.

The virtues of Obama's intentions were well disputed. Arguments were also strongly and sufficiently offered against the effect these policy changes would bring about. But few, Megan McArdle the exception, predicted the websites wouldn't work. Yet we shouldn't be surprised. All reasonable philosophies of political economy leave room for the failure of democratic governance. Coming from a libertarian, free-market philosophy, I believe these schemes are destined to fail because government lacks the proper incentives. But others coming from a progressive philosophy should expect that sinister Republicans, conservatives, tea-partiers, et al. will thwart the efforts of the enlightened. It only becomes utopian nonsense when after the supposed thwarting the defense of failure is "It would have worked if it weren't for you meddling kids."

The website failure is a demonstrative microcosm for why Obamacare is doomed. These aren't glitches, this is a canary in the coal mine.

Let's keep it suboptimal

Last week while visiting the wonderful city of Seattle, I spotted a delivery truck with an unfortunate message painted broadly across its side. The truck was a produce delivery truck and the message was apparently an intentional advertising slogan. It read, "Let's Keep It Local!" I didn't have time to take a picture. Presumably based on the other advertising art this is a local fruit and vegetable company.

I have to admit my first reaction was a little hostile. My thoughts were: Will they sell to me? What if I plan to take it back to Oklahoma? At the Pike Place Market I purchased an extra honey crisp apple and mango with the intention of taking them home. What a shame it would be if those purchases had been prohibited based on my intentions to eat them abroad. But I'm sure the localizers do not care about my consumption venue, or that I can peel an apple in one long, curry strip. It is only the production origin that concerns them; I can imagine them saying. But that just leads to more questions:

• You're okay with exports, but you don't like imports? 
• So, you're saying you'd like to have your apple cake and eat it too? 
• Does it concern you that such a scheme will lead to your own wealth being reduced? 

Did I lose them with that last one? It is the mantra of the local movement that by "keeping it local" we keep both sides of the exchange--notice the "we" here, and remember there is no "we". We is an arbitrary fiction. It implies at some point people stop being one of "us" and start being one of "them". Such xenophobia is not just morally unhealthy. It is economically destructive--itself a moral wrong.

If you eat your own apple cake, you then won't have one left over. If you (import and) eat mine, you still have yours. All I ask is that you give me something you value less than the cake but that I value more than my cake. Like perhaps a Locks tour from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington. This is the essence of gains from trade. These gains expand as the market expands--as more of "them" become "us". 

No Great Stagnation: Celebrity Escort edition

That title should get some search hits . . .

In the vein of argument against Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation story, I offer this low-hanging fruit. Among the many, many things my grandfather kept from his many, many travels to the State Fair of Oklahoma were two new car brochures. One is for the 1983 Chevy Celebrity and the other is for the 1984 Ford Escort. These were once considered automobiles worth of use by famous and heroic investigative reporters. Today they are . . . I'll let you judge for yourself. Enjoy!

PS. I know the Tempo ≠ Escort exactly.

If Marie Antoinette lived in a glass house, would her pot and kettle be black?

So I'm mixing methaphors . . . and stealing one in this case. Bob Stoops, the University of Oklahoma's rather well-paid football coach, made some comments the other day to the Sporting News regarding college football players' "pay". Having read the article, I'm not nearly as worked up as I was when the comments were related to me--so much for the reliability of hearsay.

The part where I'm stealing a metaphor comes from The Oklahoman's columnist, Berry Tramel's, article. I think he gets it basically right: message wasn't so bad, but delivery including the messenger is a problem.

Stoops' message is an argument worth having: that college football players do get paid in the form of scholarships, tutoring, athletic training, etc. Of course at some point the NCAA's basic message would be in conflict with Stoops' in that all the TV ads the cartel runs keep telling us that college athletes are almost always "going pro in something other than their sport". So much for the value of the training.

I read that Stoops says he is all for stipends. So maybe we are just arguing about the form and structure of how college football players, et al. should be paid. But if he wants to argue that a scholarship is of high value to an athlete, and let's remember that value is subjective (i.e., wage value is in the eye of the laborer), then there is a simple test we can conduct. Let athletes choose between full scholarships and the comparable amount in after-tax income. Stop making them attend classes unless they choose to attend and pay for college. If Stoops is right, then not much should change in the college football landscape.

PS. To those who would invoke the silly argument that college football players would make a foolish choice taking the money instead of the education, I'd say be careful the point you raise. Are you sure you know better how adults (nearly all college football players are adults) should live their lives than they do? If college football players are so foolish or short sighted or subject to bad decision making perhaps due to adverse influences in their lives, then are we sure no one other than the people profiting off of their labor should be making these choices for them? Are you sure college is as valuable as you think? Have you read Charles Murray? Are you sure all universities are created (and continue) equal? Does the fact that 115,000 janitors hold bachelor's degrees give you pause? How would you characterize "The Great Gatsby"? Was he . . . uh  . . . great!?

Honey, I shrunk the bank.

As a continuation of the on-going discussion I have with colleagues, one sends me this link to a WSJ article by Dallas Fed Chief Richard Fisher and his executive VP Harvey Rosenblum on "How to Shrink the 'Too-Big-to-Fail' Banks". My comments were:


I generally like it—a step toward less government involvement and less social insurance of profit-seeking firms. But there is a bit of hand waving over the third tier in their proposal:

Third, we recommend that the largest financial holding companies be restructured so that every one of their corporate entities is subject to a speedy bankruptcy process, and in the case of banking entities themselves, that they be of a size that is "too small to save." Addressing institutional size is vital to maintaining a credible threat of failure, thereby providing a convincing case that policy has truly changed.

Easier said than done in defining how small a bank would need to be. They need more specifics here; otherwise, the cronyism is in the details.

I'll take Intellectual Reconciliation for $1000, Alex.

A reader sent me this screenshot of a Ron Paul Facebook post from today:

This is one of the few areas where Ron Paul and I part ways. I'm not sure relative to me if he is too pessimistic about the power of the market to overcome government failure or if I am too optimistic about the limits of government as a destructive force. Possibly some combination is the truth. We are both definitely believers in the market as a force of good and the government as a force of destruction (beyond extremely limited government). For the long-term, however, I would tend to agree with his take presuming no significant changes to the current trajectory of government growth and power. The unsustainability of the current path would imply downward corrections.

I am certainly reading between the lines on his post and perhaps making some errors when doing so.

Is a cooperative, capitalistic society a de facto partial realization of a socialistic ideal?

Other titles considered for this post:

• What's one man's treasure, is another man's rental.
• Something borrowed . . .

I've written about sharing before. I've also mentioned 3-D printing, which seems to have the promise of shifting cost curves down by several orders of magnitude. But we should consider an opposing force that rather than increasing the quantity of tools (capital goods) and toys (consumption goods) increases the productivity of existing tools and toys--the "share economy".

Megan McArdle writing in the Daily Beast points to a Forbes piece that reveals just prolific sharing may become with new technological advances. The company profiled is AirBnB, and it serves as a good proxy for the many companies and changes this sharing economy could bring. Like any paradigm shift this substantial, technology alone won't get us there; culture changes probably will need to play a role as well. Regardless, the potential implications seem tremendous.

For example, also writing in Forbes, Chunka Mui has a series on how Google's driverless car technology could have trillion dollar impacts relatively soon--creative destruction writ larger than we've seen it in some time. If he is even partially correct, this will be a change to the auto industry (and many other industries as well) very comparable to what the advent of the auto industry did to buggy whips (and horse-drawn carriages, of course). 

Now to relate this to the chosen title for this post. Part of the socialist ideal is a society where ownership does not preclude use or sharing. If my neighbor has a tool, I too can have a tool if I need one. Part of the problem for realizing the socialist ideal is that ownership is fairly essential for orderly allocation of resources. It is a practically necessary condition and definitely a sufficient condition for solving the Calculation Problem-assuming a price system evolves out of ownership. Capitalism, perhaps more appropriately free markets, has always been the best means of achieving the goals of more and more for everyone and continually optimizing resource allocation. Here again we see a major step toward realizing those goals. 

The debate between socialism and capitalism is very much mostly not an argument about desirable ends but rather an argument about practical (largely) and principled (less so) means. Capitalism has always been saying, "I have some, and you can have some too." Socialism on the other hand has always been saying, "I ain't got nothing, but you can always have half!"