Where’s The Magic Formula?

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on March 3, 2018.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2018...a/#3a4e6da97a01

For some time, I’ve argued that a lot of economic policymaking boils down to the Magic Formula, which is: Low Taxes and Stable Money. There is more to it than this, of course; but if you don’t get the big stuff right, the little stuff won’t matter. So, get the big stuff right, first.

Conversely, when a country runs into trouble, you can usually find that high or rising taxes, unstable money, or both are also present. The analysis usually doesn’t have to go much further. Fix that, and the ship will right itself.

This is not supposed to be a complicated, or surprising idea. Forty years now after the “supply side revolution” in the U.S., and after decades of diligent and detailed work by the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and others in favor of Low Taxes and at least a rude avoidance of monetary disasters, it should be a familiar concept. Every Republican presidential candidate has a tax reform plan, and recently they have been both aggressive and sophisticated. Actually, this was familiar concept two hundred and fifty years ago, too. Adam Smith, writing in 1755, summed it up:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Smith said not only that you should get the big stuff right, but that if you get the big stuff right, the small stuff will more-or-less take care of itself, “all the rest brought about by the natural course of things.”

Smith didn’t have as much to say about Stable Money, but, at the time he was writing, the British pound had been one of the most reliable currencies in Europe, having been essentially unchanged in value for over two hundred years. It probably didn’t seem that pressing. Nevertheless, he devoted the last chapter of The Wealth of Nations to a warning to avoid currency devaluation.

And yet, I’ve noticed that economic intellectuals don’t seem to have much to say about the Magic Formula. Rather than building on Adam Smith’s insight, they seemed to have forgotten it.

Greg Mankiw, a mainstream academic economist, once summed up what his specialty had to offer in the form of ten principles. They were:

1. People face trade-offs
2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it
3. Rational people think at the margin
4. People respond to incentives
5. Trade can make everyone better off
6. Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity
7. Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes
8. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services
9. Prices rise when the government prints too much money
10. Society faces a short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.

Not a word about the Magic Formula. Reading this list, can you describe what beneficial economic policy might be? (You might think that “people respond to incentives” is about taxes, but it’s not.)

Yoram Bauman, a professor of economics at the University of Washington, translated Mankiw’s Ten Principles for laymen:

1. Choices are bad
2. Choices are really bad
3. People are stupid
4. People aren’t that stupid
5. Trade can make everyone worse off
6. Governments are stupid
7. Governments aren’t that stupid
8. Blah blah blah
9. Blah blah blah
10. Blah blah blah

The Foundation for Economic Education, representing a more libertarian approach, suggested their own target="_blank" twelve principles:

1. Gains from Trade.
2. Subjective Value.
3. Opportunity Cost.
4. Spontaneous Order.
5. Incentives.
6. Comparative Advantage.
7. Knowledge Problem.
8. Seen and Unseen.
9. Rules Matter.
10. Action is Purposeful.
11. Civil Society.
12. Entrepreneurship.

All fine ideas. Not a word about the Magic Formula. Nothing about peace and a “tolerable administration of justice” either.

Let’s go on. target="_blank" Applied Mainline Economics (2017), by Matthew Mitchell and Peter Boettke of the Mercatus Center, is a summary of how to apply the Austrian/libertarian economic principles of the Mercatus Center to practical policy. It has no discussion of either Low Taxes or Stable Money. Boettke’s Living Economics (2012) has one index entry about taxes, which refers to one sentence. Austrian Economics and Public Policy (2016), by Richard Ebeling, has a nice discussion of Stable Money, but again almost nothing about taxes (although he does prefer them to be low and unobtrusive). This mirrors target="_blank" Human Action (1949), by Ludwig von Mises, which has six pages of discussion about taxes out of 900.