skirmishes

Communication Power Tip:  Instead of always giving the "right" answer to people, try asking them for an answer.

Questions make people think. And when someone comes up with the right answer themselves, they are more likely to claim the idea as their own ... because it is their own idea!

Here's one example from Wall Street Journal editor John Fund. Suppose someone is talking about the need for a major government role in providing for the poor. Instead of lecturing the person (which could start an argument and put the person on the defensive), try this question: ''Suppose you won the lottery or otherwise came into a large sum of money, and you wanted to help the poor.

''You could give $100,000 to a private charity of your choice. Or you could write your check to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Which would you choose, and why?''

The answer is virtually always predictable. And in answering it, people convince themselves of the advantages of charity over government.

Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs). I'll bet you don't know that we've already had MSAs.

They were a Reagan initiative, passed in 1982, but repealed in 1984. The medical reform was part of the Flexible Savings Accounts I described in a previous column (The best-kept secrets of healthcare reform).

Flex Accounts are maintained by (mostly) large employers. They contain tax-free dollars, supplied by either employers or employees — for reimbursing Child Care and uninsured Medical expenses.

The bill sailed through Congress in 1982, with strong bipartisan support. It was mostly Democrats who wanted the tax break for Child Care. It was mostly Republicans who wanted the tax break for uninsured Medical expenses.

Health insurers responded by offering higher-deductible coverage — with the lower premiums credited to employee's Flex Account. It was not yet the full-blown MSA that we talk about now. The biggest savings to my wife's account were only $450 a year, from the (slightly) higher-deductible. But the savings could roll over from year to year.

That's what Congress repealed in 1984 — the rollover of tax-free dollars — before full-blown MSAs could evolve. Employees now forfeit any dollars remaining in their Flex Account at yearend.

In a trend we still see today, Democrats simply rolled over the hapless Republicans, who still controlled the Senate. If Republicans had defended their own initiative, we would have likely avoided the severe inflation in health insurance later that same decade.

Phone companies vs. the Internet.  Many market libertarians are charging off in the wrong direction, on the issue of higher telephone rates for Internet users.

On the surface, we have regulated phone companies vs. unregulated Internet providers. That causes some free-marketers to instinctively side with the unregulated industry. What we really have, though, is Internet users defending their free lunch.

Residential phone rates, for unlimited local calling, are themselves a creature of regulation. If a still tiny number of Internet users requires increased capital investment by phone companies, then who should pay for that investment?

If Internet users don't pay for that investment, then the costs will be paid by all telephone customers. The monthly rate for unlimited residential calling will increase for everyone.

That's a subsidy to Internet users, paid by the 85% of households with no Internet access, imposed by government rate regulation.

If that's not clear yet, review the fixed-price folly of America Online. It's now so difficult to access AOL, that some members simply stay online for days at a time. We may laugh at AOL on this, but their members are also tying up phone lines for several days, at a fixed price for residential phone service. Who pays for that?

Lesson from Dad. I never did convert my father to libertarianism. But I learned something far more valuable — I never had to. To place him culturally, he'd be 81 today. By current labels, he was a social conservative, though he said Barry Goldwater was the best presidential candidate he'd voted for.

There are several libertarian positions Dad would have never actively supported. But I didn't need him to.

Dad already knew economic regulation was a failure. He came to passively accept (with occasional reminders) that social regulation was just as bad. I had modified a Goldwater theme: any government big enough to ban dirty books is big enough to ban the Bible. Sure enough, government indeed now seeks to ban both.

Note the distinction between "active support" and "passive acceptance." That's the key. It's a major factor that libertarian purists cannot grasp.

We shall prevail, not when a majority of voters support most of our most passionate issues.  We shall prevail when voters accept these notions, grudgingly, as a price they must pay — for whatever they hope to gain in a free society.

I call that the Social Contract version of TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Even left-liberals understand the TANSTAAFL principle. Listen as they promote social tolerance. Tolerance for others is the price one pays to have one's own values respected.

That's right, liberals are running around condemning a free lunch, something for nothing, on the issue of social tolerance.

Turn that around; try reframing economic rights as economic tolerance.

We don't need left-liberals to actively support economic rights. We need only their acceptance of the notion, even if grudgingly — in exchange for whatever they hope to gain in a tolerant society.

Live and let live.

CPI measures ... what? For pure nonsense, it's hard to top the notion of adjusting the Consumer price Index.

Let's think about the most common complaint, and the most-quoted example of that complaint. We're told that CPI fails to properly measure changes in consumer buying behavior, such as when consumers switch from beef to chicken.

Why measure that at all?

To illustrate, let's assume everyone now buys filet mignon, at $7.00 per pound. Beef prices increase, so we all switch to T-bone. Prices increase again, we move to sirloin. Eventually we're down to chuck steaks, then to chicken — still at $7.00 per pound.

Government statisticians properly and quickly make all the adjustments in consumer buying patterns. Chicken now costs as much as filet mignon cost just a few years earlier, but the CPI reports ... zero change.

Yet, we hear this nonsense supported by leading politicians and think tanks — on the right. Might they have a different agenda? I believe so.

They just want to increase your taxes.

Two things would happen if the CPI is reduced. Federal spending on inflation-indexed items, like Social Security benefits, would be reduced. But income taxes would increase, because "indexing" would be reduced on tax brackets, the personal exemption, and the standard deduction.

In the above example, which is quite common, the CPI understates inflation. That's also true for all consumption where consumer spending patterns are changed by consumer price increases — which means the Consumer Price Index does not measure consumer prices at all.

They just want to increase your taxes.

WILE E. COYOTE OBSCENE!!! FILM AT 11. A Seattle-area student was sent home to change his T-shirt, which his Junior High principal deemed obscene. The shirt, later shown on TV news, has a picture of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote. The shirt was officially licensed by Looney Tunes, not a novelty or satire shirt.

The principal claims Wile E.'s snout looks like a penis - long and cylindrical, with a bulb at the end. You get the picture.

It does look like a penis. But I would never have seen that on my own, and I wonder about anyone who does.

Let's put this into context. I assume many parents in that school are controlling their kids' access to 'questionable' material on the Internet (which they have a right to so) - while entrusting their kids to a principal with a penis fixation.

I wonder if the school has a flag pole.

Black employment and poverty data show a damning indictment of Bush/Clinton economic policy. Both rates fell sharply after the Reagan tax cuts, reaching their lowest levels in two decades. But since 1990, black unemployment and poverty rates have both skyrocketed.

In 1990, we saw the triple kill of two tax increases (income and FICA), plus a hike in the minimum wage (which had been frozen for a decade). Of the three, the minimum wage increase tends to be ignored, which may be why Republicans got beaten so badly on hiking it again. It's been supply-siders, who credit the Reagan tax cuts for everything except curing cancer, who ignored the benefits of freezing the minimum wage.

Cause and effect are difficult to link, where there can be multiple causes. But common sense suggests the tax cuts helped the black poverty rate, while freezing the minimum wage is mostly what slashed black unemployment.

Even then, supply-siders were denying what they'd done, by denying all the low-wage jobs created in the 1980s. Of course low-wage jobs were created, a lot of them. That's something to be proud of. When people move off welfare, where do they start working - as brain surgeons? The entry-level jobs were there, in abundance, because the minimum wage stayed constant.

Black unemployment fell more than half, from 19% to 9%, by 1990 - reversed to 14% in 1991, and was still higher than 10% last year. In other words, overall unemployment is down sharply from 1990, but for blacks it's higher. For young black males, the unemployment rate fell from a crisis-level 70% to less than 30% - before also reversing upward.

For low-skilled African Americans, the minimum wage is worse than slavery. (Slaves were never duped into voting for their masters.)

Note how easily liberal Democrats dismissed that `some' people will now be thrown out of work. ''That's a small price to pay,'' they claimed cynically, ''in return for higher wages everywhere else.'' Here's the shabby truth: most of the lost jobs are held by blacks, and most of the higher wages will go to whites.

But it's Republicans who are racist. Uh-huh. Then again, you should have heard this from Newt Gingrich or Bob Dole, not from me.

Marxism failed in this country, mostly because Americans laughed at their rhetoric. Marxists doggedly persisted in claiming we're an oppressed and enslaved people. A few still try. That's a tad hard to sell, in the richest and freest nation on earth.

But at the opposite political pole, a handful of libertarians are using the same rhetoric, with the same stubborn devotion, and are also being laughed at.

My favorite libertarian writer, Jerome Tucille, once observed that the only detailed strategy for non-violent revolution had been created by Marxists. Libertarians often use the same strategy, Tucille observed, only because it's there. No libertarian revolution could succeed, he concluded, unless and until it adopted a strategy more appropriate to its goals.

That was over 20 years ago. But we still see libertarian purists -- along with conservative and liberal purists -- shrieking that Americans are oppressed and enslaved -- the same premise that relegated Marxism to the ash heap of history.

Liberty deserves better. But we still don't have that strategy. Just for openers, why do so many libertarians think America needs a libertarian party? We don't.

We need two or three libertarian parties  ... defined as seeking economic and social tolerance.