According to Nobel Economics Prize Laureate George Akerlof, President Trump is acting like a five year old. Not even like any ordinary five year old; rather, like a spoiled petulant brat. When he loses a game, he upsets the entire apple cart.
What has the President of the United States done to earn such castigation? Akerlof charges that Mr. Trump did not much like a recent unemployment report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics; and therefore fired the head of this august organization.
Akerlof admits that this institution “operate[s] under the executive branch.” However, he continues, “For over a century, the integrity of U.S. economic data has rested on a fragile but vital precept: independence. Agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis operate under the executive branch, but their mandates are to serve the truth, not the administration.”
Hold on a minute. Even eminent economists cannot have it both ways. Either the president is the executive in charge of these bureaus or he is not. If he is, he can hire and fire anyone he pleases. If Mr. Trump is not the boss, then he is stuck with these so-called “truth seekers,” all of them, including the head of this organization, whether he likes them or not.
Sayeth Akerlof: “Yes, legally the president can fire the Bureau’s commissioner.” But this commentator also maintains that firing one of them is akin to “removing the referee.”
Again he blatantly contradicts himself. If the BLS and its confreres really play the role of arbiters, the President should no more be able to remove any of them than would a baseball player be able to over-rule the umpire. Maybe they don’t teach logic at Georgetown University where Akerlof holds court as a professor.
Murray Rothbard quite properly called BLS statistics the Achilles’ Heel of Government. No truer words were ever written. The point is that such data emanating out of official Washington D.C. are the lynchpin of central economic planning. Without them, the government and all the rest of us will have to rely upon the “Magic of Market” as President Ronald Reagan characterized the free enterprise system. In the absence of such information, the government is economically blind, as it should be under a system of economic freedom, and cannot even make a pretense of its beloved central planning.
This sounds horrid to the economically illiterate ear, but do we want to pursue the central planning policies of East Germany and North Korea, or the freer market systems of West Germany and South Korea? To ask this question is to answer it. It is rare in economic history to have a virtually controlled experiment exposing the weaknesses of one of these systems.
Nothing said here impugns in any way, shape or form private statistics. If individuals, groups, private corporations wish to engage in this sort of market research or any other type of statistical investigation, they should be perfectly free to so. If Mr. Trump does not welcome the results they report, too bad for him. This is still a free country.
Such private initiatives pass the market test, unlike the BLS. As astute economist Thomas Sowell has said: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” When the BLS errs, does it pay any penalty? Of course not. When a private statistical firm does so? There's a negative market reaction, including the possibility of bankruptcy.
But our pinko professor is not done yet. He avers: “… what protects the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not law but a common set of assumptions about how government should function. A basic idea that says: Presidents don’t manipulate the scoreboard.”
But this again sets up the BLS as the unimpeachable umpire. Who appointed them to that role? No one elected them, as they did the president. They were first established in 1884, more than a century after the beginning of our county. We got along without the BLS before that time, and can continue to do so just fine now and into the future.
Here is yet another swipe at the piñata of our critic’s: “The credibility of American statistics is foundational. It undergirds investor trust. It guides fiscal and monetary policy. It tells businesses when to hire, when to expand and when to hold. When those numbers are tainted or appear to be, the ripple effects are vast.”
Yes, yes, of course, true. But from whence are more reliable statistics likely to emanate, from the private or public sector? Professor Akerlof acts as if there is no alternative to socialist statistics.
President Trump is one of the rare politicians who takes seriously his campaign promises. He strives mightily to fulfill them. One of these commitments was to drain the swamp. Well, these bureaucrats who leech off the taxpayers certainly qualify as creatures of the Black Lagoon. The Census Bureau has only one Constitutional function. It is to count the population for voting purposes. Has it limited itself to that? Ever hear of mission creep?
What do you call 50,000 left-wing economists at the bottom of the sea? A good start. What do you call the firing of the head of the BLS. Also, a good start. Where should “five year old” Trump go from there? Get rid of this entire socialist outfit!
