Originally published by Douglas Carswell June 16, 2023

Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the US-Mexico border than on the other? Why is the average Canadian twelve times richer than the average Moroccan, despite having similar size populations?

We are often invited to believe that a society’s relative success has a lot to do with its geography or climate. Not so.

There are plenty of resource-rich countries in Africa, blessed in every imaginable way by geography and climate, that still produce only grinding poverty. Conversely, there are plenty of resource-poor places, such as Japan or Iceland, that prosper.

Much more important than a country’s natural resources is its political economy.

If property rights are insecure, power arbitrary and taxes high, a society will remain poor. If, on the other hand, people are free to spend more of their own money and make their own choices for themselves and their families, society overall will thrive.

Perhaps the single best illustration of this is Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula has been divided. North Korea has been run by a communist dictatorship, under which there are no property rights and rules for everything, including what you can wear. South Korea, especially since the 1980s, is an open, free-market society, with relatively low taxes and light regulation.

The North today can barely feed itself. The South is as wealthy as Europe or the US.

Korea shows us what happens when a society is subjected to two different extremes – one free market, the other a tyranny.

Making sure that every society is run along free market principles is essential to maximize prosperity. But even with the most liberty-minded policies in place, would everyone in a free market society flourish?

In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, undertook a famous experiment. He offered kids a marshmallow on the understanding that they could either eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait a few minutes and have two.

What Mischel was doing was measuring each child’s time preferences. Those kids that were prepared to wait had what we call a low-time preference. The less patient kids that opted to have one marshmallow right away, had what we call a higher time preference.

Having assessed each kid’s time preference, Mischel then tracked their progress over the years that followed. He discovered a startling correlation between having a low time preference (being prepared to wait) with academic and other kinds of success. Those inclined towards instant gratification, his research seemed to suggest, would be less successful.

Time preferences, it seems, play an important part in how we as individuals do. Might time preferences also have a role in explaining the different trajectories societies take?

Could it be that the USA, Canada, Finland and Japan are relatively rich because they are countries with low time preferences? There is a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, like Mexico and Russia, have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries like Tanzania and Nigeria have really high time preferences.

The conventional explanation for this is that prosperity produces lower time preferences. Might it not be the case that lower time preferences produce prosperity?

If being wealthy explained your time preferences, not the other way around, you might expect that people with comparable incomes in different countries had similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences impact outcomes, not the other way around.

Mainstream economists have a lot to say about how individuals transact with other individuals. They less often look at how we as individuals transact with our future selves.

Surely how people in a society transact with their future selves is critical in explaining economic outcomes? In a society with a low time preference, people are more likely to defer consumption and save. Dropout rates in education are likely to be lower. Capital and knowledge will accumulate from one generation to the next.

Time preferences are a key factor driving a society’s economic development. What about propensity to commit crime? Presumably, if you are willing to risk seeing your future self sent to prison in return for the chance of an immediate material reward you have a different time preference to someone that isn’t?

Time preferences can clearly be influenced by public policy. Hyperinflation, for example, would give people a powerful incentive to spend, rather than save. Some research has suggested that exposure to communism had impacted the time preferences of East Germans, compared to those who lived in West Germany (albeit that the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world.)

When considering some of America’s deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. Here’s a heretical thought; how might time preferences vary across the country?

What can we do to lower time preferences? Can one actually lower time preferences, or is it perhaps a case of not raising them?

Idealists believe that if only we adopted the right policies, we would get better outcomes. A conservative idealist should recognize that there are some aspects of human nature that we can neither change nor perfect. Time preferences might be one of them.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

Originally published by Reddwebdev December 5, 2017

When a client comes in and is willing to pay for your product or service it can be a good day. We work hard to provide that product or service and each sale or contract is a direct validation of that work

Recently whilst perusing our social media accounts I happened across a link provided by an account we once followed over on Twitter — @RWD posted a link to an international brand for extreme outdoor wear, extolling the presumed virtues of a site written well using the Responsive Web Design standard.

@RWD posted to Twitter, “Here’s an incredibly impactful—and important—piece of responsive design:”

Fair enough I suppose. Here’s someone with some seeming authority on the platform taking on a presumed instructional role hoping to again presumably educate the masses on the practical and useful application of Responsive Web Design.

Upon after clicking the link in the tweet provided I was disappointed to see “not” the practical and useful application of Responsive Web Design, but rather a full panel political statement with regard to the President and how he was presumably stealing land from the poor and downtrodden masses.

I proceeded to the site anyway, completely ignoring the intended divisiveness that this company had hoped to promote via it’s poorly applied splash. The company site boasted of being “Green” but yet promoted or otherwise sold items that were non-biodegradable.

Lesson learned — Trolls exist I suppose, and the sad fact is that we’ll never be fully rid of them on the net. I had never once thought that Ethan Marcotte, who coined the term “Responsive Web Design”, and administers @RWD on Twitter, was a troll, but I was wrong.

When we go into business for ourselves, it’s up to us to pursue a path that we feel might best suit our needs with regard to that business. We find ourselves writing our business policies, following various different business models, and generally hoping for the best end result as it might apply to our bottom line. We want to be profitable, and in becoming profitable, we might find ourselves sharing the wealth by hiring more employees, passing out performance bonuses, and other what nots.

Demographics plays a critical roll as well in most businesses – Who, what, and where, are all questions we continually ask ourselves every day.
What can we do to make our business as profitable as we can in the shortest amount of time? It’s important to get the word out and demographics helps us to do just that as we apply that resource in trying to reach as many people as possible.

Even still, and at the end of the day, we understand that your business is yours to do with as you please – You could scream your political angst from the mountain tops if you so wished, but why would you?

Target, Hobby Lobby, and many others have done this very same thing and look where it got them.

Do you really want for your business to exist in a bubble?

Do you really want to cut off your true business potential by choosing to only serve the select few?

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the political winds shift constantly in this country. What might be all true and acceptable today, might not be all true and acceptable next week at 2 o’clock.

Your products and services are a given — Political ideologies are not. This is why it might be wise to avoid the rhetoric of the day and concentrate instead on growing your business.

Money doesn’t care who marries who or what bathroom gets used — Money is an equal opportunity entity – So should your business be – Save the preaching for the pulpit, or the street protests.

If you find yourself refusing to sell a car, build a website, bake a cake, or not conducting any other kind of business with someone because they don’t think like you do, then you are a part of the problem and your business isn’t as successful or profitable as you somehow seem to think it is.

If you’re a new business owner you might do well to become a part of the solution by focusing your efforts on your business whilst saving all of your social angst for your off hours. Money talks and Bullshit walks in the true world of business, and becoming distracted, if even for a moment, could very likely spell the end of whatever business goals you are trying to accomplish.

Your business isn’t a business if you plan to use it to brow-beat John Q Public with regard to your political leanings or ideologies. Save that stuff for the people who might actually listen to you as you march down the street protesting over your favorite gripe of the day.

Most people who purchase are usually not interested in your bemoaning anyway. They simply want a decent product or service for a fair price and that’s it. They’ve got their own deal going on and surprise, surprise, their deal might not be your deal. So you should remember to get over yourself.

We here at ReddWebDev really don’t care who you marry, or what church you attend — Folks are just as equal across the board.

If you hire us to do the job, then the job will be done, because we are pretty aware of the fact that your deal might not be our deal. As a business, it’s not our job to sell political strife.

This business of ours has been around for exactly how many Presidents? Well lets see — We had Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump — See how that works?

We serve people, and by doing so, we’ve chosen to be a part of the solution.

Originally published by Anthony Sanders — May 24, 2023

Robbing a bank is a crime everywhere. But in some places and times you could become a criminal just by growing vegetables, feeding the homeless, playing poker or working without a government-mandated license.

African immigrant Tedy Okech risked arrest when she started working as a hair braider. She learned the craft in her youth by practicing on her mother and sisters. When she settled in Idaho in 2005, she found neighbors willing to pay for her skills. Soon she had a thriving side gig, which supplemented her income as a part-time insurance agent.

Everyone was happy except the cosmetology police, who mandated she take hundreds of hours of school and earn an occupational license. Rather than comply, Okech filed a constitutional lawsuit, prompting Idaho lawmakers to pass licensing reforms in 2022. My public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represented her.

The case highlights the importance of unenumerated rights — the ones not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. A complete list of things people may do without government permission would fill volumes. Even then, certain rights might slip through the cracks, such as the right to braid hair.

Rather than risk omissions, the framers added the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights as an etcetera clause, saving gallons of ink. Using simple language, it expands the Constitution to guarantee not just enumerated rights, but “others retained by the people.” Words with similar effect, but applied to the states, were then added after the Civil War, protecting Americans’ “privileges or immunities.”

Okech should have been safe, but two problems have emerged since these amendments. First, judges and legal scholars have found ways to explain them away. Mostly they just ignore them. The Supreme Court has yet to cite the Ninth Amendment as the primary basis for a single opinion.

Second, policymakers discovered they could skirt the Constitution with little pushback from the courts, especially when it comes to unenumerated rights — which too often get second-tier status. Results over the decades have ranged from bizarre edicts, such as rules against ice cream on cherry pies in Kansas, to serious privacy invasions, such as prohibitions on private school attendance in Oregon.

The legislative overreach has continued in modern times. Miami Shores, Florida, prosecuted Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll in 2013 for growing vegetables in their front yard. Bullhead City, Arizona, arrested Norma Thornton for feeding the homeless at a public park in 2022. And Oklahoma criminalized tattooing from 1963 to 2006.

Many jurisdictions also restrict poker, home-baked cookie sales and educational choice. New York parents violate the law if they homeschool their children without submitting annual instruction plans and quarterly reports to the state by mandated deadlines.

Meanwhile, 17 states continue to license hair braiders. Montana was on the list until April 21, 2023, when Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill following Idaho’s example.

States routinely infringe on unenumerated rights. Lawmakers meet, debate and vote, giving the appearance of legitimacy to their actions. Citing the Ninth Amendment does not help when code enforcers accuse you of breaking the law—a real occurrence for hair braiders and others.

My new book, “Baby Ninth Amendments,” explores a second line of defense. State constitutions, which can expand federal guarantees of individual rights, often contain Ninth Amendment variations. These clauses, informally called “Baby Ninths,” can help rein in policymakers when they restrict safe and common activities without providing compelling reasons.

Courts typically avoid giving these Baby Ninths their due. The implications are too great. As one Iowa Supreme Court justice hysterically noted in 1869, the result would be an “unwritten Constitution” protecting all the absolute rights of the people.

Courts prefer to pick and choose when recognizing unenumerated rights. So, they make up distinctions without differences, which usually boil down to “I like these rights and not those.” Then they apply various standards of review, which they can calibrate to get desired results.

If nothing else, courts are creative. But instead of exercising the mental gymnastics necessary to protect only the unenumerated rights they like, state judges simply could activate their Baby Ninths, which are well-disposed to protect all unenumerated rights.

Judges might resist such bold action, but this is not their choice to make. People often decry judges seizing power and legislating from the bench, yet the reverse scenario is far more common: Judges shrinking from their responsibility to apply constitutional commands.

This is what happens when courts ignore a Baby Ninth — they abdicate a responsibility the people have placed in their hands. Bank robbers deserve punishment, not hair braiders.

Anthony Sanders is the author of “Baby Ninth Amendments” (University of Michigan Press, 2023). He is a senior attorney and director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice in West Lakeland, Minnesota.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.