Free Markets – Page 7 – artdiamondblog.com

“Let the Consumers Decide When and Where They Want to Eat”

“Rachel Billow is the co-founder of La Cocinita, a food truck in New Orleans that serves Latin American cuisine. She says the city’s requirement that mobile food vendors change locations after 45 minutes in one spot isn’t feasible. “It takes about a half-hour to set up,” she says.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) A street fight is brewing between gourmet food-truck vendors and restaurants–not over the grub, but how it’s sold.

Under pressure to protect bricks-and-mortar restaurants from increased competition, several big cities are starting to apply the brakes on a rising tide of food-truck vendors with fully loaded kitchens.
Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle are among the cities enacting laws that restrict where food trucks can serve customers in proximity to their rivals and for how long. Some food-truck operators argue that they shouldn’t be punished for offering an innovative service, especially since many cities already allow restaurants to open up alongside one another.
“The rules are unfair,” says Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, a food truck in Chicago serving Asian-style cuisine that includes short ribs and mango lychee.
Three weeks after she launched the business last fall, she received a ticket from local law enforcement for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar–50 feet within the city’s limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments.
Ms. Le says she later had to spend nearly a full day in court to find out what the violation would cost her–about $300–and that she lost an estimated $600 to $700 in sales as a result.
“The 200-foot buffer prohibits me from competing,” says Ms. Le, 32 years old, who also opposes a new rule requiring food trucks to install global-positioning devices so the city can track their whereabouts. “It is a free market. Let the consumers decide when and where they want to eat.”
. . .
Gourmet food-truck operators say another problem is that in many cities they are still relegated to antiquated rules intended for ice-cream, hot-dog and other traditional mobile vendors with smaller and less complex menus.
New Orleans, for example, requires mobile food vendors to change locations after 45 minutes in one spot, among other restrictions.
“It’s not a feasible amount of time for this business model,” says 31-year-old Rachel Billow, who last year co-founded La Cocinita, a food truck that serves Latin American cuisine such as plantains and arepas. “It takes about a half-hour to set up.”
Ms. Billow says she and her business partner, Venezuelan chef Benoit Angulo, started La Cocinita after several years of working in the restaurant industry. They invested $50,000 in start-up costs, an amount that included $12,000 in modifications to their vehicle to satisfy the city’s fire code, she adds.

For the full story, see:
SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN. “Street Fight: Food Trucks vs. Restaurants; Some Big Cities Jump Into the Fray, Enacting Parking Restrictions to Cope With Rising Tide of Gourmet Vendors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 9, 2012): B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, an Asian-style food truck in Chicago, says last fall she received a fine for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar–50 feet within the city’s limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

People “Enmeshed in Modern Commerce” Are More Generous

(p. C4) A few years ago, Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues did a series of experiments in small-scale societies in the Amazon, New Guinea and Africa. They asked people to play the “ultimatum game,” in which a player must decide how much of a windfall he needs to share with another player to prevent the other player from exercising his right to veto the whole deal. The more the small-scale society is enmeshed in modern commerce, the more generous the offers people make. This may shock those who believe in Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” but not those who believe in the virtues of what Montesquieu called “sweet commerce.”
. . .
. . . , though human beings do kind things unrewarded for their neighbors, for reward they also do kind things for strangers: They hand more cash to merchants than they do to beggars.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Which Makes Us Nicer, Team Spirit or Trade?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 27, 2011): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Page 76 of the Henrich et al article has the key result that Ridley summarizes:
Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies.” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (May 2001): 73-78.

Middle Class “Doesn’t Want to Fight Wars. It Has Other Things to Do.”

“A booth for Motherson International, an Indian company that produces clothes and costume jewelry, at the Indian trade show in Lahore, Pakistan, in February.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) LAHORE, Pakistan — On the day the Indian trade delegation came across the border, Pakistan was having another political crisis. The prime minister was embroiled in a showdown with the country’s Supreme Court. Early elections were rumored. And Islamists had just staged a rally in Karachi to protest “foreign intervention” on Pakistani soil.

Not, perhaps, the perfect moment to hammer out closer trade ties.
Yet Rajiv Kumar, a leader of the Indian delegation, was pleased. It was mid-February, and his business group was staging the first Indian trade show ever held in Pakistan. Tens of thousands of visitors would attend during three days. And Indian and Pakistani business leaders, as well as both countries’ commerce ministers, swapped cards, sipped tea and feasted at lavish banquets.
“Look at this!” Mr. Kumar exclaimed as his car rolled up to the convention center here in Lahore, where crowds were thronging for the trade show. “My God! Quite good, I’d say.”
. . .
(p. 12) Ashok Malik, a journalist who was one of the writers of an academic analysis of India’s private sector diplomacy, said the influence of Indian business is evident beyond the changed relationship with the United States.
. . .
Mr. Malik noted that the rise of India’s middle class, as well as the growing domestic influence of the private sector, has created a quiet constituency for easing hostilities with Pakistan. “The growth phenomenon has made the Indian middle class less tolerant of adventurism, lawlessness and war,” he said. “It is still worried about terrorism. But it doesn’t want to fight wars. It has other things to do.”

For the full story, see:
JIM YARDLEY. “INDIA’S WAY; Propelling a Nation Onto the World Stage; Industry Opens Doors to India’s Neighbors and Rivals, Including Pakistan.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., April 1, 2012): 6 & 12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 31, 2012 and has the title “INDIA’S WAY; Industry in India Helps Open a Door to the World.”)

“India held its first trade show in Pakistan in Lahore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Libertarian Law Professor Defends Free Choice in Health Care

“Randy E. Barnett has argued against the health care law.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional.
. . .
. . . over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.
. . .
. . . the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.
. . .
(p. A14) He is a fierce advocate of economic freedom who is accustomed to being a legal underdog. In 2004, in his first (and, he says, probably his last) appearance before the Supreme Court, he argued that Congress could not criminalize the production of home-grown marijuana for personal medical use. There again, critics said he would lose 8 to 1. He did lose, but took satisfaction in the actual vote, 6 to 3.
. . .
Professor Barnett’s work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws — a position that concerns his liberal critics.
Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the “big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people,” and that his political philosophy is “much more radical” than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not “threaten the foundation of the New Deal.” But, he allowed, it would be “a huge symbolic victory for limited government.”

For the full story, see:
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CHARLIE SAVAGE. “Libertarian’s Pet Cause Reaches Supreme Court.” The New York Times (Tues., March 27, 2012): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 26, 2012 and has the title “Vindication for Challenger of Health Care Law.”)

Freedom Grew from the Greek Agora

Source of book image: http://images.borders.com.au/images/bau/97801997/9780199747405/0/0/plain/a-culture-of-freedom-ancient-greece-and-the-origins-of-europe.jpg

(p. C9) A city’s central space reveals much about the society that built it. In the middle of the typical Greek city-state, or polis, stood neither a palace nor a temple–the dominant centering structures of Asian and Egyptian cities–but an open public square, an agora, useful for gatherings and the conduct of business. When Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, first encountered Greeks on his western boundaries, he sneered at the race of shopkeepers who hung about the agora cheating one another all day. Yet that same race would later defeat his descendants, Darius and Xerxes, in two of the most consequential battles the Western world has seen, at Marathon in 490 B.C. and at Salamis 10 years later.
. . .
Mr. Meier’s approach runs counter to a tendency in recent classical scholarship to trace Greek ideas to non-Greek sources or to seek common ground on which East and West once met. The polis itself has been claimed in the past few decades as a Near Eastern, or Phoenician, invention; Carthage too, it seems, had an agora at its hub. But Mr. Meier takes pains to dismiss this claim. Relying on expertise amassed in his long academic career, he reasserts the uniqueness of Greek political evolution, the mysterious and somewhat miraculous process that culminates, at the end of this account, in the emergence of Athenian democracy.
. . .
After surveying the crucial reforms of the Athenian leader Cleisthenes, the foundation stones of the world’s first democratic constitution, Mr. Meier asks: “Was it just a matter of time before the Attic citizenry was reorganized–so that Cleisthenes did something that would have happened sooner or later anyway? Or were Cleisthenes’ achievements beyond the scope of men less able and daring?”

For the full review, see:
JAMES ROMM. “The Greeks’ Daring Experiment.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., FEBRUARY 11, 2012): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Meier, Christian. A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Economic Freedom and Growth Depend on Protecting the Right to Rise

(p. A19) Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: “The right to rise.”
Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn’t seem like something we should have to protect.
But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.
That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. . . .
. . .
But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.
. . .
. . . , we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

For the full commentary, see:
JEB BUSH. “OPINION; Capitalism and the Right to Rise; In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 19, 2011): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Paleolithic Homo Sapiens Engaged in Long Distance Trade

(p. 71) At Mezherich, in what is now Ukraine, 18,000 years ago, jewellery made of shells from the Black Sea and amber from the Baltic implied trade over hundreds of miles.
This is in striking contrast to the Neanderthals, whose stone tools were virtually always made from raw material available within an hour’s walk of where the tool was used.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

California Vegan Defends Freedom to Choose McDonald’s

“Ellsworth Wareham, 97, in Loma Linda, Calif. Mr. Wareham was a heart surgeon who stopped working only two years ago. He is a vegan, but says choice is part of the “great American system.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . last week, when the City Council approved Loma Linda’s first McDonald’s restaurant, many residents bemoaned the decision, worrying that the officials were jeopardizing the city’s reputation as a paragon of healthy lifestyles.
. . .
. . . , Dr. Rigsby [said] . . . he would support having a citywide vote on whether fast-food outlets should be banned entirely from the city. “If this is something that people are really opposed to, that’s how we should deal with it.”
What would happen during such a vote is anyone’s guess. Ellsworth Wareham, who stopped working as a heart surgeon only two years ago, at 95, is often used as an example of someone with more energy than someone half his age. Dr. Wareham attributes his health at least partly to the fact that he has been a vegan for the last 30 or 40 years (he does not remember precisely).
Eating at home, he said, is the best way to ensure that one is eating healthy food. He is certainly not about to let the impending arrival of McDonald’s raise his blood pressure.
“I don’t subscribe to the menu that these dear people put out, but let’s face it, the average eating place serves food that is, let us say, a little bit of a higher quality, but the end result is the same — it’s unhealthy,” he said.
“They can put it right next to the church as far as I am concerned,” Dr. Wareham added. “If they choose to eat that way, I’m not going to stop them. That’s the great American system.”

For the full story, see:
JENNIFER MEDINA. “LOMA LINDA JOURNAL; Fast-Food Outlet Stirs Concerns in a Mecca of Healthy Living.” The New York Times (Mon., December 19, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 18, 2011.)

You Have More Servants than the Sun King

(p. 36) The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.
But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary . . . You may have no chefs, but you can decide (p. 37) on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.
My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Diversity of Sources of What We Consume in a Free Market

Matt Ridley’s wonderful riff below reminds one of Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil,” made even more famous by Milton Friedman’s rendition of it.

(p. 35) As I write this, it is nine o’clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink. I am now sitting at a desk typing on a Thai plastic keyboard (which perhaps began life in an Arab oil well) in order to move electrons through a Korean silicon chip and some wires of Chilean copper to display text on a computer designed and manufactured by an American firm. I have consumed goods and services from dozens of countries already this morning. Actually, I am guessing at the nationalities of some of these items, because it is almost impossible to define some of them as coming from any country, so diverse are their sources.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.