If having more maids, valets, and drivers uplifted the world’s poor, could you do it? Or does maintenance of your egalitarian sensibilities require them to stay in their place?

Three months ago I wrote a long, thoughtful (ahem) critique of the Washington Post’s use of the word “anarchists” to describe people outraged at the possibility that governments might finally be forced “to cut social benefits and slash public payrolls.”

“Odd anarchists,” I harrumphed, who “object to the state reducing its size, scope, and power.”

Today, Michael Cannon made the same point to many more people in a few pithy sentences on the Post’s letters page:

Anne Applebaum informed us that “the anarchists in Athens wanted more government spending” [“The smartphone riots?” op-ed, Aug. 11]. Which is it? Were they anarchists, who want no government? Or were they statists, who want more government?

The lesson? Write letters to the editor. People read them.

Meanwhile, two other letter-writers on the same page complain that the Post should not reveal how our tax dollars are spent, lest the masses turn against Washington. I disagree.

Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland, Panama, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands.

The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit a certain profile (this applies to individuals as well). They earn a substantial share of their income in other countries and they are put at a competitive disadvantage because of America’s “worldwide” tax system.

More specifically, worldwide taxation requires firms to not only pay tax to foreign governments on their foreign-source income, but they are also supposed to pay additional tax on this income to the IRS — even though the money was not earned in America and even though their foreign-based competitors rarely are subject to this type of double taxation.

In this most recent example, an energy company with substantial operations in Asia moved its charter to the Cayman Islands, as reported by dig​i​taljour​nal​.com:

Greenfields Petroleum Corporation…, an independent exploration and production company with assets in Azerbaijan, is pleased to announce that the previously announced corporate redomestication … from Delaware to the Cayman Islands has been successfully completed.

Because it is a small firm, the move by GPC probably won’t attract much attention from the politicians. But “corporate expatriation” has generated considerable controversy in recent years when involving big companies such as Ingersoll-Rand, Transocean, and Stanley Works (now Stanley Black & Decker).

Statists argue that it is unpatriotic for companies to redomicile, and they changed the law last decade to make it more difficult for companies to escape the clutches of the IRS. In addition to blaming “Benedict Arnold” corporations, leftists also attack low-tax jurisdictions for “poaching” companies.

Libertarians and conservatives, by contrast, explain that expatriation is the result of an onerous tax system that imposes high tax rates and requires the double taxation of foreign-source income. Expatriation is the only logical approach if companies want a level playing field when competing in global markets.

I cover this issue (and also explain that the Obama administration is trying to make a bad system even worse) in the video below.

My recommendation, not surprisingly, is that politicians fix the tax code. Unfortunately, politicians prefer the blame-the-victim game, so they attack the companies instead of solving the underlying problem (and then they wonder why job creation is anemic).

Back in 2001, supermiddleweight boxer James Butler was heavily fined and barred from the sport for sucker-punching his opponent instead of congratulating him after being bested in a match.

Alas, there are no similar penalties for late sucker punches delivered after economics debates, or else the BBC-sponsored Hayek versus Keynes debate held at the LSE last month might have been Lord Skidelsky’s last. For yesterday his noble lordship delivered a most ignoble below-the-belt blow to his late opponents in the shape of a Project Syndicate column titled “The Keynes-Hayek Rematch.”

Here, among other things. Lord Skidelsky suggests that Keynes “savaged him [Hayek] while he was still alive,” and that Hayekian ideas have only succeeded in gaining popularity since thanks to Hayek’s having long outlived Keynes–as if Hayek’s growing popularity wasn’t itself mainly posthumous, and as if Keynesian ideas have lacked huge battalions of defenders, both in and out of the academy, since his death. He writes as well that only “Hayekian fanatics” could possibly not believe that the “global stimulus of 2009 stopped the slide into another Great Depression”–a statement that, besides dismissing as “fanatics” a large number of persons, including some pretty good macroeconomists who are no more Hayekian than Lord Skidelsky himself, seems rather brash. He repeats the slur, which I took pains to expose as such during the debate, that Hayek favored doing nothing to combat a post-boom collapse of spending, likening Hayek’s stand to one of “denying blankets and stimulus to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the grounds that his original trouble was overheating.” He also repeats the claim, refuted in my last post, “that public-sector austerity at a time of weak private-sector spending guarantees years of stagnation, if not further collapse.” Finally, Lord Skidelsky declares that “Hayekians have nothing sensible to contribute” (my emphasis) to the debate concerning the extent to which “strengthening the tools of macroeconomic management”–meaning (presumably) further expanding government spending and indebtedness as well as further strengthening central banks’ powers–is likely to prove beneficial and prudent.

To the last assertion, an astute commentator offers a most appropriate reply. “It’s hard to believe,” he observes, that the observation in question, among others noted,

was written by the same man who, half a dozen years ago, said of Hayek, “The particular threats to liberty that he identified may be on the wane—his book has done its work well—but there are other threats, and the victory of liberty is never secure. Hayek’s key message for us today is surely this: every new restriction or regulation should be judged by its effect not just on the problem that it is designed to solve or the danger that it is designed to avert but by its effect on the system of liberty as a whole. If we are blind to this, we will be left with a damaged system of liberty long after the particular problem or danger has passed away.”

“That, however,” the commentator continues, “was upon receiving the Manhattan Institute’s $50K ‘Hayek Prize.’ Perhaps they ought to have spread out the payments!”

It turns out that, when Lord Skidelsky was given it back in 2005, the Hayek Prize was worth only $10 thousand. I leave it to readers to decide whether to wish it had been more, or that it had been less.

The drive to let consumer-level electricity prices float as prices do in innumerable other markets has been stunted by complaints about so-called “smart meters” that would give consumers the ability to respond to fluctuations in the realtime price of electricity.

When the California Energy Commission attempted to put these kinds of meters into new buildings, the knee-jerk reaction consisted largely of complaints about the government “taking over” consumers’ electricity consumption in the case of a looming blackout. For more on why these concerns lacked some essential context, listen to the podcast with Peter Van Doren on the case of the CEC.

As I discussed with economist Lynne Kiesling at Cato University, consumer-side responses to varying electricity prices could take many forms, from smarter appliances plugged into the same pricing information to battery technology to take advantage of times of low electricity demand. What’s more, dynamic pricing could someday let consumers turn the product of electricity into the service of electricity by allowing consumers to pay a premium for costlier but “greener” methods of electricity generation.

Here’s more from Kiesling on smart meters.

Tea Partiers, of all people, should understand this concept: The federal government’s resources are limited and should be focused on its core duties of administering justice and protecting basic rights. In that light, the Obama administration made a sensible decision this week to concentrate on deporting illegal immigrants who threaten the health and safety of Americans.

At the latest count, there are still 11 million people living in the United States without government authorization. The government would be incapable of deporting them all, and even if it could, it would cause tens of billions of dollars in damage to the American economy, as Cato research has demonstrated. Even the 300,000 illegal immigrants currently being processed through the deportation pipeline are clogging the system and drawing resources away from more important business.

In a letter to Senate leaders, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano said the administration would from now on concentrate on deporting those in the system who have committed serious crimes or who have any connections to crime or terrorism. As the secretary explained:

From a law enforcement and public safety perspective, DHS enforcement resources must continue to be focused on our highest priorities. Doing otherwise hinders our public safety mission—clogging immigration court dockets and diverting DHS enforcement resources away from individuals who pose a threat to public safety.

That sounds pretty reasonable. The flip side of the policy change is that hundreds of thousands of peaceable, otherwise normal immigrants who are working and studying in the United States without the right documentation will be allowed to stay and possibly even apply for legal status. Included in this group are undocumented spouses of U.S. military personnel, immigrants who were snared in the system when they actually reported crimes to police, and students who came to the United States as young children with their undocumented parents—students who would be eligible for legal status should Congress pass something like the DREAM Act.

Conservatives such as Rep. Lamar Smith (R‑Texas) complain that the administration should be enforcing the law rather than ignoring it, but as I’ve argued for long time, the law as it is currently written is unenforceable and needs to be changed.

Internet site Gawker says that Ashton Kutcher’s editorship of Details magazine was “a brazenly self interested and highly misleading act of journalism.” He helped produce a special online version of the mag that featured tech companies he’s invested in without disclosing that fact.

Having disclosed it for him—the article is called “Ashton Kutcher Is a Massive Whore”—Gawker now reports on how federal officials are looking over their glasses at the television personality and entrepreneur.

“It’s certainly a possibility that a case like this could be investigated,” assistant Federal Trade Commission director Richard Cleland tells the Times of Kutcher’s Details special online issue, in which eight of 12 recommended products in one article were Kutcher investments. “If you’re out there promoting individual products that you have a specific investment in, it needs to be disclosed… If you have a significant economic investment that is not otherwise apparent, that may potentially affect the credibility of your endorsement, and I see that as a potential problem.” The FTC has made a priority out of online conflicts of interest.

It’s also possible Kutcher violated SEC rules. You’re not supposed to promote a company you partly own—say, in a magazine—if you know it’s soon to go public. And if a company’s shares trade on private secondary markets you must abide by federal rules on deceptive marketing, which a former SEC lawyer told the Times were “very broad… These rules apply any time there is a securities transaction.”

<sarcasm>You see, in the land of the free—where the government’s founding charter says it “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”—you can’t just say any old stuff you want to in a magazine! Say things that help your business interests too much and you are obviously outside of what the quaint old Constitution says. The First Amendment is fuzzy on this. “[M]ake no law” might mean “make a law if you have a good reason.” Duh, Ashton! You’re pretty, but maybe not very smart, saying what you want in the United States of America.</sarcasm>

This episode itself illustrates why “make no law” works despite the fact that it allows sharp business practices. Gawker and other media outlets are actively curing any information deficit with plainly worded articles like “Ashton Kutcher Is a Massive Whore.” This is in aid of the caveat emptor rule, which works even better when people know they need to think for themselves and look for assistance from outlets like Gawker, of which there are an endless supply thanks to the Internet.

Caveat supplicantem if you think that the government is going to protect your interests as a consumer better than you can. Not even close. So there is no good reason for overturning the First Amendment here.