Newt Gingrich is taking a decidedly populist tone as he tries to revive his candidacy after a big loss in Florida.

While his archrival Mitt Romney was getting an endorsement in the GOP presidential race from real estate mogul Donald Trump, Mr. Gingrich was speaking at Xtreme Manufacturing, a company that makes telescoping forklifts, delivery trucks and cubes that can be used for everything from living space to laboratories. He start off with “some fascinating differences” between himself and Mitt Romney. “Let me say first of all that I like hiring people,” he said, in a dig at the former Massachusetts governor. Mr. Romney made headlines last month for saying he liked “firing people” when talking about health-care companies that fail to provide good service.

As he campaigned in Nevada ahead of the state’s Saturday nominating caucuses, Mr. Gingrich continued to mock the GOP front-runner for saying Wednesday that he is not concerned about the very poor because they’re protected by social safety net programs.

“Mitt Romney and Barack Obama seem to believe that a safety net is all the poor need,” Mr. Gingrich said. “What the poor need is a trampoline so they can spring up.”

It’s the second time in recent weeks that Mr. Gingrich has taken up the banner of the working man. After losing badly in the New Hampshire GOP primary, Mr. Gingrich attacked Mr. Romney for practicing unethical capitalism at Bain Capital, the Boston private-equity firm he helped start. His latest volleys, some of which he first launched in Florida, are more focused on propping up low-earners.

Mr. Gingrich, for instance, often says those receiving unemployment assistance should have to enroll in business training programs. Meantime, Mr. Gingrich brushed off reports that Mr. Trump is supporting Mr. Romney. While touring the factory, Mr. Gingrich said he hadn’t expected the endorsement and wondered aloud how the star of reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice” manages to garner so much attention.

Source: Wall Street Journal.

When a presidential candidate declares, as Ron Paul has, “We’re all Austrians now,”  it’s inevitable that his critics would try to discredit him—whether they understand what he’s talking about or not. That’s what Matthew Yglesias does in his Slate piece “What Is ‘Austrian Economics’?”

I recommend the piece because it’s highly informative—about what Austrian economics is not.

We’re off to a rocky start with this: “The Austrian school originally referred to a set of classical liberal thinkers with diverse interests who came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

The earliest Austrian economists did not make their mark by advocating free markets and other classical-liberal ideas. They did so by proffering a revolutionary positive (not normative) theoretical approach to understanding how markets work, focusing on value, price, and capital, theory. What Wikipedia says is consistent with my understanding of the matter: “When Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and [Friedrich von] Wieser began their careers in science, they were not focused on economic policy issues, much less in the rejection of intervention promoted by classical liberalism. Their common vocation was to develop an economic theory on a firm basis.”

Economics vs. Politics

Yglesias thus conflates Austrian economic theory with libertarian political theory. In fairness, he is not alone in committing this error. Many libertarians do the same, which is unfortunate. Austrian economic theory describes how purposive action by fallible human beings unintentionally generates a grand, complex, and orderly market process. An additional ethical step is required to pronounce the market process good. Economic theory per se cannot recommend but only explain markets. This is what Ludwig von Mises meant when he insisted that Austrian economics is value-free. Anyone of any persuasion ought to be able to acknowledge that economic logic indicates that imposing a price ceiling on milk will, other things equal, create a shortage of milk. But that in itself is not an argument against the policy. Mises assumed the policymaker would have thought that result bad, but the economist qua economist cannot declare it such. As Israel Kirzner likes to say, the economist’s job in the policy realm is merely to point out that you cannot catch a northbound train from the southbound platform.

Yglesias writes: “Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations.” It’s odd to say this without also pointing out that Austrians believe that government causes the instability of inflationary booms, recessions, and depressions. In light of that point, the suggestion that government is capable of stabilizing the economy may be seen in its proper light.

That said, Yglesias’s statement is not quite right. Some prominent Austrian macroeconomists think that in a second-best world, the central bank (which of course wouldn’t exist in a first-best world) should counteract a sudden and substantial monetary contraction. In other words, deflation is not necessarily a cure for inflation. Mises made the point metaphorically in 1938: “If a man has been hurt by being run over by an automobile, it is no remedy to let the car go back over him in the [opposite] direction.” (See Steven Horwitz’s “Deflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” )

Distorts Markets

“In the view of the Austrians,” Yglesias goes on, “practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.” Well, yeah, and it’s amply demonstrated by George Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White in“Has the Fed Been a Failure?” (See my summary, “‘F’ as in Fed.” ) As they put it:

Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed’s full history (1914 to present) has been characterized by more rather than fewer symptoms of monetary and macroeconomic instability than the decades leading to the Fed’s establishment. (2) While the Fed’s performance has undoubtedly improved since World War II, even its postwar performance has not clearly surpassed that of its undoubtedly flawed predecessor, the National Banking system, before World War I. (3) Some proposed alternative arrangements might plausibly do better than the Fed as presently constituted. We conclude that the need for a systematic exploration of alternatives to the established monetary system is as pressing today as it was a century ago.

Yglesias understands that the Austrian theory of the business cycle has something to do with artificially low interest rates breeding malinvestment, but he thinks it can’t be right because “it’s hard to understand why business people would be so easily duped in this way. If Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises know that cheap money can’t last forever, why don’t private investors? Why wouldn’t firms avoid making the supposedly dumb investments?”

Gerald P. O’Driscoll and Mario Rizzo addressed this long ago in The Economics of Time and Ignorance:

[T]here are profits to be made from exploiting temporary situations. . . . Though entrepreneurs understand [the macro-aspects of a cycle] they cannot predict the exact features of the next cyclical expansion and contraction. . . . They lack the ability to make micro-predictions, even though they can predict the general sequence of events that will occur. These entrepreneurs have no reason to foreswear the temporary profits to be garnered in an inflationary episode. . . . From an individual perspective, then, an entrepreneur fully informed of the Austrian theory of economic cycles will face essentially the same uncertain world he always faced. Not theoretical or abstract knowledge, but knowledge of the circumstances of time and place is the source of profits.

Spending Shifts

Puzzlingly, Yglesias also thinks he can refute the Austrian theory by noting that “[s]pending patterns shift all the time without sparking a recession.” To which, Peter Klein replies, “Of course, Yglesias’s breezy summary of the theory skips over the time structure of production, the difference between consumption and investment, the role of interest rates in securing intertemporal coordination, the problem of expectations, and the other basic elements of the theory, which ten minutes of Wikipedia browsing could have explained.”

Yglesias reveals his unfamiliarity with the Austrian literature when he writes, “Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting.” Considering that Herbert Hoover’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealimpeded the market’s correction process, one wonders how the 1930s could possibly have discredited the Austrian theory of the origin of recessions.

Finally, Yglesias contends that “the Austrian school . . . preaches despair and demands no action at all.”

Balderdash. Since it explains that busts are central-bank-caused and hence avoidable through market-based money and banking, its implicit message is one of hope and optimism. And as for demanding no action, on the contrary, it puts forth a long list of actions for those who want stable economic growth—all of them designed to dismantle the interventionist state.

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, where this article originally appeared.

Source: Reason.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

It is no secret to those who know me, I love spending quality time and a good chunk of change at the strip club. Those chicks fucking love me, especially after Christmas bonus time! Well, they act like they love me, which I am totally fine with because while they are acting like they are into me, I am acting like I am into them when all I really want is to grab a few titties, slap a few butt-cheeks and have my cock attacked by gyrating asses. A girl that really knows how to utilize her knees during a lap dance really gets my wallet’s respect (hint, hint to you strippers reading this).

In the past, I have been engaged to a few strippers because on more than one occasion, a night of drunken debauchery, capitalized on by yours truly ballin’ outta control, has led to genuine feelings shared amongst myself and a few of these ladies. I’m not talking feelings grown out of monetary exchange, I am talking about two people connecting and finding some common ground and understanding. Granted these situations never panned out, as most strippers are flakes in the real world and I am hard to please and easily irritated but it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish them well. In fact, I have tried to help many understand how they could make a shit ton of cash but usually my economic lectures are interrupted by another stripper walking up to steal me away from the one I’m talking to or by some generic crunk song forcing the stripper on my lap to act like a trained monkey dancing for treats.

I have given this lesson to many but only a few have listened. However those who have listened have made a fuckload of bank! See, I have a very simple plan, one that could provide strippers with the riches they so desire and often times try to get by latching on like parasitic lampreys whenever they discover a guy who seemingly has a bottomless bank account. Fuck those guys, your plan of seductively siphoning off their riches never works out to your benefit, at least not long-term. Rich dudes are completely fucking unreliable. The only person you can rely on is yourself. Only when you break through and shatter your anti-capitalistic mentality and look at your “assets” as a real business, will you be able to transform your lackadaisical and often times inebriated work ethic into a lucrative and promising career. Wouldn’t you like to be a millionaire before the strip club owner pushes you out on your 30th birthday? Well, this is a lesson on how to do just that.

In the area that I live, strippers work for bargain prices, so my neck of the woods actually provides me with a good example. If you make more for your services than the girls do in my area, adjust your math accordingly.

In my town, strippers typically charge twenty dollars per lap dance. I have been to places where the prices are as high as forty to fifty bucks a lap dance. I refuse to pay that. Not because I am cheap but because I don’t find the exchange of that amount of money to be equal to the service provided. Maybe I am just spoiled in my neck of the woods with our twenty dollar lap dances but hey, why pay fifty for one when in most towns you can get a b.j. for less? Hell, I know a girl that gives $10 handjobs. Not that I would want a cheap b.j. or handjob, I’m just trying to put the cost of competing services into perspective. Now back to my point.

A lap dance is twenty dollars ($20). That twenty-dollar lap dance usually lasts about three-to-four minutes. Let’s round up to four (4) minutes to have the numbers nice and round. So if a stripper performs five (5) consecutive lap dances that amounts to one hundred dollars ($100).. cha-ching! That’s one hundred bucks made in twenty (20) minutes, as 4 (minutes) times 5 (lap dances) is equal to twenty (minutes). Since twenty minutes is a third of an hour, multiply these numbers by three (3). The total money made in twenty minutes is $100, so the total money made in one hour would be $300! If a stripper works non-stop, she can make $300 per hour! Fuck getting that psychology degree you are all supposedly working so hard for at the Community College!

Granted, a stripper can’t work non-stop. I mean, they do have to go on stage every hour or so for at least two songs. They also have to go to the back to freshen up and either get a swig of water or vodka. God forbid they dehydrate. So for reality’s sake, let’s say that she can squeeze in at least a half hour of real work, she is still averaging $150 an hour! Keep in kind, that this is a stripper at a $20 per dance rate. If you charge $40 per dance, you’re back up to $300 per hour! If you’re a $50 per dance stripper, you’re averaging $375 per hour! Those rare dancers in the really high-end clubs that can get $60 per dance from the high rollers will average $450 per hour! I wish I were a chick so I could hustle these horny motherfuckers and bank some serious cheese.

The craziest part is that strippers don’t just work for an hour, well technically they are at the club for more than an hour if they show up on time and don’t get sent home early. If they keep hustling during those hours, this hard earned cash will multiply with ease. If a stripper can maintain this pace, she’ll be rich in no time. Now, I know that there are peak times and low times during the day but if you have the looks and the tools, you should be able to get the attention of every dude that walks through that front door. Run that club and be the “go to” chick. It ain’t a hard thing to achieve, you just have to not look like ass and you have to make an effort to please and be pleasant and classy at the same time. No dude wants to continually throw money away on a hood rat. Stop acting like a dickhead ladies and get your shit together. Moving on!

If a chick works, say an 8-hour shift, and maintains her money making pace, she’ll walk away with $1,200 that day! Sounds crazy but strippers I’ve coached in the basics of economics have pulled this off. Sure, there are days where this won’t happen but one girl I talk to told me that she can pull this off about three times a week, when she works five to six shifts. If you can hustle like her, you can get paid! Am I sounding like an infomercial for a bullshit product yet? Really though, I ain’t selling anything, all this knowledge is free! Well, maybe you can hook me up with a few lap dances next time we meet, as a courtesy of course.

So my girl that was able to hit the $1,200 mark was also able to average this three times a week. That comes out to $3,600 a fucking week! That ass is expensive! Think about that number for a minute. You could pay for your titties in one week!

Now most of us are aware that there are 52 weeks in a year. If you multiply $3,600 (per week) by 52 (all the weeks in a year) you could hit $187,200 in a single year! This is before taxes and shit but who really claims all of their “tips”? Also, this is before you have to pay your dues to the club owner and DJ and whoever else, depending upon your establishments set up.. but damn! $187k a year is over 18 times more than the poverty level!

In five years, at this pace, you could earn $936,000! That is just shy of a million dollars! If you push even a little harder, you could be a millionaire in five years. Fuck that club owner, you could buy his ass out and run that shit the way it should be run. Hell, that might actually be a bad idea because you may just want to focus on shaking that ass because that ass is one hell of a bread-earner.

In ten years, you could earn about 1.9 million dollars! So if you started stripping at 18, by the age of 28 you could have nearly 2 million dollars. Do you know what you could do with that much money? This is considering you didn’t blow it on drugs, asshole parasite boyfriends or Hello Kitty sandwich makers. The truth is, your ass can make you rich.

So why are strippers usually broke and always whining to you about it? Quite simply, they have the shittiest work ethic I have ever seen. Some of them are there to please but half the time they are socializing with you, it is a waste. They are either trying to get you to buy them appletinis or Chinese food. Often times, the customer has to ask them for a dance, as they are too busy gossiping with regulars who are just there to drink. Otherwise, they are just bumming cigarettes while rolling their eyes whenever another stripper (who is hustling) walks by with a customer in hand. If you don’t get off of your fucking asses and try to sell your products and services, the competition will crush you and the opportunities and most importantly the money will continue to pass you by. The knowledge I have shared here is literally a million times more valuable than any dollar bill I have shoved in your black light reactive panties.

Do you want to be a winner or do you want to debate with yourself if you should quit and go back to Hot Topic because you feel that you were better off there at $7.25 an hour? At least the assistant manager from Spencer’s thought you were cute enough to buy you a smoothie everyday. Fuck all of that, it would take about 3 hours of shitty menial work at Hot Topic just to equal the $20 you could make in 4 minutes at the strip club. Do the fucking math.

You have also got to stop with the negativity and bullshit excuses. I’ve heard it all before. If you know that you are good at what you do, why the fuck are you working in a club that barely gets any customers? I’ve heard the day shift excuse too. You’re only on day shift for one of three reasons. The first, you are getting old. The second, you are a newbie. The third, you aren’t pulling your weight. If you were the top attraction, you’d be working the prime schedule. Even then, if you get the prime shifts and the customers just aren’t there to make it lucrative for you, go work at another club. Hell, move to a bigger town and get a job there. If you are better than most, you will make more than them. If this is what you do for a living, make it your fucking passion. If it isn’t, get out and go do something else. Take pride in what you do or don’t do it. PERIOD! If you take pride and have the work ethic to hustle, you will do what you have to do to make it big. Free market ass is where it’s at!

I’ve given you the key to success here. All you’ve got to do is work it and work it well! If you’re on drugs, stop using them at the office. If you spend more time drinking with desensitized regulars than looking for the steady flow of new paying clients, stop it and switch your game up. If you’re spending more time gossiping with the other girls or whining to customers about your prick boyfriend, you will never succeed at the level you could. All it takes is effort; the problem is that most strippers seemingly don’t have any. Instead of taking that as an insult, any stripper with half a brain should look at that fact as an advantage. Your competition is easy pickins. So pick away, hustle and count that paper.

You’re fucking welcome.