Milford Bateman on Microfinance

I will first state the case against Microfinance and refute it with incontrovertible arguments drawn from mathematical economics. (My arguments are supplied in bold italics)

First a must read link to Milford Bateman- scourge of Microfinance and David to Grameen Bank's Goliath, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus- all but explicitly labeling the activities of the Vikram Akulas (That's DrAkula to you, remember he has a Phd from Chicago) of the World as an example of 'control fraud'- like what happened to the S&Ls back in the Eighties.
It is blistering stuff- and a wake up call. Or it would be, if you hadn't me on hand to prove 1) Bateman has a penis 2) Bateman has a White penis. This proves he is wrong.
Bateman had earlier focused on denouncing the way Microfinance had been touted as a remedy in the post-war Yugoslavia or other places where the retreat of the State had left a vacuum in which neo-Liberal ideology could run amok. Crucially, Bateman focuses on the manner in which Microfinance crowds out productive investment in the small to medium sector.
Bateman isn't scared of going up against the big boys- not even Yunus is immune to his scathing attack. This is a link to another blog, by Rajan Alexander, which doesn't so much take a hatchet to Yunus and Akula and Vijay Mahajan as feed them into the wood chipper.

Here is a quote from an article by the Committee to abolish Third World debt-  (Prof.Patrick Bond)
Consider this outlandish claim, made by Yunus as he got started in the late 1970s: "Poverty will be eradicated in a generation. Our children will have to go to a `poverty museum’ to see what all the fuss was about."
According to Milford Bateman, a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, who is one of the world’s experts on Grameen and microcredit, the reason this rhetoric resonated with international donors during the era of neoliberal globalisation, was that "they love the non-state, self-help, fiscally responsible and individual entrepreneurship angles".


Grameen’s origins are sourced to a discussion Yunus had with Sufiya Begum, a young mother who, he recalled, "was making a stool made of bamboo. She gets five taka from a business person to buy the bamboo and sells to him for five and a half taka, earning half a taka as her income for the day. She will never own five taka herself and her life will always be steeped into poverty. How about giving her a credit for five taka that she uses to buy the bamboo, sell her product in free market, earn a better profit and slowly pay back the loan?" Describing Begum and the first 42 borrowers in Jobra village in Bangladesh, Yunus waxed eloquent: "Even those who seemingly have no conceptual thought, no ability to think of yesterday or tomorrow, are in fact quite intelligent and expert at the art of survival. Credit is the key that unlocks their humanity."
But what is the current situation in Jobra? Says Bateman, "It’s still trapped in deep poverty, and now debt. And what is the response from Grameen Bank? All research in the village is now banned!" As for Begum, says Bateman, "she actually died in abject poverty in 1998 after all her many tiny income-generating projects came to nothing". The reason, Bateman argues, is simple: "It turns out that as more and more ‘poverty-push’ micro-enterprises were crowded into the same local economic space, the returns on each micro-enterprise began to fall dramatically. Starting a new trading business or a basket-making operation or driving a rickshaw required few skills and only a tiny amount of capital, but such a project generated very little income indeed because everyone else was pretty much already doing exactly the same things in order to survive."
Contrary to the carefully cultivated media image, Yunus is not contributing to peace or social justice. In fact, he is an extreme neoliberal ideologue. To quote his philosophy, as expressed in his 1998 autobiography, Banker to the Poor, "I believe that `government’, as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a `Grameenized private sector’, a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions." At the time as he wrote those words, governments across the world, especially in the United States, were pulling back from regulating financial markets. In 1999, for example, Larry Summers (then US Treasury secretary and now President Barack Obama’s overall economics tsar) set the stage for the crash of financial-market instruments known as derivatives, by refusing to regulate them as he had been advised.
The resulting financial crisis, peaking in 2008, should have changed Yunus’s tune. After all, the catalysing event in 2007 was the rising default rate on a rash of "subprime mortgage" loans given to low-income US borrowers. These are the equivalent of Grameen’s loans to very poor Bangladeshis, except that Yunus did not go so far as the US lenders in allowing them to be securitised with overvalued real estate.
Yunus has long argued that "credit is a fundamental human right", not just a privilege for those with access to bank accounts and formal employment. But reflect on this matter and you quickly realise how inappropriate it is to compare bank debt – a liability that can be crushing to so many who do not survive the rigours of neoliberal markets – with crucial political and civil liberties, health care, water, nutrition, education, environment, housing and the other rights guaranteed in the constitutions of countries around the world.

Impressive stuff you say? What if I were to prove to you that Patrick Bond has 1) a penis and 2) a White Man's penis? Clearly he's wrong.

My own vision for Microfinance is based on an integration of micro-credit targeted at very poor women with traditional wife-beating activities which should be properly monetized and brought into the market (Coase's theorem) under the rubric of loan uptake and recovery costs, thus enabling domestic violence to count towards the G.N.P. This can not only rapidly lift poor countries out of poverty, but the securitized globally traded assets thus created could be used to fund the bail-out. DrAkula's ex-wife already has her own Domestic Violence N.G.O. It should merge with her husbands operation so as to blaze a trail not just for Third World Countries but also the brave new Post-Obama U.S.A.ruled by Momma Grizzlies escaping the effects of Global Warming on Alaska.

Is Social Choice Theory a waste of time?

Social Choice is something that happens all the time. We can't stop it from happening. But does having a theory of Social Choice
a) improve decision making?
b) not quickly lead to nonsense?
On the evidence- no.
I guess in the old days Social Choice was mainly done by criminals, lunatics and sociopaths- the Robber Baron in his Castle did Fiscal policy (i.e. levying protection money) and Institutional infrastructure (organizing markets and chopping of hands and heads) ; the lunatics (i.e. religious nutjobs) did Capital formation (i.e. Temples and Monasteries and so on) and Division of Labor (enforcing a Caste system and Gender dimorphism and regulating Innovation and Technology Transfer) and the sociopaths (lawyers and merchants and whores) did the rest.

Have things really changed?
Sure. The sociopaths are now in charge. So a Theory is needed coz just cutting of hands and heads and burning heretics isn't cool anymore BECAUSE sociopaths are cowardly little shites.
So we need a Theory of Social Choice.
But why have a mathematical theory of Social Choice? After all, the U.S was dismantling its system of administered pricing just at the time Arrow was working his mojo. I suppose, one argument for Social Choice ties up with stuff related to Market failure- it made sense to show why, Mathematically, that was bound to happen just as it also made sense to show there were bound to be Government failures to balance out the picture.
Arrow showed that there was no benign way of aggregating preferences by means of a voting rule that did not yield perverse results. You're always bound to have some sort of Preference Revelation problem or you're going to be losing important information' or screwing up dynamically or something. Gibbard Satterthwaite & Myerson-Satterthwaite are like a reverse Coase's theorem showing why mechanism design can fuck up.
What if you combine mechanism design in a bargaining game such that 'the gains from trade' are being divided up between parties? Perhaps here the maths would become intractable as an element of impredicativity arises.
In any case, in ordinary life all sorts of people who can hardly count do a pretty good job of doing back of the envelope calculations of things like Shapley index of power for a single-issue voting group. People intuitively understand when preference diversity is too great for a voting type solution. So why should this stuff not just be left to the back-room boys? Why is Social Choice Theory intellectually sexy in a manner that Cost Accountancy or Actuarial Science isn't?

Why not just go back to good old fashioned Cardinal Utility and ad hoc comparisons of different people's Utility- coz that's what it's all gonna cash out as anyway? Either that, or just let different vested interest groups battle it out in the courts and in the media and through the political system? I mean that's the way the world has always worked and Social Choice is a fact of our day to day life BECAUSE ours is a swinish existence. I'm not saying we're all not swine in the ultimate reckoning but just that we don't like our nose rubbed in it.
Where's the harm in tarting up Social Choice with a bit of Math like maybe it wasn't just swinishness but something elegant and beautiful like theoretical physics?
Pigs might fly and mathematical swine soar skyward upon Platonic wings.
In addition to Social Choice Theory, the Dr.Stangeloves of the RAND Corp. had prepared for us a beautiful Armageddon of Nuclear missiles raining down on our heads like so many air-borne pigs.

Still better than being crapped on by angels? Ah, but angels don't exist.

Irma Adelman- the woman who could have stopped the Vietnam War.

Following on from my last post on a female economist who some think might save us from catastrophic climate change, I present to you another female economist- also of Jewish origin- who could have stopped the Vietnam War.
Irma Adelman went to Vietnam in 1963 to compile some agricultural statistics that some bureaucratic bigwig had demanded for his butterfly collection. Unfortunately, the ditzy young thing got hold of the wrong end of the stick and decided to find out how to stop the war. Strangely- she was an econometrician of genius- she took the utterly bizarre approach of asking people, including poor peasants out in the country-side. They explained that so long as the insurgents kept up operations, the landlords couldn't collect their rents, being holed up in the Cities. Three years of accrued rents worked out at 1.5 times their annual income. Pacification would have ruined the peasants. Adelman calculated that a land-to-the-tiller policy, with compensation paid by the U.S, would have cost half the then military budget- a small fraction of what it would eventually snowball into.

The list of Adelman's achievements and breakthroughs and compassionate insights are too long to list. Indians may be interested to note that Adelman helped in the South Korean miracle whereby incomes for the poor tripled in ten years. BUT South Korea already had land-reform and universal primary education and assets were relatively equitably distributed. They were also prepared to take the pain of a 50% devaluation, tight money at home and a rapid dismantling of distortionary protective tariffs.

However, her econometrics was flawed in two ways- firstly it was not strait-jacketedly Bayesian and secondly not only was she lacking a penis but so was her co-author! Frankly, I think this an utter scandal and a damning indictment of Govt. underfunding for the Arts.
Not everything can be blamed on the Liberals in the Media. The homosexuals too should accept some responsibility.

Refuting Graciela Chichilnisky- an axiomatic approach.

I shall refute the strong version of the theorem that Graciela Chichlnisky is one of the great minds of our age. With scrupulous fairness I will first enumerate her so called claims to fame and refute them with advanced topological methods (these are the statements in bold)
1) Her 1994 paper. 'Intersecting Families of Sets and the Topology of Cones in Economics”, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,  showed that the basic structure of the most important forms of resource allocation was connected with Arrow's social choice paradox . The same mathematical structure was also the cause of problems of market equilibrium as well as the core in game theory. Significantly, the common root of all these problems was the issue of when sets intersect, which in economic terms measures social diversity. This is the key issue in finding a solution to market equilibrium, for social choice and for game solutions.

She writes 'In this work I showed with Geoffrey Heal the first necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of social choice rule. By myself I showed later a rather surprising result: that the same condition is necessary and sufficient for the existence of market equilibrium, the core and social choice—unexpectedly, it is the same conditions in the three cases. Social diversity holds the key. Beyond a certain point, it prevents the economy from reaching market equilibrium, a core solution or social choice rules. This validates the key role of diversity in allowing gains from trade, while at the same time limiting most forms of resource allocation beyond a certain point.'

So what? She does not have a penis.
2) She turned International Trade & Development on its head by incorporating things like increasing returns and the importance of property rights in land to get results that actually mean something.
Her penis is probably quite small. In any case, it's not just about length, girth also counts
3) Listen, you cunt- she's not some silly little Freakanomics media whore pushing factoids at Joe the Plumber- on the contrary she's a big wheel with the U.N and an architect of the Kyoto Protocol- y'know the guys with black helicopters who've got secret censors fitted to your toilet to measure your output of greenhouse gases-so just watch it that's all.
What about testicles? Does her ball sac reach half-way down to her knees? Mine does and it aint a pretty picture. You really wanna go toe to toe with me on this? Well do you, punk?No? That's what I thought.
Q.E.D.

Fucking women economists! Alfred Marshall was right... fuck's that? A helicopter? Not one of them black helicopters? Can't be coz they're all like stealth and shit so I wouldn't actually hear them till they were right on top of me... no, it wasn't a helicopter...just the neighbor's T.V. Hang on, the neighbors are out of town, what is that bright light? It's moving towards me... pod people! They're gonna replace me with a pod person...say, this anal probe aint so bad...well, that's it for tonight folks. Tomorrow, I'll refute Al Gore.

Guha and the thinkers and makers of modern India.

Ramachandra Guha's book on 19 'thinkers and makers of modern India' is out and seems to have been well received.
I find it puzzling. I'd have thought, the people whose ideas and actions might still be relevant to modern India would have been those possessed of superior rationally and maturity and independence of character rather than mere publicity mongers who abandoned even such see-through intellectual garments as Indian modesty requires, in their headlong rush to jump on every bandwagon or head up any passing mob.
Prior to Independence none of the people mentioned in this book had much power and, perhaps for that very reason, little motive or leisure to think rather than simply strike attitudes. Since the British were brokers of both Power and Knowledge rather than hegemonic monopolists of both- though India could boast its exiles, it was not the case that its exiles competed at the level of pure thought and analysis.

Keynes, in his book on Indian monetary policy, drew attention to a special sort of narrowness that arises from having knowledge only of India and England, that too only at the level of leader-writer Punditry. It is noteworthy that already, at that point in time, there were Indians with a larger vision- however, their failure to synthesize an intelligentsia with a wider horizon than that of the hacks and windbags the British had insisted on engendering meant that Thought, as a shaping force, remained a dead letter- though no doubt it might ricochet unpredictably at rarefied levels of policy framing (a necessary and sufficient qualification for participation in which, the British considered, was an impartial Mandarin ignorance of both empirical conditions in the market and the manner in which public institutions actually implemented policy).


This is not to say there was no dialogue between specialists in different fields. On the contrary, there was a sort of lowest common denominator dialogue such that the Scientist might abruptly claim that the latest radio-carbon results prove that the Vedas were written before the formation of the mountains, or a former President of India, an old Socialist, suddenly start quoting some Ananda Margi nutjob, an Econ Lecturer at some Mid West Community College, who predicted that the Western Economy would collapse in 1990 or something equally silly.
Of course, the President in question had already seen to it that his own children were all 'well-settled' in the U.S and thus his satisfaction in contemplating the downfall of the West was of a purely Philosophical sort.

Yet, India has had thinkers and shapers. Our administrators and  lawyers, even journalists and historians were, if anything, a cut above what one might expect in such a poor country. Who were they? Well, for a lot of 'Indglish' speakers they were Mummy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunty and Granny and Grandad and so on.
But- in so far as they thought and acted in a manner promoting the commonweal- were they not mere imitators of the British, Macaulay's Babu class?
To answer this question, we might begin by asking the question- what features does India have which do not flow, in a purely mechanical faction, from the fact that it was ruled by the British and that it's intelligentsia had some exposure to thoughts expressed in the English language?
What institutions, or adaptions of institutions, make independent India different, rather than inferior merely, to the probable trajectory it would otherwise have taken?
Well, we might start off with concepts and programs unique to India- Ahimsa (ghastly failure), khaddar (a bad joke), Panchsheel (hilarious till the Chinese bloodied our nose), Swadesi (apparently some Burmese nutjob actually implemented this as 'Buddhist Economics', greatly to Schumacher's delight, thus setting back his country by 80 years), Sampoorna kranti (which meant replacing Indira Gandhi with Raj Narain!) and, of course, the grandest success of them all- viz. Bhoodan which culminated in Bihardhan- i.e. the redistribution of land by the voluntary action and consent of the land-lords which resulted in the whole state of Bihar (or at least 97%) being donated to ....urm dunno...but it was what Vinobha Bhave wanted and he had vowed not to leave Bihar till it happened and then it happened and so he finally did leave Bihar and...urm...that really shaped modern India and represented like truly visionary thinking because everybody else thought it was impossible BUT only the Indians actually tried it and thus PROVED ...that they can't think or shape events worth shit.
What of Women and doing away with feudalism and stuff like that? The China got rid of 'foot-binding' in half a generation, India completely did away with things like child-marriage and ban on svagotra marriage and the tyranny of khap panchayats and so on way back in ...urm, except we didn't at all.
The Koreans get rid of untouchability and caste and land-lordism and poor hygiene in the villages and so on- all in the space of what? ten years? fifteen years? In India, Ambedkar converts to Buddhism, though he knew it was the most successful exporter of the concept of Untouchability in history, and... well... urm... the good news is that not only will the Caste system be constitutionally preserved but everybody wants to be classed as 'backwards' if not outright retarded..  
True, every nation has a bunch of wind-bags gassing on about democracy and 'wimmin's' rights and so on. But, not every nation has had democracy for over 60 years with more or less Left wing Govts in power both at the Center and the States. The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that either
a) thinkers and shapers of the sort Guha celebrates had shit-for-brains and zero practical ability
b) thousands of Indians have shown an unexampled genius as thinkers and shapers in ensuring that the thoughts and schemes of the wind-bag do-goodniks ended up frustrating their own ends.

I suppose another possibility exists- viz. Guha's brand of caramel centered historiography is an exercise in meaningless pi-jaw of a sort that we, at this time of crisis when the clash of civilizations of the environmental greenhouse gasses of the collapse of the global capitalist system and like I'm sure those fucking Germans will soon go all Nazi and start invading Poland again and like check out that Narendra Modi dude- what if his beard reaches Ayatollah proportions?- and isn't Arundhati Roy silly because in these illiberal times I will defend to the death something or the other and free speech and human rights and like that old song of Amitabh Kumar says 'Hum ko pyaar chahiye'- 'All I wants is Love' and, guess what, I'm doing another fucking big book on guess who- yup, Gandhi- coz that always sells.

But what was original in Gandhi? Hunger strikes? That was borrowed from the Suffragettes and it had already failed. Non-Cooperation, Rent strikes and so on. The Irish had been there, done that and, on balance, won their historic struggle albeit by an own goal. Yes, I suppose Gandhi was doing something novel in supporting Khilafat. But it was novel because it was silly.

More broadly, if we leave aside programs initiated or catalyzed by the British- including ex-I.C.S liberals like Hulme, Wedderburn and Cotton and so on- what are we left with?

Guha includes Jinnah perhaps because his 'hostage-theory' (whereby Indians won't kill Muslims for fear Pakistanis might retaliate against Hindus) was as hilarious and purely Indian as Gandhi's hunger strikes. But both refer to an absence of thought and were destructive rather than constructive of the inheritance from the Raj.

It is a great criticism of Guha's book that he does not mention truly great men and original thinkers like Tanguturi Prakasam who, as C.M of Madras Presidency, proposed the destruction of the textile mills so that they might be replaced by Khaddar. This led to clashes with the Communists whom he locked up- surely the only occasion when that was the wrong thing to do.

Thinkers and Shapers? I praise the wreckers and the mindless bribe-takers. It is they who, between them, have kept India going and salvaged for it such relicts of modernity as the Raj bequeathed it.

The odd thing is that there are plenty of good writers and policy-makers- Judges, Doctors, Engineers, School Inspectors and so on- who weren't the sort of futile numskulls Guha lists. What they tended to avoid was single valued solutions to complex socio-economic problems. In Economics, we have Tinbergen's rule- the number of policy instruments must equal the number of policy objectives. Any ideologue who thinks otherwise- for e.g that women's education /micro-finance or whatever  is a panacea- is either a careerist or  a nutjob or both.

Guha is looking for non-Marxists nutjobs because there is some other Guha who has cornered the market in talking up Marxist nutjobs.
Yet Guha is taken seriously.
Why?

Stephen Batchelor and the true message of the Buddha.

Stephen Batchelor, in his latest book on Buddhism writes, that Buddha's teachings “seem more to encourage a creation of a self  than a renunciation of a self, rather than present the self as a fiction, Gotama presented it as a project to be realised – the functional, moral self that breathes and acts in the world…This is a useful way of looking at the self for a lay Buddhist person who works in the world than a renunciation model.”

I feel the distinguished writer has not gone far enough. Speaking as Buddhist monk and layman of over eighty seconds standing, I feel the true message of Buddhism involves not the renunciation or creation of a self but its self-projection, along a virtual dimension, such that could you please pick up my dry-cleaning while simultaneously positing a critique of social relations with that fuckwit neighbor of mine whose car alarm keeps going off, not in a purely epistemological sense but within the parameters of a truly democratic dialogic concerned with your remembering to pick up my dry-cleaning- like it wasn't you spilled Thai lemon grass soup on my tux- you fucking retard.'

I personally honor Dr. Ambedkar most for converting to Buddhism because of the extraordinary success it achieved in exporting the concept and practice of untouchability to far off countries like Korea and Japan. The boxer, Cassius Clay who converted to Islam with the name Muhammad Ali- perhaps as a thank you to the Saudi and Omanis for finally getting round to abolishing slavery at around the same time- is my other great hero.

I look forward to Arundhati Roy's next book- hailing Max Hardcore as the greatest Feminist of all time and protesting his incarceration for obscenity.

This is the true message of Buddhism. Only real smart people got utter shit for brains.

Steve Landsburg fallacy re. Capital Gains tax as a double tax on income.

This is Steve Landsburg on Capital Gains Tax-

The New Yorker arrived today, leading off with this letter to the editor about income tax rates:

…The very rich pay at significantly lower rates, because most of their income consists not of compensation for services but of capital gains and dividends, which are capped at a fifteen per cent rate.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and you can’t begin to think clearly about tax policy if you don’t understand why. Even if capital gains taxes were capped at one percent, income subject to those taxes would be taxed at a higher rate than straight compensation. That’s because capital gains taxes (like all other taxes on capital income) are surtaxes, assessed over and above the tax on compensation.
It always pays to think through stylized examples. Alice and Bob each work a day and earn a dollar. Alice spends her dollar right away. Bob invests his dollar, waits for it to double, and then spends the resulting two dollars. Let’s see how the tax code affects them.

First add a wage tax. Alice and Bob each work a day, earn a dollar, pay 50 cents tax and have 50 cents left over. Alice spends her fifty cents right away. Bob invests his fifty cents, waits for it to double, and then spends the resulting one dollar.
What does the wage tax cost Alice? Answer: 50% of her consumption (which is down from a dollar to fifty cents). What does it cost Bob? Answer: 50% of his consumption (which is down from two dollars to one dollar). In the absence of a capital gains tax, Alice and Bob are both being taxed at the same rate.
Now add a 10% capital gains tax. Alice and Bob each work a day, earn a dollar, pay 50 cents tax and have 50 cents left over. Alice spends her fifty cents right away. Bob invests his fifty cents, waits for it to double, pays a 5 cent capital gains tax, and is left with 95 cents to spend.

Landsburg assumes all income is earned and taxed.
Let us suppose the following- income is taxed at 50% and Capital Gains at 20%. I have a choice between earning $100 by working for my Dad renovating a house he has bought for $1000 which he can later sell for $1200 or else receiving a 50% share in the Capital Gain. 
How much tax do I pay if I take my reward as earned income? Answer $50 leaving me $50 disposable income. How much if I go into partnership with my Dad and take my reward as a Capital Gain? Answer $20 leaving me with $80 to spend.
What if I'm an orphan with no capital or access to credit such that I could get into the business of property development not as a paid employee but as a speculator entitled to capital gains?
Well, I'm shit out of luck. My supply of labor will tend to be inelastic meaning that the Taxman will tend to slap a higher tax on me simply because only when supply is inelastic will a higher tax rate yield more revenue.
Now you may argue that to take income as Capital Gains involves a risk- so we are comparing apples to oranges. The answer to this is that workers and self-employed contractors are just as likely to get stiffed- i.e. not paid- and more likely to suffer prolonged hardship than a capitalist who can simply walk away from a project if the market turns against him. Indeed, the bigger the capitalist the more likely this is because his portfolio would be diversified and protected against a down-side by positions on the options market.
If capital is more elastic in supply- as with globalized financial markets it is bound to become- capital gains will always be more lightly taxed especially when you consider that economic rents tend to become quasi rents and disappear in the long run even w.r.t Land.
A situation where a country, like America, is heavily indebted to foreigners is one where taxes on capital have to be globally competitive and are under downward pressure. Since labour is not as geographically mobile and elastic in supply, taxes will have higher incidence on workers rather than those who can derive part or all of their sustenance from inherited or acquired wealth.
Taxation is really about elasticities. If you can transfer your domicile without impacting on earnings, you escape tax and, sooner or later, Tax authorities will recognize this power of yours and negotiate a sweetheart deal with you.
That's what happened to the super-rich and that's why enormous sums of money are being poured into this Tea Party bull-shit. It's also the reason why Landsburg is spending time talking to stupid people on his blog. He knows they are stupid. He knows he's talking through his arse. But, there's a big Capital Gain in it for him so screw all youse.


If Landsburg is involved in his own tax-planning, it is unlikely that he can be utterly ignorant of the numerous advantages to preferring to realize a capital gain at a convenient time rather than maximizing taxable income in the time period where an economic activity occurs.
Frankly, if Landsburg's arguments were true then all the Tax Accountants and Trust lawyers and so on would be out of a job.
Why is Landsburg peddling this ignorant shite? Is he stupid? Mencken said 'no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.'