Don't Belive the Doom and Gloom

A post from Laissez Faire books (excerpts):

It’s not as if we have no precedents to learn from. In the old days when I sat around with other economists, conversations often turned to the news media’s complete misrepresentation of free market economics.

Perhaps the oddest thing about old-school media bias is that it effectively alienates more than half of the potential customer base — viewers who believe that free enterprise is better for society than big government policies. Besides driving viewers away from their product, the media’s hostility toward half the population was creating an opportunity for potential competitors.

It was this market opportunity, of course, that naturalized Australian-American Rupert Murdoch saw and exploited with the creation of Fox News. Today, Fox dominates the news business, at least in terms of profits. This is because many legacy media outfits compete for about half the market, while Fox is nearly alone in serving the rest. This experience ought, it seems to me, to attract entrepreneurs to serve the Fox viewership in the arenas of film and television.

***

As media and entertainment are often linked, it’s pretty clear that so-called liberals still have the advantage when it comes to influencing public opinion. Today, propaganda is often called “spin,” but whatever you call it, it is only one factor in opinion formation. The other big one is actual results.

***

One of the biggest cultural changes in modern times is the collapse of the image of California as “the Golden State.” Moreover, polls of the nation as a whole demonstrate a far more sophisticated appreciation of economic cause and effect than you would surmise if all you paid attention to were Hollywood and the MSM.

Ultimately, math trumps spin. Though there are a lot of people trying their hardest to convince America that it has permanently adopted European socialism, it isn’t true. Things have been far worse in the past, by all measures. If you don’t know this, you risk falling prey to the conservative doom-and-gloom machine, which I hate almost as much as the liberal scaremongers.

The reality is that our current mess will not be that hard to extract ourselves from, once we have surpassed our national pain threshold. Part of the reason is that there is so much innovation bottled up by high taxes and overregulation. As soon as federal policies change, this backlog will create very rapid growth, especially in the fossil fuel and biotech sectors.

I've no doubt that some bad things are coming economically.

Could it be that those of us who are predicting economic gloom have been taken in by those who favor the government?

Progressives wanted to claim that awful things would happen if the sequestration happened.  Other than the air traffic controllers being forced to skip days so that the awful sequester would show up, what were the side effects?

They predicted bad stuff would happen if the government stopped functioning, some of us are predicting bad stuff when the government goes bankrupt (or whatever).

How are these two predictions different?

***

Part of the reason is that there is so much innovation bottled up by high taxes and overregulation. As soon as federal policies change, this backlog will create very rapid growth, especially in the fossil fuel and biotech sectors.

I think I was right before I over-thought it:  let's get this government collapse over with sooner rather than later.

Good Cops vs. Mean Cops

I recently discovered a new Wisconsin laws that says that you can be stopped and fined if your trailer-ed boat has its drain-plug in.  (They think that they can regulate the movement of zebra mussels and other invasive species.  Good luck with that.)

In the magazine article that I discovered this new law in (reading the actual rules and regulations is painful and confusing) the writer commented that there are two ways to deal with being stopped by the cops or game wardens: be very cooperative even to illegal searches or to be polite but ask for warrants before agreeing to be searched.

This reminded me of reading one of P.J. O'Rourke's books in which he commented on roadblocks in very poor countries.  It seems that the guys manning some roadblocks will shoot you if you try to evade the roadblock at speed, and so you must stop.  At other roadblocks you'll be robed or forced to bribe the roadblockers or you'll get shot, and so you should bypass these at speed.  And both styles of roadblocks look the same, so how are you supposed to know which is which?

How are we supposed to know whether to agree to illegal searches or which questions to answer when we deal with police?

Its not too difficult to find awful cops.  And I overhead a guy last week, who had just returned from the army, say that he wanted to be a cop, but too many of them are so bad that he did not want to be involved with them.  And one of the largest drug operations in Wisconsin was ended a year, or so, ago when the offending cops were arrested.

My heart nearly stops every time I see a police car, and I've never committed any crimes (other than speeding and not having a front license plate).

Then we keep giving the cops more laws to enforce: no talking on cell phones, seat belts required, drunk drivers are worse than pedophiles, etc.

Trivial problems like not wearing a seat belt (it can harm no one but yourself) would have been ignored by cops years ago, or so I'm told.  But no possible good can come from dealing with cops today, at best you'll be left with only having lost several minutes to being questioned.

***

I'd like to ask whoever it was that told me last week that we are more laissez faire than we used to be to repeat that claim.

Quote of the Day, 3/16/2013

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue… To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

How to Fix the Country

My three step plan to fixing what is wrong with the world:

1. Convince women to return to being mothers

2. Balance the budget by radically changing entitlements

3. Remove as many rules and regulations as possible

Stop me if I am wrong.  Doing those three things would:

Returning women to their homes would:

• Reduce unemployment
• More women would turn into mothers
• Children would spend more time with their parents
• Women would be less likely to want to get divorced
• Women would have more time to spend improving themselves
• Women would have more time to "be creative"
• Etc.

Balancing the budget by radically changing entitlements would:

• Bring stability to the economy
• Eventually, end the debt
• Taxes could be lowered
• No government default
• Give entitlements a shot at existing long into the future (the goal for some)
• Etc.

Removing rules and regulations would:

• Free people to take chances and risks
• Allow the market to work
• More competition would exist
• People wouldn't be jailed for trivialities
• Etc.

Three ideas.  What wouldn't be better if these changes were made?  Fewer workers would even result in less traffic and less global warming (which is stupid regardless).  We would even see improvements in global warming.

Wouldn't it be great if any of these three things happened?

The beauty of being libertarian...

...is that we know what is good and what is bad.  So long as no one is injuring another (physical injury, theft, property damage, forced action, etc) then things are good.

Nobody knows everything, but I'm always right.

Leave people alone, and they will take care of themselves.  Don't force anyone to to anything and don't punish someone for doing what is in his best interest.

Let's apply this to an example.  The Economist magazine is an old, respected magazine about economics.  The problem is that many of the writers, and readers, think that they are soooo smart, and understand economics soooo well that they should therefore tell others what they should do.

When I tell someone what they should do, at least politically, it is invariably to say, "stop interfering, and stop reducing people's liberty."

Lets look at the Economist's debates.  We can look at the title for past debates and the description and know what we need to know about the debate, and we can easily prove it with facts.

more freedom = good

more government interference, taxes, regulations = bad

Let's look at the past debates and see if we can find out what the correct answers are:

Should governments encourage their citizens to marry?

Who favors telling others who they should marry? Why is that anyone's business?

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons the world is massively more prosperous than it was is because stable man/ woman marriages resulted in happy, healthy, and productive children.  The problem this question-asker probably wants to address is the reduction in marriages we are seeing and our societal decline.  Why is this a problem? What caused it?

Its easy enough to know why men don't want to get married.  We take all the risks and maybe get some reward.  Women take little risk and can have the kids and half the man's assets whenever she wants it.

And the government's support of feminism (suffrage,sexual discrimination laws, etc) has also contributed to our societal decline.

The problem is government interference, and the Economist wants to know if the government should try and fix this problem.  If this is the question, we've already lost the debate.

If the government should do anything to encourage marriage, it is to stop discouraging it.  Give children to the most able parent after divorces.  End no-fault divorce. Get out of the marriage license area altogether.

Would the economy be better off without MBA students?

What difference does it make of someone gets an MBA or not?

Once again the government is a big part of the problem.  Government schools, government school loans, the inability to discharge school debt in bankruptcy are some of the many ways the government interferes with the lives of people who should make the decision to attend MBA school themselves.  (I suggest avoiding it like the plague. One MBA class was enough for me.)

Related.

Would the recovery be stronger with Mitt Romney as president than with Barack Obama?

Care to guess what the biggest problem our economy faces is?

If you guessed, "government interference," then you are right.  (If there is such a thing as "must read" then that link is it.)

Does Obama, or would Romney, build bridges? Does he cook food? Does he mine for coal?  The president does none of those things.  The president, no matter who he is can only influence the economy with taxes, and regulations.  He does no actual production, which is what it takes to have a strong economy.

Both have shown a willingness, as politicians, to add new rules, and taxes, and regulations.  Will creating a huge new entitlement program (Obamacare, Romneycare) with new taxes and pages, and pages, of new rules encourage someone to start a business?  Or will lots of people figure that trying to figure out hundreds of pages of regulations makes starting a business not worth the bother?

Will manufacturing return to the West?

Why has manufacturing moved to the East? Because labor is cheaper and there are fewer government rules and regulations.

Want to know how to get manufacturing to move back to the West?  Remove workplace rules and regulations to make it more economical to manufacture things here.

Can you see the problem the world faces?  The government interferes with our lives everywhere, wonders why we are not as productive, marriage minded, or getting the "correct" amount of education, and then tries to fix problems that the government itself largely created.

I'm not claiming that the government is the cause of all the world's woes, but it makes everything worse.  And many of the non-government problems that we face could be more easily fixed, if only the government would get out of the way.

Next time you see a story about a new regulation or law, ask yourself, "will this law increase liberty or will it restrict liberty?"

Its A Jetsen's World

Talking about how bad the government is all the time can be depressing, and wearying.  One of the joys in reading Bourbon for Breakfast and Its a Jeten's World by Jeffery Tucker is that much of those two books are about the marvels of private interactions and private enterprise, when it is left alone by the government.

Read them and enjoy a fun way of understanding what is wrong with the world.

Buy them, or read them for free, here.

"When you talk about liberty, smile." - Milton Freidman

Why Our Economy Stinks

Our economy is a mess.  Our economy is in as bad of a shape as it has ever been since the founding of this country.

Read (or re-read): Dumb Ways (for an economy) to Die

Our economy is capable of improving, most of us want to work, businesses want to grow, we all want to buy more iPads, etc.  But we are being held back by our government.

...there are many dumb ways to kill an economy. Over the last five years, the federal government seems to have set the record for attempting as many as possible in record time. Then we look at growth rates and wonder why they are so anemic, why our kids can’t get jobs, why sector after sector seems to be crumbling, and why so many people are looking abroad for opportunity.

We all want to be safe, to have minimal accidents, to lose minimal property, etc. and because of that the government has created countless laws to keep us safe.  The problem is that we do not life in a perfectly safe world, and accidents happen.  We take risks in life everyday.  If we were really all about safety, then the speed limits would be 5 mph, we'd never use pointy knives, and we wouldn't need to lock our doors.

Because our government wants to be responsible for keeping us safe it has passed countless laws.  And while we may want to be safe, we need to take some risks, and some of us are willing to take greater chances than others.

Let's look at it with an analogy.  Assume that our economy is a runner trying to go as fast and as far as possible.  And then our government decides that that is good, but this runner needs to be safe too.  So this runner is required to wear a helmet, glasses, shoulder pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, a flak jacket, a raincoat, knee pads, thigh pads...

A runner would indeed be safer, from most things, by wearing all of this safety gear, but the runner will be much slower than it would be were it not so encumbered. 

Many of us may like the idea of being safe, even at the cost of some progress.  But the greatest progress comes from those who take risks and chances.  And forcing all of this safety upon us slows us all down.

Safety laws are just several of many things that our government has done in order to (allegedly) improve our lives.  You make like the safety, but you cannot argue that it has not slowed us down and will continue to retard growth, and will continue to slow any recovery that we may experience.

Let us throw off the yoke of government laws, rules, and regulations.  Let us run free, so that we may experience the greatest accomplishments that we are able.

Or we can continue to do what we are doing: spend, spend, spend, regulate, regulate, regulate...  After all, what's 8% unemployment among friends?

Wonder Why Our Economy is a Mess?

Have you been wondering why our economy is a mess?  Have you wondered about 0% interest rates? Have you wondered why kids these days can't get a job?

Well, wonder no more:

Dumb Ways (for an Economy) to Die by Jeffery Tucker and Douglas French

excerpt:

Stimulate Failing Sectors. The crash of 2008 exposed gigantic investment errors goaded on by previous bad Fed policy. The market tried so hard to make things right. But the Fed, the Treasury, and every living government official fought the entire way, with TARP, QE, ZIRP, Operation Twist, bankruptcy protections, debt creation, and many trillions of dollars in squandered wealth. And for what? To save the housing, banking, and financial sectors from the consequences of their errors. But the errors haven’t gone away. The sectors haven’t been stimulated. The net effect has been to ratchet down wealth creation, and so it will be until the stimulators stop diverting wealth and start facing up to reality.

Protect Against Imports and Exports. “Economic patriotism” is one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language. It means using the taxes called tariffs and quotas to prop up economically inefficient industries in our borders and failing to allow consumers to get the best deal whenever they can find it. Obama brags: “We’ve brought twice as many cases against unfair trading practices than the previous administration and we’ve won every single one that’s been decided.” The archetype case concerns China. You are paying more for lower-quality tires due to this intervention, at an estimated cost to consumers of $1.1 billion. The goal of energy independence is a bad one because it diverts production from efficient to inefficient technologies. Protectionism (and we have it for thousands of goods such as sugar, cheese, and ball bearings) is for losers. The belligerence against China is harmful. The sanctions against Iran and a dozen other countries are stupid. The U.S. economy needs to embrace the global economy, or else it will die alone.

Regulate Everything. In the name of health, safety, the environment, and intellectual property enforcement, nothing that exists has been left outside regulatory management. Each day, an average of 68 new regulations appear, giving bureaucrats the opportunity for endless meddling and harassment, and shutting down entrepreneurial ideas. Every machine in your home has been forcibly degraded, from your toilets to your washing machines to your soap. We can’t kill bugs in or out of our homes. Lawn equipment is wonky now, thanks to the regulatory tsunami. IP enforcement through patents and copyrights has slowed the pace of development of media, software, and industrial machinery. Enterprise lives in a cage and still somehow manages to stay alive. But what are we missing as a result? That’s the great unknown.

There are many ways that the government has interfered with our lives read about some more of them here.

Look at this list of dumb ways to kill an economy. It is a stunning tribute to the private sector and the power of enterprise that we manage to grow and still somewhat prosperous, regardless of this relentless beating.

And we wonder what’s happened. We wonder why capital is fleeing, why people are leaving, why wealth is not being created, why growth is anemic. This is not a reality built into some kind of civilizational way or some inexplicable great stagnation. It is all a direct result of a conscious decision to wreck the machinery of freedom. It’s dumb.

Talking about libertarians

Two libertarians discuss libertarianism, interacting with non-libertarians, and where the best place to live is.

(For some reason I cannot upload the video here, try this link.

Links!

Also...

Links!

Dr. Tim says we are all at least half libertarians already, why not become complete libertarians?  Liberty is what has made us more prosperous than anyone, anywhere, at any time.

excerpt:

Liberty’s first virtue is its practicality.  Liberty immunizes the general population from the tragic mistakes of its individual members. When two people exchange in bad faith, those two people alone suffer the consequences.  Unless, of course, those two people just happen to be John Boehner and Barack Obama - then the innocent victims number in the hundreds of millions. 

The idea itself is absurd; why should two men you have never met negotiate how much of your labor they will keep for their own purposes?  What if they compromise on all of it?  Would you celebrate the spirit of bipartisanship and breathe a sigh of relief that a crisis has been averted?  Will you be happy that Washington is working again?  Does gridlock still seem like such an awful thing? 

For that matter, can you even describe the crisis they are trying to avert without using the word “cliff”?   It is a fiscal curb, crack in the driveway, a chalk line. 

They are niggling over the last half trillion as if the first $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities doesn’t matter.  If Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner would decide to quit stalling and take all of the nation's wealth, we would finally be equal.  That should make many people happy, as equality - not freedom - is the progressive's perverted idea of justice.  

Equality of outcome has a price, and that price is everything. 

The relevant question is not which of those two men will convince the Beltway paparazzi that the other guy blinked: it is how much government do we need?   We can answer it in two minutes right here: Democrats, write down how much of your own income you would have given to George W.Bush if he could spend it any way he chose; Republicans, do the same with President Obama in mind.    

What did you decide?  5%, maybe less?  There you go – nearly everyone is already half-libertarian; now just keep both the left hand and right hand out of your wallet - and your school, your work, your bedroom, your gun rack, your church, your charity, your emails, and your stash - and you will complete the journey.      

Alas, the current President does not read Moment Of Clarity, he does not seek consensus on such trivial matters, and he does not regard the Constitution – wisely written to protect us from guys like him - as particularly relevant to his ambitions.  He is hell-bent on raising income tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, and the Republicans appear to be ready to do what they do best – cave. 

Francis Begbe writes the best description of the CT shooting that I have read anywhere.

excerpt:

So, just another few things. First, events like these cannot be predicted. They are Black Swans in the truest sense, although negative Black Swans are more likely to occur than positive Black Swans. With youth unemployment as high as it is, with hypergamy being what it is, with obfuscating leftie Boomer mentality pirulating every aspect of society, all exacerbated by a mental condition, that is what makes people just give up. The foot on the face of the beta male. Work on that. This wasn't a suicide neither, this was an act of desperation, an act seen though the lens of a horrible, crushing future. Second, murders like this don't occur when someone "snaps". They are usually meticulously planned, months and months in advance. Lanza was long gone before yesterday, long gone. Was something going on here with the mother we don't know about as well?

One problem with Francis' post is this: "obvious disclaimer, I'm not saying that gun restriction causes murders"

Banning guns may not be the direct cause of more murders, but more murders do happen where guns are banned.

Katie Pavlich says:  "New data out from the UK, where guns are banned, shows gun crime has soared by 35 percent."

The following chart shows the number murders in each city in the Washington D.C. area.  Which city, do you suppose, is the only one that banned handguns?

 
Dana Loesch comments on the CT shooting.

excerpts:

Where have these mass tragedies occurred? Virginia Tech. Aurora, Colorado. Schools, the majority of them. What do these locations have in common? They are designated “gun-free” zones. Are progressives unable to recognize that their gun control was already in place? Guns were already forbidden? The only solution left is “confiscation,” which goes beyond what they imply by “control.” I would like to hear it explained how a gun-free school zone, in a state with some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country, would have prevented the actions of a man whose intent was not following the law that day?

another excerpt:

From Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools, etc. That was the finding of a famous 1999 study by John Lott of the University of Maryland and William Landes of the University of Chicago, and it appears to have been borne out by experience since then as well.

excerpt:

I’d like for the left to explain how it is people are dying from gun shots in Chicago when the city explicitly banned them?

excerpt:

The NSC estimates that in 1995, firearm accidents accounted for 1.5% of fatal accidents. Larger percentages of fatal accidents were accounted for by motor vehicle accidents (47%), falls (13.5%), poisonings (11.4%), drowning (4.8%), fires (4.4%), and choking on an ingested object (3.0%).

Ban gravity! Ban Poison! Ban water! Ban fire! Ban choking!

Plus there are links to good gun stories. (at the bottom of the page)

Jeffery Tucker, my favorite author and who's website is at the top of my list of blog links for a reason, says that, despite the Fed's insistence to the contrary, the Fed's activities will hurt, not help, our unemployed.

excerpt:

Ben Bernanke began his press conference with a touching tribute to the unemployed. Oh, how he cares! And so deeply! His description of the problem was accurate enough. But then out came the smoke and mirrors.

Bernanke said that to remedy the unemployment problem, he will continue the Fed’s program of asset purchases. Specifically, the Fed will continue to buy and hold mortgage-backed securities (yes, they are still sloshing around the banking system) and Treasury securities — $40 billion-plus per month. Plus, he will keep the federal funds rates at near zero.

The great change, he said, is the intense focus on the policy objective of unemployment. The committee sees no inflation threat, so it might as well turn its attention to the labor markets. The Fed loves the unemployed, you see, and wants to help them.

But here’s the disconnect. What the devil does buying bad debt from zombie banks have to do with getting people jobs? The relationship between assets purchases and policy goals is murky at best.

“I need a job, so I hope the Fed buys more bad mortgage debt” — said no unemployed person ever.

Good news! John "By The Way I Served in Vietnam" Kerry is going to be our new Secretary of State!  Don't you feel safer?  How soon do you suppose that quibble in Syria will get cleaned up once By The Way I Served in Vietnam arrives on scene?

"Oh no!" the bad Syrians will say, "Tough and scary By The Way I served in Vietnam is here to end evil and save the day! Whatever shall we do!?!"

[Note to my liberal readers: The previous two paragraphs are sarcasm.  Sarcasm is when someone says one thing but means the opposite.]

Mellon vs. Geitner

If you're not reading the posts at Laissez Faire books yet, you should start now.

From Mellon vs. Geitner:

Left to its own devices, the economy’s healing powers are extraordinary. For instance, the depression of 1920 was a doozy. Unemployment jumped that year from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent.

Had the likes of Tim Geithner taken over as Treasury Secretary, who knows for how long the pain would have dragged on. But it was not a career bureaucrat that took the job but instead a 66 year old industrialist, Andrew Mellon.

By the summer of 1921, recovery was already underway. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and it was only 2.4 percent by 1923. By 1926, Treasury Secretary Mellon was able to say, “We are now at a very high tide of prosperity.”

Instead of bailouts, Mellow agitated for lower taxes and immediately went to work on peeling away America’s bloated post WWI debt. Mellon had built industrial dynasties in oil, steel, shipbuilding, construction, and banking. To take the Treasury job he resigned directorships at 60 companies.

His first day, as Mellon biographer David Cannadine relates, Mellon arrived for work at 8am, an hour before the staff. “Such a thing had never happened in the memory of any of the Treasury’s night watchmen.”

Mellon knew that if tax rates were lowered on businesses and individuals that money would be reinvested in the economy, creating jobs and promoting economic recovery. But he didn’t immediately get all he wanted. The farm bloc stood in the way of most of his tax agenda, but taxes were reduced and over time Mellon succeeded.

At the same time, Mellon was able to whittle down the federal debt that stood at $24 billion when he took office. By 1929 he had reduced it to $16 billion, saving the government millions a year in interest payments. He believed the domestic debt would be extinguished by 1942. A goal the Great Depression postponed.

"Vices Are Not Crimes"

Thanks to an excellent article about the perils of government at Laissez Faire Books, I've found an article written in 1875 by Lysander Spooner.

Vices Are Not Crimes

A Vindication Of Moral Liberty

by Lysander Spooner (1875)

I.

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime --- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another --- is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

II.

Every voluntary act of a man’s life is either virtuous or vicious. That is to say, it is either in accordance, or in conflict, with those natural laws of matter and mind, on which his physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being depend. In other words, every act of his life tends, on the whole, either to his happiness, or to his unhappiness. No single act in his whole existence is indifferent.

Furthermore, each human being differs in his physical, mental, and emotional constitution, and also in the circumstances by which he is surrounded, from every other human being. Many acts, therefore, that are virtuous, and tend to happiness, in the case of one person, are vicious, and tend to unhappiness, in the case of another person.

Many acts, also, that are virtuous, and tend to happiness, in the case of one man, at one time, and under one set of circumstances, are vicious, and tend to unhappiness, in the case of the same man, at another time, and under other circumstances.

III.

To know what actions are virtuous, and what vicious --- in other words, to know what actions tend, on the whole, to happiness, and what to unhappiness --- in the case of each and every man, in each and all the conditions in which they may severally be placed, is the profoundest and most complex study to which the greatest human mind ever has been, or ever can be, directed. It is, nevertheless, the constant study to which each and every man --- the humblest in intellect as well as the greatest --- is necessarily driven by the desires and necessities of his own existence. It is also the study in which each and every person, from his cradle to his grave, must necessarily form his own conclusions; because no one else knows or feels, or can know or feel, as he knows and feels, the desires and necessities, the hopes, and fears, and impulses of his own nature, or the pressure of his own circumstances.

Read the rest here.