Questionário

Monday 26 September 2016

Do Republicans risk becoming a neo-Nazi party?

Is Donald Trump simply a maverick inoffensive contestant from a Jerry Springer reality show?

Many moderate Republicans sincerely hope so, and refuse the similarities between Trump and Hitler.

There are certainly some differences, and Trump is no match to Hitler in terms of racism, imperialism or intelligence. However, the similarities are too many, from an anti-capitalist and protectionist stance, to an exacerbated nationalism, both being compulsive liars, demagogues, militarists and paranoid self-centered personalities.

Yet what is more frightful in relation to a possible election of Trump, is that a number of economic and political conditions are comparable to those in the 1930-1933 Germany when Hitler rose to power. I shall deal here with the political parties only.

Just like Trump, for many years until 1928, Hitler was basically seen as a wild card. Still, Hitler’s Nazi party rose to power from a 2.6% share of the vote in May 1928 to reach 37.3% in July 1932, followed by a subsequent decline to 33.1% in November 1932.

This meteoric rise was the result of a combination of the misery caused by the economic crisis of 1929, the political instability created by the fall of the so-called center-right grand-coalition brought down by the People’s Party (DVP), the 6.3% rise of the Communist Party (KPD) to 17%, at the expense of the social democrats (SPD) which declined 9.5% to become the second party, the divide in the left and right-wing liberal parties (DDP and DVP), rising anti-Semitism and, crucially, the referendum held in Germany on December 1929 to introduce a 'Law against the Enslavement of the German People' which gave prominence to the Nazis.

Throughout this period, the German Centre Party (Catholic)’s share of the vote remained stable at around 12%. But, it headed the government and, together with the German National People's Party (DNVP), was one of the main “establishment” conservative parties. The successor of this party is now the CDU (Mrs. Merkel party) and it its ideology is close to the declining moderates still in the Republican Party.

So, the main political base for Hitler’s rise came from the other conservative parties – DNVP, DVP and DDP. Let me reproduce from Wikipedia some of its characteristics, so that we may compare them to the political factions in today’s Republican Party in America.

Classical liberalism of the kind espoused now by some Tea Party and Cato Institute activists, was also split in Germany between liberals on left (DDP) and right (DVP) wing parties.

The German Democratic Party (DDP) was founded by leaders of the former Progressive People's Party, left members of the National Liberal Party, and a new group calling themselves the Democrats. The party was attacked by some for being a party of Jews and professors. Among its well-known politicians were Hugo Preuß, the main author of the Weimar constitution, and the eminent sociologist Max Weber. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank and one of the founders of the party, left the party in 1926 and became a supporter of Adolf Hitler. This party today would resemble some of the Bernie Sanders supporters that refuse to vote Clinton or may even vote for Trump.

The German People's Party (DVP) was a national liberal party in Weimar Germany and a successor to the National Liberal Party of the German Empire. It was the right-wing liberal or conservative-liberal party, generally thought to represent the interests of the great German industrialists. Its platform stressed Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsides and hostility to "Marxism" (that is, the Communists, and also the Social Democrats). Today’s equivalent names in the Trump campaign include people like Ralph Reed and Paul Ryan on the religious/political side and Aleson, Deason, Ichan and Ross on the business side. Today’s Trump financiers are mostly involved in casinos and deal making, and not so much in the traditional military industrial complex.

The German National People's Party (DNVP) was a national conservative party in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of nationalists, reactionary monarchists, völkisch, and anti-Semitic elements, and supported by the Pan-German League. After 1929 the DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931, forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933. Initially, the DNVP had a number of ministers in Hitler's government but quickly lost influence and eventually dissolved itself in June 1933, giving way to the Nazis' single-party dictatorship. The current day Republican equivalent is found among the more conservative Republicans and some Tea Party activists.

These three parties had their role in paving Hitler’s rise to power, the same way that several Republican factions paved the way to Trump’s nomination as Republican candidate for President in 2016.

Should Trump be elected, can we expect the Republican factions to merge into a neo-Nazi party?

The risk is very real.

So, what can Bush and other moderate Republicans do to stop this nightmare scenario?

They have basically two defense lines. First, recommending a vote for Clinton to stop it happening. Second, should this fail, to stop the Congress and Senate from approving an “enabling act” of the type that gave Hitler the power to obliterate the other parties and become a dictator. Not even if Trump portrays himself simply as a Putin-like dictator, and not a radical like Hitler, should the moderate Republicans conciliate.

In conclusion, Republicans have an enormous moral and historical responsibility in stopping the devil before it rises again. The Great American Nation and World Peace depend on their wisdom and courage!

Tuesday 20 September 2016

O equívoco de Mariana Mortágua sobre capitalismo e desigualdade

Mariana Mortágua, deputada do Bloco de Esquerda, terá sido muito aplaudida num encontro de socialistas por produzir afirmações como a seguinte:
as desigualdades vêm necessariamente do próprio funcionamento do sistema capitalista

Ora, não é preciso ser economista ou historiador para perceber que esta ideia, generalizada entre muita gente de esquerda, é totalmente falsa. Basta ter presente o que aconteceu recentemente na China quando substitui o comunismo pelo capitalismo. No entanto, para os interessados noutros exemplos e em saber porque é que o capitalismo, pelo contrário, contribui para reduzir as desigualdades, sugiro a leitura do capítulo 8 do meu livro “The Beauty of Capitalism”.

Um equívoco muito comum na esquerda é confundir o aumento da riqueza com desigualdade. Um exemplo numérico muito simples esclarece a diferença.

Imagine-se que em Portugal havia 100 pessoas, uma rica com 901 mil Euros e as restantes 99 pobres com apenas mil Euros cada. O rico e os pobres reinvestiam o seu património durante 10 anos com um rendimento de 1%. A pessoa rica pagava 40% de IRS todos os anos. Os 99 pobres não pagavam IRS e pelo contrário recebiam do estado um quinto do imposto pago pelo rico.

Qual seria o património de ambos ao fim dos dez anos? O rico teria 956,5 mil Euros e os pobres teriam 1126 Euros. Isto é, a desigualdade máxima entre ricos e pobres baixaria ligeiramente de 901 para 809.

Consideremos agora dois cenários alternativos. No primeiro, Portugal enveredava por um sistema de capitalismo de mercado em que os capitais passavam a ganhar 4% ao ano. No segundo cenário, Portugal transformava-se numa republica socialista do tipo Venezuela, ao gosto do Bloco de Esquerda, onde o governo expropriava 80% do património do rico e distribuía um quinto pelos pobres passando o capital a perder 4% ao ano. Quais seriam os resultados ao fim de 10 anos?

No cenário da Venezuela o rico passaria a ter um património 120 mil Euros, isto é, 73 vezes maior que o dos pobres que passariam a ter 1633 Euros.

No cenário de capitalismo de mercado, o património do rico passaria a valer 1142 mil Euros, isto é, 612 vezes o dos pobres, que passaria a valer 1867 Euros.

Estariam os pobres disponíveis para sacrificar 234 Euros só para reduzir a desigualdade máxima entre ricos e pobres? Parece-me que a maioria não o desejaria.

Mas esta não é a história completa. Os prejuízos acumulados pelo capital desincentivariam o investimento e o emprego diminuindo os salários reais dos pobres. Em suma, o empobrecimento geral não seria bom para ninguém!



Monday 12 September 2016

Malthusian Delusions in the XXI Century

Last week I attended another talk on demographic projections for 2050. A persuasive speaker (Mark Forman) impressed the audience with scary numbers about the probable increase in world population. So, let me clarify a few things.

The fear is that in the next 50 years the world population may rise to about 10 billion from the current 7 billion. This growth will be unequally spread around the globe, mostly adding to the 2.1 billion still living with less than $3.1 a day. Feeding all this people will deplete natural resources and seriously damage the environment. Equally scary, in rich countries, the rise in health care will increase life expectancy beyond 100 years, which, coupled with a drastic fall in birth rates and a rise in robotics, means that the ratio between retired people and employed workers will continue to increase. Meanwhile, lower qualified works may lose their jobs or will see them taken over by migrants.

These gloomy predictions may materialize or not, but even if they do happen they are not cause for panic. Let me explain why, one-by-one.

1) The danger of world famine. This is simply a repetition of Malthus erroneous conclusion in the XIX century and it is clearly misplaced since humanity has never lived in a world with so little hunger. Indeed, based on FAO estimates, if the increases in food production and productivity in the past 50 years (170%) are repeated in the next 50 years they will exceed by three times the forecasted rise in consumption. This is more than enough to feed the estimated two billion increase in population and still accumulate unnecessary stocks. Starting from a smaller base the growth in the recent past is more than enough to feed a much larger increase in population from two to seven billion inhabitants.

2) The depletion of nonrenewable resources, or its extensive use, like in the case of fossil fuels, will damage the environment to the point of making earth inhabitable. Again, history has shown that we can find new energy sources. For instance, just as humankind managed to replace coal by fossil fuels before we ran out of coal, we are also in the process of replacing these by electricity produced from solar and wind sources of energy before exhausting the fossil fuels.

3) Large scale migration will cause unemployment and bankrupt the welfare state. This is an old fear that history has repeatedly shown to be misplaced. Not only have mass migration flows been short lived, but they were also correlated with rising economic growth. Whether we consider ancient migrations during the Neolithic Revolution, the Indo-European expansion, and the Early Medieval Great Migrations or the recent flows to North and South America, or the contemporary flows within Europe the result has always been positive in economic terms. Of course these flows are not without turmoil, especially when they involve cultural shocks. Nevertheless, even at the cultural level, the rise of a global culture resulting from globalization at the level of the media and international travel will reduce cultural barriers.

4) Robots will replace humans causing mass unemployment. This is the same argument that led some workers to destroy machines at the start of the industrial revolution fearful of losing their jobs of 15 and 16 hours per day, including children. Many now work only 5 days a week and less than 8 hours per day and the feared massive unemployment did not materialize. It is foreseeable that robotics will facilitate longer education, longer holidays, and shorter weeks and days which will facilitate the employment of everybody for a long time. The possibility that robots might one day replace humans in most jobs is a welcoming evolution, since most humans can find better things to do than work. Still, such it is still too far away to be considered a threat.
5) An aging population is a time bomb since there are not enough babies being born and the ratio between pensioners and workers is increasing dangerously. In what concerns the risk of a pension time bomb I have written a post explaining why it is unfounded and easily overcome by past levels of productivity growth. The possibility of an inverted age pyramid is real but it is not a threat. Indeed, it will delay the replacement of humans by robots because the care for the elderly is more labor-intensive than other jobs performed by humans. All we will need is to adapt to a society with more elders than youngsters. But, humankind is eminently adaptable.

So, whatever way we look at the so-called demographic threat there is no reason to fear the future. With the right policies and transition periods all the frictions caused by demographic shifts can be solved, as long as people disregard the ignorance or malfeasance of the prophets of doom.

This is not to say that there no threats to humankind. There are certainly external threats, like the celestial bodies who destroyed the dinosaurs, as well as man-made dangers. The later may be accidental (e.g. result from scientific experiments) or may be caused by the evil use of weapons of mass destruction. Technical advances in space technology may help us avoid the fate of the dinosaurs while careful science monitoring may prevent scientific accidents.

Indeed, where humanity runs the risk of not progressing enough is in organizing society to stop evil or mad leaders from using arms of mass destruction.

All in all, as long as humans violent forms of conflict resolution, we have more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic about the future of humankind. Such conflicts are the true threat to the humankind not demography.

Sunday 4 September 2016

Sobre os 15 mil milhões que a Apple não terá pago e a Irlanda não quer receber

Este início de mês ficou marcado pela disputa entre a Comissão Europeia e a Apple/ Governo Irlandês sobre o não pagamento pela Apple dos impostos devidos à Irlanda. A Comissão invocou as regras sobre ajudas estatais, o que como disse a anterior comissária da concorrência não é correto. Não irei pronunciar-me sobre isso ou sobre eventuais motivações politicas que normalmente estão associadas a estes episódios.

Irei apenas tentar estimar se a situação traduz a concorrência fiscal legitima da Irlanda ou se indicia também uma situação de desvio de receita fiscal a favor da Irlanda. A circunstância de a Comissão não ter ainda publicado os dados em que se baseou a sua investigação e a informação incompleta que tem aparecido na comunicação social serem muito limitadas só nos permite fazer uns cálculos por alto, o que é manifestamente insuficiente para conclusões definitivas na análise de uma matéria tão complexa.

Existe uma presunção, geralmente aceite, de que os impostos sobre os lucros das multinacionais devem ser receita dos países onde foram gerados. É evidente que a imputação dos lucros a um determinado país não é tarefa fácil, em especial em empresas tecnológicas, e as multinacionais têm ampla margem de manobra para reconhecerem mais lucros onde os impostos são mais baixos, em países como a Irlanda onde a taxa de IRC é de apenas 12.5%. Porém, existem diversos acordos internacionais sobre preços de transferência e dupla tributação para minimizar essa possibilidade que importa ainda melhorar.

Será que a Irlanda abusou dessas regras para beneficiar a Apple?

A Comissão Europeia diz que a Apple reconhece a totalidade dos lucros com as suas vendas na Europa na Irlanda, e que por sua vez os imputa na quase totalidade (99.9%) a uma entidade não sujeita a tributação. Segundo a CE, a Apple teria pago em 2014 apenas 0,005% dos lucros realizados na Europa. Isto é, cerca de 72 milhões de dólares num lucro 14,5 mil milhões reconhecido pela empresa como tendo sido gerado na Europa.

Este valor está em total contradição com valor de 400 milhões que a Apple diz ter pago nesse ano na Irlanda. À taxa de 12,5% em vigor na Irlanda, isso corresponderia à obtenção de um lucro de 3,2 mil milhões na Irlanda, isto é, 22% dos lucros realizados na Europa. Também não condiz com os 26.1% de taxa efetiva que Apple diz pagar a nível global.

Para ajuizar sobre estas contradições temos de fazer uma estimativa, ainda que grosseira, sobre o montante de lucros realmente obtidos pela Apple na Irlanda. Para tal podemos assumir que o lucro médio por trabalhador obtido globalmente pela Apple (2,12 milhões) se aplica aos seus 6000 trabalhadores na Irlanda e estimaríamos o lucro na Irlanda em 12,7 mil milhões. Outra hipótese seria admitir que os lucros corresponderiam à percentagem dos seus trabalhadores Europeus localizados na Irlanda (35%) o que se traduziria em lucros de 5,5 mil milhões de Euros. Uma outra hipótese seria admitir que 50% do total dos ativos da Apple na Europa (4,6 mil milhões) estão localizados na Irlanda e nesse caso os lucros gerados nesse país teriam sido cerca de 7,3 mil milhões.

À taxa de 12,5% em vigor, e com base nas estimativas acima, a Apple devia ter pago em 2014 entre 680 e 1586 milhões dólares e não os 400 que diz ter pago. É normal que as práticas de deferimento de impostos possam fazer variar estes valores de ano para ano, mas o valor intermédio e superior das nossas estimativas estão muito acima de tais oscilações.

Assim, salvo prova em contrário, a Irlanda tem recorrido a práticas abusivas em matéria de concorrência fiscal muito para além das aceites pelos seus parceiros na União Europeia, e com prejuízo para estes.

Já a hipótese de a Irlanda beneficiar de uma parte das poupanças fiscais conseguidas na Europa pela Apple, esta não se confirma. Na verdade, a Irlanda também está a receber menos do que é a sua contribuição para os lucros gerados pela Apple na Europa.

Concluindo, existem fortes razões para a Irlanda acabar com tais abusos que prejudicam o seu orçamento e o dos seus parceiros. Porém, nada justifica que tal possa ser feito com retroatividade ou que possa por em causa a sua politica de baixa tributação dos lucros.