Take the notion of the efficient market. What does that mean? Today, hordes of people are coming out of economics and finance majors believing an absurdity. Yes, I said absurdity. They think that, if the market is efficient, it’s impossible to beat the average investor. This is based on the premise that stock prices (or commodity prices, bond prices, etc.) always incorporate all relevant information.

This means that it’s impossible to know something that others don’t know.

If that were true, then entrepreneurs could not exist, and central planning committees should decide how to best spend the collectivized resources. But it’s not so.

What everyone knows is sometimes false. For example, at one time people thought the world was flat. No matter how unpopular it may be, it’s always possible to discover the truth. When this happens in regards to the value of an asset, the discoverer can make money. This fact should be uncontroversial.

So how did it become controversial?

Part of the answer may be that the philosophy departments have long ago defaulted. It is accepted in the mainstream that knowledge is out there, literally in the universe. In this view, prices are right out there with knowledge.

Information, and more importantly understanding, only incurs in here—in your head. It takes an individual mind to process information, and form an understanding. This means that there is no direct transmission process from information to prices. It is a process of each individual mind coming into contact with the information, deciding for itself whether it even agrees and if so, what importance to ascribe to it. And then, and only then, whether to buy or sell.

Case in point, I can say that the information is out there that all fiat paper currencies eventually collapse. I have put some of that information out there myself. Does that mean that all market participants sell their fiat paper currencies and bid up the price of gold to infinity (or permanent backwardation) instantly? They haven’t done so yet.

Some people know how fiat currencies fail, but most people don’t. Price is set at the margin, so we can say that the marginal gold trader doesn’t know about fiat currencies. Or, it could be that he doesn’t care. The marginal seller could be a gold mining company with a lot of dollar-denominated debt. It will not stop selling gold, no matter what the CEO believes. If he does not sell the majority of the mine’s output, the company will be in default and the creditors will take over. Different actors in the markets have different motivations, let alone different knowledge.

So what on earth could efficiency mean? What could the original intent of this word have been?

There was a time, not too long ago, when a commodity could have a different price in different markets within a city. Communication was slow, and transportation even slower. Economists of the day were aware of this, and concerned about it. If wheat could be had for 4 shillings in the north of London, and 3 shillings in the east end, then many people were making an obvious mistake. Buyers in the north were overpaying, and sellers in the east were accepting too little.

Distributors entered the market. They developed ways of knowing the price in different places, and sought to profit by buying where goods were cheaper and selling where they were more expensive. The result of this activity was a price closer to 3 ½ shillings in both north and east London.

Suppose that wheat was trading higher in Scotland, but cheaper in France. This is the same problem, on a larger scale. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed by adding telegraphs, railroads, and boats.

Similarly, one might observe a wide spread in wheat. The bid might be 2 ¼, but at the same time the ask is 3 ¾. The market maker comes into the wheat market, ready to buy at the bid and sell at the ask. In so doing, he and his competitors narrow the spread. It could become a bid of 3 and an ask of 3 ¼.

Another kind of spread occurs across calendar time. Suppose the wheat harvest comes in, on August 1. The price of wheat collapses for a while. But bakers will still want this commodity next month, and every month through July next year. By late Spring, the price of wheat skyrockets. So warehousemen enter the market, able to buy spot wheat and sell forward contracts for future delivery.

Economists of the day might say that the wheat price reflected all available information. This does not mean that 3 ¼ shillings is right in any intrinsic sense. These arbitrageurs are not supposed to be omniscient. In fact, all they are doing is closing the price gaps they find, and earning a small profit to do so.

This is the original idea of efficiency. It had to develop, as these market innovations were occurring. Note that these have nothing to do with the belief that the current price represents the absolute or universally right price for wheat. Perhaps wheat demand will soon drop off due to a new diet. Perhaps the price will rise due to an insect working its way west out of Russia. These vague concerns have nothing to do with the arbitrageurs.

Efficiency in this original sense is a concept pertaining to the losses one will take to trade in and out, to buy at one’s preferred location, to buy when one chooses, etc. Efficiency exists when a variety of arbitrageurs are active in the market, able to close gaps of distance, spread, or even calendar time.

The arbitragers can be said, in an abstract sense, to be using information to impact prices. However, one should look past the abstract idea to the mechanics of where the rubber meets the road. The simple processes of arbitrage cannot provide the sort of guarantees in which today’s efficient market theorist believes.

The modern idea of efficient markets switches to an entirely different kind of actor. The speculator is no arbitrageur. The distinction is important, because arbitrage is a powerful lever than can narrow any spread. Speculation cannot do what arbitrage does. Speculation, subject to uncertainty, overshooting, undershooting, and risk, is a generally weaker and always inconsistent force than the lever of arbitrage.

Suppose Joe the speculator thinks that the price of wheat will collapse, because of the paleo diet. He and his buddies may sell wheat short, taking down the price. At the same time, Jen the speculator thinks that the price will rise due to some insect in Russia which is eating wheat. So when Joe is about done selling wheat down, she and her friends begin buying it up. Perhaps Joe and his buddies get squeezed, and are forced to buy wheat at a higher price, and their buying pushes up the price even further.

The result is that the price moves around chaotically. At no point in this maelstrom can we say that the price incorporates all information. Sure, Joe and his buddies have pushed the price down based on their diet theory. Then Jen and her friends push it up, leading Joe and his friends to (unintentionally!) push it up further. Next, it may be too high and now Bob and company can short wheat once more, to get the price down to what Bob calculates is the point where supply meets demand. Jen and her friends could get stopped out, and so the price undershoots to the downside.

The wheat market is not like a pond coming to equilibrium after you toss in a pebble. It can often be more like a pinball machine, with lots of automatic bumpers and actuators slamming the ball this way and that.

It should be noted that there is an important asymmetry between selling short and buying long. Short sellers have the risk of unlimited price rises, but can only make a finite amount when the price drops. They will therefore tend to be timid, and only enter for short periods of time.

There is no way to say that speculators make prices perfect—or make markets efficient—in according with the information they trade on. Unlike arbitrage, speculation cannot guarantee any particular market outcome. It involves numerous risks (sometimes lopsided), uncertainty, doubt, incomplete understanding, and many other challenges.

When reading any economics work (including mine!) you should strive to understand the meaning, nature, and consequences of the ideas. If something is said to be true, ask how that is so. Who would have to do what in order for it to be so? Look at real markets, and ask yourself is the theory working out in practice, or do you observe the exact opposite of what the theory predicts?

Sometimes a writer may not be as clear as he could be, especially if he thinks a relationship is obvious or takes a word or concept for granted. Other times, the problem may be that his choice of words is imprecise. No matter what, never fail to drill down, ask deeper questions, and look beyond the mere word to the truth of how markets work.

An efficient market is one which maximizes the marketability of the goods or securities traded in it. The higher the marketability, the lower the costs of doing business such as getting into and out of a good. An efficient market is one with the minimum possible spreads: bid-ask, geographic, calendar, brokerage commissions, etc.

An efficient market is not omniscient. The concept is closer to frictionless. A car with frictionless bearings does not guarantee you will drive to the right destination. It simply drives with the lowest possible fuel bill.

With apologies to his fans, Jerry is an evil little mouse who constantly pesters Tom the Cat. Tom tries and tries, but cannot seem to overpower someone who is a fraction of his size and strength.

Watching Stephen Moore attempt to debate Paul Krugman was like that.

The “economics” of Krugman is Keynesian economics. It consists of central planning your life by force, because market failure. And Krugman repeated this phrase “market failure” several times. Of course the solution was always government intervention.

Here is an interesting endorsement about one of Keynes’ books.

“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”

This was said by someone who knows all about fascism, Benito Mussolini. Fascism is a corporatist system. Although it has private ownership in name, it’s all under government control. Krugman is a real economic lightweight who proposed fascism for nearly everything that came up. His debate tactics consisted of context-dropping, asserting simple fallacies, and cherry-picking data.

In the TV cartoon, Jerry would steal something and run into his mouse hole. Tom would be left whacking at the hole with a broom, in vain. At FredomFest, Krugman would say that the government must spend more to get the economy out of recession. Moore disagreed, and Krugman displayed a chart showing government spending and GDP growth rates for many countries around the world. Government spending and growth correlated very well.

Instead of flailing away with a blunt instrument, I would have said “Seriously, Paul? What a simple fallacy. The definition of GDP includes government spending. You haven’t proven anything. It’s a tautology that if government spending goes up, GDP goes up. This is the flaw in GDP. Sometimes, rising GDP means the people are being impoverished.”

Next, Krugman moved on to one of the central fallacies of Keynesianism. In Krugman’s words, “You just gave the logic for government deficit spending. Your spending is my income. Where is the income supposed to come from, if everyone cuts spending? Government has to make up the difference.”

I would have said, “Seriously Paul. Again?! This is like the Broken Window fallacy [which Krugman said in 2011 “ceased to be a fallacy”]. Not all spending is consumer spending. Investment spending is important. When people slow consumption, it doesn’t mean they hoard dollar bills. They increase their bank deposits. Banks lend to promising companies. You know, that next new product or lifesaving technology? Except you don’t know it, because government spending has crowded them out.”

In an economic downturn, people go on fewer gambling and drinking binges to Las Vegas. Krugman is basically saying that the government has to take up the slack, and go on gambling binges. Because demand shortfall.

Shortly after telling Moore that one cannot cherry-pick one’s data, Krugman showed a graph comparing Jerry Brown’s California to Sam Brownback’s Kansas. For one year. I felt embarrassed for him, as there were sounds of amused laughter from the audience.

Why did it come to Kansas vs. California for the year 2014 (I didn’t write the year in my notes)? It’s because Moore was defending free markets by appeal to aggregate statistics. Moore used red states as examples of freer markets, and blue for less free markets. He showed a few charts in which red states fared better than blue.

Krugman’s cherry-picking got him safely back to his mouse hole, with Moore stuck outside, banging with a floor cleaning tool.

You cannot defend freedom using statistics, as you cannot get a mouse out of the wallboards with a broom.

Both Krugman and Moore were nervous speakers. Krugman was hunched a bit in on himself (though to be fair, he was in hostile territory and he knew it). Both spoke too rapidly and with a jittery character to their voices. Each has a nervous tell, with Moore incessantly taking little sips from his iced tea and Krugman playing with his fingers.

Krugman took the lead on each issue. Moore often respond with a long caveat, which conceded the point to Krugman. For example, Krugman said that some kids are born disadvantaged, so we need to give them each $8,000 to $10,000 (per year, I assume) in free money. He actually said they “choose the wrong parents.”

Someone please tell him that this is only possible by robbing the taxpayers. Maybe add that it will just accelerate America’s collapse into bankruptcy. Trillions in welfare spending do not fix anyone’s problems, and are actually the cause of the disadvantage Krugman discusses.

Moore said he supports a social safety net, because America is rich, we can afford it, and it’s morally right. When the broom failed to defeat the mouse, not even Tom tried singing to Jerry.

The topic moved to healthcare. Moore noted that government involvement has caused costs to spiral. Krugman offered another whopper. It’s because innovation.

This is absurd, and even Krugman knows it. In computers, there’s been decades of both rapid innovation and falling prices.

Krugman moved on to his shining moment, in the Ellsworth Toohey sense of shine. He unshrunk from his hunch, and his voice rang with moral clarity. “Obamacare is a life saver!”

The audience booed.

“I know someone whose life was saved by Obamacare. If you don’t know anyone like that, then I’m sorry for your narrow little world.”

This is a faux-apology and a presumption. Who the heck is this guy to apologize to me for my life not conforming to his ideology? Not to mention, Krugman glosses over the people harmed by it. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, even if handout beneficiaries think there is.

Worse yet Krugman implies that, to be moral, you must sacrifice yourself. He is cashing in on the guilt many people feel, at their own success. He’s learned that all he has to do is raise the specter that someone else is suffering, and they will concede him anything he demands.

This being FreedomFest, and not the People’s Workers’ Party, a large majority of the audience supported Moore. However, moderator Mark Skousen asked a very clever question, “If you did not enter this room in agreement with Paul Krugman, did you change your mind as a result of what he said today?” I estimate about 50 people clapped or cheered.

Krugman won because he appealed to people’s sense of right and wrong. Morality trumps economics any day of the week. Moore didn’t even respond to Krugman’s economic errors, much less smack down his phony judgmentalism.

I attended a panel discussion yesterday on the problems startups have in raising capital caused by securities regulation. Startups have to hire a lawyer before they raise the first dollar of capital. It’s a real catch-22.

Entrepreneurs are often surprised to find that raising capital means selling securities. They cannot legally sell securities to just anyone. They are restricted to Accredited Investors (basically people with high income or high net worth). Most young entrepreneurs don’t have a rolodex full of such investors. There are other restrictions, for example, they can’t hire someone to help them raise capital unless he has a license to sell securities.

Welcome to compliance hell. It’s perfectly legal to fail, to lose your own money and even your house. It’s fine by the law if your dream dies, your marriage fails, and all of the other negative consequences occur when a business does not succeed. But if you raise money, you better be fully compliant. Where’s the concern for people?

The stated purpose of regulation is to protect investors from fraud and bad actors. However, fraud was illegal even before regulation. It is already a crime to lie to someone to take his money. Regulation does not change that. It does not make crime more illegal.

Regulation offers a tantalizing promise. We don’t have to wait for criminals to strike their victims. We can make it impossible for them to commit the crime in the first place. We just force them to comply with regulations. No matter how many Enrons and Bernie Madoffs happen, few stop to ask if the theory is even valid. Can regulators proactively prevent bad things from happening?

Nor do people ask if investors deserve to be treated as children. It used to be (before the Nanny State) that once you reached the age of 18, your majority, you were able to enter into any contract or do anything that any adult could legally do. Now 18 is just one milestone. Until you have a million dollars net worth, you aren’t an adult investor and cannot invest in startups. It’s for your own good, you understand. You might make a bad investment.

While we’re at it, we should also ask the age old question: qui bono–who benefits? Lawyers are one obvious group. More importantly, it protects big and wealthy incumbents. Wall Street can easily afford compliance, unlike its small would-be competitors. More insidiously, regulation implicitly supports Wall Street’s model and makes it more difficult or impossible to develop a new one. This is why no one has done the Uber or AirBnB of the stock market yet.

I found it odd that when several speakers on that panel began with apologies, “of course, we want to protect investors.” They began with total capitulation, saying in effect, “I can’t be trusted without a government minder.” Any reform based on this will be little more than deck chair rearrangement on the Titanic. There is a real solution, and it’s simple. The law should treat adults like adults. Let entrepreneurs raise capital without having to get permission at each step, so they can build new products to offer us, make money for themselves, and create jobs.

The battle over minimum wage is raging. Emotions are running hot. Some cities are setting the bar very high. For example, Seattle is mandating a $15/hour wage.

Economically, the issue is very simple. Minimum wage laws do not raise anyone’s wage. This is because it’s not sustainable to overpay.

Suppose you run a small tailor shop. Customers are willing to pay $20 to repair a pair of slacks. Why are they willing to pay that, and no more? It’s not just their budget, but also the relative value of fixing their old trousers compared to buying new. A higher wage for your employees will have no effect on customer willingness to pay.

You have rent, utilities, insurance, wear and tear on your sewing machines, etc. that add up to $10. Therefore your maximum gross profit is $10. You cannot pay someone $11, much less $15, to do this work. If the law attempts to force you to overpay, then you have to lay off workers or even close your doors. Going out of business is no fun, but it beats losing more money.

This is black and white. Minimum wage law can destroy jobs and businesses but it cannot raise wages. However, many people become very emotional on this issue. So let’s look at the issue from a different angle.

There is an endless outpouring of sympathy and support for the unskilled laborer. How is this poor downtrodden helpless victim supposed to feed a family, cover medical expenses, and save for retirement earning only $7.25 per hour?

I don’t know.

My lack of an answer to this question is no justification for minimum wage laws. This is not even the right question. It is an example of the logical fallacy known as begging the question—when you presume what you should be asking. We should ask if one man’s need creates a duty in anyone else. Then the answer is a lot clearer.

The last time I checked, we had not adopted the Communist Manifesto as our new constitution. There is no law saying that each is to be given according to his need.

In comparison to the general sympathy for unskilled laborers, there is none for doctors. Just look at the endless commentary about Obamacare. What are the most popular complaints today? In my admittedly non-scientific sampling, the most common are higher costs, reduced choices, or a broken website. Some people worry about lower quality or less access to care.

There is virtually no discussion of what Obamacare will do to doctors. Doctors make far more than the minimum wage. One presumes that their needs are covered by their incomes, and therefore of no worry to us.

Need is the wrong way to look at it.

Instead of asking what someone’s need is, you should ask what are these people doing for you? What do they create? What value do they add? This brings the issue into sharp focus.

The unskilled laborer can be put to work turning a crank. He needs lots of supervision, which is an additional cost. The crank is paid for by someone else’s saved and accumulated capital, and this investor must be paid a return on capital for placing it at risk in a business. The laborer can be held accountable for showing up every morning and turning the crank all day, but not for business profitability.

This, by definition and by nature, is what unskilled labor is. He brings no capital, no skills, no knowledge, no expertise, no prior learning. He may be a young and inexperienced worker. Or he may have years of prior experience, but he is the sort of person who learns nothing from experience. Either way, the employer is taking on real risks and expenses.

Finally, the unskilled laborer is virtually indistinguishable. Many towns have a street corner, where construction contractors go to pick up a few laborers for a day’s work. There is a standardized market wage for these workers, and the employer doesn’t care who jumps in the back of the truck on any given workday.

How much does one of these workers impact your life? What would happen to you, if one of them stopped working?

For the next part of the discussion, please bear with me. I am assuming a free market in healthcare. In a free market, patients pay doctors for their services, the same way that homeowners pay plumbers, and diners pay restaurants.

Suppose you notice a lump in your neck. You’re worried it may be cancer. Catching it early is the key to surviving with maximum quality of life. You really want to see the best doctor that you can afford. You get a recommendation, and you call his office. They tell you he just retired. You get a second recommendation. You call this doctor’s office, but her receptionist says she was hit by a car this morning and is in critical condition. You open the phone book and call the last specialist. He is on sabbatical, teaching head and neck surgery in Thailand.

Now what do you do? Three doctors are unavailable, and you already feel a bit desperate.

You widen your search, and keep calling more. Suppose for some reason, all the doctors you call are unavailable. One by one, you hear why they can’t see you and you become increasingly frantic.

Why?

The doctor contributes the most value to your life, including saving it. By contrast, the laborer contributes the least. If 10 doctors stopped practicing medicine, you could die. In comparison, if 100 laborers stopped working, you wouldn’t even notice it.

What would you be willing to pay someone who saved your life?

If you would like a doctor to be available, in case your life needs saving, you must change how you think about wages. Start thinking about the value someone produces, and stop thinking about need. Your willingness, indeed your happiness—no your eagerness—to pay the doctor big money has nothing to do with his need. It has everything to do with what he does for you. Your life is worth more to you than the money you spend.

In comparison you aren’t willing to pay the same to someone who washes your dishes or trims your front lawn. If you would like restaurants and landscaping to be available, you must approach it the same way as with doctors. Start thinking about the value they provide and stop thinking about the needs of their unskilled workers.