Capitalism and democracy are weakening – reviving the idea of ‘calling’ can help to repair them

  Ask someone what a calling is, and they’ll probably say something like “doing work you love.” But as a management professor who has spent two decades researching the history and impact of calling, I’ve found it’s much more than personal fulfillment.

  The concept of calling has deep roots. In the 1500s, theologian Martin Luther asserted that any legitimate work – not just work in ministry – could have sacred significance and social value, and could therefore be considered a calling. In this early form, calling wasn’t merely a vocation or passion; it was a way of living and working that built character, competence, and social trust.

Personal data isn’t the ‘new oil,’ it’s a way to manipulate capitalism

  My recent research increasingly focuses on how individuals can and do manipulate, or “game,” contemporary capitalism. It involves what social scientists call reflexivity and physicists call the observer effect.

  Reflexivity can be summed up as the way our knowledge claims end up changing the world and the behaviors we seek to describe and explain.

  Sometimes this is self-fulfilling. A knowledge claim — like “everyone is selfish,” for example — can change social institutions and social behaviors so that we actually end up acting more selfish, thereby enacting the original claim.

Burnout is a capitalism problem, not a millennial one

  Over the weekend, the New York Times ran another iteration in the conversation about millennial burnout, this time focusing on the hustling economy — a topic that has been amply critiqued in recent years. Writer Erin Griffith explored “toil glamour” and the high expectations to love the work you’re doing so much that you’ll put in long hours at the hustle. #RiseAndGrind, you’re falling behind. It followed on Anne Helen Petersen’s incredibly popular Buzzfeed piece on millennial burnout that focused on debt, disrupted career paths, dashed dreams, and reluctance to do errands.

  The fundamental flaw of such pieces — often beautifully written and deeply intimate — is that they are personal. They highlight the struggles of a narrow swath of the authors’ generation but fail to consider the larger implications that their experiences may have for the country as a whole. They bemoan a failure to achieve a promised life, but this life was only promised to, and expected by, a specific group of people.

Why won’t conservatives pick a peach?

  The favorite slogan of conservatives has long been “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.” Another conservative favorite is the term “personal responsibility.”

  Since personal responsibility is so important to conservatives, one must ask: Why hasn’t even one conservative taken personal responsibility by traveling to the Midwest and helping farmers pick their crops, given that conservatives are responsible for the massive crop losses that farmers are incurring?

Jacob G. Hornberger: Show me your immigration plan

  Whenever liberals or conservatives tell you that they favor immigration controls, one way to stop them dead in their tracks is to say to them: Show me your plan.

  They will stare at you blankly. They will be dumbfounded. They won’t know what to say. It is likely that they will simply respond with something like, “A nation has the right to control its borders.”

  Okay, but what is your plan for making your system of immigration controls work? What is your plan for finally bringing an end to the ongoing, never-ending “immigration crisis” that has lasted for at least 70 years?

Richard M. Ebeling: Capitalism and asymmetric information

  Capitalism is a wondrous human institution for the mutual betterment for all in society. Yet, critics often insist that market systems enable sellers to take advantage of buyers because those on the demand-side often lack the specialized knowledge that suppliers possess, thus, enabling a possible exaggerated misrepresentation of what is being offered for sale. What is missed is that market competition generates the incentives and opportunities to earn profits precisely by not misinforming or cheating the buyer.

Jacob G. Hornberger: The coming economic fascism

  The recent efforts by President-elect Donald Trump and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence against Carrier Corp. provide us with a signpost of the economic fascism that lies ahead after both men take office. Whatever might be said about economic fascism, one thing is for sure: it is contrary to the principles of economic liberty, private property, the free market, and the rule of law.

  Targeting Carrier for daring to move some of its operations to Mexico, Pence, as governor of Indiana, offered the company a package of tax incentives to induce the company to keep some of its operations in Indiana. At the same time, Trump announced that as president he will punish any American company that moved abroad with the imposition of a high tariff on any goods it wished to ship into the United States.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Conservatives and the free market

  One of things that conservatives love to tell people is how devoted to the free market they are. A recent example involved GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who criticized Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for being socialists while Rubio, as a conservative, was supposedly devoted to free enterprise.

  What a joke. Conservatives are no more devoted to the free market than leftists are. They just like to tell themselves that and others as well. But their pro-free-enterprise proclamations are nothing more than empty bromides and pabulum.

James L. Gattuso: Amazon and antitrust: Should Washington sue to make books more expensive?

  As Americans set out to the beach this summer with their favorite novels in hand, federal officials are being asked to sue the nation's largest bookseller, Amazon.com. Why? For not having higher prices.

  A group of authors and competing booksellers recently petitioned the Department of Justice to open an antitrust investigation into the activities of the online retailer. Their complaint, expressed in separate letters to DOJ from the American Booksellers Association and Authors United, is not that the firm charges too much for books, but too little.

Stephen Moore: Using tax dollars to lobby for more tax dollars

  Here's a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 million, would they then let the Ex-Im Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down?

  I ask this because the aerospace giant is the largest beneficiary of the Ex-Im Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Ex-Im Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington.

Richard M. Ebeling: Americans see big corruption in big business

  A recently released report on the degree of confidence that Americans have in the country’s leading political and economic institutions shows that few of these institutions are held in high regard by the public.

  The survey was conducted by NORC, a respected research organization at the University of Chicago. It was found that only 11 percent of those asked expressed significant confidence in the institution of the presidency of the United States. About 23 percent of the citizenry expressed positive confidence in the Supreme Court. But, seemingly, no one has confidence in the United States Congress. Only seven percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans expressed any great deal of confidence in the legislative branch of the federal government.

Jacob G. Hornberger: The Virtues of free trade

  I find it absolutely amazing that there are still people around who look with disfavor on free trade. A recent example occurred in the New York Times just last Sunday in an op-ed entitled “Our Misplaced Faith in Free Trade” by Jeff Madrick. According to Madrick, “free trade creates winners and losers — and American workers have been among the losers. Free trade has been a major (but not the only) factor behind the erosion in wages and job security among American workers. It has created amazing prosperity — but mostly for those at the top.”

Laurence M. Vance: Dogs and diners

  Americans are dog lovers. In fact, many people love their dogs so much that they take them wherever they can. Some people would even take their dogs out to eat with them if they could.

  If they live in California — now they can.

Paul Larkin: Co-opting the criminal justice system for anti-competitive purposes

  Most people assume that legislatures pass criminal laws to benefit the public, and most of the time, they are right. Statutes outlawing murder, rape, robbery, and the like protect all of us against a small number of ruffians who would do us harm.

  But not every statute has that goal. Some protect favored sons and daughters at the expense of the public. When that happens, everyone — except certain cronies — loses.

Bill Bowling: Toward a literate definition of socialism

  We are a nation full of armchair politicians and Archie Bunker throwbacks. We are also a nation brimming with a citizenry that isn't equipped to state what the Bill of Rights contains, much less discuss the more abstract conceptualizations of our political ethos. Yet that doesn't stop the large numbers of the ill-informed from spouting off about things they know nothing about. There is one term that these folks on the fringe like to toss around, presumably in the attempt to get the goat of all left leaners, or simply to stir up the stink in the big crap pond. That term is socialism.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Why do conservatives support Medicare and Medicaid?

  For the life of me, I just don’t get conservatives. They profess to love free enterprise and free markets and they say they hate socialism.

  Okay, then why do they never call for the repeal of Medicare and Medicaid?

Cameron Smith: If you built it, they paid for it

  President Obama recently noted that "[i]f you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own." But the President's argument did not stop with the assertion that economic success fundamentally requires paying customers. Instead, the President essentially argued that the successful person somehow "owes" the government for the fact that he or she makes a good living.

  For most businesses in America, making money is a fairly simple concept even if it is challenging to execute. In short, the business makes a product or provides a service that customers value more than the money in their pockets. As a result, the business profits and the customer receives something he or she values. But where is the government in that exchange?

Sheldon Richman: An Echo, not a choice

  With Mitt Romney’s sweep of Tuesday’s primaries, he will almost certainly be President Barack Obama’s Republican opponent in November. Romney has vowed to make the economy the chief issue against Obama, and he is sure to portray the president as an enemy of free enterprise in order to draw a contrast with himself. How fit is Romney’s claim to be a champion of economic freedom?

  The former Massachusetts governor and private-equity capitalist speaks often about free enterprise and the need for government to let entrepreneurship pull the economy out of its current doldrums. This sort of rhetoric is common for Republicans, who then proceed to violate economic freedom.