Does anyone remember Crocodile Dundee?

“That’s not a knife!” Mick said dismissively at the New York punks trying to hold him and his girlfriend up with a small folding penknife. “This is a knife!”

Stop me if I told you this before but COVID-19 is not a pandemic. COVID-19 is a penknife. Spanish flu in 1918-19 was a pandemic. It killed more than 20 million people in the space of 18 months. COVID-19 is entering the northern hemisphere spring with fewer than 10,000 deaths globally, having killed the first in November, ie 4 months ago. The virus will be stopped by the sunshine of the northern summer.

COVID-19 kills those who catch it and who are weak for other reasons – age, infirmity, respiratory weakness etc. But not all who are exposed catch it. Not all who catch it die. This panic is misplaced. In fact the cure, as imagined by panicked politicians, is worse than the virus. This is no reason to kill small businesses and strangle taxpayers to support the barely surviving business.

Then the clueless central bankers add to our misery with their incredibly stupid policy response – “whatever it takes, there are no limits to what we will do” said the pathetic creature Philip Lowe, so-called governor of Australia’s central bank. He is willing to trash the Australian currency for this? He obviously never recovered from his university education.

Investors want yield. Many will take on quite a degree of risk to earn it. But yield has become difficult to find over the last five to eight years and there is every prospect that it will remain elusive for the foreseeable future. Are we mired in a never-ending low yield out-look?

To a large extent, the low yield environment has been deliberately generated by central bank policy in most countries. Faced with the prospect of a recession after the the sub-prime financial crisis, including the collapse of some banks, US and UK central bank policy engineered a reduction in interest rates by creating cheap easy money (in effect, printing banknotes) as a matter of priority. On top of that, fiscal expenditure programmes were instituted in haste, a course of action followed in Australia to the ludicrous extent of the Government mailing $900 cheques to citizens (including dead ones, of course). The end result has been budget deterioration, increased public debt and, crucially, a distortion in the structure of interest rates in the market and the delay in cleaning out bad investment projects.

The intent and the outcome often differ, especially when it comes to legislation aimed at correcting perceived injustices. Today’s example comes via the Chief Executive of the Women in Super group in Australia. According to Investment Magazine, Sandra Buckley  believes increasing the Superannuation Guarantee minimum contribution rate, possibly to 19% of earnings, is essential for women to catch up on their super after time out of the workforce for raising families.

Would that be in the interests of women? The short answer is no. It would disadvantage the very group that Sandra wants to help.

To understand why, Sandra should ask herself where would the extra money come from to make those higher contributions? It does not come from the taxpayer, nor from the employer. It comes from the individual herself. It is a forced wage deferral. There is nothing stopping women, or anyone for that matter, from voluntarily increasing their contributions now. They can do so and defer their income, the result of which would be a larger retirement savings pot. If they can do so now but don’t, that must mean they value take-home pay more highly than an increased superannuation contribution. There are plenty of reasons why that could be the case.

Why does the Women in Super CEO argue that such choice should be removed from women?

Helping Australians build adequate retirement savings is an important objective for policy makers, advocates and practitioners. Attempting to do so by calling for higher compulsory contributions is a lazy option, devoid of imagination and ultimately counterproductive.

“Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. […] I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. […] My mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my mother’s disposal, without any restriction whatever. It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the world.”

From Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen (1775-1817)

As countries get wealthier, the citizenry has more time to forget how economic well-being and rising living standards are actually created.   Prosperity is not a natural human condition. In fact, the reverse is true. But when too many people think wealth is a natural state, they believe exercising their political imperatives, for example agitating for entitlements, benefits, hand-outs, redistribution to favoured interests and cronies, constraints on the freedoms of others, has no opportunity cost. When business leaders indulge publicly in such idealism, it becomes even more dangerous. In many businesses today, we observe social responsibility objectives affecting business decisions. What is deemed to be socially responsible, of course, varies by political persuasion. These actions are not costless.

Milton Friedman explained the social responsibility of business in an article published in 1970 by the New York Times Magazine. It is worth every minute of reading time. It should be read and re-read by captains of industry and students alike.  I re-print it here in its entirety:

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits

by Milton Friedman

The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Copyright @ 1970 by The New York Times Company.

When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free en­terprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. Busi­nessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

The discussions of the “social responsibili­ties of business” are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that “business” has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but “business” as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom. Continue reading →