Earlier this month, the Treasury Department released its semiannual “Report to the Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies.” The report’s key conclusion, that China is not a currency manipulator, was met with incredulity on the part of a number of members of Congress, some of whom suggested that Treasury’s “inaction” would move Congress closer to enacting provocative legislation to compel China to allow the yuan to rise.

The belief fueling this get-tough rhetoric is that the undervalued Chinese yuan is the primary cause of the $200 billion U.S. trade deficit with China, and that appreciation of the Chinese currency will restore greater balance of trade. But here’s a novel idea: before expending more energy grandstanding about the impact of the insidious yuan, devotees of the currency conspiracy theory might first attempt to validate their premises by looking at the relationships between other currencies and our respective bilateral trade balances.

What they would find is that other factors, such as changes in relative incomes and wealth, might play a more significant role than currency values in determining trade flows. For example, the U.S. dollar declined by 30 percent against the Canadian dollar between 2002 and 2005, yet the U.S. deficit with Canada increased by 58 percent. The dollar depreciated by 32 percent against the euro over the same period, and the deficit with the 12 euro-using EU countries increased by 33 percent. Likewise, the greenback decreased by 14 percent against the Japanese yen over the period, yet the deficit with Japan increased by 18 percent.

Of our 10 largest trade partners (which account for 75 percent of U.S. trade), eight have free-floating currencies (Malaysia’s and China’s are tightly managed). The currencies of seven of those eight appreciated against the dollar over the period of 2002 through 2005 (only the Mexican peso declined relative to the dollar). Despite pronounced dollar depreciation, the U.S. bilateral deficit increased with respect to 7 of those 8 countries (it decreased slightly with Taiwan).

What is so tiresome about the strident rhetoric from Congress is that it doesn’t stand up to simple analytics. The staffs of Senators Schumer and Graham must have access to some basic trade data and a pencil sharpener. Assuming they do, they might also notice that U.S. exports to China are soaring in 2006. First quarter figures from this year show a 39 percent surge in exports over the same period last year, which far exceeds the 14 percent growth in total U.S. exports and the 17 percent growth in U.S. imports from China.

Yes, the yuan has actually appreciated by about 4 percent since last summer, and greater currency flexibility is in China’s interest. But U.S. export growth is more a function of rising Chinese incomes than of relative price changes caused by currency movements. After all, U.S. exports to China grew at a rate five-times faster than exports to the rest of the world between 2002 and 2005, a period during which the yuan-to-dollar ratio was almost entirely constant.

In other words, U.S. exporters should and do welcome rising Chinese incomes. Punitive sanctions, such as the 27.5 percent tariff under consideration in the Schumer-Graham bill, would stunt Chinese income and choke-off access to our fastest-growing major export market. Congress should get out of the way and allow economics to run its course.

Ironic side note: Of the 33 countries to which U.S. exporters have sold over $1 billion worth of products so far this year, the two fastest growing markets from the same period last year are China (39%) and the United Arab Emirates (91%), both countries that have been so warmly embraced by Congress in recent months. That’s no way to treat the customers.

One of the things I’ve learned in my study of the happiness literature is that people don’t take enough risks. The evidence seems to indicate that many people would be happier if they quit their job and either went into business for themselves, or found a new job that better matched their individual strengths—even if it is a job that pays significantly less. (You can take a quiz here, at psychologist Martin Seligman’s website, to find out what your signature strengths are.)

Because we are so risk-averse—so wary of experiencing losses—and because we tend to predict that the downside of a risky decision will be bigger than it actually will be, doing what is most likely to make us happy—taking the periodic entrepreneurial gamble—requires a kind of bravery. But that’s just the personal side of the matter. Culturally, we need a climate of opinion that values risk and rewards initiative with respect and praise, reinforcing and encouraging personal courage. Institutionally, we need a flexible labor market that allows us to easily enter and exit new jobs in search of a good match for our interests and strengths, and a system of laws that does not make it difficult and expensive for people to start their own businesses.

This interesting article from Sunday’s Boston Globe about Brett Zaccardi, who dropped out of college to start his own “alternative media and communications agency,” makes this point well, even drawing on psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s work on predicting our future feelings:

When it comes to career schemes, we do not have accurate imaginations about what life will be like for us in different situations, says Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology and author of ”Stumbling on Happiness.” Our most accurate information about what will make us happy comes from snooping on other people to see if they are happy. And the best way to watch other people is to be in a variety of offices. Gilbert calls the informal process of judging other peoples’ happiness ”surrogation.” He says ”surrogation is the best way to predict if we’ll be happy. Observe how happy people are in different situations.”

…

So what do you need to know before you decide? Figure out what was bad about the jobs you’ve had so you don’t duplicate the problem. Then just start testing the waters – put a toe in the current to see how it feels. Then take a leap, and if you don’t like where you land, reframe your landing pad as just a steppingstone. And put your foot in the water again.

”We should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we’ll feel,” Gilbert says. ”We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave.”

Clearly, this kind of serial toe dipping and steppingstone strolling requires an institutional climate where labor market entry and exit is easy, and where starting a new business is not a huge hassle. The predictable consequence of this kind of openness and dynamism will be a bit of volatility in employment and earnings, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.

Now, compare this absolutely gob smacking exchange between writer James Traub and Ségolène Royal in Traub’s NYT Magazine profile of the French politician (via Virginia Postrel):

In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She regards Villepin’s peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure against précarité….Royal countered my observation with a familiar refrain: “The problem is that everybody isn’t subject to insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say, ‘In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?’ “

Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of someone pulling out a trump card, “Are you in an insecure situation?” Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have little security.

Royal wasn’t going to be put off the scent that easily. “Yes, but how many years does your contract last?”

“I sign a new one every year.”

Now she was frankly incredulous. “You could be fired every year?” For all her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally–and not only in France–market liberalism and globalization have the status merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no less so if the fact appears to obviate the right. “The global economy shouldn’t be supported by wage earners,” Royal insisted. “They have to be able to build a future, like any human being.”

This is amazing in part because many of us have never had anything but an “at-will” contract, according to which we can be fired any minute. And we should consider ourselves lucky. Societies obsessed with abolishing précarité—the so-called precariousness of dynamic markets—tend to implement rules that lock people into the first career track they set foot in, or lock people (immigrants especially) out of the labor market altogether. Regulatory insulation against employment and wage instability does provide a kind of stability—just not the kind that makes for satisfied lives. You get, on the one hand, stable sub-optimal matches between individual strengths and jobs, since it is difficult under those conditions to dip your toes in lots of different currents. In which case, careers are less likely to be seen as “callings” and work is less likely to be experienced as meaningful and intrinsically satisfying (causing demand for things like six hour work days and six weeks of vacation to go up.) On the other hand, you get stable levels of high unemployment. Studies show that long-term unemployment delivers a big hit to happiness only slightly less toxic than divorce. As it turns out, a little précarité is not simply, as Traub writes “the price you must choose to pay for freedom,” but the price you must pay for happiness.

Betsy McCaughey digs into some of the details on the effects on business of Massachusetts’ brave, new health insurance experiment:

Say, for example, you open a restaurant and don’t provide health coverage. If the chef’s spouse or child is rushed to the hospital and can’t pay because they don’t have insurance, you – the employer – are responsible for up to 100% of the cost of that medical care. There is no cap on your obligation. Once the costs reach $50,000, the state will start billing you and fine you $5,000 a week for every week you are late in filling out the paperwork on your uncovered employees (Section 44). These provisions are onerous enough to motivate the owners of small businesses to limit their full-time workforce to 10 people, or even to lay employees off.

What else is surprising about this new law? Union shops are exempt (Section 32).

Of course, in states like Maryland (where I live), the possibility of killing off jobs in small businesses would hardly deter the passage of similar laws.  As far as politicians here are concerned, undermining the private economy is not a legislative bug.  It’s a feature.