Quotulatiousness

March 22, 2011

“He is kind of like a rock star, a nerdy professor, and your crazy uncle rolled into one”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Andrew Foy tries to place Ron Paul in the context of the modern Republican Party:

In his recent editorial “The Fighters vs. the Fixers,” appearing on National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg discussed what I suspect is his crop of contenders for the upcoming election: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee. Considering that Paul smoked all of these candidates in the 2011 CPAC straw poll, where he garnered 30% of the vote, it was an odd choice to leave him out, and even more so when you account for the fact that Goldberg’s recently edited book Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation featured several essays in which the authors expressed strong libertarian points of view.

Ah, but that CPAC straw poll was explained away as “Paultards” packing the event, which no other candidate would ever do, so the poll result was therefore invalid. Oh, and lots of chatter that Paul supporters would not be welcome to the next CPAC.

. . . Paul is an outspoken advocate of Austrian economics. Without being an economist myself, I would say that this economic school of thought argues against econometric models, state planning, bailouts, economic stimulus, and the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. One of the hallmarks of Austrian economics, for which Hayek won a Nobel Prize, is the view that central banks create asset bubbles and hence the business cycle. Austrian economics predicted the recent housing collapse and economic recession when the mainstream economists and politicians, to whom we’re still wedded, were telling us that everything was “A-okay.”

In a 2007 address to the American Economic Association, Bernanke proclaimed, “The greatest external benefits of the Fed’s supervisory activities are those related to the institution’s role in preventing and managing financial crises. In other words, the Fed can prevent most crises and manage the ones that do occur.” A year later, we were mired in the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression. While the great majority of politicians today (Democrats and Republicans) are happy to heed the advice and inflationary policies of the Fed, such as QE2, Paul is a lone voice in the wilderness crying foul. Conservatives should welcome his dissent.

March 21, 2011

More re-Volting details on GM’s electric car

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:20

Patrick Michaels looks at the Chevy Volt:

. . . GM was desperate for customers for what they perceived would be an unpopular vehicle before one even hit the road. It had hoped to lure more if buyers subtracted the $7,500 from the $41,000 sticker price. Instead, as Consumer Reports found out, the car was very pricey. The version they tested cost $43,700 plus a $5,000 dealer markup (“Don’t worry,” I can hear the salesperson saying, “you’ll get more than that back in your tax credit!”), or a whopping $48,700 minus the credit.

This is one reason that Volt sales are anemic: 326 in December, 321 in January, and 281 in February. GM announced a production run of 100,000 in the first two years. Who is going to buy all these cars?

Another reason they aren’t exactly flying off the lots is because, well, they have some problems. In a telling attempt to preserve battery power, the heater is exceedingly weak. Consumer Reports averaged a paltry 25 miles of electric-only running, in part because it was testing in cold Connecticut. (My engineer at the Auto Show said cold weather would have little effect.)

But not to worry! They’ve found someone to buy half of the total Volt production:

Recently, President Obama selected General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to chair his Economic Advisory Board. GE is awash in windmills waiting to be subsidized so they can provide unreliable, expensive power.

Consequently, and soon after his appointment, Immelt announced that GE will buy 50,000 Volts in the next two years, or half the total produced. Assuming the corporation qualifies for the same tax credit, we (you and me) just shelled out $375,000,000 to a company to buy cars that no one else wants so that GM will not tank and produce even more cars that no one wants. And this guy is the chair of Obama’s Economic Advisory Board?

March 20, 2011

A different way to visualize the proposed US budget cuts

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Jon sent me an interesting link on a different way to visualize the relative size of the proposed budget cuts:

That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent?

The arithmetic is pretty simple, due to the extensive nutrition information that McDonalds makes available online. A Big Mac Extra Value Meal has three components: a Big Mac, a large order of french fries, and a medium soda. The McDonalds site tells us that a Big Mac has 540 calories, a large fries has 570 and a medium Coke has 210, for a total of 1,320 calories.

Meanwhile, the federal budget is currently around $3.8 trillion, which means that a $6 billion cut represents one 633rd of the total. What would be an equivalent cut in a Big Mac Extra Value Meal?

One variable is not readily available online; that is, how many french fries are there in a large order? To answer that question, I went to a nearby McDonalds at lunch time, paid for a large order of fries, and counted them. There were 87. (I counted fries regardless of size, but did not count the hard bits in the bottom of the container.)

This allows us to complete the calculation. If there are 570 calories in a large order of fries, and 87 fries per order, each french fry, on the average, contains 6.5 calories. One 633rd of the total calorie content of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is 1,320/633, or 2.1 calories. That equals almost exactly one-third of an average sized french fry.

March 18, 2011

Ignoring death threats to politicians (but only on the right)

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

An interesting article at the Huffington Post on the relative media silence on the spate of death threats against Wisconsin politicians:

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to Wisconsin State Department of Justice, authorities have found a suspect who admitted to sending the following email:

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

After the Giffords shooting, authorities have to take this sort of threat seriously. The media should too, even if the disturbed person who sent that email was motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more threats floating around the internet, in varying degrees of scary and credible.

The Google search for the string “Wisconsin death threats” only returned 704 results for me this morning, and the only major media outlets represented on the first page were the Chicago Sun-Times and Fox News.

March 17, 2011

Rick Mercer on “the Harper Government”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:02

Police and fire unions threaten to “boycott” businesses that support Wisconsin governor

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

You’ve got a nice office here, guv. Shame if anything were to happen to it, y’know?

Here is another reason public unions should not be allowed to collectively bargain with politicians running a local or state government. Union leadership — including those from law enforcement and firefighters — have sent letters out to local businesses demanding they publicly oppose the efforts of Wisconsin’s legislature and governor or face the consequences.

Not only are they suggesting they publicly oppose the fiscal-sanity measures in Wisconsin, they are flat out telling them they will publicly boycott businesses who do not proactively do so. From James Taranto’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

In the letter to Wisconsin businessmen, however, we see why so-called collective bargaining is particularly corrupting to the police. Although the letter explicitly threatens only an economic boycott, when it is written on behalf of the police — of those on whom all citizens depend to protect their safety — it invariably raises the prospect of another kind of boycott. Can a businessman who declines this heavy-handed “request” be confident that the police will do their job if he is the victim of a crime — particularly if the crime itself is in retaliation for his refusal to support “the dedicated public employees who serve our communities”?

LauraW clarifies the message here:

We’re the Police and Firefighters Unions.

If you don’t accede to our demand, we’ll put you on The Naughty List. And, um….boycott you. That’s our threat. We’ll boycott you. That’s all.

Right.

…did we forget to mention that we are cops and firefighters?
Just checking. Making sure you caught that.

H/T to Jon for the link.

March 9, 2011

“It’s the libertarians who push this crap”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Dave Weigel tries to find the answer to the burning question “Why do conservatives hate trains so much?”:

But it could hardly make less sense to liberals. What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”?

“You need to distinguish between Republicans and conservatives and libertarians when you look at this,” says William Lind, the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. “It’s the libertarians who push this crap.”

Libertarians, of course, have no problem with trains (see, e.g., Atlas Shrugged). They do have a problem with federal spending on transportation, as do many Republicans. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957; Amtrak took over the rails in 1971. Since then, conservatives will sing the praises of private rail projects but criticize federally funded projects that don’t meet the ideal. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., for example, pushed a high-speed rail initiative through Congress in 2008. By 2010, he was denouncing “the Soviet-style Amtrak operation” that had “trumped true high-speed service” in Florida. In 2011, as the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he is interested in saving the Orlando-Tampa project by building 21 miles between the airport and Disney World. This is about 21 miles farther than local Republicans want to go.

March 7, 2011

UN shows true colours again on eve of International Women’s Day

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

As a self-parody, the UN can’t possibly go much lower than this, can they?

On the eve of International Women’s Day, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on March 8, the United Nations has delivered a serious insult to women around the world: On March 4, the UN appointed Iran to its Commission for the Status of Women.

Iran has an abysmal record on women’s rights. Its police can arrest women for getting a suntan, wearing too much makeup, or dressing “immodestly.” One of its religious leaders made headlines around the world last year when he blamed women’s immodesty for causing a series of earthquakes. In 2003, Iranian state thugs raped, tortured and killed Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi because she photographed a Tehran prison.

As a sign of its relative unimportance, I only just realized that I didn’t even have a tag for the UN. That’s a pretty strong indication that they’ve lapsed from view.

March 5, 2011

Robert Fulford on feminism

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Coming up on the 100th observance of International Women’s Day, Robert Fulford takes a step back to view the feminist movement:

Some organized attempts to improve the lot of humanity claim limited victories; others do more harm than good. Only feminism can claim to have broadened, permanently, the lives of half the humans in the West. Its success, based on earnest arguments and improvised political strategies, is without parallel in the last century. Nothing since the Industrial Revolution has done so much to expand opportunity.

Feminism has altered a whole culture’s ideal version of sexual roles. It has changed the professions, most strikingly medicine and law. It has affected how children are raised, how the law deals with domestic life, how corporations and public institutions are staffed.

Like all revolutions, feminism is at war with itself. Many one-time feminists have quietly abandoned that term after watching former comrades flock behind every dubious new faction in the grievance culture. Radical feminists consider feminism a failure because it has not wiped out poverty, which should have been its goal. Events have so addled the radicals that they believe anyone who calls feminism a success is a covert enemy. Radicals believe we are living through a long dark night of conservatism and therefore have a right to be miserable, indefinitely. Celebrating anything, even the success of a movement they helped start, would rob them of their bitterness.

The world still needs the feminist spirit. It should shine a consistent light on the many millions of women who are caged by misogynistic religions and male-made dictatorships. Freeing them should become the central feminist project.

March 1, 2011

The shifting tide of extreme wealth

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:07

Ever wonder how the children of wealthy foreign potentates fit in with “ordinary” wealthy westerners? Anne Applebaum says the relationship has shifted from bare toleration all the way out to sycophancy, but its most noticeable change is the way they can buy influence and apologists:

Money, even foreign money (and particularly that Saudi money), has always been able to buy access to Western statesmen. But in the last decade or so, the proportions have subtly shifted. The democratic West has become relatively poorer, while a clutch of undemocratic “emerging” markets have become richer. To put it more bluntly, Western politicians, ex-politicians, and even aristocrats have become much, much poorer than the very, very rich businessmen emerging from the oil-and-gas states of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Twenty years ago, no retired British or German statesman would have looked outside his country for employment. Nowadays, Blair advises the governments of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, among others; Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, collects a paycheck from Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth.

True, there is a legitimate argument for maintaining contacts with dictators: Blair helped persuade Col. Qaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, and in the last 10 days he has twice called the dictator and asked him to stop shooting his people. It hasn’t helped, of course, but it can’t hurt to try.

But there is no justification for taking dictators’ money or befriending their offspring, especially not while simultaneously playing politics with their parents. This is not just a British problem, either. Frank Wisner, the U.S. envoy sent by President Barack Obama to negotiate with Hosni Mubarak in the early days of the Egyptian revolution, also works for Patton Boggs, a law firm that has worked for the Egyptian government. The administration was reportedly angry when he unexpectedly opined that Mubarak “must stay” just a few days before Mubarak fled Cairo. But should anyone have been surprised? Meanwhile, Michelle Alliot-Marie, the French foreign minister, has just lost her job because she went on holiday in Tunisia during the revolution, hitched a few rides on a private plane belonging to a friend of the Tunisian president, and helped her father do a business deal there. When she got back, she tactfully suggested that the French help their friends in the Tunisian police put down the riots.

February 25, 2011

“epistemicfail” calls on liberals to stop the evil Koch brothers

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

“epistemicfail” is trying to rally liberal and progressive forces to recognize and combat the evil that is embodied in the Koch brothers:

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

   1. decriminalize drugs,

   2. legalize gay marriage,

   3. repeal the Patriot Act,

   4. end the police state,

   5. cut defense spending.

Who hates the police? Only the criminals using drugs, amirite? We need the Patriot Act to allow government to go through our emails and tap our phones to catch people who smoke marijuana and put them in prison. Oh, it’s also good for terrorists.

Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like:

   1. CATO Institute

   2. Reason Foundation

   3. cancer research ($150 million to M.I.T. – STOP THEM! KEEP CANCER ALIVE!)

   4. ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Family_Foundations

The Kochs basically give a TON of money (millions of dollars) to the CATO Institute. Scott Walker, $40K? HAH! These CATO people are the REAL problem. They want to end the War on Drugs. Insane, right? We know that the War on Drugs keeps us SAFE from Mexicans and keeps all that violence on their side of the fence. More than 30,000 Mexicans killed as of December! Thank God Mexican lives don’t count as human lives. Our government is doing a good, no, a great job protecting us and seriously, who cares about brown people or should I say non-people? HAHAHA! Public unions are good, government is good, and government protects us from drugs and brown people. The Kochs want to end all that. Look, as far back as 1989 CATO has been trying to decriminalize drugs. Don’t worry, nobody listens to them because they are INSANE.

Let’s hope they heed his call.

February 23, 2011

Poll question: how would you vote if a federal election is called

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

[poll id=”2″]

February 17, 2011

Victor Shih interview on China’s economy

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

The Browser interviews Victor Shih:

What do people get most wrong when they think of the Chinese economy?

The biggest misperception about China is that it’s a dynamic market economy — it isn’t. It’s a fast-growing, state-dominated economy with some dynamic, private-market aspects. If you look at investment, a main driver of growth, much of it is going to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or shareholding companies dominated by state entities. Or it’s going directly to government investments carried out at a central or local level. The misperception has abated recently following Richard McGregor’s book on the Chinese Communist Party. People are realising that the party is still behind much of what happens in China.

[. . .]

Your first choice is Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. I believe this book successfully demolishes the idea that China is developing a new economic model called ‘market authoritarianism’.

I think Yasheng goes a little too far with some of his claims. But the broad outline is correct. There was a period of healthy organic growth in the 80s, driven by the de facto private sector. Many township and village enterprises were collectives or owned by the local government. But in reality they were private enterprises. This changed in the mid-90s, especially with the adoption of the ‘grasping the large and letting the small go’ policy that circumvented the special interests in the state sector. When Deng Xiaoping was alive, his executive vice premier, Zhu Rongji, wanted to bankrupt or merge many of the smaller state-owned enterprises into larger ones. It was a political tactic to further reform. And it worked.

The problem was that it created these giant, state-owned enterprises. Recent statistics reveal the state sector made a profit of 2 trillion renminbi last year, of which the 122 largest SOEs made 1.35 trillion. They have combined assets of over 10 trillion dollars and have become an enormously resourceful and powerful interest group. Their CEOs have numerous ties with top political leaders and sit on the party’s central committee. Most bank loans, issued bonds and stock-listing proceeds in the system go to these conglomerates. There’s still a private sector but it has been squeezed tremendously, especially in the last two years.

[. . .]

Most investment bankers like to talk things up, but that’s not something we can accuse Carl of doing.

By the late 90s, China’s banks were technically insolvent because the non-performing loans ratio was 40 to 50 per cent. Carl’s still a big fan of Zhu Rongji, the former prime minister. One of Zhu’s greatest achievements was to ‘solve’ the problems in the banking sector by setting up asset-management companies and recapitalising the banks. Today, of course, the banks are still lending very recklessly despite a lot of reform — the formation of credit and risk-management committees, for example. The banks continue to require bailouts and recapitalisation from the Chinese government, which props them up so that they can sell these bank shares to the public in Hong Kong or Shanghai. Carl sees this process as a kind of Ponzi scheme.

February 15, 2011

US budget from a different universe

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:10

You’d have to assume that President Obama and his team really do live in a different universe than this one, as the latest budget fails to rein in spending in any meaningful way:

The budget has 2012 spending falling a bit from record 2011 levels, but that’s because “stimulus” spending is winding down, war costs are supposed to fall, and unemployment benefits should decline as the economy improves. Let’s look at some of the new budget data (all data for fiscal years):

  • Total federal spending jumped from $2.98-trillion in 2008 to $3.82-trillion in 2011. Obama’s budget has outlays at $3.73-trillion in 2012, but that’s still up 25% from 2008. Spending in 2011 is the highest share of GDP since the Second World War at 25.3%.
  • Non-defence discretionary spending jumped from $522-billion in 2008 to $655-billion in 2011. Spending is supposed to fall to $611-billion in 2012, but that’s still up 17% from 2008.
  • Defence spending jumped from $612-billion in 2008 to $761-billion in 2011. Spending is supposed to fall to $730-billion in 2012, but that’s still up 19% from 2008.
  • Entitlement spending jumped from $1.59-trillion in 2008 to $2.19-trillion in 2011. The budget has entitlement spending at $2.14-trillion in 2012, which is up a huge 35% from 2008.

[. . .] In the administration’s mind, apparently absolutely nothing has changed on fiscal policy in the last year. Obama hasn’t shifted toward fiscal responsibility an inch. The Tea Party movement, the November elections, the government debt crises in Europe, and the Obama Fiscal Commission have all been totally ignored in the new federal budget.

Even in economic good times, this would be an irresponsible budget. It’s far worse as the US economy is still crawling out of a deep hole.

February 12, 2011

First Tunisia, then Egypt: is Algeria next?

Filed under: Africa, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

The Algerian government is taking a more vigorous approach to protests, by sending in the riot police early:

Thousands of riot police have been deployed in the capital of Algeria to stop an anti-government demonstration from gathering the momentum of the protests that forced out the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.

About 50 protesters managed to reach the square in Algiers where the protest was due to take place but they were surrounded by hundreds of police and some were arrested, the Reuters news agency reported.

Opposition groups have called for a march to demand democratic change and jobs, but it has been banned by government officials and most residents have so far stayed away.

“I am sorry to say the government has deployed a huge force to prevent a peaceful march. This is not good for Algeria’s image,” Mustafa Bouachichi, a leader of the League for Human Rights, said.

Protesters who managed to reach May 1 Square, where the march was due to begin at 11am (10am GMT) shouted “Bouteflika out!” — a reference to the Algerian president — before police arrested some of them.

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