Daniel Hannan: Euro now on death watch

Zone Out the Euro


November 28, 2011 9:23 A.M.

Never mind Spain or Italy or even Belgium; the euro crisis has spread to Germany, which is struggling to sell its bonds. The Corner’s Mark Steyn likes to say that, if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together, the result will generally taste more like the latter than the former. It’s true of international organizations (the context Mark uses) and it’s true of what’s happening in the euro zone.


EU leaders have spent the past year issuing sententious bromides about “avoiding contagion.” It’s an odd metaphor, since the usual defense against contagion is quarantine. Eurocrats, however, have insisted on taking Italy and Greece’s problems and making them everyone else’s. Result? The only economic havens in Europe are those outside the single currency: Switzerland, Scandinavia, and (oddly, when you consider that our deficit is higher than Portugal’s and almost as high as Greece’s) the United Kingdom.


From the beginning, the Brussels elites made it clear that, to adapt Abraham Lincoln, their paramount object was to save the Union. Never mind if that meant imposing epochal poverty and emigration on the southern members, and unprecedented tax rises on the northern. Never mind if it meant toppling the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replacing them with Eurocrats (respectively a former European Commissioner and a former vice president of the European Central Bank — two perfect specimens of the people who caused the crisis in the first place). They were prepared to pay any price to keep the euro together — or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU employees are generally exempt from national taxation.


The alternative policy — an orderly unbundling of the euro — has never been seriously considered. Had it happened two years ago, a great deal of pain might have been avoided. If it happens now, there will be a cost, but it is still patently the least bad option.


Germany and its satellites could leave the euro tomorrow, establish a hard currency and bequeath the legal carcass of the euro to the Mediterranean states. The peripheral countries would thus devalue, price themselves into the market and receive an immediate stimulus. Their devaluation would probably be accompanied by a partial default (although not necessarily in Italy). Each state would then be free to adopt a monetary policy that suited its own conditions and, while the recovery would be painstaking, at least there would be a recovery.


Eurocrats, though, won’t countenance any challenge to their project. They remind me of the nomenklatura at the end of the 1980s. Even as the revolution overwhelms them, they carry on trotting out the old slogans — European economic government, fiscal federalism, eurobonds. Not in the hope of convincing anyone; not even in the hope of convincing themselves; but simply because they don’t know what else to do.

“Something must be done,” the economics editors of the world intone. By “something,” they mean “sufficient fiscal transfers from Germany to preserve the euro.” This, though, is to beg the question. The euro is the problem, not the solution. It is a recessionary device, whose maintenance threatens to topple large parts of the world back into recession. The quicker it is dismantled, the better for everyone.

— Daniel Hannan is author of The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America

Daniel Hannan: Germany no longer needs Europe

A speech given by Daniel Hannan on how patriotism in Germany is a good thing, and how it is about time that German citizens stand up for their sovereign right to refuse further bailouts of their eastern European neighbors. "Fortunately, the German people have seen through the racket."

Given May 17, 2011 at an Intelligence Squared debate.

Hannan builds on E.L. Jones' theory that  decentralization made Europe rise from squabbling tribes 500 years ago to the central cultural force in the past 200 years.

Daniel Hannan: The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government

A verbal tongue-lashing delivered by conservative Daniel Hannan to British prime minister Gordon Brown.

Nigel Farage unleashes the fury on Euro technocrats

Wow. Just... wow.

Transcript:

"Here we are on the edge of a financial and social disaster and in the room today we have the four men who are supposed to be responsible. And yet we have listened to the dullest most, technocratic speeches I've ever heard.

You are all in denial. By any objective measure the euro is a failure. And who exactly is responsible, who is in charge out of all you lot? The answer is none of you because none of you have been elected; none of you have any democratic legitimacy for the roles you currently hold within this crisis.

And into this vacuum, albeit reluctantly, has stepped Angela Merkel. And we are now living in a German-dominated Europe - something that the European project was actually supposed to stop. Something that those who went before us actually paid a heavy price in blood to prevent. I don't want to live in a German-dominated Europe and nor do the citizens of Europe.

But you guys have played a role, because when Mr Papandreou got up and used the word 'referendum'. Or Mr Rehn, you described it as 'a breach of confidence', and your friends here got together like a pack of hyenas, rounded on Papandreou, had him removed and replaced by a puppet Government. That was an absolutely disgusting spectacle that was.

And not satisfied with that, you decided that Berlesconi had to go. So he was removed and replaced by Mr Monti, a former European Commissioner, a fellow architect of this Euro disaster and a man who wasn't even a member of parliament.

It's getting like an Agatha Christie novel, where we're trying to work out who is the next person that's going to be bumped off. The difference is, we know who the villains are. You should all be held accountable for what you've done. You should all be fired.

And I have to say, Mr Van Rompuy. 18 months ago when we first met, I was wrong about you. I said you would be the quiet assassin of nation states' democracy, but not anymore, you are rather noisy about it aren't you. You, an unelected man, went to Italy and said, 'This is not the time for elections but the time for actions'. What in God's name gives you the right to say that to the Italian people.



Here is another YouTube clip with an extensive interview with Nigel on Russian television, made almost  a year ago (Dec 1, 2010).

High speed rail in California grows from $9B to $98.5B

In this Washington Post op-ed, even their editors shake their collective heads in amazement at what has happened in California. A referendum on a high-speed rail line that was estimated to cost 9 billion dollars has now skyrocketed in costs to over ten times the original estimate.

There are governors who are hitting the reset button on various infrastructure projects that aren't economically viable. Chris Cristie put the kibosh on a train tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan in late 2010. Scott Walker and Rick Scott have refused federal money for high-speed rail projects that were obvious boondoggles, and which would be financially unsustainable once the lines were open for business. The governors were roundly criticized by the mainstream media and Progressives for actually applying cost/benefit ratios and logic to these problems and pulling the plug on them when they didn't make financial sense. In the case of New Jersey's train tunnel, there were already sunk costs. But governor Christie knew that there were going to be cost overruns that his state was responsible for, and he put the project on indefinite hold.

So fiscal sanity rules at the state level, where state budgets have to balance at the end of the year. Jerry Brown aught to stop this insanity, or if he doesn't have the spine, put a referendum on California's ballot initiatives to ask the voters if they really want to be on the hook for a rail line that will cost California tens of billions in money they don't have.

California -- not so good for business

In this LA Times opinion piece, Wendel Cox and Steven Malanga shine a spotlight on California's growing anti-business climate, and how such a climate causes more jobs to be lost than added.

California — toxic for business

Unless Sacramento moves to improve the business climate, California's reputation as one of the country's most toxic business environments will make it hard for the Golden State to regain its luster.

By Wendell Cox and Steven Malanga

November 14, 2011

Last year, the medical technology firm Numira Biosciences packed its bags and left Irvine for Salt Lake City. When asked about the firm's departure, its chief executive praised Utah's quality of life but also blamed California's business environment for the move. "The tipping point was when someone from the Orange County tax [assessor] wanted to see our facility to tax every piece of equipment I had," Michael Beeuwsaert told the Orange County Register.

For years, California could rely on its temperate climate and a talented workforce to attract and keep businesses even as taxes and regulations increased. No more. In surveys, executives regularly express the view that California has one of the country's most toxic business environments, and they say it is one of the least likely places they would open or expand a company. Many firms headquartered here say they have forsaken expansion in the state. Meanwhile, California suffers from an unemployment rate some 2 percentage points higher than that of the nation as a whole.

The deep discontent of the business community is just one sign of larger problems in the California economy that predate the 2008 national financial crisis. A study by City Journal using the National Establishment Time Series Database, which has tracked national job creation and migration from 1992 through 2008 (the latest data available), suggests that California's economy started showing signs of sclerosis a decade ago. So even after a national recovery takes place, the Golden State may keep struggling — unless Sacramento moves to improve the business climate.

Economists usually see business start-ups as the most important long-term source of job growth, and California has long had a reputation for nurturing new companies. Indeed, from 1992 to 2000, California added 777,000 more jobs from start-ups than it lost to closures. But this dynamism vanished in the 2000s. Between 2000 and 2008, California lost 262,000 more jobs from closures than it gained from start-ups.

Between 2000 and 2008, some 80,000 more jobs left California for other states than came here from other states. The leading destination of the job migration was Texas, with Oregon and North Carolina running second and third. California managed to add jobs only through the expansion of existing businesses, and even that was at a considerably lower rate than a decade earlier.

Another dark sign has been that economic growth in California's major cities stalled after 2000. Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area had been the engines of California's economic growth for at least a century. But between 2000 and 2008, California's two big metropolitan areas produced fewer than 70,000 new jobs — a nearly 95% drop from the 1990s and a mere 6% of job creation in the state. This was a collapse of historic proportions.

Equally troubling was that California's growth in the 2000s, such as it was, took place disproportionately in sectors that rode the housing bubble. In fact, 35% of the net new jobs in the state were created in construction and real estate. All those jobs have vaporized since 2008, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

While there are many reasons for these troubling trends, the state cannot ignore the role its policies have played in the economic decline. For seven consecutive years, executives polled by Chief Executive magazine have ranked California as having the worst business environment in the country. In a 2011 survey of its members by CalRecovery, a California coalition of businesses and industries based in the state, 84% of about 400 executives and owners who responded said that if they weren't already here, they wouldn't consider starting up in the state, while 64% said that the main reason they stayed in California was that it was tough to relocate their particular kind of business. In a recent op-ed, Andrew Puzder, chief executive of Carpinteria-based CKE Restaurants, which manages 3,000 eateries around the country, called California "the most business-unfriendly state we operate in."

Another troubling sign: California is even losing the battle for green manufacturing jobs. Earlier this year, Bing Energy, a fuel-cell maker, announced that it would relocate from Chino in San Bernardino County to Tallahassee, Fla., where it expected to hire nearly 250 workers. "I just can't imagine any corporation in their right mind would decide to set up in California today," Dean Minardi, Bing's chief financial officer, said.

California's suffocating regulations have a lot to do with this discontent. A 2009 study by two California State University finance professors, Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian, estimated that regulation cost the state's businesses $493 billion annually, or nearly $135,000 per company. Additionally, dense and complex land-use regulations have driven up housing construction costs in the state, giving residents a double whammy: a stagnant economy and unaffordable home prices, even since the real estate bubble burst.

Taxes are another burden. According to the Tax Foundation, California imposes the nation's second-heaviest tax burden on businesses, and finance officers of major companies recently rated the state's overall tax environment the worst in the country, according to a poll in CFO magazine.

On top of taxes and regulation, the state can also claim what may be America's most expensive litigation environment for firms. The American Tort Reform Foundation recently named California one of the country's five worst "judicial hellholes," in part because state law allows trial lawyers to sue firms for minor violations of California's complex labor and environmental regulations.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared that "California always comes back." But history shows that great states can decline. Some, like New York, which was the nation's economic engine before California, never regain their luster. The state's leaders need to acknowledge the message they are hearing from the local business community and consider ways to help the state regain its economic edge.

Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public policy consulting firm. Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal, from whose fall issue this article is adapted.

Krugman called out by Nile Gardiner

In this article, Nile Gardiner highlights Dr. Paul Krugman's slight-of-hand in a recent NYT opinion piece. Europe's woes and travails squarely rest with Keynesian economics, or at least the policies now practiced by Progressives (Democrats and the like) everywhere; more entitlement spending and larger government payrolls creating a 'multiplier' effect that 'grows' the economy, rather than the Monitorist economic view that government should be downsized to make budgets balanced.

How would Dr. Krugman solve the Euro-zone problem (brought about by policies he pushed and currently pushes for the US)? More spending (famously theorizing that the fourth, largest stimulus passed by Democrats in the spring of 2009 was undersized-- less than half of what should have been spent)?  Enlarging entitlements and the recipient pool? More environmental regulations? More union work-rules and constrictions on free-enterprise?

Enjoy the article.

Paul Krugman is rewriting history now that the eurozone, beloved by US liberals, is going down in flames

Paul Krugman: wrong again

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is right about one thing, when he says: “now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all”.

But the rest of his analysis of the crisis in Europe, as well as the causes, is in the realm of pure fantasy. In his recent piece entitled “Legends of the Fail”, Krugman rejects the idea that “Europe’s woes reflect the failure of welfare states in general, and that Europe’s crisis makes the case for immediate fiscal austerity in the United States”.

It’s true that all European countries have more generous social benefits — including universal health care — and higher government spending than America does. But the nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well — if anything, the correlation runs the other way. Sweden, with its famously high benefits, is a star performer, one of the few countries whose G.D.P. is now higher than it was before the crisis. Meanwhile, before the crisis, “social expenditure” — spending on welfare-state programs — was lower, as a percentage of national income, in all of the nations now in trouble than in Germany, let alone Sweden.

Oh, and Canada, which has universal health care and much more generous aid to the poor than the United States, has weathered the crisis better than we have. The euro crisis, then, says nothing about the sustainability of the welfare state.

Krugman cites Sweden as an example of a social welfare success in Europe, but fails to mention two important points. Firstly, in recent years, Sweden has begun rolling back the welfare system and government expenditure while adopting important free market reforms. Secondly, Sweden decided to stay out of the eurozone, another key reason why it has so far kept out of the financial mess engulfing southern Europe. As Johnny Munkhammar, a Swedish member of parliament noted in a piece for The Wall Street Journal in January, Sweden owes its success not to welfare statism but to reforms that have increased economic freedom, including greater competitiveness in the provision of health care and other public services:

For many years, foreign policy-makers have pointed to Sweden as a positive model to follow, making Swedes like me proud. Too often, though, foreigners have drawn the wrong lessons from Sweden's success. For instance, whenever I give a lecture, anywhere in Europe, about economic reform, I always get the following response: "But you come from Sweden, which is socialist and successful—why should we launch free-market policies?"
The simple truth is that Sweden is not socialist. According to the World Values Survey and other similar studies, Sweden combines one of the highest degrees of individualism in the world, solid trust in well-functioning institutions, and a high degree of social cohesion. Among the 160 countries studied in the Index of Economic Freedom, Sweden ranks 21st, and is one of the few countries that increased its economic freedoms during the financial crisis. Sweden gets higher scores for liberal markets than Germany and Belgium, or reformers such as Cyprus and Georgia.

All of the European countries now in deep trouble in Europe – Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal – are in the 17-member eurozone, and have deeply entrenched welfare systems, which have not been reformed along the lines of the Swedish model. Germany also operates a large welfare state and generous pensions structure that in the long run is unsustainable, with its rapidly aging population. But it has avoided the current financial contagion by maintaining a budget surplus with the introduction of strict austerity measures to limit government spending, of the kind that Krugman would no doubt balk at if applied in the United States.

In his piece Mr Krugman also makes the astonishing claim that the doomed European Project was originally “cheered” by American conservatives but “questioned” by US liberals:

The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.

I don’t recall “American right-wingers” cheering on the rise of the single currency, and the growth of a European superstate. Quite the opposite, in fact. British-style Euroscepticism has always been fashionable among US conservatives who have long admired Lady Thatcher’s views on Europe, but mocked and derided by the State Department and by the Left. American liberals in contrast have long been among the biggest supporters of the European Project. Witness the fawning Eurofederalism of the Obama administration as well as bastions of the ruling liberal elites such as The New York Times. Krugman is rewriting history now that the European model, beloved by East Coast liberals, is going down in flames.

The reality that Krugman refuses to accept is that Europe offers a glimpse of America’s future if it continues down the path of European-style big government. The root of Europe’s financial crisis lies in decades of over-spending and over-borrowing, largely to pay for overgrown and bloated welfare systems, vast public sectors, and incredibly generous pension plans. Europe has a huge entitlements disaster heading its way, with graying electorates unable to sustain the status quo. Added to this has been the disastrous euro experiment, which has created a one-size fits all approach for 17 EU countries, with varying levels of economic advancement. It has been a huge leap into the dark, without a shred of democratic accountability.

There is only one path Europe can take if it is to avoid economic meltdown: dramatic cuts in public spending, the dismantling of its welfare states, the removal of crippling taxes and business regulations, the downsizing of the public sector, and a return to self-determination for EU member states. It is Europe’s lack of fiscal responsibility, economic freedom, and national sovereignty, that are at the heart of the current economic crisis, and the United States must do all it can to avoid European-style decline.

Why Virginia is lost to Barack

This article by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal highlights a little-discussed problem with Obama's re-election campaign: it is depending on Virginia and North Carolina to remain blue to overcome a loss in one of the three states Obama won (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania).

In a previous post, I had stitched together an electoral college map that would give Barack Obama a win even with the loss of North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Florida. The Democrats are holding their convention in North Carolina, which they're hoping will help keep that state voting for Barack.



Obama's Virginia Defeat

Democrats were trounced in Tuesday's state legislature election, despite the president's heavy investment of time in the state.

Of all the noise of this week's state election results, what mattered most for Election 2012 came out of Virginia. It was the sound of the air leaking out of the Plouffe plan.
That would be David Plouffe, President Obama's former campaign manager and current senior strategist, who is focused today on how to cobble together 270 electoral votes for re-election. That's proving tough, what with the economy hurting Mr. Obama in states like Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania that he won in 2008. The White House's response has been to pin its hopes on a more roundabout path to electoral victory, one based on the Southern and Western states Mr. Obama also claimed in 2008.

States like Virginia. Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.

So the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state's former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats' "New Dominion." The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday's election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.

Let's just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber's votes—the party's largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn't work.

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.

Topline figures aside, what ought to really concern the White House was the nature of the campaign, and the breakout of Tuesday's election data. Mr. Obama may have big plans for Virginia, but the question is increasingly: him and what army?

Elected state Democrats—who form the backbone of grass-roots movements—couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

State House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong felt compelled to run an ad protesting that it was a "stretch" for his GOP opponent to "compare me to Barack Obama." After all, he was "pro-life, pro-gun and I always put Virginia first." (Mr. Armstrong lost on Tuesday.)

Virginia Democrats were happy to identify with one top official: Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is providing a lesson in the benefits of smart GOP governance in battleground states. Criticized as being too socially conservative for Virginia when he was elected in 2009, Mr. McDonnell has won over voters by focusing on the economy and jobs. His approval ratings are in the 60s, and he helped raise some $5 million for local candidates. He's popular enough that Democrats took to including pictures of him in their campaign literature, and bragging that they'd worked with him.
Mr. McDonnell has been particularly adept at connecting with the independent, white-collar voters Mr. Obama used to win Virginia in 2008. That crowd lives in North Virginia's booming exurb counties of Prince William and Loudoun, and presidential races hinge on their votes. Mr. Obama's 2008 victory in Virginia rested on his significant wins in both Loudoun (8%) and Prince Williams (16%).

Yet Tuesday's results showed the extent to which that support has reversed. Loudoun in particular proved an unmitigated rout for Democrats. Republicans won or held three of four of the county's Senate seats. It swept all seven of the county's House seats. It won all nine slots on the county's Board of Supervisors, and pretty much every other county office. In Prince William, the story was much the same. This is what happens when a recent Quinnipiac poll shows Mr. Obama's approval rating among Virginia independents at 29%.

Democrats are now arguing that turnout (about 30%) was too low to prove anything, but then again, the particularly low Democratic turnout suggests that, on top of everything else, the White House really does face an enthusiasm gap. It's still got time to try to remedy that problem, and some other Virginia fundamentals. But going by Tuesday's results, Mr. Plouffe might need to start considering Electoral Plan C.

Even the Washington Post is concerned about public pension plans

This article gives a cursory overview of how bad the problem is.

A graphical look at our close-encounter with YU55

An excerpt from this article:
Since a humble start at a single telescope in the 1980s, NASA’s $5 million-per-year asteroid-tracking program has matured to the point where the agency said in September that it has detected more than 90 percent of “planet killer” asteroids, those bigger than one kilometer in diameter. None will hit Earth in the foreseeable future, the agency has said.




Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

How the Left dismisses the Reagan Revolution

This article in Forbes by Brian Domitrovic details how historians (and other Liberals) tend to nitpick the outliers of aspects of Reagan's presidency, while ignoring the reduction of unemployment, inflation, and "malaise" while at the same time standing up to their beloved Soviet Union, which crumbled officially in 1989. In the early 80's this was not a foregone conclusion. Reagan came into office in January of 1981 with high unemployment, an economy in recession, and a high "misery index." He left with America on the upswing. 

How Historians Boot the Reagan Revolution

In 2007, writing in the wake of a slew of books that had just come out on the end of the Cold War, historian and author Steven F. Hayward noted the following: “With these works, the literature on Reagan’s foreign policy is more or less complete—until additional classified documents are released or new Soviet sources are revealed. By contrast, the story of Reagan’s domestic policy remains clouded and obscure, in part because we are still wrestling with many of the same issues today—tax cuts, trade and budget deficits, globalization, affirmative action, and the rest of the culture war.”

Not much has changed. We are still waiting for our massive academic establishment to produce histories of Reagan’s domestic policy – particularly his economic policy – commensurate with its significance. What I wrote in 2009 in my own book on the history of supply-side economics, Econoclasts, is applicable today: “There does not appear to be one scholarly book or article, in the discipline of history, on the topic of supply-side economics that has called on and analyzed the relevant complement of primary sources. Not one.”

So what is passing for scholarly opinion on Reaganomics these days? Comments such as this, which appeared two weeks ago in the New York Times, care of Rutgers history professor James Livingston: “The architects of the Reagan revolution tried to reverse…trends as a cure for the stagflation of the 1970s, but couldn’t.”

Here is an implication that the Reagan Revolution did not solve stagflation. It is notwithstanding these facts: as Reagan’s reforms got put into practice in the 1980s, unemployment fell from 11% to 5%, inflation went down from 14% to 2%, growth boomed at 4.3% per year, and stocks tripled.

Livingston identified himself to Times readers “as an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years.” And he went on to contend that “private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.”

Livingston’s weird and misleading Times column, called “It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid,” is reflective of a deeper problem. It’s the problem of to what lengths our top historians will go to misrepresent if not ignore the Reagan Revolution – in particular its manifest successes.

Last year, Livingston released a book, The World Turned Inside Out, about trends in intellectual history and culture over the closing decades of the twentieth century. It began with a chapter ruminating on the history of supply-side economics.

This chapter deployed a now-classic strategy of big-name historians’ (Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and Daniel Rodgers use it too) when dealing with the Reagan Revolution: focus on its outliers. Livingston expended pages canvassing the career of George Gilder, 1981 bestseller Wealth and Poverty author, as the meat of his presentation on supply-side economics. Lots of points were scored in portraying supply-side economics as oddball, in that Gilder’s previous work was a full-throated dismissal of feminism.

At last Livingston made a list of supply-siders, and tellingly the name of Robert A. Mundell, the 1999 Nobel laureate and intellectual lodestar of supply-side economics, was not given.

Not only is this the same unconscionable omission that Rodgers made in hisAge of Fracture earlier this year, it made tenuous Livingston’s specific claims: “[The supply-siders’] argument never made any sense…but the arithmetic was beside the point.” Mundell was the greatest practitioner of economic geometry of his era, and the equations behind the graphs that first outlined the supply-side solution in the 1960s were gone over in the official Nobel Prize discussions of Mundell’s work.

You don’t make this kind of mistake if you commit to reading sources. But did Livingston read sources to compose his history of supply-side economics? The signs are not good. In the Introduction, Livingston avowed that “This book takes supply-side economics and South Park equally seriously.”

Invariably this does not mean applying rigorous historiographical discovery to the phenomenon of South Park (the profane cartoon on television), but rather to apply South Park-like heedlessness to the phenomenon of supply-side economics. Thanks a lot, James Livingston.

The failure to take sources seriously inevitably leads to major factual errors. For example, The World Turned Inside Out has it that “marginal tax rates on corporate and individual incomes were cut substantially (by half) in 1981.” In fact, corporate rates were not cut at all, and personal rates went down a phased-in 23%. A passing acquaintance with the iconic Reagan tax law, the Economic Recovery and Tax Act of 1981, would have corrected this doozy.

From time to time I visit the Ronald Reagan archives in California, where I learn that there’s little interest among visiting researchers in the tax cut files of the Reagan presidency, even though these files have been open and available since 1994. Rather, there is capacious interest in things like Central America policy, even as Nicaragua has reverted to its natural status as a global footnote. It’s funny what responsibilities you can’t count on our huge historical establishment to fulfill.

Blame it on Brokaw

Jonah Goldberg's take on Tom Brokaw and the mainstream (old) media.

Another article on how the double standards of the mainstream media is making them more and more irrelevant, with less viewership and readership as time progreses.

Blame It On Brokaw

By Jonah Goldberg

You know who I blame for the terrible tone in American politics? Tom Brokaw.
No, not the man himself, but what he represents.

Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Brokaw stands as the last of the respected “voice of God” news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt’s phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn’t. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, “And that’s the way it is” — as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.

You can still find this sort of hubris on the masthead of the New York Times, which proclaims “All the news that’s fit to print” — a claim that would be subjected to truth-in-labeling laws were it not for the First Amendment.

Brokaw, an honorable and industrious man, is now playing the role of elder statesman while touting his new book, The Time of Our Lives. In it, he writes: “Slashing rhetoric and outrageous characterizations have long been part of the American national political dialogue . . . but modern means of communications are now so pervasive and penetrating they might as well be part of the air we breathe, and therefore they require tempered remarks from all sides. Otherwise, the air just becomes more and more toxic until it is suffocating.”

There’s much wisdom here. But blaming the new media environment for what ails us is an awfully convenient alibi. It suggests that the old media, of which Brokaw was a master of the universe, played no part in losing the trust of so many Americans.

For starters, when the mainstream media complains about the national “tone,” it almost invariably means the tone to their right. After the tragic Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the mainstream media reported, and liberal pundits raced to insist, that Republican rhetoric — particularly, a pictogram on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page — inspired the suspect. The evidence disproving all of that is voluminous; the record of apologies and retractions from those who reported it is comparatively scant.

At the same time, Democratic rhetoric has grown ever more extreme. Vice President Joe Biden said pro-tea-party Republicans in Congress acted “like terrorists.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said Republicans want to “end life as we know it.”

More recently, Biden has insisted that the GOP’s refusal to pass the White House’s jobs bill would cause a surge in rapes, sexual assaults, and other crimes across the country. Perhaps he’s right, because the legislation has failed (at the hands of Democrats and Republicans alike), and such offenses at Occupy Wall Street protests have risen (that’s why they’ve built a women-only tent at Zuccotti Park). But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from watching the nightly news.

When tea partiers angrily shouted down their congressmen at some town halls around the country, then-speaker of the House Pelosi and then-majority leader Steny Hoyer wrote in an op-ed article in USA Today that such behavior is “simply un-American.” The mainstream media, which during the George W. Bush years often imagined and certainly trumpeted alleged GOP assaults on the patriotism of Democrats, yawned in response.

Meanwhile, violence, extreme rhetoric and wanton lawlessness have been prevalent in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the coverage remains largely positive. And any politician who suggests these protests are “simply un-American” risks getting worse than a yawn from the media. The Today show even ran a segment on how the protests offered “civics lessons” for children.

All too often it seems as if the supposedly evenhanded media cherry-picks positive examples from the left and negative ones from the right. And even when they do cover ideologically inconvenient news, the passion and hysteria are nearly always reserved for the threat from the right.

Brokaw and his heirs don’t understand that such double standards breed precisely the rhetoric they find so toxic. Because the new media Brokaw laments allows conservatives to see how much important news the old media didn’t deem fit to print, they learn not to trust or respect those who wag their fingers rightward about civility — or anything else. 

Herman Cain and the Media

I like Herman Cain. I've liked him before he was the front-runner in the Republican primary. I thought he would be a good candidate to field against Barack Obama. I still feel he would be a good candidate for the presidency, but in 2016 or 2020, not 2012. Frankly, I think Herman thinks this time around is a good way to get his message out, build some electoral 'cred, and expose any skeletons in the closet. And there are certainly skeletons.

But his chief of staff, Mark Block, has done Herman, and the Republican party, a disservice with the way this campaign is being run. This is amateur hour. It has to be textbook for how NOT to run a campaign. The only reason why Cain is neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney is because of Herman, period. Certainly not because of any credible advice from his advisors.

The main litmus test I use to judge a person is the quality of people they surround themselves with. Have they hung out with people who accomplished great things themselves? Do they hang with others who are "yes" men or those who bring vibrant life experiences to play and can (and do) challenge the person when they say stupid things? The world is not black and white, but has pastels and shades of every color. The fact that people can tune in to opinions that validate their world view means there's a rich set of material out there that has to be debunked, challenged, or accepted at face value and wrestled with (the fact that Liberals are more prone to do this than Conservatives is an issue I'll discuss in another post, but it's why they can't articulate a coherent Conservative issue to logically refute). I see Herman has surrounded himself with a win-at-all-costs-damn-the-principles characters, and this disappoints me. Not that Barack has surrounded himself with stellar advisors of high quality (even ones that had some life experienced have been relegated to radicals who've come through academia, rather than the crucible of the private sector, where ideas are put to the test every hour of every day).

So I felt this article begins to scratch at the surface of some of my complaints against the Cain campaign. Liberal or Conservative, I think it raises some truth that one can walk away with, namely the double-standard of the media, and the lack of standards being applied by Herman's team.

Herman Cain and Journalistic Ethics

By Carl M. Cannon - November 9, 2011

Herman Cain has met the enemy and he is us. The media, that is.

Not his libido. Not his lack of impulse control. Not his changing stories. Not his flaky campaign manager. Not the “Mad Men” environment of the restaurant business, or the evolving standards of male-female behavior -- not even the sometimes ephemeral standards of sexual harassment.

No, his problems stem from the First Amendment. He’s the victim, not the growing roster of women who have accused him of boorish behavior. Anonymous sources! Hidden agendas! Sensationalism in the Fourth Estate! Yes, that’s the true scandal here. That’s his story, anyway, and he’s sticking to it. So is his lawyer.

“Herman Cain finds himself on trial in the court of public opinion . . . where there are no rules except those made up by the media,” Lin Wood, Cain’s high-dollar defense lawyer, groused on Tuesday.

“Don’t even go there,” Cain scolded a reporter who tried to ask him about the accusations a day earlier.

“Can I ask my question?” the surprised reporter asked.

“No!” Cain replied, before adding, bafflingly: “Where’s my chief of staff? Please send him the journalistic code of ethics.”

Say what? It’s hard to know what Cain had in mind, just as it’s hard to fathom what campaign manager Mark Block was doing when he breathlessly told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he had “confirmed” that the son of one of Cain’s alleged victims worked for Politico, the news outlet that broke the original story.

Except that the journalist in question, Josh Kraushaar, is not related to Karen Kraushaar, the former National Restaurant Association employee who brought sexual harassment claims against Cain and was given a cash settlement for her troubles. Nor does Josh Kraushaar work for Politico. He works for Hotline, a rival news outlet owned by Atlantic Media. Josh did work briefly at Politico, but that was 16 months ago -- before anyone had ever heard of Herman Cain.

Let’s return to that “journalism code of ethics” crack of Cain’s for a minute, though. I’m going to pull rank on him here.

Herman Cain made his reputation working for Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza. I like hamburgers as much as the next man (Big Macs more than Whoppers), and I ordered a carryout pizza for my kids the night of Cain’s latest press conference. And although I worked in a pizza parlor and a burger joint in high school, I don’t presume to know as much about the fast-food business as Cain. And he damn sure doesn’t know as much as I do about journalism.

I was born and raised in the news business. My father was -- and is -- a highly respected reporter and presidential biographer. I have a college degree in journalism, and have worked for 35 years as a reporter and editor, and covered every presidential campaign since 1984. I’ve worked on newspapers, magazines, and online organizations, including this one. I’ve written books, done investigative reporting, won several of the prestigious journalism awards, lectured at colleges, been a writing coach, and done in-depth media criticism.

I have delved more deeply into the ethical obligations of journalists than anyone running for president in 2012. Although not a conservative myself, I’ve long been troubled by the pervasive liberal slant of political reporting in the mainstream media. I’ve written about this problem -- and named names -- and strained friendships over it. I was disgusted by the one-sided political coverage in 2008, particularly concerning Sarah Palin, and said so in print.

And yet, my view is that Herman Cain and his conservative defenders couldn’t be more wrong about the 

duty of the press corps.

Cain wants to be president of the United States. He’s never held elective office before, has displayed only cursory knowledge of domestic politics and international affairs, has passed others’ words off as his own, and has made several dubious statements about sensitive public issues. These have ranged from suggesting a fence between Mexico and the United States be electrified to asserting that he wouldn’t put a Muslim in his Cabinet. When these statements received critical news coverage, Cain responded: He claimed he was joking about wanting to electrocute illegal immigrants, and issued an abject apology to Muslims.

That’s how self-government works. These candidates say what they’d do as president (“9-9-9”), and we examine their ideas. That’s as it must be. The presidency of the United States is a temporary job but the person who holds it possesses more power than any single person on this planet. So Americans want to know the character and temperament of the individual they are putting into office.

Is the candidate sufficiently worldly? Is he (or she) tough enough, smart enough, empathetic enough? Do their policies make any sense? Will they keep us out of war? Will they help the poor? Do they know anything about the economy? Can we envision their family in the White House? Is the candidate a bully?

These are the questions voters turn over in their minds. Any reporter who doesn’t think sexual harassment is a legitimate area of inquiry ought to turn in his press pass to a younger, hungrier reporter and become a food critic or travel writer. Examining how Herman Cain treated the women at the restaurant association is exactly the role of the press.

Most conservatives know this, but they have issues with the media. I had an exchange of emails about Cain with a movement conservative from my home state of California. His name is Mark Meckler, and he’s co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. He’s uncompromisingly conservative, but a principled guy; and I wondered what he thought about a candidate accused of serial groping.

Mark didn’t speak directly to the Cain allegations. Instead, he compared the feeding frenzy on the Cain story to the almost defiant refusal of the mainstream media to report on the John Edwards sex scandal until after Edwards was no longer a 2008 Democratic candidate. Mark called it an “obvious double standard,” concluding his message with this thought: “The history of journalism of this era will be one of blatant bias and an amazing lack of responsibility and professionalism.”

Those words ought to bother my journalistic brethren more than they do: The double standard is not imaginary, and has helped sustain the career of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators who this week were noisily defending Herman Cain and attacking his accusers and the mainstream media.

But blind partisanship is a distorting instinct, whichever side is doing it, and leads its practitioners to some strange rhetorical places. “Sexual harassment is a political tool of the left to get rid of people, or to score money gains, whatever is most desired,” Rush said last week.

Limbaugh knows better, but it’s the kind of thing that pops out of one’s mouth when partisan points are the goal instead of non-partisan elucidation. Was the press too hard on Sarah Palin and too easy on Joe Biden? Absolutely. Did it take a powder on John Edwards? Yes, but I would suggest that the fate of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a very liberal Democrat, is a more recent and relevant example.

I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the nuances of journalistic ethics in the Weiner case. Acting on a tip (which came in the form of a “retweet” on the social networking site Twitter) of a lewd picture posted via Rep. Weiner’s Twitter account, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart republished a screenshot of the picture (which had since been deleted) in a post raising questions about the Congressman’s claim that his Facebook account had been hacked.* When it soon became clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress. 

We don’t have photographic evidence documenting any wrongdoing on the part of Herman Cain, and aren’t likely to find it. We do have the testimonials of an increasing number of women, however. It’s the media’s job to examine these stories carefully, and also to search for other possible victims and witnesses. I’m not nominating Politico for a Pulitzer Prize just yet, but I will suggest that Joseph Pulitzer himself would have approved of the publication’s exposé on Cain.

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy,” Pulitzer once told his assistant Alleyne Ireland. “Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”

That’s our job. 

(*This story was updated to clarify the circumstances surrounding the Weiner case.)

"There is 99 of us, and only one of you..."

From a PowerLine post by Scott Johnson:

Bitter Seals tell of killing 'Bert' Laden

An article from the Australian:  It immediately leaves an open question-- what if Barack Obama hadn't announced the death of Osama Bin Laden (code name 'Bert') right away. Would that have given our side half a day to a day of analyzing intelligence and rounding up even more Al Qaida operatives?

• BY:
• 
  
CHRISTINA LAMB 
• From:The Sunday Times 
• November 06, 2011 2:44PM

OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed within 90 seconds of the US Navy Seals landing in his compound and not after a protracted gun battle, according to the first account by the men who carried out the raid. The operation was so clinical that only 12 bullets were fired.

The Seals have spoken out because they were angered at the version given by politicians, which they see as portraying them as cold-blooded murderers on a “kill mission”. They were also shocked that President Barack Obama announced bin Laden's death on television the same evening, rendering useless much of the intelligence they had seized.

Chuck Pfarrer, a former commander of Seal Team 6, which conducted the operation, has interviewed many of those who took part for a book, Seal Target Geronimo, to be published in the US this week.

The Seals' own accounts differ from the White House version, which gave the impression that bin Laden was killed at the end of the operation rather than in its opening seconds. Pfarrer insists bin Laden would have been captured had he surrendered.

The first hint of the mission came in January last year when the team's commanding officer was called to a meeting at the headquarters of joint special operations command. The meeting was held in a soundproof bunker three storeys below ground with his boss, Admiral William McRaven, and a CIA officer.“There isn't a politician in the world who could resist trying to take credit for getting bin Laden but it devalued the 'intel' and gave time for every other al-Qa'ida leader to scurry to another bolthole,” said Pfarrer. “The men who did this and their valorous act deserve better. It's a pretty shabby way to treat these guys.”

They told him a walled compound in Pakistan had been under surveillance for a couple of weeks. They were certain a high-value individual was inside and needed a plan to present to the president.

It had to be someone important. “So is this Bert or Ernie?” he asked. The Seals' nicknames for bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are a reference to two Muppets in Sesame Street, one tall and thin and the other short and fat. “We have a voice print,” said the CIA officer, “and we're 60 per cent or 70 per cent certain it's our guy.” McRaven added that a reconnaissance satellite had measured the target's shadow. “Over 6ft tall.”

When McRaven added they would use Ghost Hawk helicopters, the team leader had no doubt. “These are the most classified, sophisticated stealth helicopters ever developed,” said Pfarrer. “They are kept in locked hangars and fly so quiet we call it 'whisper mode'.”

Over the next couple of months a plan was hatched. A mock-up of the compound was built at Tall Pines, an army facility in a national forest somewhere in the eastern US.

Four reconnaissance satellites were placed in orbit over the compound, sending back video and communications intercepts. A tall figure seen walking up and down was named “the Pacer”.

Mr Obama gave the go-ahead and Seal Team 6, known as the Jedi, was deployed to Afghanistan. The White House cancelled plans to provide air cover using jet fighters, fearing this might endanger relations with Pakistan.

Sending in the Ghost Hawks without air cover was considered too risky so the Seals had to use older Stealth Hawks. A Prowler electronic warfare aircraft from the carrier USS Carl Vinson was used to jam Pakistan's radar and create decoy targets.

Operation Neptune's Spear was initially planned for April 30 but bad weather delayed it until May 1, a moonless night. The commandos flew on two Stealth Hawks, codenamed Razor 1 and 2, followed by two Chinooks five minutes behind, known as “Command Bird” and the “gun platform”.

On board, each Seal was clad in body armour and nightvision goggles and equipped with laser targets, radios and sawn-off M4 rifles. They were expecting up to 30 people in the main house, including Bin Laden and three of his wives, two sons, Khalid and Hamza, his courier, Abu Ahmed al- Kuwaiti, four bodyguards and a number of children. At 56 minutes past midnight the compound came into sight and the code “Palm Beach” signalled three minutes to landing.

Razor 1 hovered above the main house, a three-storey building where bin Laden lived on the top floor. Twelve Seals abseiled the two metres down onto the roof and then jumped to a third-floor patio, where they kicked in the windows and entered.

The first person the Seals encountered was a terrified woman, bin Laden's third wife, Khaira, who ran into the hall. Blinded by a searing white strobe light they shone at her, she stumbled back. A Seal grabbed her by the arm and threw her to the floor.

Bin Laden's bedroom was along a short hall. The door opened; he popped out and then slammed the door shut. “Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” radioed one Seal, meaning “eyes on target”.

At the same time lights came on from the floor below and bin Laden's son Khalid came running up the stairs towards the Seals. He was shot dead.

Two Seals kicked in bin Laden's door. The room, they later recalled, “smelt like old clothing, like a guest bedroom in a grandmother's house”. Inside was the al-Qa'ida leader and his youngest wife, Amal, who was screaming as he pushed her in front of him.

“No, no, don't do this!” she shouted as her husband reached across the king-size bed for his AK-47 assault rifle. The Seals reacted instantly, firing in the same second. One round thudded into the mattress. The other, aimed at bin Laden's head, grazed Amal in the calf. As his hand reached for the gun, they each fired again: one shot hit his breastbone, the other his skull, killing him instantly and blowing out the back of his head.

Meanwhile Razor 2 was heading for the guesthouse, a low, shoebox-like building, where bin Laden's courier, Kuwaiti, and his brother lived.

As the helicopter neared, a door opened and two figures appeared, one waving an AK-47. This was Kuwaiti. In the moonless night he could see nothing and lifted his rifle, spraying bullets wildly.

He did not see the Stealth Hawk. On board someone shouted, “Bust him!”, and a sniper fired two shots. Kuwaiti was killed, as was the person behind him, who turned out to be his wife. Also on board were a CIA agent, a Pakistani- American who would act as interpreter, and a sniffer dog called Karo, wearing dog body armour and goggles.

Within two minutes the Seals from Razor 2 had cleared the guesthouse and removed the women and children.

They then ran to the main house and entered from the ground floor, checking the rooms. One of bin Laden's bodyguards was waiting with his AK-47. The Seals shot him twice and he toppled over.

Five minutes into the operation the command Chinook landed outside the compound, disgorging the commanding officer and more men. They blasted through the compound wall and rushed in.

The commander made his way to the third floor, where bin Laden's body lay on the floor face up. Photographs were taken, and the commander called on his satellite phone to headquarters with the words: “Geronimo Echo KIA” - bin Laden enemy killed in action.

“This was the first time the White House knew he was dead and it was probably 20 minutes into the raid,” said Pfarrer.

A sample of bin Laden's DNA was taken and the body was bagged. They kept his rifle. It is now mounted on the wall of their team room at their headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, alongside photographs of a dozen colleagues killed in action in the past 20 years.

At this point things started to go wrong. Razor 1 took off but the top secret “green unit” that controls the electronics failed. The aircraft went into a spin and crashed tail-first into the compound.

The Seals were alarmed, thinking it had been shot down, and several rushed to the wreckage. The crew climbed out, shaken but unharmed.

The commanding officer ordered them to destroy Razor 2, to remove the green unit, and to smash the avionics. They then laid explosive charges.

They loaded bin Laden's body onto the Chinook along with the cache of intelligence in plastic bin bags and headed toward the USS Carl Vinson. As they flew off they blew up Razor 2. The whole operation had taken 38 minutes.

The following morning White House officials announced that the helicopter had crashed as it arrived, forcing the Seals to abandon plans to enter from the roof. A photograph of the situation room showed a shocked Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, with her hand to her mouth.

Why did they get it so wrong?

What they were watching was live video but it was shot from 20,000ft by a drone circling overhead and relayed in real time to the White House and Leon Panetta, the CIA director, in Langley. The Seals were not wearing helmet cameras, and those watching in Washington had no idea what was happening inside the buildings.

“They don't understand our terminology, so when someone said the 'insertion helicopter' has crashed, they assumed it meant on entry,” said Pfarrer.

What infuriated the Seals, according to Pfarrer, was the description of the raid as a kill mission. “I've been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words 'kill mission',” he said. “It's a Beltway (Washington insider's) fantasy word. If it was a kill mission you don't need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades.”

The Sunday Times

John Ratzenberger: Society has devalued manufacturing skills.

Bangor Daily News notes a speech that John Ratzenberger gave to the Maine State Chamber of Commerce.  Watch the video below: Ratzenberger is very funny.



The actor told the chamber how society used to let children go out an play, explore, try things, fix things. At some point, society devalued self-directed play and pushing vocational work.

"There was a time when self-esteem was not bestowed on you by just showing up, you actually had to doing something."
...

“You can imagine Tip O’Neill fixing his roof. Now imagine Nancy Pelosi doing the same thing. That’s not going to happen,” he said, to laughter. “So is it a surprise they don’t care about manufacturing going overseas? They don’t understand the strength of it.”


He talked about the sense of entitlement that he thinks younger generations have today. A CEO friend of his hired a man two years out of college and had to fire him three days later, said Ratzenberger. The employee wasn’t a team player and wanted an office with a window. On the fourth day, the former employee showed up with his mother, Ratzenberger claimed, demanding an apology to assuage her son’s self-esteem.

I would suggest that manufacturing can be competitive in the United States, but it takes a number of steps that many politicians are fearful of taking:

• Emphasize non-renewable energy. Cheap electricity is necessary for manufacturing.
• Emphasize capital. Capital makes workers productive through automation, robotics, and advanced tools and machines. This is anathema to the Occupy Wall Street folks.
• Emphasize scaling back strict environmental regulations.
• Emphasize scaling back unions, especially in the public sector, where even FDR felt public unions would be bad for the country.
• Emphasize scaling back taxes on business.
• Emphasize vocational education, not just in high school, but throughout one's life.

It should be no surprise that states that have high taxes, strong union work rules, large state and local government employment, and burdensome regulations (environmental, health, and work) will loose manufacturing jobs. Easy prediction: California will loose more and more jobs as environmental regulations get more burdensome, energy costs rise, and taxes rise. Therefore, captial (money, entrepreneurs, and skilled labor) will move elsewhere.

Peter Schiff vs. Occupy Wall Street

Peter Schiff argues with Occupy Wall Street'ers. He is sympathetic to their plight, but argues that Capitalism, not Socialism (or what we've seen in the past decade: Corporatism), will get them working and will lift the poor to have better living standards.

A smack-down of John Kenneth Galbraith's Money by Thomas Sowell

Granted, this was back in 1975, and I'm sure there are more intellectual balloon-burstings by Thomas out there, but this one is just hilarious. A thorough dressing-down.

From Commentary Magazine:

Money, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Thomas Sowell — December 1975

Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went.
by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Houghton-Mifflin. 312 pp. $10.00.

For all his sophisticated wit and parade of scholarly erudition—enlivened by lovingly detailed anecdotes—John Kenneth Galbraith is fundamentally as anti-intellectual as any ungrammatical Archie Bunker. From his earlier books on “countervailing power” and “affluence” to his present Money, Galbraith argues by assertion, insinuation, and elegant cheap shots at those who disagree with him. It may be good entertainment, but show business is not economics.

For about 200 of the 312 pages of this book, Galbraith meanders through a selective history of money in the Western world. It is hard to see where the tour is going, but the scenery is nice and the guide calls our attention to various points of interest. Then suddenly there is what Galbraith calls “The Coming of J. M. Keynes,” and the grand design of the book falls into place. Throughout history the story of money has been the story of knaves and fools, but now the Truth has been seen.

What is the Keynesian truth for which all the earlier monetary history of the world was only a preamble? According to Galbraith, Keynesian theory and history both demonstrate that controlling the money supply does not control aggregate demand, and therefore cannot restore full employment after a depression. The Keynesian reason is that when the money supply is increased in an effort to spur demand, fearful individuals and institutions may choose to hold the additional money during the depression. Therefore direct government spending is necessary to get the money into circulation and restore full employment. Nowhere does Galbraith reveal that this sophomore Keynesianism has been under attack—and generally retreating—over the past thirty years. The reader gets no pros and cons. Instead, he is conned by a pro.

Much of the evidence that expansionary monetary policy is ineffective is based on the Great Depression of the 1930′s—when the many zigzags of the Federal Reserve System could hardly be dignified as a policy of any sort. But in Galbraith’s argument by straw men, the mistakes and pomposities of the Federal Reserve are made to appear as fatal flaws in the theories of those who believe that changing the money supply changes aggregate demand. No one would guess that Milton Friedman (the chief exponent of the “monetarist” view) has been at least equally critical of the Federal Reserve, and has based that criticism on more solid research than Galbraith’s. In short, the one thing on which all sides are agreed is that the Federal Reserve has blundered on a staggering scale. It is not an issue in the controversy.

As for the things that are at issue among economists, the jury is still out, and there are modifications on both sides that look suspiciously like plea bargaining. But in the picture that Galbraith presents, there are no real issues. There is only the Keynesian truth and those too blind to acknowledge it. Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase, “economic royalists.” There are also intellectual royalists, who rule by decree and give the peasants no reasons, but only the time-honored “bread and circuses.” Galbraith omits the bread.

Perhaps the most courageous—or brazen—position taken by Galbraith is in defense of government price-fixing. He not only pronounces World War II price-fixing right and good, but even defends the National Recovery Administration of the early New Deal. His defense of NRA may be unique among economists. The NRA theory was that the general price level could be raised by raising individual prices, industry by industry. This ignores the role of the money supply. If prices are forced up on products A, B, and C, then clearly there will be less money left to spend on products X, Y, and Z, which will then have correspondingly lower prices than otherwise, because of a lower demand. So while individual prices can be forced up (or down) by price-fixing, the general price level rises and falls as the money supply rises and falls.

Price-fixing during World War II was in the opposite direction—trying to keep prices down while the money supply rose. These controls were “highly effective” according to Galbraith. His evidence? The official price index did not rise much during World War II. That is, the prices officially reported to the government did not rise much during a time when it was a federal crime to raise prices. The black markets and quality deteriorations of the period are mere “legend,” according to Galbraith, though those of us who lived through it may remember it quite differently. Galbraith also glides smoothly over the horrendous shortages resulting from price-fixing which often reduced the “official” price to a hypothetical number showing what you would pay if you could actually get butter, steak, or housing. Of course, if you were serious about getting those things, you paid a lot more—and neither you nor the seller reported those prices to the government.

As in all the Galbraith books of the past quarter of a century, it is not supply and demand that determine prices but something called “power.” This “power” can be as specific as needed for purposes of illustration, and as nebulous as required to escape confrontation with facts to the contrary. For example, Galbraith makes a dichotomy between “the corporate and the competitive sectors” of the economy. In the non-competitive “corporate” sectors prices are set or “administered” above their competitive levels through “power,” in defiance of supply and demand, and this is “pervasive in the American economy.” His evidence? It is “not seriously subject to debate.” Certainly Galbraith does not seriously debate it—or anything else. But if we stop and think of huge corporations like Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other retail chains, we realize that they are hardly administering prices above the competitive levels, and in fact they are more typically shaving a few cents off here and there as a result of the economies of large-scale operations and the principle that a large volume produces more profits than high mark-ups.

But if we stop and think, Galbraith’s whole game will be over. The name of that game is power to the Galbraiths of the world, to direct our lives in the way that he helped direct the price controls of World War II which he now pronounces “highly effective.” The only unifying thread running through Galbraith’s Keynesianism, market-”power” assertions, and “affluent-society” wastefulness theories is that we would all be better off to abdicate our tastes and preferences—and the market mechanisms through which they are expressed—in favor of the higher values and superior wisdom of the beautiful people, like Galbraith. From this perspective, it is only consistent that he does not bother to present serious evidence that would allow us to judge for ourselves.

Some thoughts on Andy Rooney's passing...

I'm copying Jeff Carter's article, verbatim, from this source.

No More Minutes With Andy Rooney         Jeff Carter
Sorry to hear Andy Rooney passed away. Barely a month past his resignation from 60 Minutes.

He was 92.

One of the reasons I am involved with building the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans is because of people like Andy Rooney. His generation isn’t getting any younger. The museum should have been built in the 1960's, when memories were fresher. But, Rooney’s generation came home from the war and went to work. They raised families and built businesses.

Few talked about their wartime experiences. They wanted to shield their kids from the pain. I haven’t ever talked with a person that was in battle that actually beats their chest and yells, “Look what I did”. Most of the ones that do weren’t ever under fire-at least according to my friends and acquaintances that were.

Today, we have a thing called Honor Flight. I think it’s great. They fly WW2 vets out to a memorial in Washington DC. My only regret is that I wish they would fly those same guys to New Orleans to visit the museum. Then we could get an oral history from them-something on tape to save for the generations to come. Something historians one hundred years from now could have access to.

Rooney and I differed politically. But, his accounts of World War Two resonate to this day and I believe his experiences are what caused him to be so antiwar in the later stages of his life. War is such a waste of resources.

But, sometimes they do have to be fought when left with no other practical choice. World War Two was one of those wars. It was truly a choice between freedom and totalitarianism. Human decency and dignity vs Destruction of humanity.

I hope that someday you make a trip to New Orleans to see the museum and learn about the war, and what can be done to stop future wars from being fought. Plus, I’d be happy if you sent a check to the museum and made a small donation. Every little bit helps, even twenty bucks.

Here is a little of what Andy Rooney witnessed and wrote after the war. It came from an article by Bethanne Kelly Patrick Military.com Columnist

Andrew A. Rooney set out from his hometown in the Albany, N.Y., area to nearby Colgate College, ready to play football and have a good time — until fate, in the form of World War II, intervened.

Rooney was drafted and sent to basic training at Fort Bragg, N.C. His most memorable achievement there, he noted, was managing to heist a chunk of ice back to the barracks on a hot night so that he and his cohorts could enjoy canteens full of cold water.

The unit soon had a cold shower of reality when they were shipped out to Europe. Because Rooney had a smidgen of education and a very brief amount of Army writing experience, he was assigned to “detached service” with the newly created Stars and Stripes newspaper. Housed in the vacated Times of London offices (that venerable journal had moved underground), the busy military newsroom covered events as diverse as VIP visits, unit softball games, and — oh, yes, combat. Rooney was detailed to the 8th Air Force and spent so much time observing its preparations, maneuvers, and landings that he co-authored his first bestseller, “Air Gunner,” during that time.

It was while Rooney was attached to the 8th that he witnessed a death terrible in its inevitability. A call came in that one bomber’s ball turret gunner was trapped. Operating in the bomber’s belly, ball turret gunners rotated their plastic “cages” for maximum target capability. On this particular aircraft, the rotational gears had jammed and the gunner could not return to a position where he could exit into the plane.

The bomber was losing altitude fast and would have to make a crash landing. Everyone –crew, observers, and especially the ball turret gunner — knew what was going to happen. The pilot ordered the crew to ditch everything to keep the plane in the air for a few more precious minutes, but still the wheels could not be brought down. “We all watched in horror as it happened,” Rooney writes in “My War.” We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.”

And then young Sgt. Rooney went back to his city desk and his work. “I returned to London that night shaken and unable to write the most dramatic, the most gruesome, the most heart-wrenching story I had ever witnessed,” he recalls. “Some reporter I was.”

Thanks Andy.

An excellent video of Thomas Sowell from Uncommon Knowledge

Peter Robinson's latest interview with Thomas Sowell:

Jay Lenno's Video Metaphor for Obama's Mortgage Relief Plan

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video translates a thousand-page bill....

Art imitates life; it works... and then the homeowner defaults anyway.

You just can't make this suff up... Why Steve Jobs could ride around without number plates on his Mercedes

According to this article, Steve Jobs could ride around without a number plate on his Mercedes because California law allows a new car to be driven without license plates for up to six months. So Steve made an arrangement with a dealer to allow him to lease a new Mercedes every six months, while the dealer could advertise the off-lease car as having been driven by none other than Jobs himself! A win-win all around.

Folks, you WANT income inequality: Part 1

Richard Epstein explains why income equality is good:

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

To summarize: the system of the United States encouraged and rewarded innovation. Innovation benefits society by a factor of between 10 and 20 more than what the entrepreneur receives. A Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs has wealth measured in billions, but their contributions to society would be much, much more than their wealth (most of which is locked up in stocks).

Does innovation happen elsewhere? Of course, but not as much of it. Talent and genius are spread equally around the world population. Which system rewards and develops talent better? The Soviet Union certainly had talented people who were discovered and nurtured, but the average citizen still had to stand in lines for basic items because the party mis-allocated scarce resources which had alternative uses. In China's Great Leap Forward, university professors were (literally) dragged out of their houses and forced to work in the fields. Was this a wise allocation of resources? Answer: soon afterwards, tens of millions starved to death. Western Europe, which our president wants us to emulate, has much wealth redistribution, and not much opportunity to raise out of your class. Not just Greece, but Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and even France are in trouble because their governments spent too much money not on infrastructure, but on transfer payments to unproductive citizens.

In the end, professor Epstein paraphrases a quote from Abraham Lincoln, "You don't make the poor rich by making the rich poor."

Here is the actual quote:
"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves." --Abraham Lincoln

Look at what wealth redistribution has done to scores of people: it has robbed them of dignity and incentive, and turned them into feral animals with base instincts. Are the riots in Greece or Oakland caused by extreme poverty or folks on the gravy train who have been sold a bill of goods (either overly-generous government benefits or, in the case of OccupyOakland, the promise of a job after graduation from college), only to have reality smack them upside the head?

I'll write more on this topic later. But what we see in Europe, and what we see in the Occupy___________ movements is the reality of "Chickens...coming home...to roost"