Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category

Pop! Goes the Housing Market

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

David Rosenberg has a set of very depressing charts:

More depressing charts at the link.

Keep in mind, folks, it’s all George Bush’s fault, and The Won is doing everything he can to make sure you remember that.

Quick Links

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Global Warming Freakout.

Most of the federal government hangs on the Commerce Clause. Here’s how that happened.
[Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.]

1848 Daguerreotypes Bring Middle America’s Past to Life
Got any old Daguerreotypes lying around? Look at them under a magnifying glass — or even a 60x microscope. You might find surprising detail.

Smug asshole Schumer wants to kill political speech.

EPA wants to ban lead ammo.
Quote of the Day in bold:

Naturally, the NSSF stresses the reasonable, Fudd angle, telling you to write your unaccountable, unfireable, unelected EPA bureaucrat and tell them:

* There is no scientific evidence that the use of traditional ammunition is having an adverse impact on wildlife populations.

Which is, I suppose, more diplomatic than what I would want to write, which would be more along the lines of

* There is anecdotal evidence that the banning of traditional ammunition would have an adverse impact on government bureaucrat populations.

Say Uncle says gives the other QotD, the core definition of being a gun nut:

If you fuck with me bad enough, I’ll kill your ass.

He elaborates. Read the whole thing. And see this at Smallest Minority.

Best Investment Advice. Roughly speaking: pay off consumer debt, and put your assets in cash. The tsunami is coming, folks.

If this is true, then everybody involved at the IRS must be fired.
Immediately. No excuses.”
Oh,yes. Oh, very yes indeed. If your group is pro-Israeli, you will be singled out for extra scrutiny on your application for tax-exempt status “to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Blatant tyranny. These policies “constitute an explicit admission of the crudest form of viewpoint discrimination, and one which is both totally un-American and flatly unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”

Traction

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Billy Beck, talking about tractors:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is about managing the immutable reality of mechanical systems. People can bullshit each other — and even themselves — over concepts in all sorts of ways. When concepts are forged in steel, that becomes impossible. You don’t get to bullshit your way around a 5/8″ bolt. You just don’t. When you’re dealing with a flywheel pilot bearing, no mental substitutions — whether from sloppiness or outright psychosis — will suffice: that bearing is only what it is, and your mind had better be right about everything about it.

Robert Pirsig once wrote a very ridiculous book, but he wrote it about a very serious subject.

There is great philosophy in machines.

Accompanied by some heart-warming shop photos.

[Hey, Billy! I've done a couple of head rebuilds, and my question is, where are you getting the gasket sets for this beast?]

This prompted Mike Soja:

I was standing in front of a green hooded idling number of about half the age of Beck’s specimen, while the man I was there to do business with slowly hand pumped diesel into the fuel neck from a large tank out behind his corn crib. Over the rumble, he pointed to the name plate at the prominent place on the nose and asked, “Ever see one of those before?” The plate said, “Deutz”, and I allowed that I hadn’t. He said it was a three cylinder, air cooled.

[He] remarked, “I’d like to buy a new one of these, but they don’t make them anymore.”

I asked, “Did they go out of business?”

“No. They just can’t make them. The government says they have to be water cooled, now.”

And that opened up whole new areas of conversation.

I’ve whacked out about half of that; see the whole thing for the flavor.

I’ve done volunteer teaching of fifth grade science labs. They stopped doing that;it was too damn much trouble, too messy, too loud.

I don’t know how much science got through, but if I managed to get across the faintest glimmer that the universe does what it does, and not what you think it ought to do, I succeeded.

Anybody who thinks economics doesn’t follow that same principle is advocating ruin, death, and chaos.

The Pantry Proof

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

From Staghounds, a simple way to show collectivists that central planning will always lead to disaster.

It’s too short to excerpt, and Staghounds deserves the traffic for coming up with this.

Via Robb Allen at Sharp as a Marble, who does as good a job at summing up as possible: “You ever run out of sugar?”

Evocative, if not exactly illustrative, from Taking Hayek Seriously: 20 miles of empty lumber rail cars in Eastern Oregon.

[I'm posting Ransom's image here because he's having trouble getting the image to show up in-line.]

QotD: “Governments Redistribute Poverty, Not Wealth”

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Doc Zero write, “Value is Knowledge“:

there is very little feedback from the free market to the State. The State conjures deficit money from thin air, and believes itself capable of sustaining unlimited losses in the service of a “just cause.” Ideology is pursued in defiance of cost and benefit analysis. Politicians rarely suffer personal consequences for disastrous economic decisions. In fact, they have a good chance of manipulating such disasters into golden opportunities to acquire more power for themselves.

The State is exceptionally poor at analyzing the true value of anything. The lens of ideology is filled with clouds of hatred, occasionally sundered by blinding flashes of righteousness. The actual value of health care and medical insurance was almost completely invisible to the architects of ObamaCare.

The great lesson of socialism will be repeated one more time, as it has played out around the world, without exception: governments redistribute poverty, not wealth. Some people will find ways to make money in the dreary twilight of an economy where the light of knowledge through value has been blotted out. You probably won’t be one of them.

And this:

The masterminds behind ObamaCare will quietly relish the collapse of the private health insurance industry, which was one of their primary objectives all along.

It’s crucial to understand that this is their objective because they believe the marketplace is inherently evil. They think they’re doing the right thing, that they are making the world a better place.

They believe that wealth is money, gold, wampum. Beads and trinkets.

Doc has it right: what has real value is information. “Information wants to be free,” yes, but socialists believe that the government can own all the information, and hand it out in equal little chunks out to everybody. They don’t understand that different people in different situations place different value on a given piece of information.

Out of Context

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Your President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

President Obama on controlling the debt: “Somehow people say, why are you doing that, I’m not sure that’s good politics. I’m doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it’s the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country….

He’s talking about controlling the debt, and I should be thrilled with that, but this quote just scares the pants off me.

I’m reading that bit about politics and “right thing to do” as “I don’t care what you morons think, I know what’s best for you and I’m going to give it to you good and hard.”

I’m reading “should learn that lesson about me” as “the gloves are coming off”. I hate that phrase in his mouth. [update: Moreover, he's talking down to us: "You children, you."]

And most of all I’m reading “hard choices” as “no choice at, you’ll do what I say”.

As for “I said I was going to do it”, yes. I believe that. Thing is, I think he’s talking about stuff he and his mentors were talking about back before anybody knew he was, not what he said in the 2008 Presidential Campaign.

Listen to things he lists as examples of things he said he would do and did. Stuff he doesn’t like, doesn’t care about, like the oil spill or Afghanistan, he plays golf. Things he does care about, like health care and financial reform, or firing a disapproving general, he bulls through ruthlessly.

Jesus, this man scares the hell out of me.

Via John Lott.

When The Dam Breaks

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Watch this to understand what’s at stake with uncontrolled immigration into the United States. Easily debunks the idea that we need to accept immigrants as a “safety valve” for the third world.

Via SilenceDogood2010.

On Ramp to The Road to Serfdom

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Or maybe it’s the off-ramp, I dunno. Depends on if you’re talking about socialism, the actual road to serfdom, or F.A. Hayek’s explanation of how to avoid it.

Anyway, Thomas J. DiLorenzo of The Mises Institute has an excellent introduction to the ideas and history of Hayek’s clear-eyed refutation of the myth that the state can direct the economy, even intimate personal lives of its citizens, without falling into despotism.

When Friedrich A. Hayek published his classic book, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944 he was loudly denounced by academic statist apologists in England, where he resided at the time, and in America. In the preface to the 1976 edition of the book Hayek noted that a prominent philosopher even denounced the book despite admitting that he had not read it! But average citizens did read it. The book was a gigantic success in America, quickly selling over half a million copies. Millions of copies of a condensed Reader’s Digest version of the book were also sold and widely read.

The court historians in academe were not concerned about Hayek’s age-old warnings about the dangers that centralized political power posed to liberty and prosperity, for they intended to be beneficiaries of that power as well-paid advisers to the state. Millions of average citizens were not as enthusiastic, especially Americans who, during the war, had experienced oppressive and confiscatory taxation, the slavery of military conscription, government-imposed product rationing, pervasive shortages of basic staples, and endless bureaucratic bungling.

[My emphasis.]

Galvanizing, isn’t it? All that rationing we hear about in the histories wasn’t just the heroic sacrifices of patriotic citizens; it was the direct result of FDR’s ham-handed control of the economy and society itself.

It’s often said that Stalin won the war on the Eastern front despite his best efforts to lose, by purging his best generals and foolishly sending his subjects to die in the German Wehrmacht meatgrinder to no good result.

Here we see Stalin’s ally, FDR, presented in the same light. Economic historians are beginning to understand that FDR didn’t rescue America from the Depression, he worsened it, lengthened it. Then he used the war as an excuse to tighten the straps even further.

How quickly might the war have been over had FDR unleashed the American economy? Would our enemies have dared to attack or harass the American powerhouse of the 80s and 90s?

We’ll never know. But we’re in another war right now, and our Commander in Chief is more interested in fighting American industry and business, and in controlling the lives of we citizens, than he is in defeating America’s enemies.

That cannot end well. Hayek explains exactly how far down the road we’ve gotten.

Teachers’ Unions = Thieves’ Guilds

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

This graph from the Cato Institute is making a pretty big splash over at Big Government, among other places, and rightfully so:
Coulson-Cato-PS-Cost-Scores-2010-s

I have two problems with the graphic:

First, the scale for expenditure per child is absolute, in constant dollars. It shows an almost four-fold increase. However, it commits a cardinal sin: it doesn’t start at zero. This makes the increase look worse than it is.

Second, the scale for “achievement” is not absolute, it’s relative, a percentage of the starting point. It has no units; we don’t know what’s actually being measured here, and it’s hard to understand where we could expect the achievement to be, given the increase in expenditure.

I think the easiest way to present that would be to make the expenditure scale a percentage as well.

If we do that, a four-fold increase would display as a four hundred percent improvement.

The original graph scales achievement from -10% to +100%. A 100% improvement would represent a doubling in achievement. We had a four-fold increase in expenditure; we’d like to see a four-fold increase in achievement.

The actual achievement increase wanders around less than 10%, except for science, which falls off to about MINUS 5% and then stays constant.

If we rescaled the graph so that both sides went to 400%, the achievement lines would be essentially flat; the variation would be not much more than the line thickness.

As bad as this graph is; the achievement scale has actually been magnified so you can see the variation. The actual situation is even worse.

Since we don’t know what’s actually being measured by the “achievement” scale, let me take a wild-ass guess that the original metric has itself shifted over the years. Educators are grading themselves on the curve, and that curve has been adjusted so that student achievement can at least be shown to remain constant.

The expenditure scale is in “constant 2009 dollars”.

I bet that if “achievement” were being measured in, say, “constant 2009 grade point averages”, the achievement graphs would be decline almost as precipitately as the expenditures have risen.

Jon Stewart, Iconoclast

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

Was he really this good all through the Bush years?

Jon Stewart traces the Presidential campaign to reduce dependence on foreign oil all the way back to Nixon.

Watch all the way to the very last word, which will take your breath away.

And is the complete and total truth.

I thought Stewart attacked Bush because he was just another leftist hater. No, actually, it turns out he was just doing his job, and mercilessly attacking the Man in the Oval.

It took him a bit to find his stride with Obama, but he was one of the first to find true satire about the one, and to step up fearlessly.

There are many, many leftist commentators out there who have my contempt for only just now realizing what a god awful disaster Obama is.

Stewart’s not on my list; he understands what a god awful disaster the American Presidency is.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

via Charles at Little Green Footballs.