Market? Shmarket.

A lede from Real Clear Politics today:

STUDENT: Hi, I am Mario. I am a student here at Ivy Tech. My question is if community college becomes free, do you think the value of an associates degree will fall?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Absolutely not. I have been asked this question before, and I do not know where it is coming from.

For the first time I think our Boy King is telling the truth.

Told Ya.

Yep, Jonah pretty much says it all.

If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place.

Rectal Cranial Inversion Epidemic In Brussels

Well, the EU assf@!kery has reached a New Low.

The EU on Monday unveiled a "single European transport area" aimed at enforcing "a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers" by 2050.

The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.

Top of the EU's list to cut climate change emissions is a target of "zero" for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU's future cities.

Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto "alternative" means of transport.

"That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres," he said. "Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour."

Best comment so far is from London Dave, who says "Thank goodness we won World War 2, and a bunch of crazed totalitarian Nazis didn't get to enforce their crazy will on the rest of us."

The Stench of Hypocricy Rises Into My Nostrils...

President Obama is congratulating Brazil on its plans to drill for oil offshore.

“By some estimates, the oil you recently discovered off the shores of Brazil could amount to twice the reserves we have in the United States.  We want to work with you.  We want to help with technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely, and when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.  At a time when we’ve been reminded how easily instability in other parts of the world can affect the price of oil, the United States could not be happier with the potential for a new, stable source of energy.”

  Just so we're clear, this is the same guy  who called a moratorium on drilling last summer and refuses to issue new drilling permits, causing the loss of about 20,000 jobs -- if the administration's own figures are to be believed. US domestic oil production is expected to drop by 220,000 barrels per day in 2011.

On Clocks and Cleaning

Reading tea leaves is always tricky. It looks as though the Democrat party is about to get what they richly deserve, (...waits for the cheers and raucous howls of derision to die down...) although its not yet clear if the electorate will deliver a mild slap upside the head or beat them like a rented mule.

Lets be cautious, though.

What drives the voters is not be a sudden conversion to Republican principals of smaller government and fiscal conservatism. Just like in the last election, the electorate is pissed off and is about to let the man in charge and his buddies know it.

Which means that the next set of ample buttocks planted in those House and Senate offices better fix some of the problems or they'll get kicked even harder in a few short years.

Milton Friedman outlined the problem and the tendencies of those in power much better than I could:

"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.”

Lets not get cocky, guys. OK? Please?

A License to Print Money

I've heard a lot of complaints recently about the Federal Reserve, some of it pointy headed econobabble about quantitative easing and interest rates, and some of it Wookie-suit hysteria about conspiracies and Bilderbergs and the Trilateral Comission and so on.

I tend to be suspicious of both jargon I can't understand and large conspiracy theories, but there's something just not right about this story I heard on NPR (I try to keep an open mind) about the Fed's plan to buy up mortgage backed securities. .

The team spent six weeks coming up with a plan of attack, and 15 months actually buying mortgage-backed bonds, all of which came with a government guarantee that they’d be paid back even if the borrowers defaulted.


The program’s intent was to keep interest rates low, and slow the decline in housing prices. The team ended up buying more than a fifth of all of the government-backed bonds on the market.
"It's possible I was buying the mortgage on my own house," says Nathaniel Wuerffel. "Very possible."

In the end, they came very, very close to their target: They told us they were just 61 cents short. (In other words, they bought $1,249,999,999,999.39 worth of mortgage-backed bonds.)
The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power: It can create money out of thin air, whenever it decides to do so. So, Dzina explains, the mortgage team would decide to buy a bond, they’d push a button on the computer — "and voila, money is created."

Does anyone else feel like maybe it shouldn't be quite that easy to create money?

In Which We Restore Your Faith In Government

You will be as astonished as I am to learn that the passage of the health care bill will make it harder to balance the budget.

You had better sit down for the next one and ensure that you have a nourishing and restorative drink handy. It turns out that some people at the SEC were ignoring their responsibilities and instead of watching out for nogoodniks, they were downloading giant amounts of PORN. 

Well, if this doesn't restore your faith in the benevolent hand of our central government, I dunno what will.

FairTax March In Washington

Is anyone going to the FairTax march in Washington on April 15?

I'll be there with my wife and kids.

Say 'hi' if you see me.

I'll be the guy in the Rothbard t-shirt: "Anti-State, Anti-War, Free Markets."


(PS. Anti-War doesn't mean pantywaist. I'm in favor of kicking ass when necessary.) 

In Which We Perform a Public Service

We take our role as disinterested and unbiased observers of public events very seriously, here at the palatial MANP Blog Command Center.*

And therefore we like to steer the teeming multitudes in our audience to useful, helpful articles like this one, which lays out in clear simple terms what the Congress in DeeCee spends our money on.

Unsurprisingly the top 3 are, Social Security/Medicare, Defense, and Anti-Poverty Programs. Its important to realize that things like foreign aid don't even register on the list.

I mention this as there are quite a few folks who think we should cut our entire foreign aid budget. While that might please some people who spend their time in an earsplitting snit because we hand over 3 billion clams a year to Israel, its unlikely to help much with the deficit. 

As the brilliant Megan McArdle put it, balancing the budget by cutting foreign aid "is like trying to pay off your credit cards by slashing your chewing gum budget." If you don't read her blog, you should start. 


*This part is a lie. In an effort to make our ideological enemies look stupid, we employ a variety of rhetorical tricks that include -- but are not limited to-- cherrypicking, straw man arguments,  red-herrings and suppressed correlatives. 

We've also been known to stretch the truth to justify a pleasing bit of invective or turn of phrase.  No notification is given when these practices are employed.

China? Pull The Other One

Put on your Jan Brady hat and say it with me: "China China China!"

Malthus.

Global Cooling.

Killer Bees.

Hetero AIDS.

Ebola.

The USSR.

Bird Flu.

Global Warming.

These were all big "gotchas" that were supposed to zap us over that last few decades that all turned out to be great big nothings. Now it's China I'm supposed to worry about. A country of 1.3 billion where a billion of 'em live in huts and make a few dollars a week. A tyranny that can't build buildings that can stand up to earthquakes and won't let its subjects log onto the internet. No free market, no free government, and no free press.

Folks, we've been through this before, and its name was Japan. They got some money and tried to be America and they fell flat. But at the time I had friends aping Gore Vidal about how we were going to be Japan's boutique, etc. etc. One of the most ridiculous books I read at the time was "The Coming War With Japan" by a couple of guys who were all spun up about Japan remilitarizing. What a joke. As if building an aircraft carrier (one of the theses of the aforementioned book) would have made up for 50 years of lost naval tradition and practice.

China's in the same boat. They've financed a ton of our debt, and sure, that's annoying now that we've overspent, but the idea that they'd call in that marker before we right our financial ship of state is ludicrous. The Chinese are making a big stretch and a big posture puff-up right now, but it's unsustainable, and when they crash we'll just buy our crap from someone else, but they'll have to worry about how to keep a billion people too happy or too cowed to put an end to their latest dynasty - the ChiComs.

Now, if they made good cigars I'd be a little worried, but as it stands, let 'em have their fun and don't worry about it.

That Was Easy

Here in the not-potato fields, we sometimes fret and froth about that bugaboo of all bugaboos, taxes. No one truly likes to be taxed, but I think most folks realize that some levy is necessary to keep the Wheels of State crunching and grinding away. Personally, I'm okay with an income tax (I know, much like a dog that grows up with clipped ears is okay with them), and if left 100% to my own devices I prefer a 100% flat tax. So what would a federal tax look like in Smashtopia?

My team of experts would figure out what the magic # is for a flat tax rate. To keep it simple and round, let's pretend that the magic # is somewhere around 15%. I've read as low as 13% and as high as 20%, but the Federal Gubmint in Smashtopia would have rather less on its plate than the current one, so let's play at 15%. The tax structure would look like this:

Rate for "top" 10% of income earners: 20%

Rate for "middle" 80% of income earners: 15%

Rate for "bottom" 10% of income earners: 10%

All "second taxes" - cap gains, etc., are taxed at one tier lower (= zero tax on "second taxes" for "bottom")

Corporations play by the same rules.

And that's it. No exceptions. No exemptions.

"But Smasher, that's a progressive tax - it's not fair!"

That's right - it's a "flat, progressive" tax combo. But everyone pays, so everyone's invested in the idea of more efficient government, and the little bits of progressivism are blatant, unfair, and simple to see. And simple to calculate.

If states want to do something similar and throw in their own types of exemptions to encourage business, marriage, home ownership, whatever, then fine, have at it. But the Federal version stays simple and clean.

I like it.

GDP? BFD, FYI.

Everyone was shouting yesterday about the rise in GDP -- we're up to 3.6% increase, apparently. There was barely restrained glee from the White House and mumbling from various parts of Congress.

Three quick points:

1) This has very little to do with the $780 billion stimulus plan that was passed by Congress earlier this year. Most of that money hasn't been spent yet.

2) Mainly responsible for the increase are Cash For Clunkers and the $8000 new-homebuyer tax credit. On the one hand, paying people to buy cars and houses is odd. Still it puts money back into the hands of the American people, instead of leaving the Congresscritters to decide what to do with it. So I can't complain too much.

3) What really steams me about this phenomenon is the repeated description of Cash for Clunkers and the $8,000 tax credit as "government spending ."

What a crock of shit. Why does the government reduce taxes and consider it spending? In order for that to make any sense at all, they'd have to assume that they actually own all your money, and they are entitled to tax every cent of it.

I Hold These Truths to be Pretty Darn Clear (Even If Nobody Else Does)

While there is plenty to argue about today, these issues should not be on the list.
Afghanistan.
Somehow we confused fighting a war in Afghanistan with our national interest, which is keeping the US safe by killing terrorists. Since the Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is convinced the United States is fighting an global anti-Muslim war, could we find some way to fight them that doesn't hand them a propaganda victory every time we drop a bomb?

Iran
 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does say some crazy shit, but that doesn't mean his opponent Mousavi is a noble humanitarian. Mousavi was Prime Minister when Iran founded the Hezbollah, if that gives you some clue to his political leanings. 

I know lazy reporters call him  a reformer, but he just wants to make Iran a better theocracy, not turn it into the 51st state. If this guy was running the show in Tehran, the Flying Spit Index might dip, but other than that, we wouldn't notice.

Two more things from the bleeding obvious pile.
1) Iran's internal struggles are none of our business. Can we focus on their nuclear program?
2) Even if Mousavi was Thomas Jefferson come again, any support from the US would hurt him way more than it helped.


Back Home
The US is a not-particularly-ideological center-right country and that isn't going to change. What's new is we're now an angry center-right country. Gas prices are going nowhere good, the house is an unreliable ATM, people are getting laid off all over the place, and we're running two wars.

The defining political characteristic of 2009 is not a resurgence of racism or socialism*, but anger. The electorate threw Bush out of office, and is impatiently waiting for Obama to fix things.
The key to political victory in the next couple years is figuring out why the electorate is angry (not hard) and what to do about it (very hard). Will the voters give them chance? Angry people are tough to predict. Anyone sitting in Congress or the Oval Office should try very hard not to make them angrier.


*All the bloviating about racism and socialism is "fun", but ultimately pointless. Being nasty has a long and glorious tradition in this Republic. Go read what Benjamin Bache wrote about George Washington in the Aurora after the Jay Treaty was signed, if you don't believe me.

Also, most of the internet political readers ARE ideological and do have a clear political philosophy, so if you're angry about creeping socialism, and have proof, you may indeed be livid, but I'm not talking about you. You've probably been mad for a while.  We are hugely outnumbered by the not-particularly-ideological and we live in their world.

Our Imaginary Vegan Ancestors (Of Whom There Are None)

I elevated this from comments because I have a cogent rebuttal. (Astonishing as it sounds.)

In this fantasy pre-historic cave-man land that you all seem to think you know so well, meat would probably have been damn hard to come by. Most days, if you were lucky enough to eat, you'd be eating vegan.

Well, no. Vegans don't use any animal products at all -- that means no honey, no leather, no fur, no silk. I was once told (but can't be bothered to confirm) that many vegans won't drink certain brands of beer as some brewers use gelatin in filters during brewing. A vegan lifestyle for our prehistoric forebears is unlikely.

But if you just want to restrict your comments to food, well, you're still wrong. Our ancestors ate all the way up and down the food chain. We share about 98-99% of our DNA with chimps, and if they can eat termite larvae, so can we.

But the most powerful argument against prehistoric humanity living in some kind of vegan paradise comes not from archaeology or sociology but from mathematics. You simply can't eat only vegetables and fruit and ingest enough calories or enough protein to survive outdoors, especially in a place that has a winter. (Note: I'm talking about pre-cultivation history here. Once you settle down and plant rice or wheat, things change a little)

And if you want more evidence, you should look at the great die-off of animal species that happened everywhere that humans emerged from Africa and spread around the world.

In North America, dozens of species disappeared 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, after the arrival of humans, including mammoths and mastodons (both relatives of modern elephants), giant ground sloths, tapirs, a large camel, llamas, a large-horned bison, prong-horned antelopes, oxen, a type of mountain goat, a giant armadillo and the glyptodonts, large mammals covered with solid armor. Large predators such as the saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and some bears also died off.

Just to make it clear: they died off because WE ATE THEM. A LOT.

The Plow, The Surplus and The Idiot

Civilization began in the great river valleys in Africa, Asia, and Mesopotamia. Every year the waters would rise and fall, refreshing the soil, irrigating the land.

But it wasn't until we began to farm that we stayed in one place to harvest and plant again. And it wasn;t until we developed tools like the plow that our nascent nations were able to produce a surplus of food, and allow some of the population to spend time not hunting or growing food.

The creation of the plow allows priests, merchants etc. to genuinely emerge and flourish.

I told you that so I could ask you this:

The following comes from a Vegan Roomate Wanted ad on Craigslist (Best Of). Do you believe, as I do, that our western Democracies must have an amazing amount of surplus production to allow this sort of person to appear?:

Vegan household only. No animal products in the house; no new leather shoes (I am not going to shun you for an old pair of hiking shoes�I am an avid dumpster diver and may have old stuff in my life too that is on its last round), no honey, no bee pollen, no wool, no down comforters. I am a liberationist animal rights person who has a total commitment to veganism. It is a defining feature in my life.

I take care of inside-only cats. It is important to be aware of the cats when opening the door, because they are inside only,but they are older and mostly you do not have to worry about escapees, just when bringing in groceries or something like that. I scoop the cat litter everyday and vacuum very often. I am very clean about the cats. They have been with me for a decade and are the sweetest older cats ever. I do not support the domestication of animals�they are rescue kitties from the streets. Their names are Mulder, Bromden, Theo, and Zen Mama.

It is important for me to live in a straight-edge environment. Please, no alcohol or pot or anything else in the house. Please be sober in the house, even if it is not your lifestyle.

I am an environmentally aware person. I do not have an air conditioning unit, I use the heat on low in the winter (lots of layers). I shop at People�s coop and Food Fight!, I recycle, reuse, reduce. I am very DIY. I do not have a garden (there is hardly a yard here). But you can bring compost waste to various places around town if you like. I am childless by choice and do not want any kids living here, sorry parents.

True Dat

In some left-leaning circles, Texas is more of a punchline than an actual place. Democrats in places like New York and California look proudly at their environmental policies and social safety net and cringe at the thought of living in some unspeakably sordid place like Texas or "the South."

And yet, while New York and California have multi-billion dollar budget deficits, Texas doesn't.

This NYT piece by Ross Douthat's is worth a look , especially if any of you are fans of limited government.

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Its a good piece. Read the whole thing.

While We're On the Subject of Statist Idiocy, Theft and Medical Records...

If you march into your doctor's office and demand (or even ask nicely for) your medical records, the surly bitch* behind the counter has to give them to you.

Why? Because they are yours. Your medical records are your property and you own them.

So why don't you get a say in this government-inspired crusade to turn your paper records into bits and bytes?

When you go to a doctor's office for the first time, they make you sign a release listing the people with whom your medical affairs may be discussed. But apparently the privacy regulations don't cover changing your records from paper to a digital, interchangeable format that can be accessed from any facility in the USA.

While I understand the advantages of networked systems**, I wonder why We The People don't get to opt out of a system that could have our personal medical data stolen by Russian hackers and sold to anyone who wants a list of all the people in Nebraska with a prescription for Oxycodone.

I'm also not thrilled about the records coming into the possession of nosy and officious government burocrats who decide that since Joe Smith took Valium for nerves 10 years ago, he can't fly a plane or own a gun.

Finally, the glibness with which meatpuppet talking heads throw around the term "digital medical records" just irks me. Its pretty clear they've never had to make 2 stakeholders agree on a common standard for anything, to say nothing of every doctor's office in the country.

*Apologies if you work in administration in a medical facility and are a sweet angel whose voice is likened to the choirs of heaven. There should be more of you and its a pity you don't work in my neighborhood.

**Blah blah blah, waste fraud and abuse. Blah blah blah improved efficiency. Blah blah blah, better understanding of the patient. Some of these are good arguments, but the downside of digitizing the nation's medical records isnot getting enough news.

Silicon And Its Discontents

Technology scares me. I still love it, but with the Greatest Generation of Social Engineers in the White House, the implications for personal freedom and privacy are quietly terrifying.

The guys over at Google keep talking about 'scale,' which is the notion that a technology solution for a given problem can serve a very large number of customers, more efficiently than whatever it was you had before.

A simple example is the web server -- publish your blog once and anyone with a computer can read your paranoid scribbling and profane ranting.

But with scale comes the potential for centralized control and high levels of surveillance.

Amazon just deleted -- of all things -- George Orwell's novel 1984 from all the Kindle e-books in the USA. Apparently the publisher didn't have the rights to sell digital versions in the USA (oops), so Amazon deleted the book from the account of everyone who bought it and issued them a refund. I suppose I'm naive, but I never realized to me that Amazon could reach out and delete anything they sold from a hard drive.

Legally, Amazon has a watertight case. Without a 'recall' they'd be an accomplice in selling stolen property, but it's still terrifying. Its only a short hop from deleting what I sold you to knowing the entire contents of the hard drive that you bought, own and consider 'private'.

Will ebooks be as ubiquitous as ipods and cell phones in 20 years? Will vendors like Amazon know what you have on your personal hard drive and be able to ban it whenever they want?

Next on my list of Ominous Developments -- digitizing medical records. Hailed as a panacea for eliminating waste and inefficiency in the health care system, this is actually a large crock of shit, and anyone who has ever worked on enterprise level databases and applications knows it.

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh computerized their entire health care system in 2002, requiring nearly everything that was once written down to be typed or entered into a computer. The system was so badly designed that in the emergency room, one doctor had to attend a patient while the other typed instructions into the computer. Emergency transfer patients began dying twice as fast, after the new system was installed. Nearly everything else the doctors did was slower and less efficient.

In 2003, Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA tore out a computerized health system and junked it, after the doctors refused to use it.

And even when the systems work, the fact that they are so massive and scalable means that your privacy, your rights and your job are more at risk than ever.

Just a week ago, the Canadian Press reported that hackers broke into the Alberta Health Services computer system and viewed the medical files of 11,582 people, including names, addresses, health-care numbers, lab test results and diagnoses, officials said yesterday.

In the past, this blog has mentioned the Virginia state site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. Hackers copied, then deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Still want the results of your AIDS test, or the dermatologists record of your genital wart removal, or your prescription for Prozac or Viagra up there?

Yurrp Is Odd

The other day on the radio I heard two stories that reinforced to me just how odd Europe is.

One of these reports was a refutation of the notion that women on corporate boards do a better job of governance than men, but included in the analysis was the fact that in Norway, 40% of the seats on corporate boards are reserved for women, with the result that in Norway you find women who sit on the boards of 8 or 10 companies, which is apparently rather a lot of work.

The other report was a mention of a brothel in Germany (where prostitution is legal) that offers a 5% discount if you arrive by bike or public transportation.

Barney Frank: So Easy To Hate

I don't need another reason to loathe that odious, bombastic shit Barney Frank. But in its generosity, the Universe keeps providing them.

As we all know, General Motors is firing workers and closing plants and facilities as part of it's restructuring plan. One of the facilities was a parts distribution warehouse in Norton, Mass that employed 90 people. When he learned that a GM facility in his district was about to be closed, Rep. Frank (D) (duh) called GM CEO Fritz Henderson and got the warehouse a 7-month extension.

When you are the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, you can do that kind of thing. Lex bovis, non jovis*, after all.

Apparently Frank's long experience not working in the car industry (or any other industry) means he knows better than the poor bastards who are trying to unfuck GM. Or maybe the kind of arrogant, ignorant, dictatorial idiocy that would not be out of place on a Soviet apparachik just comes naturally to him.

If this is the kind of enlightened stewardship practiced by the US Congress, we might as well give up now and start importing all our cars from China.


*The law is for the cattle, not the gods.