Surreal is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year because it was looked up significantly more frequently by users in 2016 than it was in previous years, and because there were multiple occasions on which this word was the one clearly driving people to their dictionary.
There are essentially two kinds of high-volume lookups that we track: perennial words that are looked up day-in and day-out, and words that spike because of news events, politics, pop culture, or sports. By analyzing these spikes, we can get a sense as to what significant events sent people to the dictionary, and sometimes, what people think about those events.
Surreal had three major spikes in interest that were higher in volume and were sustained for longer periods of time than in past years. In March, the word was used in coverage of the Brussels terror attacks. Then, in July, we saw the word spike again: it was used in descriptions of the coup attempt in Turkey and in coverage of the terrorist attack in Nice. Finally, we saw the largest spike in lookups for surreal following the U.S. election in November. […]
In the future, Americans — assuming there are any left — will look back at 2016 and remark: “What the HELL?”
They will have a point. Over the past few decades, we here at the Year in Review have reviewed some pretty disturbing years. For example, there was 2000, when the outcome of a presidential election was decided by a tiny group of deeply confused Florida residents who had apparently attempted to vote by chewing on their ballots.
Then there was 2003, when a person named “Paris Hilton” suddenly became a major international superstar, despite possessing a level of discernible talent so low as to make the Kardashians look like the Jackson 5.
There was 2006, when the vice president of the United States — who claimed he was attempting to bring down a suspected quail — shot a 78-year-old man in the face, only to be exonerated after an investigation revealed that the victim was an attorney.
And — perhaps most inexplicable of all — there was 2007, when millions of people voluntarily installed Windows Vista.
Yes, we’ve seen some weird years. But we’ve never seen one as weird as 2016. This was the Al Yankovic of years. If years were movies, 2016 would be “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” If years were relatives, 2016 would be the uncle who shows up at your Thanksgiving dinner wearing his underpants on the outside. […]
Sigh…
Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!
There are books that every libertarian should read and books every libertarian has read, but those circles don’t perfectly overlap. Here are 13 diverse book recommendations for well-rounded thinkers.
I’ve read about half of these. I give the list +1 for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and for anything written by Thomas Sowell, who once said, "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." I’ll allow that Twain himself couldn’t have put that one any better.
But I give the list -1 for Paterson’s The God of the Machine. What an incredibly odd read that is. I found Paterson’s use of pseudo-technical terms to describe economic relationships both tedious and distracting. So I’d say read one of Russell Roberts’ books instead.
The older books on this list (Bastiat’s, Smith’s, and Spooner’s) are available for little or nothing to Kindle readers.
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela — When hunger drew tens of thousands of Venezuelans to the streets last summer in protest, President Nicolas Maduro turned to the military to manage the country’s diminished food supply, putting generals in charge of everything from butter to rice.
But instead of fighting hunger, the military is making money from it, an Associated Press investigation shows. That’s what grocer Jose Campos found when he ran out of pantry staples this year. In the middle of the night, he would travel to an illegal market run by the military to buy corn flour — at 100 times the government-set price.
“The military would be watching over whole bags of money,” Campos said. “They always had what I needed.”
With much of the oil country on the verge of starvation and malnourished children dying in pediatric wards, food trafficking has become big business in Venezuela. And the military is at the heart of the graft, according to documents and interviews with more than 60 officials, company owners and workers, including five former generals.
As a result, food is not reaching those who most need it. […]
Saying “The Russians hacked the election” is really lame in my view. It’s the kind of statement intended to get a knee-jerk reaction from the implication that Russians hacked the voting process. I don’t know of any reputable claims of that happening and I don’t believe it did.
Since the Democrats don’t disavow the content of their hacked e-mails, their claim that they were injured by the release of those messages basically shows that they were hoist by their own petard. "Oops… we didn’t want that to go public."
But all that said, a separate and more important point is that the U.S. isn’t blameless in this regard. This article from the Independent Institute’s The Beacon recounts ways the U.S. has interfered in the elections or governments of other countries.
The FBI and CIA are in agreement that Russia in some way interfered in the U.S. election. What is known so far is that Russian hackers were able to access the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Hackers also breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
According to sources, the Russian government sought to hinder the Clinton campaign and work to assist Trump in winning the presidency. […]
People seem floored by these revelations. How could Russia interfere in the workings of the U.S. political process? How dare they try to manipulate the outcome of a presidential election?!
I’m reminded of a Biblical passage.
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?
Those barking loudly over Russia’s involvement with the U.S. political process would do well to take a look at the history of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. government has a long history, some two hundred years long, of interfering in the politics of other countries—and we’re not just talking emails. […]
1898—In the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, the U.S. government invaded the Philippines, reneging on a deal with Philippine rebels to help the nation win independence and overthrowing the country’s new government.
1903—The U.S. government helped Panama secede from Colombia. […]
1953—The U.S. government launched operations to overthrow the government in Guatemala. […]
1958-1960—CIA engineered at least three coups in Laos.
1966—Kwame Nkrumah was the Prime Minister of Ghana when the country gained independence from the British. The U.S. government was not fond of his socialist, anti-imperialist views. As such, the U.S. government, via the CIA, worked to oust him in a coup in 1966.
(Note: the above is woefully incomplete. For a couple more list of U.S. efforts to interfere in other countries’ governance, see here and here.) […]
Here’s an interesting video from MTV, who evidently still don’t understand the backlash against political correctness involved in the recent election. (Robby Soave has another good column about that, btw.)
[…] This is a remarkable document not so much because of the individual “resolutions” but of the source — one of those nefarious multinational corporations that specifically tries to sell fake coolness and hipness to youngsters that progressives are always railing about — and the tin-ear quality of its overall effect.
Whole swaths of corporate America — especially in the entertainment industry — seem utterly convinced that their audiences are irredeemably stupid, racist, homophobic, and beneath contempt. All this, despite massive strides toward equality under the law and growing comfort with all sorts of ethnic, racial, sexual, and lifestyle diversity. […]
The MTV vid goes beyond mere virtue-signaling into uncharted territory of contempt and spite that works to undermine all feelings of common cause that might actually make for an even more-open and tolerant United States. In this, it rivals the sort of remonstrations emanating from the pages of another hugely powerful corporate entity, The New York Times.
Tomorrow’s the day the members of the Electoral College meet to elect the next president. Since I visited the HamiltonElectors site this week, Google Ads has been showing me things like this since.
I thought the "Make Russia Great Again" cap was a clever touch.
Here’s the most recent video from HamiltonElectors.
This clip is different than the one I saw earlier this week, which featured Martin Sheen and a group of entertainers. That one’s been removed from YouTube unfortunately. I found it amusing to hear them going on about the sanctity of the Constitution – that came across as an argument of convenience. (But no matter; why anyone cares about celebrities’ political opinions is still beyond me.)
Update 1/16/17: And here’s Tucker Carlson interviewing two electors (about a month ago).
I found Carlson’s argument that the electors would be acting as an ‘oligarchy’ pretty lame. Electors only have the power they do because of the system they’re involved in. They didn’t invent that system – and they’re only Oligarchs-for-a-Day.
The leaders of Congress or the Supreme Court would be more apt examples of an oligarchy.
Since the earlier video isn’t available, here’s a different one of Tucker Carlson debating Bret Chiafalo about his position as an ‘Hamilton elector’.
As before, I don’t agree with Carlson’s partisan argument. What’s the point of having an Electoral College if the electors have no choice but to reflect the popular vote? It’s too bad Chiafalo didn’t ask Carlson that question.
This is sort of a rambling post about items I’ve come across recently that are loosely related.
ReasonTV released this clip this week.
This pretty much confirms what I’ve read about NAFTA. And that’s one reason I’ve never been happy about Trump’s bashing free trade agreements, NAFTA in particular.
Trade’s not a case of one-side-wins-while-the-other-side-loses. Trade works to mutual advantage: that’s why people engage in it, after all.
The only point I can take from Trump’s comments is that the U.S. is big enough to gain concessions by threatening to stop trading so freely. (He may be correct about that but I think it would be a bad idea.)
Being a free trade kind of guy, I was more than a little surprised to read about Stephen Moore’s turn to "the Dark Side."
If you know anything about Moore’s background, his new position is a fundamental shift for him. (For example, the Wikipedia article about him says, "Moore is known for advocating free-market policies…")
But read this whole thing to find out why Moore now backs Trump’s approach to trade and the economy.
I stirred up some controversy last week when I told a conference of several dozen House Republicans that the GOP is now officially a Trump working-class party. For better or worse, I said at the gathering inside the Capitol dome, the baton has now officially been passed from the Reagan era to the new Trump era. The members didn’t quite faint over my apostasy, but the shock was palpable.
I emphasized that Republicans must prioritize delivering jobs and economic development to the regions of the country in the industrial Midwest — states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. These are places that, for the most part, never felt the meager Obama recovery and where blue-collar Reagan Democrats took a leap of faith this election and came back to the Republican party for the first time since 1984. The GOP will be judged in 2018 and in 2020 on whether they deliver results for this part of the country and for the forgotten middle-class men and women (“the deplorables”) whom Democrats abandoned economically and culturally. This is all simply a political truism.
What roused the ire of some of my conservative friends was my statement that “just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, with his victory this year, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist, America First party.”
One friend lamented that I must have been drunk when I said this.
No. I meant exactly what I said, but I will clarify. […]
And here’s an interesting TED Talk by David Autor, professor of Economics and Associate Head of the MIT Department of Economics. It was published at the end of last month.
Prof. Autor has some explanations for the fact that the more we automate, the more people we have working. There are more jobs, not fewer.
Near the end of the clip, he makes a good point about the influence of culture on the employment picture.
Update 12/19/16:
I ran across an interesting post at pseudoerasmus that goes into detail on Prof. Autor’s topic. Despite its mocking tone and focus on conspicuous consumption, I think it’s a pretty fair explanation of how employment can increase despite increasing automation. (It doesn’t have a lot to say about people working in fields that weren’t even possible before automation enabled them, unfortunately.)
I don’t I have much to add to the debate about the dystopian robot future scenario envisioned by many people. But I do think the nightmare scenario is less mass unemployment than a kind of revamped neo-mediaevalism. I’m not predicting that, so much as saying that’s the worst-case scenario. {Edit 28/12/2016: This was written more than 2 years ago as a half-joke to mock trends in luxury consumption more than anything else.}
In the past 250 years, technological progress has not caused unemployment because human wants have been infinite. Every time productivity (output per unit of input) rises, the implied extra income in the economy still gets spent on something (at least when there isn’t a recession), and extra work gets created to produce that something. In other words, fewer inputs may be used to make one unit of output, but more output always gets desired / created. (OK, that sounds Say’s Law-ish, but please be patient.)
Environmentalists understand keenly that when energy prices fall, people frequently just drive more or fly more, or the savings get spent, ultimately, on something else that uses energy. Productivity growth produces the same effect. Which is why, as of now, we’ve never had permanent mass unemployment from technological displacement.
After the basic needs of food and shelter are satisfied, people go in search of other fulfillments — more caloric, varied, and exotic diets; more living space to fill with ever more stuff; 58 changes of clothes instead of 2 per year; more leisure in the form of vacations and entertainment; and ever more marginal extensions of life expectancy. That’s all very obvious.
But as people get wealthier, they demand not only more quantity of stuff, but also ever more trivial and even imaginary increments to the quality of goods and services. How else to explain the market for, say, honey in a jar that’s ‘raw’, unfiltered, unpasteurised, ‘fair-trade’, non-GMO, single-country-origin, single-bee-colony, and single-flower-species? […]
Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.”
I have to wonder if all these people are really unemployed or whether some of them are simply working off the books in the underground economy.
[Update (12/14/16): Reuters has specified that the rootkit was implemented as a Linux kernel module. Wow.]
Yesterday morning, Reuters dropped a news story revealing that Yahoo installed a backdoor on their own infrastructure in 2015 in compliance with a secret order from either the FBI or the NSA. While we all know that the US government routinely asks tech companies for surveillance help, a couple aspects of the Yahoo story stand out:
1. The backdoor was installed in such a way that it was intercepting and querying all Yahoo Mail users’ emails, not just emails of investigation targets.
2. The program was implemented so carelessly that it could have allowed hackers to read all incoming Yahoo mail. Of course this also means FBI/NSA could have been reading all incoming Yahoo mail.
3. Yahoo execs deliberately bypassed review from the security team when installing the backdoor. In fact, when members of the security team found it within weeks of its installation, they immediately assumed it had been installed by malicious hackers, rather than Yahoo’s own mail team. (This says something about what the backdoor code may have looked like.)
4. Yahoo apparently made no effort to challenge this overly-broad surveillance order which needlessly put hundreds of millions of users at risk.
At the time this was happening, I was on the Yahoo Security team leading development on the End-to-End project. According to the Reuters report, the mail backdoor was installed at almost the exact same time that Alex Stamos and I announced the open-source launch of a Chrome extension for easy-to-use end-to-end encryption in Yahoo Mail at SXSW 2015. Ironically, if only we had been able to actually ship E2E, we would have given users a way to protect themselves from the exact backdoor scenario that they ended up in! […]
Most of all, keep pushing for end-to-end encryption.
H.T. Paul B
Since you can’t generally verify your e-mail provider’s security, you can’t trust their security. The only alternative is to provide your own security.
And the bigger lesson is that the U.S. government is relentless in its secret surveillance.
Excerpts: Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver ’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer : “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”
WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research — which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.
I understand why Mr. Podesta — most recently Hillary Clinton ’s campaign chairman — wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.
More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests — even our own?
I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.
Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.
Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops. […]
Pielke’s description of (a) the groupthink about climate and (b) how the climate issue has been highly politicized is pretty sobering.
Venezuelan authorities have arrested two toy company executives and seized almost four million toys, which they say they will distribute to the poor.
Officials accused the company of hoarding toys and hiking prices in the run-up to Christmas.
Last week, the government issued an order to retailers to reduce prices on a range of goods by 30%.
Business owners say the order is a populist political move, and pushing them towards bankruptcy.
Venezuela’s consumer protection agency, Sundde, said toy distributor Kreisel had stockpiled the goods and was reselling them at a margin of up to 50,000%.
“Our children are sacred, we will not let them rob you of Christmas,” it said in a tweet, along with photos and video of thousands of boxes of toys.
During this last year, the Venezuelan government and its opposition have been in talks mediated by the Vatican. The topics ranged from politics to allowing humanitarian aid to Venezuelans. Here’s a report from the Caracas Chronicles about the humanitarian aid.
Remember the "Humanitarian Channel" the government and the opposition had agreed to set up in Vatican-mediated talks? That’s right, the one that was meant to be administered by Caritas, the Catholic Church’s global charity. That one.
How’s that been going?
Well, funny you should ask…
[Five tweets in Spanish omitted here.]
In short, the government’s tax inspectorate, Seniat, openly announces that they’re impounding church-donated medicines at port because they lack requisite customs paperwork. The shipment was declared "legally abandoned" and then "adjudicated" to the government-run Social Security administration.
You’d think that would make for some awkwardness at the next set of talks, right?
It came as no little surprise when, three years ago, François Fillon accepted my invitation to participate in the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, organised by Britain’s Centre for Policy Studies. Needless to say, no other French politician even bothered to answer the invitations I hardly bothered to send out.
In French political debate, “Thatcher” is used in the same way as “the Vichy regime” – as a label that disqualifies an opponent from office forever. Open and avowed Thatcherites in Paris are a fringe movement of degenerate right-wingers, tolerated purely as a sign of open-mindedness, in the same way as advocates of cannibalism or sado-masochism.
But there Mr Fillon was. All of a sudden, a Gaullist with a fondness for the “French social model” […] had morphed into an unrepentant free-marketeer, promising to slash taxes and liberalise the labour market with a forcefulness that would make the IMF blush. […]
Over the past few years, he has assembled a team of like-minded economists and entrepreneurs and put together a detailed program of reforms with a credible implementation timeline.
The plan includes disposing of 500,000 civil servants and cutting public spending by €110 billion. It also covers critical social reforms, such as granting a greater level of autonomy to state schools (a proposal distantly inspired by Britain’s academies) and shaking up the health care system (for example by funding non-essential treatments via private health insurance).
For that, Fillon had been the butt of journalists’ and fellow politicians’ ridicule – until the electorate unexpectedly gave him a sweeping victory in the first round of the primary election for the centre-right Republican party (44 per cent of the vote against 28 per cent for Alain Juppé, with Sarkozy eliminated after coming in a humiliating third).
How did this miracle occur? Because Fillon’s message struck a chord. From the farmer sick of spending a third of his time doing paperwork (according to the latest surveys), to the entrepreneur stifled by regulation, to middle classes strangled by taxes, a popular revolt is starting to emerge. After decades of bureaucratic doziness, could France be starting to roar again? […]
A U.S.-based group is preparing a pilot program in Kenya that will test the effects of a universal basic income—the increasingly popular concept of giving virtually everyone in a community unconditional payments on a regular basis. Unlike past large-scale experiments of this sort, this one is being run and funded privately.
The organization behind the effort is GiveDirectly, a charity whose work in Africa is based on the idea of giving people cash without restrictions on how the money can be spent. (The underlying anti-paternalist principle is that the needy know their needs better than outsiders do.) That outlook led naturally to an interest in the basic income, and so the organizers conceived a randomized control trial:
• In one set of villages, every adult will receive monthly payments equivalent to 75 cents a day for two years.
• In another set of villages, every adult will receive such payments for 12 years.
• In yet another set of villages, the adults will receive a single lump-sum payment equivalent to what the two-year group will be receiving.
• The last set of villages is the control group, so they don’t get any money at all.
The aim here, GiveDirectly’s Ian Bassin explains, is “to isolate the effects of what most people consider a ‘basic income’—that is, a permanent payment over time—from something resembling more traditional temporary supports. For example, when someone knows they have a long-term, guaranteed floor below which they cannot fall, do they take more risks like starting a business or going back to school? And does that security produce greater overall returns?” […]
Even private aid to Africa has its pitfalls. When the price of clothing or shoes goes to $0, that puts the local textile and shoe makers right out of business.
I have to wonder what happens when these GivingDirectly programs end. Or, if they’re continued indefinitely, at what point their participants become ineligible because of income or assets.
Years ago, a partner of mine wrote a very simple BASIC program he called Kneel.
10 GOTO 10
He ran it on a client’s DEC VAX (with admin privilege) and it brought the machine to its figurative knees. In fact, the machine operators had to cycle power on the VAX to recover. That was sort of a big deal because it was a time-share system and all its users were locked out of the system until it had been restarted.
I don’t want a “strong leader.” I want a president of this constitutional republic to preside over limited government and leave us free to lead our own lives.
This interesting article at The Economist comes via Paul B. Everyone knew that travelers’ luggage was being searched, but who knew there was an DEA-funded incentive program?
This stuff won’t stop until the legal theft we call civil asset forfeiture is outlawed and we put an end to the War on Drugs.
THERE are many reasons why you might have been stopped at an American transport hub and your bag searched by officials. You might have be chosen at random. Perhaps you matched a profile. Or you could have been flagged by an airline, railroad or security employee who was being secretly paid by the government as a confidential informant to uncover evidence of drug smuggling.
A committee of Congress heard remarkable testimony last week about a long-running programme by the Drug Enforcement Administration. For years, officials from the Department of Justice testified, the DEA has paid millions of dollars to a variety of confidential sources to provide tips on travellers who may be transporting drugs or large sums of money. Those sources include staff at airlines, Amtrak, parcel services and even the Transportation Safety Administration.
The testimony follows a report by the Justice Department that uncovered the DEA programme and detailed its many potential violations. According to that report, airline employees and other informers had an incentive to search more travellers’ bags, since they received payment whenever their actions resulted in DEA seizures of cash or contraband. The best-compensated of these appears to have been a parcel company employee who received more than $1m from the DEA over five years. One airline worker, meanwhile, received $617,676 from 2012 to 2015 for tips that led to confiscations. But the DEA itself profited much more from the programme. That well-paid informant got only about 12% of the amount the agency seized as a result of the his tips. […]
Naturally I have to wonder how scalable this technology is. How much energy can be extracted from one of these diamond generators at a steady rate. Are we talking microwatt-hours, milliwatt-hours, watt-hours, or kilowatt-hours?
And, second, I have to wonder how many’eternal batteries we want out in the wild. How would you ever disable one of these if that were necessary?
Update 12/18/16:
Here’s an AMA session at Reddit about these batteries.
The president-elect was a crony capitalist businessman. Now he’s set to become a crony capitalist politician.
As a real estate developer, Donald Trump made and sought special deals designed to use the power of government to improve his personal bottom line.
The first building project he ever developed, the Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan, was completed usinga multi-decade tax abatement obtained using his father’s connections. This was not a broad-based tax cut so much as a state-granted subsidy that granted Trump’s project the financial wherewithal to proceed. In 1994, Trump proposed that the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, become a partner with him on a $350 million theme park project, allowing him to get access to land by declaring a number of businesses as condemned properties. Over the course of his career as a developer, he repeatedly pressured the government to use eminent domain to clear private property owners out of the way, including one instance in 1994 in which he requested that the government kick an Atlantic City widow out of her home in order to replace it with a limousine parking lot. While campaigning for president, he aggressively defended the use of eminent domain, calling it a “wonderful thing,” and describing it as necessary for construction projects that create jobs.
For Trump, this is not merely a business strategy. It amounts to a working theory of how government and the private sector should interact. And it is one that should worry anyone concerned about maintaining a fair and proper division between the state and the private sector. […]
He doesn’t believe that the government’s role is to set clear ground rules and let market competition work things out. […]
Remember all the well-deserved grief Obama took for Solyndra and Fisker?
One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case. […]
Republicans might have had a little bit of a point in the question of general tax cuts: A tax cut and spending are different things, even if the budgetary effects are exactly the same.
But in the matter of industry-specific or firm-specific tax benefits of the sort extended to Carrier in Indiana, they do not have a leg to stand on. These are straight-up corporate welfare, ethically and fiscally indistinguishable from shipping containers full of $100 bills. […]
For Carrier’s accountant, any pecuniary benefit will do. So far as the bottom line is concerned, a $7 million tax credit is the same as a $7 million check or $7 million in Apple stock or $7 million in gold. It’s all +$7 million on the line where you want it. […]
This is a case of Frédéric Bastiat’s problem of the seen vs. the unseen. The benefits are easy to see, all those sympathetic workers in Indiana. The costs are born by sympathetic workers, too, around the country, and by their families and by their neighbors. But those are widely dispersed, so they are harder to see and do not hit with the same dramatic impact.
But the math is the math is the math. Trump and Pence are trying to sell you a free lunch, the same way the Keynesians and their magical spending multiplier do when they promise that government stimulus programs (Trump is pushing one of those, too) will somehow magically pay for themselves. […]
I suppose the good news for most of us is that the State of Indiana (and its taxpayers) will be the ones picking up the tab for this.
No Truce With Kings 