An interesting clip by Michael Cannon at Cato giving reasons why states should not establish Obamacare exchanges.
En la república bananera del norte
June 16, 2012I’ve mentioned before that it seems obvious the Obama administration is paying off its union backers with political favors. So this article from the Wall Street Journal wasn’t much of a surprise, though it still shocks me that the Executive branch interceded in judicial proceedings in such a transparent and heavy-handed way. How in the world did it get away with that?
Sherk and Zywicki: Obama’s United Auto Workers Bailout
If the administration treated the UAW in the manner required by bankruptcy law, it could have saved U.S. taxpayers $26.5 billion.President Obama touts the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler as one of the signature successes of his administration. He argues that the estimated $23 billion the taxpayers lost was worth paying to avoid massive job losses. However, our research finds that the president could have both kept the auto makers running and avoided losing money.
The preferential treatment given to the United Auto Workers accounts for the American taxpayers’ entire losses from the bailout. Had the UAW received normal treatment in standard bankruptcy proceedings, the Treasury would have recouped its entire investment. Three irregularities in the bankruptcy case resulted in a windfall to the UAW.
My father was a member of the UAW for several decades though he never worked for one of the Big Three auto companies. (He worked at Caterpillar, building engines for dozers and graders and the like.) So the UAW had some influence on my raising, though I’m not sure how much or what kind. But this deal still stinks, Mr. King.
Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock had this to say about the lawlessness of the Chrysler bailout back in 2009.
Escape from Camp 14
June 10, 2012A few months ago, I read Escape from Camp 14, the story of Shin Dong-hyuk that was written by Blaine Harden. Shin claims he was born and raised in a North Korean labor camp and later escaped from it.
Harden notes that not all of Shin’s story can be verified (naturally). All of the parts about Shin’s life in North Korea depend on his truthfulness. But the story jibes with news I’ve read about North Korea in recent years and so I took it at face value. It’s a damned ugly face.
To me, the most amazing thing about this book is that places like Camp 14 still exist and are still guarded by sadists. Where do all these monsters come from? Is sadism a trait that any of us will learn, when we’re in those circumstances?
If so, the obvious implications are (a) Choose your political system wisely and as a corollary (b) Avoid Communism at all costs.
But the worst of the sadism is what places like Camp 14 do to the children born in them, as Shin was. Part of the book describes Shin’s emotional maturation after he arrives in the U.S. and starts to learn that his first duties are not to The State, they’re to his family and his friends.
I find these thoughts fairly depressing. The barbarism just goes on and on, century after century.
Update July 21st. ’12: I came across an interesting piece of speculative fiction in Gardner Dozois’ 29th annual collection of science fiction stories. It’s a short story called "A Militant Peace", written by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell. You can read the entire thing here. (It won’t take long.)
The story describes the non-violent liberation of North Korea by UN troops, funded by a consortium of businesses. Curious, eh? It has a couple of interesting premises to support the plot.
I doubt they’d ever be feasible but it is a speculation, after all. Nonetheless, I liked the story and especially the idea of freeing North Korea.
I also ran across a post at Richard Fernandez’ Belmont Club blog titled The Story of Oh.
The BBC tells the melancholy story of Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean man who, convinced by his Marxist education that North Korea was a worker’s paradise, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986. Oh, who had just completed his PhD in Germany in Marxist economics and who “had been active in left-wing groups” had no reason to doubt the beckoning invitation of North Korean officials who promised him free health care and a government job, like certain other people you may know.
He chose poorly.
Aged and broken, Oh now concludes that his “life was ruined by his decision to defect to North Korea. Seventy years old, he still does not know the fate of his wife and daughters – either dead or imprisoned in a labour camp.” His wife, who lacked the benefit of a European education, suspected something was amiss from the first. She was aghast when he told her of his plan to defect.
Update January 28th. ’13:
Canada did it
June 2, 2012Here’s an interesting article by Chris Edwards at Cato that’s worth a read.
We Can Cut Government: Canada Did
Two decades ago Canada suffered a deep recession and teetered on the brink of a debt crisis caused by rising government spending. The Wall Street Journal said that growing debt was making Canada an “honorary member of the third world” with the “northern peso” as its currency. But Canada reversed course and cut spending, balanced its budget, and enacted various pro-market reforms. The economy boomed, unemployment plunged, and the formerly weak Canadian dollar soared to reach parity with the U.S. dollar.
[…]
America needs to get its fiscal house in order, and Canada has shown how to do it. Our northern neighbor still has a large welfare state, but there is a lot we can learn from its efforts to restrain the government and adopt market-oriented reforms to spur strong economic growth.
A love letter to plywood
May 26, 2012Since I just bought a sheet of 3/4″ plywood this evening, I was pleasantly surprised to run across this video at TYWKIWDBI a couple of hours later. (My son and I had gone shopping for a piece to build this.)
June 23rd: This video’s been udpated to the latest version, which adds ~3 minutes to talk about saw safety, kerfs, and the importance of matching Phillips bits to Phillips screws. These seem obvious to me now but I admit that they weren’t all that obvious 30 years ago.
What are they thinking?
May 23, 2012Here’s a chart from Business Insider for the spot price of oil as of today (I believe). It highlights the fact that the price dropped below $90 per barrel for the first time since last October.
What are those silly oil speculators thinking? They’re driving the price down! And just before the peak driving season in the US?
Somebody ought to give them a clue.
How the sausage was made
May 20, 2012I’ve been reading Aaron Clarey’s book Behind the Housing Crash. I haven’t finished it yet but I think that anyone with savings or investments in U.S. financial institutions should read it.
It’s a well-told account of how the housing bubble came into being and then popped. Clarey tells the story from his point of view as an analyst/underwriter for commercial loans at a credit union and then at some local banks in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. It’s like a tour of a financial butcher shop.
I think Clarey has a good grasp of financial basics – in part because he confirmed one of my own conclusions about the U.S. markets. I used to wonder about the phenomenal run-up in stock prices over the last 30 years. To illustrate, I recall a friend asking me in the early 80s, “When do you think the Dow will break 1000?” and then in the late 90s I called him and asked, “So, Mike, when do you think the Dow will break 10,000?”
My conclusion was that there was too much money chasing too few investments – that the increasing amount of retirement money was driving the demand up while the supply of equities remained relatively fixed. What else explained a 10-fold gain in the DJIA in less than 20 years? There had been nothing like it in the history of the U.S. exchanges.
My next thought was that maybe this was due to the way the tax code for retirement plans was written In the U.S., tax-deferred retirement savings can only be invested in stock and bond markets.
(What will happen to the price of stocks and bonds as the Baby Boomers start drawing out their retirement money and changing their investment patterns is left as an exercise for the reader.)
So I was intrigued to see Clarey mention this tax law factor himself as a reason for the bubbles of recent history. In particular, he writes about how all the retirement funds in the market drove the dot com bubble and then were a ready market to buy CDOs (bundled mortgages), which was one of the factors driving the housing bubble.
Clarey writes the Captain Capitalism blog.
Kaboom
May 19, 2012Here’s an attention-getting ad from Gary Johnson’s campaign. It’s pretty well done, I think (and I liked the audio).
I won’t nitpick ‘The People’s President’ claim, though I’m not real sure what that’s supposed to mean. Nor will I ask how ‘the people’ are somehow distinct from ‘them’ (the politicians).
George Carlin on the law
May 9, 2012I thought this was pretty hilarious, particularly the part about legal traditions and how the State (i.e., police) abuse them.
Via Simple Justice
Johnson-Gray 2012
May 6, 2012The Libertarian Party picked its candidates for President and VP yesterday at its convention in Las Vega. They’re former Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico and former Judge Jim Gray of California.
There are press releases at the LP’s site, of course, but I got the news (and the photo above) from Reason’s Hit & Run, where they’ve been following the LP convention all weekend.
Gov. Johnson started this year’s race running for the Republican nomination before switching to run for the Libertarian nomination. I still don’t understand why Johnson was excluded from the televised Republican debates. Johnson has a pretty impressive record from his two terms as governor of New Mexico, when he earned the nickname ‘Governor Veto’.
So why wasn’t Johnson in the debates? Was his record as a governor somehow less legitimate than Herman Cain’s record as a businessman? Right.
Here’s a campaign ad Johnson published last fall.
Judge Gray is a well-known critic of the Drug War and I’ve mentioned him earlier. He wrote a book about the War on Drugs in 2001. He ran as the Libertarian candidate for US Senate against Barbara Boxer in 2004.
The LP press release about Gray’s nomination claims that he’s ‘the chief proponent of a California ballot initiative called “Regulate Marijuana Like Wine“‘. Here’s his ‘elevator speech’ on that topic.
I think this pair is a good choice for the Libertarians, even though Johnson is (in some senses) a renegade from the Republican party. It gives those looking to avoid the Coke or the Pepsi party a reasonable alternative.
It’s always Free Beer Tomorrow
May 3, 2012I wish I could say this report at Powerline blog was a surprise. But of course it’s not. It’s Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football all over again.
Senate Votes to Abandon Budget Control Act
Last summer, Republicans in Congress agreed to increase the federal debt limit in exchange for the Democrats’ pledge to cap future spending at agreed-upon levels. The compromise was embodied in the Budget Control Act; discretionary spending was to increase by no more than $7 billion in the current fiscal year. I wrote yesterday about the fact that the Democrats intended to violate the Budget Control Act by increasing deficit spending on the Post Office by $34 billion. The measure probably would have glided through the Senate without notice had Jeff Sessions not challenged it. Sessions insisted on a point of order, based on the fact that the spending bill violated the Budget Control Act. It required 60 votes to waive Sessions’ point of order and toss the BCA on the trash heap.
Today the Senate voted 62-37 to do exactly that. This means that the consideration that Republicans obtained in exchange for increasing the debt limit is gone. Moreover, some Republicans–I haven’t yet seen the list–voted with the Democrats today.
One principal lesson can be drawn from this experience. It happens all the time that Congressional leaders will trumpet a budget agreement that allegedly saves the taxpayers trillions of dollars–not now, of course, but in the “out years.” But the out years never come. Tax increases are rarely deferred to the out years; they take place now, when it counts. But spending cuts? Never today, always tomorrow.
(My emphasis in the final sentences.)
Via Coyoteblog
Damn Obama, you scary
April 28, 2012Here’s a somewhat frightening report by Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ. Read the whole thing.
Strassel: The President Has a List
Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.
Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for “betting against America,” and accuses you of having a “less-than-reputable” record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.
Are you worried?
Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I for one have had enough of The Cult of the Presidency.
Industrial bots
April 28, 2012If you’re interested in heavy industry, here’s an interesting video about how a Mercedes E-class auto is built. Lots o’ robotic action going on.
I came across this in a post titled Feed The Monkey at Sippican Cottage. The gist of that post, as I took it, was useful work is nitpicked to death by Those Who Would Regulate.
Maybe so. I’ve often thought we have entirely too many people who want to manage, mostly by virtue of their credentials (as opposed to their acumen) — relative to the number of people who actually do useful work with their knowledge.
But what struck me about this clip was the amazing amount of skull sweat that had obviously gone into building this factory. Watch the robot set the dashboards and then back itself out of the vehicle, without leaving a mark on the piece or the vehicle. It takes an incredible amount of thought to design a robot that will do that. I’m sure it took a team of people to design that machine.
And it takes a fair amount of thought and concentration just to get the robot adapted to a particular task – after the robot itself has been designed and built. There’s a lot to understand about how an industrial robot controller works before you can actually put one to work. Getting the robot to move heavy things is pretty easy; getting it to move heavy things without damaging them or damaging other things is an entirely different kettle o’ fish.
Of course the Germans aren’t the only ones doing this. The Japanese are no slouches when it comes to automated manufacturing. Here’s a snippet from a Wikipedia article about "Lights Out" manufacturing.
FANUC, the Japanese robotics company, has been operating a “lights out” factory for robots since 2001.[7] “Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. “Not only is it lights-out,” says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, “we turn off the air conditioning and heat too.”
I’ve been working with a FANUC ‘spider robot’ the last few months. It’s like the two in the center of the frame in this video. (They’re M-1iA models.)
It looks like the robots in the video are using Fanuc’s built-in machine vision system to see the things they’re picking up (when the red light appears). Our team used a custom, hyperspectral vision system to find particles and pick them out of a stream of material on a conveyor belt. But the end result is fairly similar.
These robots move pretty quickly: they’ll pick three particles per second. That may not sound like much until you calculate that it’s nearly 11,000 particles per hour — for however many hours you want to run them.
In a New York minute
April 27, 2012Here’s an interesting proposal at the American Enterprise Institute’s The American. It’s not much longer than this excerpt so RTWT.
Would You Settle Your Claims on Social Security for 80 Cents on the Dollar? (I Would)
Current headlines read: “Social Security’s Financial Forecast Gets Darker”; “Stress Rises on Social Security.”
Well, yes: but who is surprised?
Certainly not young people, who are rightly skeptical about whether Social Security in the future will be able to give them back the money it takes from them today.
The problem is pretty basic: According to the new calculations of the Social Security Trustees’ 2012 Report, Social Security’s future costs are a lot bigger than its future income. […]
Many observers, considering this insolvency, quickly conclude that you must force Americans to either pay more in Social Security taxes or mandate a cut in their benefits.
But there is another, voluntary alternative. Give people a choice? Imagine that!
I have previously asked, “Would you settle your claims on Social Security for 83 cents on the dollar?”—and answered, “I would—in a heartbeat.”
And here’s another interesting alternative for reforming Social Security. This one’s longer but packed with interesting details so it’s worth your time too.
Social Security by Choice: The Experience of Three Texas Counties
Stock market volatility remains one of the primary objections to switching from the current pay-as-you-go method of funding Social Security benefits to a system of prefunded personal retirement accounts. However, three Texas counties that opted out of Social Security 30 years ago have solved the risk problem.
Galveston County opted out of Social Security in 1981, and Matagorda and Brazoria counties followed suit in 1982. County employees have since seen their retirement savings grow every year, including during the recent recession. Today, county workers retire with more money, and have better supplemental benefits in case of disability or an early death. Moreover, the counties face no long-term unfunded pension liabilities.
If state and local governments — and Congress — are really looking for a path to long-term sustainable entitlement reform, they might consider what is known as the “Alternate Plan.”
The Alternate Plan. The Alternate Plan does not follow the traditional defined-benefit or defined-contribution model. Rather, employee and employer retirement contributions are pooled and actively managed by a financial planner — in this case, First Financial Benefits, Inc., of Houston, which both originated the plan and has managed it since inception.
Like Social Security, employees contribute 6.2 percent of their income, with the county matching the contribution (Galveston has chosen to provide a slightly larger share). Once the county makes its contribution, its financial obligation is done. As a result, there are no long-term unfunded liabilities.
We’re Number 1!
April 1, 2012A post at the Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry blog.
No Fooling: U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World
This April Fool’s Day, the joke is on all of us. That’s because as of April 1, the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.
Remember this the next time you hear some political genius going on about the patriotism of companies that don’t "invest in America."
Mind the microseconds
March 26, 2012I’ve heard this story about Grace Hopper’s nanosecond-long-wire many times over the years. I didn’t know there was film of it.
Immigrants
March 25, 2012Recently I read a post at another site which mentioned that ‘Open Borders’ (not enforcing immigration laws or allowing unrestricted immigration), costs the working class jobs and lowers its wages.
I really wish we could lay this one to rest. Here’s why.
When the size of the labor pool is restricted by law – and that’s exactly what’s being proposed by restricting immigration – then the working class’s higher wages are due to scarcity. Those wages are paid by everyone. And that ‘everyone’ includes the working class itself. I don’t know how something so obvious gets overlooked so often.
Have people forgotten what it was like in the 1970s to pay too much for a mediocre car made in Detroit by highly paid union labor? The working class – at least some of it – was getting its higher wages and the rest of us were paying the price.
Second, this claim is often stated as "They’re taking our jobs." What I want to know is: Who is this ‘we’ which ‘owns’ these jobs?
Those jobs aren’t ‘ours’ by virtue of being citizens. If the jobs belong to anyone, they belong to the people seeking to hire others. They certainly don’t belong to the people seeking to be hired.
Third, when the state of Georgia managed to chase off its immigrant labor, the farmers complained that they couldn’t find the help they needed.
And, oddly enough, something similar happened in Alabama. Gee, who’d have thought?
Where were all the job-seekers among ‘us’ who weren’t applying for those jobs?
Fourth, I have an abiding respect for the Melting Pot concept. I suspect it demonstrates hybrid vigor: both in the physical, evolutionary sense and in the Matt Ridely, ideas-have-sex sense.
Having more people at the party isn’t a problem. More people at the party is more human capital that generates more social dividend.
The only drawback I see to allowing open borders is that you can not follow that policy and have a lot of ‘social benefits’ (i.e., a strong welfare state). “Open Borders or Open Bar”: that’s the choice that needs to be made.
In the early 1980s, I lived in Tucson. Tucson has seen phenomenal population growth in the last century (PDF). It went from ~7500 in 1900 to just under 500,000 in 2000. While I lived there, I met an old-timer who told me that in 1948 there was only one traffic signal in Tucson.
The reason I mention Tucson is that many people were concerned that all the new immigrants – those people moving to Arizona from the Midwest and other parts of the US – were taxing the water supply. Older folks who’d been raised in Tucson could remember when its rivers ran year ’round. When you see those rivers today, all you see is dry riverbeds because of the fall of the water table.
So the question in Tuscon in the early 80s was: Who’ll be the Last Man in Tucson? Which of the previous immigrants is going to tell the next immigrants, “Sorry, we’re full up.”?
I think we can apply that same question to the United States as a whole. We’re pretty much a nation of immigrants and their children. Which of us is going to tell the next immigrants that there’s no more room?
More to the point, why would we past immigrants deny the future immigrants? Don’t we want them to have the same opportunities our parents had?
Aside from the They’re-Taking-Our-Jobs complaint, there are some other common objections to open immigration that come up frequently.
It’s illegal. I really don’t get this one. OK, I’ll stipulate that it’s illegal under current law.
But many things have been illegal in the past: sale and possession of alcohol, for one example. Many things will likely be illegal in the future: refusing to buy a health insurance policy comes to mind.
There’s a difference between things that are illegal and things that are immoral. Murder is usually both (except in self-defense). Driving over the speed limit, like swimming the Rio Grande, is illegal. But it’s not a violation of moral law in my view.
If people want to improve their lives by moving, more power to ’em. I’ve done it a couple of times myself.
They bring new and dangerous diseases. There’s certainly some truth to this though it’s hardly news. It’s been a problem in the past, too.
While this objection should certainly influence disease policies, I don’t see why it needs to influence immigration policy in general. I’m not advocating that we allow any individual to immigrate, regardless of how disease-ridden s/he may be.
Social services are overwhelmed. This objection follows hard on the heels of the previous one. One of the common complaints I’ve heard about this is that the illegals are swamping the emergency rooms because they don’t have doctors or health care policies.
This is a big complaint in southern Arizona and I don’t doubt that it’s true to some extent. I do wonder, though, how much this affects the cost of emergency care. Or is it mostly a complaint about hearing a group of Spanish speakers in places where people don’t expect them?
They’re violent offenders and are filling the jails. There’s a fair degree of contention on this topic. I’m not sure how to sort out the claims and counter-claims about this. Some say there are correlations between immigrants and crime. Others say there is no correlation.
To me, it sounds as though no one knows whether this is a true claim. There are even some who claim immigrants have lower crime rates.
¿Quién sabe?
D’oh!
March 4, 2012According to legend Winston Churchill said, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." That came to mind when I came across this news item at Instapundit.
People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments. […]
Now there’s a fairly gloomy – but actually somewhat intuitive – take on electorates. Trying to get a mass of people to act sensibly is like herding cats (depicted so well in this EDS ad).
So I was interested to see that the article concluded with this.
Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they “effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.”
I think that "mere" advantage is actually quite a feature and it confirms Churchill’s opinion.
Now I’m wondering how he felt, being an elected leader in such a system.
How ideas propogate and evolve
February 25, 2012Matt Ridley gave this talk at TED in 2010. I thought it was fascinating; and, judging from their applause, his audience at the talk did as well.
His latest book is The Rational Optimist.
No Truce With Kings 