Austrian Economists and Fellow Travelers

Sweet. The Ludwig von Mises site has photos of various economists. Above we see one Friedrich August Hayek, author of many substantive works, and one massive hit: The Road to Serfdom.

This sounds like the crappiest movie in the world. The characters are: first grade teacher (at a private school, not one of those public school losers), a biographer of George Bernard Shaw, a social worker, and a non-profit service lawyer.

Who are these awful little people? The teacher should be teaching art and science, but “is better known for his musical adaptations.” Uh-huh.

No machinists. No IT techs. No insurance agents. Just soft little people in soft little jobs; the only thing post-modern Hollywood knows. Oh, and hey: the box office was soft, too. Odd, that.

Harry "Keynes" Potter and the Mindless Automatons

Via The American Magazine, Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims won the Nobel prize in economics:

The state of the economy was set by the intersection of aggregate demand and aggregate supply curves. An adept policy maker could, by pulling the right levers and twisting the right knobs, shift these curves and thereby set the economy on the proper course. Implicitly, to such a policy mastermind, the economy was populated with individuals who acted in reliable, predictable ways.

Some are accusing Sargent and Sims of finally recognizing that people aren't rational. This is not what they mean: the old Keynesian model did not utilize rational actors, but robots who acted according to simplified models without self-correcting behavior. In fact, some people are ahead of the curve, predicting the economists, and some people, well, some few people never learn. People are not perfectly rational, but neither are they mindless automatons.

Obama's marginal counter-revolution

But why should we worry about them? Imagine for a moment that Buffett’s sentiments are fairly common and that even 19 out of 20 employers would just pay the higher taxes and only one would throw in the towel. What does it matter if there were only one tax-sensitive outlier in the bunch? That would be a mere 5 percent; should it really drive the whole conversation?

Why, yes… yes it should.

Clive Barker and the Dearthly Imagination

Anyone else read Clive Barker? I'm halfway through Imajica. Is there a reason why the fiendishly creative author of the Books of Blood, the most inventive horror since H.P. Lovecraft, has done nothing in The Great and Secret Show and Imajica but re-write Weaveworld, only not as well? Damn it, “In the Hills, the Cities” almost made my brain explode. Ian made me read it while he sat there so he could watch me experience the reading of it. Imajica makes me feel like I'm forever reading with the next clause pre-ringing in my head, already surfing the next sentence I haven't read yet.

(Not to mention Hellraiser, the single greatest re-imagining of Hell since Dante Alighieri. That is why an ex-girlfriend scorned sequel Pinhead in the Catholic church: the Cenobites were miles away from Christianity.)

Hitchens on “The Personal Is Political”

Christopher Hitchens on the most awful catchphrase ever:

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

The Dead Horse theory

From the Steitz for Senate page, the Dead Horse theory:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government and education more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course....

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

US Congressional term limits

Recently on Facebook, I wrote:

Actually, I am opposed to a balanced budget amendment. Simply, I call it a “tax-hike amendment;” better by far to pass a “flat tax amendment:” if the “proles” want a 50% tax rate on the rich (I do not think the U.S. has many proles, nor do I think they want a rate this high), let them pay it, too. Under this amendment, any deviation from the flat tax would last 2 years and require a 3/5 majority in Congress to pass.

The idea is to make tax laws written for special interests more expensive. Only the broadest exemptions will be allowed (e.g., personal and dependent exemptions, &c.).

But someone asked about term limits. Will we weaken the Legislature against the bureaucracy if they are too low? Yes, but I have no idea how low that effect would begin. (Perhaps low term limits would simplify procedural rules, or not.)

That being said, I think 30 years is a good start on eliminating the Robt Byrds. Go to the Wikipedia page on the U.S. Senate members: click the small graphic under the column header “First took office.” We would eliminate 9 Senators: Inouye (D-HA), Leahy (D-VT), Lugar (R-IN), Hatch (R-UT), Levin (D-MI) (a sacrifice I will gladly make), Cochran (R-MS), Baucus (D-MT), Grassley (R-IA), Bingaman (D-MN). 5 Dems, 4 Repubs: 9% is not bad. We could also allow a Senator to serve less than half an extra term if raised to office in a special election.

The House should be lower, but how much? Let's try 28 as a start. Let's look at the House membership lost: Dingell (D-MI), Conyers (D-MI), Young (R-FL), Rangel (D-NY), Young (R-AK), Stark (D-CA), Miller (D-CA), Waxman (D-CA), Markey (D-MA), Killdee (D-MI), Dicks (D-WA), Rahall (D-WV), Lewis (R-CA), Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Petri (R-WI), Smith (R-NJ), Dreier (R-CA), Rogers (R-KY), Hoyer (D-MA), Frank (D-MA) (YES!), Hall (R-TX), Wolf (R-VA), Berman (D-CA), Burton (R-IN), Levin (D-MI), Ackerman (D-NY), Towns (D-NY), Kaptur (D-OH).

17 Dems, 11 Repubs. 6.43% of the total. Sadly, Frank would still have been around to cover Fannie and Freddie and get a job at the former for his then current butt-buddy. (I'm bisexual, I can say it.) So this amendment, as I noted, will not guarantee good government: we're basically eliminating deadwood.

Boehner is serving his 10th term and Pelosi was well under 28 years when she served. McConnell (who opposed McCain-Feingold) is fresh on his 5th term. McConnell could be replaced by Shelby, McCain, Hutchison, Kyl, Inhofe; all have 15+ years in the Senate right now, and more would accumulate that experience in the next 4+ years. Going back to the Nixon era, all Senate Majority Leaders were serving under 30 years during their leadership tenure, so leadership would not be affected.
 

Of Wine and Whiners

We read in Althouse some manufactured Talking Points Memo rage after Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) tablemate ordered a bottle of $300-plus wine. Ryan had a glass and insisted on paying his share. Please note this prevents Ryan from being indebted to this acquaintance, you'll be a step ahead of the game. (The Leftie and her Enraged Ovaries do not mention Pelosi One and the $100,000.00-plus liquor bill she racked up.)

Althouse notes:

TPM should be ashamed of itself passing along this embarrassing story and for the way it presented this material. In the middle of the piece, TPM informs us of Congressional ethics rules barring expensive gifts from lobbyists. I was thinking: Oh, maybe this is a serious problem. But if you keep reading, much further down, you see that Ryan paid for the meal with his own credit card, and TPM saw the receipt. Ridiculous! What hackery from the once-respectable Talking Points Memo!

Why is this so surprising? My mom listens to Rush Limbaugh religiously, so one day, when I read Josh of TPM babbling about how good he was to complain about Bush putting troops into Afghanistan, since righties were complaining about US involvement in Kosovo, I wrote him to tell him I had heard Limbaugh (mentioned specifically by TPM as one of these Cassandras) assuring his listeners not to be worried if the US military needed to put boots on the ground in the Balkans. His response? "Well, he probably said something else like it, so it doesn't really matter!"

Once a dirty, lying shitbag, forever a dirty, lying shitbag. Why so surprised?

Democratic Astroturf and false flag operations

I have just gotten some Democratic false flag astroturf in an email from some outfit calling itself the National Tea Party Alert. These people are busy trying to convince us that the Gipper loved tax hikes, just like Joe Biden. Email follows:

Throwing The Gipper Under The Bus

It's impossible to overstate both the importance and impact that President Ronald Reagan had on the modern conservative movement. Actually, one could be forgiven for definitively stating that Reagan was the founder of the modern conservative movement. The problem with holding such an exalted position is that it's easy for people on both sides of a debate to co opt your legacy for their own purposes.

Reagan is rightfully exalted for being the godfather of supply side economic theory. He didn't develop it (Economist Arthur Laffer did), nor did he even modify it, but he was certainly his most enthusiastic supporter (with former congressman Jack Kemp coming in a close second) and the economic growth that his policies helped create were unprecedented in American history.

The problem with the Reagan presidency is separating fact from fiction, and nowhere is this problem more evident than in the current debate over extending the national debt ceiling. House republicans, led by John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan have insisted that no tax increases are up for discussion, with Speaker Boehner saying, "...tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter"

Oddly enough, the record shows that supply side cheerleader Ronald Reagan himself incorporated tax increases into his economic recovery plans, most famously into 1982's Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, though there were four more tax increases in the remaining six years of his presidency, with a total of $190 billion (in today's dollars) in revenue increases coming from those tax hikes. That's an amount significantly above what Vice President Biden is calling for during the recent deficit talks with GOP leaders.

In hindsight, one of Ronald Reagan's most enduring legacies was the economic recovery from the 1970's "malaise" and it's staggering, long-term positive impact on both our economy and our society as a whole. No one is doing Reagan's legacy any favors by misstating it's essential truths.

Ronald Reagan's revolution, despised and fought by, at the time, 95% of America's media establishment, was and is incomplete, and in the same way that America's revolution is incomplete. All men are not yet free. All are not guaranteed their rights, due by Nature and Nature's God, of life, liberty and property. Reagan famously said, "Better to get 80% of what you want now and go for the rest later." Reagan, working with a Democratic Congress after 1982, managed to rein in government growth. I appreciate the man for what he did, against all headwinds. But we must surpass the teacher, not repeat his mistakes and forced strategic retreats. Ronald Reagan is dead. Long live Reaganism.

And political death to tax-and-spend Leftists and con men.

From Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin

Inspired by this.

I was born in January. I was 11 for the 1980 election.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis is my first political memory. The '81 recession is my next. After that was the glorious recovery; everyone could see it. Berke Breathed (a self-described "schmiberal") teased libs in Bloom County over the success of the Reagan Revolution.

Ronnie rolled over the '84 election like the USS Iowa over a sailboat. Iran-Contra was a bit of a black eye, but frankly, if he was trying to deal with the fscking Iranians, how could the Democrats have ever called this guy a warmonger?!?

I was a libertarian: I'd read Heinlein from junior high on, but aside from a belief in small govt., I was terribly uninformed. I did keep my eyes open, learned about the Venona intercepts (which helped vindicated the anti-Communists) and generally sneered at socialism—but my understanding was terribly shallow.

Hell, in 2000 I voted for Gore.

Please understand: I'm half gay (I'd say "bisexual" if it didn't sound so damned pretentious) and Pat Buchanan repelled me. (Still does.) Now he's a recognized pariah, but in 1992 he had addressed the Republican convention: hey, I hadn't expected him to lurve teh gheys, but he was seriously bent about the whole subject.

The first Gulf War? I supported it. Congress approved hostilities 2 days before my birthday. I was just 22.

I thought I was cannon-fodder.

Again, please understand: I was brainwashed by the media. Do you remember how they hyped that "fourth largest army in the world"? Aside from Grenada, what had we done since Vietnam and Jimmy's abortion of a military op that ended in fire in the sands of Iran? Our Congress-critters and the media were warning us to expect 20,000 casualties!

See, I didn't know. I didn't know how close we came to sealing victory in Nam before Congress cut off the money. I didn't know the military had, in fact, seriously revised its tools, tactics and strategy. I was also seriously unaware that those damned $600 hammers no one could shut up about were, in fact, seriously worth every G-d damned penny and that they were in fact all copies of Mjolnir because I was dancing around my rented room in my buddy's house when the U.S. military swept in like the wrath of an angry god.

I was treated to the sights of preening Congressional braggadocio only days after they had been staining the marble floors yellow.

And then we left Saddam Hussein in place. Remember how that felt?! After all that build-up, it was like a body blow. It was terrible hearing about the Shia, but a friend who was in the Army for Desert Storm explained exactly just how messed up the Middle East was, and how our occupation of Iraq would probably indeed set the place on fire just as I had been imagining only weeks before.

Clinton. I never hated Clinton. Gingrich could be a bit much, but he wasn't in the media so often. It was nice to see a Republican House. I was only upset that they never passed term limits. Government shutdown? Yeah, and that wrecked my day how, exactly?

I mostly voted Republican or Libertarian. It was easy to see how the unions were hurting Michigan; easy to see how their job rules, future pay pensions and hidden costs were hurting Detroit.

I know that the Federal government would have nothing to do with homosexuality if it wasn't for its Socialist tendencies. Social Security makes gay marriage a necessary Federal issue, nothing else. If all the Federal government had to say on it was about gay partners of US citizens being granted citizenship after a few years, we'd have it already.

One more down, and the future…

Famous asshole Osama bin Laden is dead. Kudos to President Obama for pursuing a military policy of targeted killings that former President Bush would applaud. Meanwhile, for the Left, war is still all about us. As for bin Laden himself… I have nothing to say. Islamist terror long preceded him and will, sadly, survive him. We must endure.

But let's take a protip from the Left, and talk about us. Besides, I wanted to link these yesterday afternoon, and why start a new post?

Hillsdale College's Paul A. Rahe ticks down the list of Republican contenders for President. First, he covers former Gov Romney, former Speaker Gingrich and former Gov. Huckabee, contrasting Gov. Mitch Daniels and Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Second, he covers two very different fiscal hawks: Paul Ryan and Ron Paul. Rahe then finishes with Sarah Palin, admitting he draws a blank on her. But, Rahe suspects, Palin will not let him remain blank on her for long.

Dr Helen Stumps for Trump

Elsewhere on Google Blogspot, Instapundit’s prettier, smarter half, Dr Helen, tells us Why I Like Donald Trump. She has very sensible reasons, of course, but I have one caveat.

As much as I dislike politicians, their Statism and their arrogance, they actually do have job skills. They build consensus, lead legislative and partisan rebellions and attacks, and generally politick and maintain diplomatic relations with people they want dead. They also have to establish and maintain a relationship with large groups in their political base. I have not yet seen Donald Trump do any of these things, but if he starts displaying these skills in public, I will willingly vote for him.

Net Neutrality: Threat or Menace? Part II

ETA: Part I here.

From last year, a notice on regulating the Internet. Henry “Socialism with a Human Face” Waxman (D-CA) was trying to get Republicans down with his Net neutrality bill, which contained God knows how many unspeakable traps for the future of conservatives and classical Liberals alike. This was a classic shakedown, using the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) illegal threats to regulate Internet speech as cover.
Why is Net neutrality bad? Net neutrality comes in two forms, the Greater and the Lesser.

1. Greater Net neutrality is the attempt to make charging for network latency illegal, or at least regulated.
2. Proponents say this is lovely because evil ISPs (Internet Service Providers, like dial-up, DSL and broadband, and did we mention they’re CORPORATE!?!) want to feed you laggy packets to destroy your EverCrack accomplishments (a-hem) and make your YouTube Caturday vids shudder.
3. Of course, the idea of charging latency to end users is ridiculous.
4. It would be impossible to track latency on packets from 1,000,000,000 computers.
5. This is for the computers at YouTube, Netflix, &c. Big corporate customers with easily identifiable packets.
6. Why should they not be charged for latency?
7. Don’t they get charged for bandwidth? How is bandwidth any different than latency or setting a maximum lost packets Service Level Agreement?
8. How do the ISPs expect to get away with making latency worse for their big corporate clients?
9. They don’t.
10. In fact, latency advisory bits are in the TCP/IP protocol and have been since the early ’80s.
11. The real problem with latency is making all ISPs and Internet backbones support them to a certain level.
12. See, since they outlawed “collusion,” any industry-wide agreement must have political support.
13. Which is why corporations give lots of money to politicians,
14. Who are very busy fondling underaged pages and don’t want to take time out to work on legislation for some stupid industry,
15. Just because it creates or enables thousands of jobs in their state or district.
16. They have lives, you know.
17. So they demand money from the corporations.
18. Which would not be too bad, really,
19. As the corporations have the dough,
20. But the politicians insists that they are “protecting” us from the evil corporations,
21. When in reality the politicians just did the corporations a service for a huge fee,
22. Which makes sense seeing as how most of them are lawyers and they’re used to acting this way.
23. But the lies the politicians tell us cause the rest of us to live in fear, either from corporations or politicians.

So, that is the Greater argument on Net neutrality. It’s a little technical, and a little corporate lawyerly, but there it is. The only problem with Net neutrality is that the politicians want to lie to us about a fake threat to make themselves seem more important.

In the Declaration of Independence, this was called “the Insolence of office.”

The Lesser argument is the argument of so-called Free Speech, and comes in two parts. ISPs tend to use software packages to set up home computers, these frequently set up your browser home page. AT&T has a partnership with Yahoo!: the latter provides and administers email accounts and provides the newspaper-like home pages for Web browsers. (Please note, these home pages can be changed at any time.) Almost all Americans are so inured to advertising that this is barely noticed.

However, the corporations are limited in what they can offer. It has to be pretty bland, lest they annoy their paying customers. My dad, a person who regards his computer in much the same way most Americans regards Europe, as barely-reliable allies, managed to change his home page (to something equally as bland, heh).

But if the government starts setting standards, we run into a corruption and rent-seeking problem, where the limits on possible home pages will be jiggered to certain sites. Home page providers will be incentivized to buy politicians to keep their content legal and acceptable. Sadly, money will be the least of the dirty goods offered in exchange. Content will also be neutered and emasculated, lest it upset the Would Be Powers That Be in the crappiest school district in the United States.

(Washington, D.C., you dumb lefties.)

As Friedrich A. Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, the power of, say, fathers over their children is fairly large, but it also has a time limit and various traditional limits. But if the State (or the Feds) usurps this power, they wield the combined power of a hundred million fathers as a united tool — or weapon.

Bad. Very bad. But it gets worse.

See, the alternate definition of Net neutrality is the prevention of ISPs from blocking traffic to various websites. But again we must, per Frédéric Bastiat (or Penn Gillette), look not at the seen, but the unseen. No government law will protect access to child porn or such; it is impossible. Therefore, the law that demands that ISPs not block traffic to some websites will protect those ISPs that block traffic to others, ipso facto.

There is no reason pass Net neutrality, unless it is to create an industry standard for latency for traffic sensitive to lag. The rest is rent-seeking and politico-criminal shakedowns.

So there.

The Donald hits a popular vein

Yes, Obama should publish his real birth certificate. But he won’t. And this is why (50/50):

1. His birthplace is outside of the United States. And so what? So is McCain’s. Obama is the son of an American mother and so he is an American citizen. But what if Mummy renounced her citizenship in her revolutionary fervor? This is actually kind of hard to do now, the United Nations Declaration is against it. (Haha! Sorry, just a sec…)
2. His birth certificate says, “Muslim.”

None of these things really matter.

Long story short, because Adolf Hitler was staatlos in Germany after renouncing his Austrian citizenship, stateless people are seen are problematic, so everyone is “assigned” a nation by the UN. Now, even before this, the U.S. was in the habit of accepting people back: think of it as an international hygienic protocol. So if his mom did renounce, the U.S. would likely have accepted her back anyway. But it would be immediately contested and, ultimately, come down to nothing more than a judge’s opinion as to whether the light bulb really wanted to renounce its nationality.

Finally, if his birth certificate really does say Muslim, and if we accept that the Rev. Wright’s church is… nominally… Christian, then he is an apostate, a religious unperson, a legitimate assassination target in most of the Middle East. Now, while we might cheer W when he said, “Bring it on,” we must be clear that Obama is no Bush and not likely to weather such a storm well. For the peace of mind of the American nation, and our foreign policy, I hereby approve of the CIA breaking into the Hawai’ian Hall of Records, scratching out “Muslim” and substituting “Christian.”

So there.

A general strike in Michigan? Yes, say teachers

A Conservative Teacher writes that teachers will try for a general strike in May. This is a little insane, but not too insane for the unions:

My sources in the MEA indicate that the MEA is preparing for a teachers strike in May and will ask that other unions also join in this strike… Michigan's striking teachers would be supported and joined by all union workers in the state of Michigan, from government employees, police, fire, and private labor unions like the UAW…

 Let's be prepared for the fight of our lives.

God save us from the peaceful non-violence of the Left...

During the era of the Fairness Doctrine:

• Harry Truman was shot at by Puerto Rican separatists,
• JFK was targeted by an elderly postal worker before he was killed by a Communist,
• RFK was killed by a Jew-hating Christian Palestinian,
• MLK was killed by a George Wallace Democrat,
• Malcolm X was killed by Nation of Islam thugs,
• Richard Nixon was targeted by a Jewish would-be Black Panther,
• George Wallace was shot by a actual nutjob,
• Jerry Ford was shot at by a filthy hippie and a stupid radical,
• Finally, Ronald Reagan was shot by another actual nutjob.

Then Ronald Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and all this ended. Saddam Hussein tried to kill George H.W. Bush in Kuwait after the Gulf War (a war act by a Stalin fan) and one guy died landing his plane in front of the Clinton-era White House (friends suggested it was a publicity stunt, not an assassination attempt).

• Bill Clinton saw an ex-military ex-con (convicted and imprisoned by the US Army for violent assault) subdued by the Secret Service for shooting at people on the White House lawn. Thank God, no one was harmed.
• George W. Bush, of course, lived through several assassination attempts, almost all connected with al Qaeda, except for another nutjob who tried before 9/11. Again, no one was harmed.

Two plots against Barack Obama, mostly staffed by moronic losers, were interrupted by the Secret Service and other officers. This is made possible entirely by better policing. Final summation:

• Thought control: ineffective.
• Suppressing conspiracy theorists: lets them fester and explode.
• Exposing them: shrinks and humiliates them.
• Effective law enforcement: saves lives.

End of argument.