Sigh…
I really don’t want him to be the nominee. I think that Pawlenty would be much better. He at least had the sense to change his mind on cap’n’tax.
Category Archives: Economics
In Which The Dalai Lama
…declares himself an economic and ethical ignoramus:
“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.
Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.
Well, he can afford to be. The rest of us? Not so much.
We Need More Bureaucrats
…like Orson Swindle:
Mr. Swindle is keen to point out that he did not “eventually come around to the view” that the EDA is a mess and a waste — he went in knowing that. A true-believing Reaganite, his desire was to kill the EDA, or, failing that, to get it on a very short leash.
“It was a controversial agency at that point in time,” he says. “We knew what we were doing: We had to cut off the flow of money. And EDA was one of the worst examples I’d seen in my life, just one massive divvying out of money with nothing to show for it.”
Unable to simply shut the agency down, Mr. Swindle began engaging in some Reaganite hijinx: He began by submitting budget requests of $0.00. When Congress appropriated the money, anyway, Mr. Swindle made it harder to spend, capping grants at around $600,000 instead of the previous multi-million-dollar awards. The bureaucrats did not appreciate that: Ten $600,000 grants instead of one $6 million grant meant ten times the work.
And when all else failed, he turned to shaming the grant recipients. It is customary for government grant-making agencies to write boilerplate congratulatory letters to their clients, along with those oversized checks designed for photo ops. When a particularly egregious grant was proposed, Mr. Swindle would fight it. If eventually forced by Congress to make it, anyway, he’d have some fun with that letter. “Instead of writing, ‘Dear Mr. Mayor, it is my pleasure to award you a $400,000 grant for . . . whatever,’ I’d write, ‘As you know, you have been awarded $400,000 for a project that does not meet the standards or guidelines of EDA. Since you’re getting it, some other, more deserving city isn’t.’”
Maybe the next president can get him back.
Climate Change–The Republican Position
Some lengthy thoughts and suggestions from Steve Hayward. I particularly liked this:
The climate campaign’s monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can’t promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn’t get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn’t get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn’t get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies.
Bjorn Lombog’s Cool It is a good source of common sense on this as well.
Freedom And Locale
Some thoughts. While a lot of people will continue to live in California despite it’s relative lack of economic freedom (like me, for one, for a while), there’s been a lot of outward migration to Texas.
Growing The Energy Supply
It comes from markets, not bureaucrats:
There is a lesson here for public policy generally, including health care. No centralized government expert predicted the vast expansion in energy supply from hydraulic fracking. It was produced by decentralized specialists in firms subject to market competition.
Just as Friedrich Hayek taught, no central planner can know or foresee enough to produce the beneficial results regularly produced by competition in free markets regulated in accordance with the rule of law. And no central planner can accurately predict the course of innovation that can be achieved in decentralized markets. That’s something you might want to keep in mind when someone tells you that Medicare costs can be controlled by 15 members of an unelected board created by Obamacare. Better results and lower costs can be expected with the kind of market competition set up by the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law.
We can’t get rid of these unjustifiably arrogant ignorami soon enough. But it’s less than a year and a half to judgment day.
Fact Checking The President
The strangest thing about this is the source. Even the WaPo says that he’s full of it on the auto bailout
We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Of course, if the Times did it, it would mean the End Times.
“Bone-Headed Beliefs”
Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.
Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?”
On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness?
Yes, that’s much more reasonable.
A Job (And Wealth) Creator, Not Destroyer
Draft Rick Perry for president?