Is getting more and more attention.
Category Archives: Business
The Latest Warm-Monger Scam
Some thoughts:
Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?
Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.
What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”
This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.
The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.
Drug Shortages
Did the White House undercut Congress? I’m shocked, shocked.
Magnificently Right
Here’s why the Tea Party is:
Republican consultants report that in focus groups, TV commercials about out-of-control debt prompt strongly positive responses even from Democrats. Even Democrats have to live somewhere and a lot of them own homes. And there are a lot more Democratic taxpayers and homeowners than there are government workers. This is a wedge issue for Republicans that won’t quit.
Here’s one result that I found remarkable: It shows the aggregate property taxes paid to state and local governments, against aggregate mortgage payments (the outstanding volume of mortgage debt multiplied by the current mortgage rate). The result is somewhat exaggerated, because about a third of property tax collections are commercial rather than residential, but it’s still compelling: the property tax burden on homeowners is now roughly equivalent to the interest burden on their mortgages!
When one gets to that point, one is no longer a home owner, but simply renting their home from their local government. That’s the way it feels here in CA. Our mortgage is still more than taxes, but not by all that much.
Are Schoolteachers Underpaid?
No:
Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.
I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.
The Government Caused The Housing Crisis
This shouldn’t be news, but it is, because it doesn’t fit the leftist media narrative, which is that it was caused by underregulation.
[Update late morning]
Will the Republicans break their pledge to stop interfering in the housing market? If so, I will be disappointed, but not surprised.
Is The Tea Party About God?
It certainly shouldn’t be. Making religious beliefs a litmus test will splinter the movement. It’s about individualism and limited government.
[Update a few minutes later]
Vaguely related — what leftism does to people. It’s a religion, and a pretty nasty one.
The Civil War
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program — John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
This isn’t going to end well.
Aerospace Strikes Back?
There’s an overview of the current state of the aerospace industry over at R&D Magazine. I think it’s a little too credulous about Liberty, and it would have been nice to see more recognition of what’s happening in the suborbital world than just a mention of Virgin.