The states with the highest unemployment rates just happen to also have high marginal tax rates, high unionization, or both.
Category Archives: Business
Credit Where It’s Due
One of the few things that I liked about the Clinton administration was its support for free trade. So it’s nice to see the Obama administration get this right as well, despite a lot of idiotic protectionist rhetoric during the campaign:
The media made much of Obama’s polite gestures to dictators, but he gave them nothing resembling what he gave to Uribe. Name one dictator Obama sat with for lunch. Which troublemaker got a White House invitation? Which tinhorn got a promise to visit?
And has anyone heard of Obama giving his autograph — “with admiration!” — to another president? It was as if Obama himself unclenched his own fist to reach out to the Colombian hand.
Obama may have had political reasons to seek out Colombia — the Chavez-Obama pictures didn’t do him any good domestically, and Drudge Report ran pictures of them all weekend, infuriating White House officials.
But the outlook for free trade has been improving for several weeks, too. On a visit to Medellin last month, Uribe gave us a veiled signal of positive moves on trade under the surface, and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has since made encouraging statements.
Two congressional delegations of pro-trade Democrats turned up in Colombia this month, back-slapping with the Colombians. But nothing approaches the good news seen now.
One of the causes of the Great Depression was protectionism and the imposition of tariffs. I hope that we’ll at least avoid that policy insanity.
Making Ayn Rand Look Good
Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:
A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.
In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.
“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.
An Upcoming Regulatory Disaster
Since EPA plans to find endangerment on both health and welfare grounds, the Agency could be compelled to establish “primary” (health-based) NAAQS for GHGs. Logically, the standard would be set below current atmospheric levels. Even very stringent emission limitations applied worldwide over a century would likely be insufficient to lower GHG concentrations. Yet the CAA requires EPA to ensure attainment of primary NAAQS within five or at most 10 years—and it forbids EPA to take costs into account. Regulate CO2 under the NAAQS program and there is, in principle, no economic hardship that could not be imposed on the American people.
It’s the new hair shirt in the new environmental religion. And all from unelected bureaucrats.
[Tuesday morning update]
Here’s a place to go to express your concerns.
[Bumped]
None Dare Call It…
Jonah Goldberg evaluates the Treasury Department’s efforts to control the banks without actually nationalizing them: “It’s not socialism. It’s corporatism.”
It is interesting that Harwood depicts the choice to discuss the use of the word fascist as a strategic choice to pump up the volume, which it may be for some. For other commentators, such as perhaps Larry Kudlow, they might be straining not to deem as “fascist” proposals that they would call fascist if that term were not so politically charged.
Me, I just call ’em like I see ’em. And I’m going to continue to attempt to recapture the language from the left. They’re not liberals. I’m a liberal. They’re fascists, even if they insist on remaining ignorant of their own intellectual history.
High-Speed Rail
…the boondoggle:
I love trains. If moderate- or high-speed rails worked, I would be the first to support them. But all they will really do is subsidize the rich, while they do more harm to the environment than driving or flying.
These are religious policies, not rational ones.
Why Your Taxes May Double
I’d be amazed if they only doubled. This is simply financially unsustainable. The government has gone completely mad.
Atlas Shrugged
A review, in the context of contemporary events. It is quite striking, and dismaying, how prescient she was.
The Politically Incorrect Guide
…to the Great Depression and New Deal
Falcon One Problems?
Via email from Jim Oberg comes this story from Malaysia:
The launch of the RazakSAT, Malaysia’s second remote sensing satellite has been postponed until further notice due to “technical problems”.
Due for lift-off on April 21, Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry secretary-general Datuk Abdul Hanan Alang Endut said the delay was because of problems with the launching vehicle.
The vehicle, Falcon 1, belonging to a company Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX), is to lift off the satellite from the launching pad at Omelek Island, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Island.
Abdul Hanan said SpaceX will be doing the repairs which will take at least six weeks.
There’s nothing visible on the SpaceX’s front page about a delay. They list the launch date for the Malaysian ATSB as “2009.” I assume that’s the same bird.