The rent-seeking green-energy scam continues its collapse.
[Update a few minutes later]
I love this: “‘It seemed so safe,’ he said recently. ‘It was a government guarantee.'”
Category Archives: Economics
“Income Inequality”
…and the Left:
Just like the apparatchiks of the socialist regimes, the wealthy — including those who most yell about the injustices of income inequality — take very expensive vacations. They don’t opt for a day trip close to home or stay at a Holiday Inn a few days near a crowded public beach. Nor do they decide to give what they planned to spend on a luxury trip to the poor, so they could all have a vacation instead of staying at home the week or two they are off from work.
We know that these folks are hypocritical, and hope that no one will call them on their personal behavior. When they say that all their goals could be covered by higher taxes on the rich, they probably also realize that even if they raised the tax rate phenomenally for the truly wealthy, the amount they would raise would not cover any of the expenses for all the programs they support. Eventually, the category of “rich” will be lowered to those who earn, let’s say, $150,000 yearly in a big city, in which living expenses are so high and mortgages and rents also outrageously so. Such an income for a family of four puts one squarely in the mid ranges of the middle class.
They still believe that if inequality exists, redistributing the wealth is the only way to address the question. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw decades ago in The New Yorker, in which a king announces to the crowd that he wants an educated populace, so he’s awarding every subject a Ph.D. What the socialists who seek to make policy want is the equivalent: create equality by essentially making everyone more poor, so no one will have enough to go around.
Like equating “health care” with health insurance, leftists like to equate fighting poverty with erasing income inequality, because no one would argue that we shouldn’t fight poverty, while worrying about income inequality allows them to indulge in one of their favorite sins: envy.
But the two things are not the same. One can eliminate poverty (which in many ways we in fact have in America, as measured by the traditional definition (no or poor shelter, limited access to food and clothing and basic necessities) and still have income inequality. In fact, in America the “poor” have cell phones and fancy sneakers, and as others have noted, we are the first society in human history to have poor people who are obese. So curing poverty does not, in itself, end income inequality.
Similarly, one can eliminate income inequality by the very simple measure of impoverishing all. Which is what socialism and income redistribution tends to do, historically, for very good reasons. Well, except for the apparatchiks, who will always have theirs.
The American Energy Boom
…booms on:
As Daniel Yergin puts it, “the shale-energy revolution [provides] a new source of resilience for the US and enhances America’s position in the world.”
It’s the one bright spot in the American economy, and it’s happening despite, not because of, “progressive” policies. Of course, they’ll take credit for it, though.
And the Left just hates it. I’d like to see to what degree the anti-frackers and anti-Keystone people are being funded by the Saudis.
NASA’s Unneeded Test Stand
Here’s a story on the Stennis boondoggle, with a quote on pork from Yours Truly.
“Progressivism”
…of the elite.
The New School
An interview with Instapundit on his new book
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, Academia, winter is still coming for you:
…a lot of people would like to be research professors: no boring students, job security, lots of conferences, prestige, research! (This is what the profession looks like to 22 year olds who have spent all their lives in school environments and have been trained to see professors as authority figures and mentors.) Sprinkle in student loan programs, the natural ambition of colleges to become universities and small universities to become big ones, and there are a lot of forces pushing academia to expand. The result is one of the more cruel and exploitative workplaces in the United States today. While the lot of day laborers and poultry plant employees is worse still, they at least haven’t spent a decade of their lives preparing for jobs that they are then denied.
This system is now coming undone. There aren’t many jobs for entry level doctoral grads, and even fewer for tenure track. Oversupply pushes wages down and keeps desperate hangers-on thronging around looking for adjunct positions. Older professors who were once obliged to retire at 65 now keep teaching. The result is a huge jobs crush.
To resolve the oversupply, we’re going to have to close down many PhD-generating graduate programs and shrink most others. The result will be that demand for professors in the affected field will shrink even more. With fewer grad students to teach, most schools will not need the large tenured faculties they have today, and tenure positions will shrink more still. That in turn should lead to another round of grad school shrinking—even fewer openings as more universities cut department size to adjust to the shrinkage of grad school programs—until at some point the process reaches an equilibrium.
And that point could come sooner than later.
I’d also like to see more lawsuits like this. As that report on the nation’s educational system said almost a third of a century ago, if a foreign power had imposed it on us, we’d consider it an act of war, but we did it to ourselves. Finally, it’s starting to come undone.
Farewell To California
One businessman who has had more than enough of the taxes and regulatory insanity.
Commercial Crew
It needs maximum support, and should be a priority over SLS (which shouldn’t exist at all).
Space Mining
A good overview of the companies going after lunar and asteroidal resources. Expect to hear a lot more nonsense like this as the industry evolves, though:
Space exploration researcher Alice Gorman is based at Flinders University, Australia, and is an internationally recognised leader in the emerging field of space archaeology. Passionate about space, she believes both industry and academia underestimate the emotional investment people have in the night sky.
‘There is the view that it’s just unethical to destroy another celestial body… but then [people] also question if it is right for a profit-making company to make massive profits from this,’ she says. ‘Nobody doubts the investment will be monumental and some argue that those willing to take these risks deserve all the rewards as this isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
But, as Gorman also highlights, the world already has unequal distributions of wealth and some wonder if space-based industries could drive these disparities further apart. As she asks, could Earth one day comprise a terrestrial-based underclass looking up at the off-world wealthy.
We wasted six bucks Saturday night to watch Elysium on pay per view. It’s based on the same stupid socialistic fantasy premise.
More Concealed Carry
And this is one of the rhetorical games (i.e., lies) the Democrats always play that infuriate me:
A frequent claim by control advocates this year has been that 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans are in favor of expanded background-checks legislation. But the polls showing such overwhelming support really ask little more than whether people want to stop criminals from obtaining guns, not whether voters actually favor the legislation that the Senate was voting on.
The actual laws being discussed were much less popular.
For example, a mid-April poll by the Pew Research Center provides one such illustration when it asks voters whether they were happy that the Senate bill had been defeated. While 67 percent of Democrats were “disappointed” or “angry” about the defeat, more Republicans and independents were “ very happy” or “relieved” than upset by the defeat.
That’s an interesting conflation of objective and process – claiming support for what a public policy ostensibly seeks to achieve, rather than what it actually does. Needless to say, this tactic is hardly unique to gun control policy.
Yup. For instance, back when the economic ignorami, like Chuck Schumer, were pushing Porkulus, they said things like “almost every economist says that this is necessary,” when at best most economists only thought that some sort of stimulus was necessary. No economist with two brain cells to rub together thought that the Democrats’ payoff to public-employee unions would be helpful.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Also, remember this the next time someone talks about a “Republican” war on science. The Left clings to their gun-control dogma in the face of all empirical evidence. Because it’s not about controlling guns. It’s (as always) about controlling you.
[Update a few minutes later]
Detroit police chief: “Better start carrying.” When seconds count, the police are only minutes (or hours) away. A decade ago, when Michigan reformed its carry laws, the anti-gun nuts predicted blood in the streets. Just the opposite happened. But they remain firmly anti-science.