Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Detroit’s Van Gogh

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…would be better off in LA:

Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.

This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.

Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Leviathan Fail

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Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:

Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking So­mali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.

Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson in­stead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”

Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to bio­logical evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.

Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”

Read the whole thing, and buy the book.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Detroit

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…heads to the pawn shop:

This is another grim reminder of just how destructive Detroit’s corrupt machine politics have been. At one time, Detroit was the manufacturing capital of America and one of the country’s great cities; today it’s trying to stave off a kind of modern-day bonfire of the vanities.

This is the fate of the country at large if we don’t send a better class of people to Washington.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Campaign

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How it plans to get its groove back:

Look for this to be the headline of the next IPCC report, due out in September. The report will walk back previous estimates of climate sensitivity, but will affirm that we’re still doomed unless we go ahead with the previous program of handing over power to bureaucrats to control our energy supply. You read it here on Power Line first.

The interesting part will be to see whether climate orthodoxy proposes a new, and theoretically more plausible, GHG emissions reduction target and timetable, like a 50 percent cut by the year 2060. I doubt it. Hatred of “fossil fuels” is the categorical imperative of modern environmentalism, and it long predates the arrival of global warming as an issue. The original complaint was that that hydrocarbons produced too much conventional air pollution, but once we solved that problem global warming became the fallback position. Nothing will deter environmentalists from this wisp—certainly not facts or progress. I’m betting they’ll stick with the previous 80 by 50 target. But if they come in with a different one, I’ll do the math to figure out what year in the past it will take the U.S. back to: I’ll bet it will still be something like 1925. Stay tuned.

It was never about science. It was always about control, and political power.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A US Lunar Colony?

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New legislation is being introduced in the House:

The Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act (H.R. 1446), introduced by Rep. Bill Posey (R-Florida), would direct NASA to come up with a plan to return to the Moon and “develop a sustained human presence” there by 2022.

…But Houston, we may have a problem passing the Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act, considering that in September 2009, President Obama’s blue ribbon Human Space Flight Review Committee concluded that any plans on the part of NASA for future human exploration of space beyond low-Earth orbit would be “perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.” In other words, further exploration of the Moon would require money that NASA just does not have and is unlikely to get from Congress.

That’s not the problem. NASA has plenty of money to establish a lunar base. What they don’t have is the discretion to spend it intelligently toward that goal, instead being forced by the same people proposing this bill to waste billions on a launch vehicle it doesn’t need to do so. Someone needs to tell them that, if NASA won’t.