[Via the Von Mises Institute]
Category Archives: Economics
An Even Scarier Jobs Chart
Remember the one I showed this weekend? Well check this one out:
I remember when James Carville demagogued Bill Clinton into office in 1992 with continuous lies that it was “the worst economy in fifty years.” Well, folks, this is the worst economy seventy years. And it won’t improve until we remove from office the people determined to keep wrecking it, who first took power five and a half years ago. There are a lot more scary charts at the link, if that’s not enough for you.
Stealing You Blind
…How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off You
A new book on corruption and rent seeking by my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Iain Murray, launches today.
[Update a few minutes later]
An explanatory editorial from the author.
…my new book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You, doesn’t just talk about the excesses of government pay. It looks at how the modern American state has rigged the rules to support itself at our expense. The Internal Revenue Service is allowed to ignore the Constitution. Regulations cost our economy more than the federal deficit without anyone batting an eyelid, as they turn ordinary Americans into criminals. Worst of all, our education system has ceased to educate our children and now only works to benefit the education establishment—unionized teachers and administrators.
And teach them to allow the statists to continue to rob us blind.
Just How Bad Is it?
This bad:
It’s Rooseveltian, in that the president inherited a bad situation, and made it worse (and continues to do so). Fortunately, we have term limits now, so he can only do the damage for eight years at most, but if the voters are smart, they’ll preempt the extended disaster next year.
The Most Misunderstood President In History
…I think, was Herbert Hoover.
The mythology about him is truly amazing. As Glenn says, he was the Barack Obama of his day. Except, of course, he actually had accomplishments in the real world before he became president and, as an engineer, at least understood basic math.
Why The “Stimulus” Didn’t Work
…because people aren’t stupid.
Well, except for the people who thought this would work.
More End-Of-Shuttle Links
…over at Instapundit. Expect to see a lot of nostalgia not just for the Shuttle, but for the entire way of doing business-as-usual as it’s been done at NASA for the last half century. It ended about forty years too late, but the future is bright now.
The “Liberal” Project
…has run out of money.
Finally. The problem is, it was our money.
Warren Buffett’s Worst Investment
…was probably Barack Obama.
Heh.
The Problem With Big Cities
It isn’t about race:
Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.
Many sensitive and idealistic people in our society work very hard to keep from connecting these dots and admitting to themselves that bad jobs are something we need. Quacks abound promising us alternatives (“green jobs” is the latest fashionable delusion), but ugly problems rarely have pretty solutions. We need entry level jobs that will get people into the workforce, and we need ways that they can learn useful skills at affordable prices that will help them climb the ladder and move on.
To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work. Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist. The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, pushcart vendors and day care operators need licenses; construction work has to comply with elaborate guidelines and city bureaucracies disgorge the required permits slowly and reluctantly.
The minimum wage is part and parcel of this problem.