Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Six False Lessons

31 Comments

…of the Shuttle program. With Atlantis in orbit for the last time, I have some cautionary words over at Popular Mechanics.

[Update a few minutes later]

I also have a piece up over at National Review Online — is the era of big-government space programs over?

[Update at 12:45 PM PDT]

I’m on hold right now with Bill Carroll on KFI-AM in LA, who’s been bewailing the end of the space program. Don’t know if I’ll get on or not.

[Update a while later]

The segment ended before he got me on, but I’ve been in an email discussion with his producer, so maybe next week.

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

The Problem With Big Cities

14 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The War On Industry

9 Comments

Make that industries:

So starting as a presidential candidate, Obama has:

Called for bankrupting the coal industry.
Raised gas prices by forcing domestic production to a crawl.
Demonized bankers and automatic teller machines.
Went to war against Fox News, talk radio, and Twitter user Kevin Eder.
Alienated Wall Street, which backed him in 2008 — and will probably do so again.
Nationalized the car industry.
Forced Chrysler to terminate 25 percent of its auto dealers.
Demonized Las Vegas.
Alinskyized the Chamber of Commerce.
Blocked Boeing from expanding into a Right to Work State.
Is busy transforming the insurance industry into the equivalent of quasi-government utilities.
Created an uncertain (to say the least) regulatory environment, making new hiring a challenging proposition.
And is now Alisnkyizing private planes, despite having temporary custody of the greatest “private” plane of all.

As Doug Ross wrote last fall, “Unlike Tricky Dick Nixon, Obama Wears His Enemies List On His Sleeve.”

And yet, when only 18000 jobs were created last month, and unemployment is at 9.2%, it’s “unexpectedly.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

See?

U.S. employers added 18,000 workers in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly climbed, indicating a struggling labor market.

Emphasis mine.

[Update a few minutes later]

Economic calamity:

…Keynesian economics is a total fail. Fred Barnes quoted FDR Treasury Secretary this morning in the WSJ:

“In FDR’s time, a surge in spending by Washington was a cornerstone of New Deal efforts to lift the country out of the Depression. But unemployment never dropped below 14% in the 1930s and rose to 19% by the end of the decade. “Now, gentlemen, we have tried spending,” Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary, confessed to House leaders in 1939. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”

Combine that with James Pethokoukis column yesterday that lays out exactly how dire the future budgeting and debt of the US is and you have an actual, not manufactured, crisis that needs to get resolved today.

This isn’t rocket science. But it does require the progressive wing to give up their reliance on economic theory that only works in a textbook. Economics is a social science and a study of human behavior. Keynes postulated a theory and we have numerous empirical examples of that theory failing miserably. How long will it take?

Einstein said the theory of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. There, my friends, is the core principle of Democratic policy. Insanity.

Frighteningly, almost half the electorate shares their affliction.