Thoughts, and memories, from Frank Sietzen. I may answer his essay questions later, if I get the time.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Housing Insanity
If you want to know why us libertarian types are skeptical of the government’s ability to prevent housing market bubbles, well, I give you Exhibit 9,824: the government’s new $1000 down housing program.
No, really. The government has apparently decided, in its infinite wisdom, that what the American economy really needs is more homebuyers with no equity.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
The Top Ten Signs Of Doom
For the Democrats, not for the rest of us. Fortunately.
Oh, and for the record, I’m still not a Republican. But I’m even more not a Democrat.
Liars
Or maybe not. Maybe they really believe this nonsense.
They Have Much To Be Modest About
Why is the political class so confident?
Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?
The old British aristocracy could at least truthfully say that they had physical courage and patriotism and cared for their shires and neighborhoods and served for free as justices of the peace. The old French aristocracy could at least truthfully say that had refinement and manners and a love for art and literature and sophistication and beautiful things. The old Yankee elite could truthfully say that it was enterprising and public spirited and willing to rough it and do hard work when necessary. This lot have little or nothing to be proud of, but they are arrogant as Hell.
Why aren’t these people laughed out of the room?
This would be a good start:
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott:
That the gulf between these two Americas is growing wider is seen most disturbingly in Rasmussen’s finding that less than a quarter of Mainstream America now believe the government has the consent of the governed. Washington has a profound credibility crisis.
That Rasmussen’s results are far from unique or isolated is seen in the Gallup Poll’s most recent finding that only 11 percent of those surveyed have confidence in Congress and only a third have confidence in the presidency.
So how do we explain these two Americas? Rasmussen says his data shows that “the American people don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. The American people want to govern themselves.”
President Reagan understood this. In his first inaugural address, he reminded us that “from time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
Reagan in 1981 and Rasmussen in 2010 are pointing to the same fundamental truth: Our Political Class wants to govern Mainstream America, indeed thinks it’s their right and privilege to tell the rest of us how to live because they think they are smarter than we are. But that attitude flies in the face of what America is and always has been about, though imperfectly so, to be sure.
That the Political Class’ attitudes toward Mainstream America are corrosive and destructive is seen in Obamacare. It became law despite opposition from a clear majority of voters and only after President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress resorted to corrupt bargains and procedural abuses to force its passage.
I think there’s going to be a great reckoning in less than ninety days.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Obama elite versus the American people.
These people might revive the great American tradition of tar and feathers.
The Great Bamboozler
Some thoughts on the president’s latest bit of demagoguery.
As Goes Missouri
They say Missouri is a — perhaps the – bellwether state. If so, the Democrats had better start typing up résumés. At time of posting, support for the the measure stood at between 75 and 80 percent.
“Repeal ObamaCare” sounds like it could be a pretty potent campaign issue this fall. It really puts the Donkeys in a well-deserved bind.
The Rich
…have options:
Leaving aside the morality of abridging property rights based on income level, and the meaningless puddle this practice has melted our Constitution into, it seems reasonable to conclude there is a sweet spot on the Laffer curve: a point at which tax and regulatory burdens are low enough to encourage the most growth-oriented behavior from wealthy individuals and large corporations, but high enough to generate the income necessary to fund government without running huge deficits. The government must, in turn, live within its means. It must be small enough to survive on the funding provided by this optimum rate of taxation. Obviously, our current federal government has swollen far beyond this size, becoming a tumor that murders its host organism with increasingly frantic demands for greater nourishment.
Soak-the-rich policies are dismal failures, because they rely on controlling the behavior of people who have many options to escape. The promises of such systems depend on capturing extremely agile dollars. Those of us with fewer options, and less liquid income, always end up suffering the fallout from these failures. We live the dusty spaces left behind when billionaires decide not to follow the scripts prepared for them by Washington social engineers.
Unfortunately, the country is being run by economic ignorami. At least for another few months.
Missing The Point
Over at Popular Mechanics, Erik Sofge says that NASA misses the point with its new video game. Unfortunately, he misses the point himself, setting up the age-old and false dichotomy between humans and robots:
The game serves as an epitaph for what appears to be NASA’s lost decade. The agency failed to stay on time or on budget throughout the life of the Constellation program, its highest and most expensive priority. But while manned spaceflight foundered, unmanned exploration thrived. The modern-day equivalent of Aldrin and Armstrong are Spirit and Opportunity, robotic vehicles that survived years longer than expected on the surface of Mars. The rovers uncovered signs of water, and paved the way for the discovery of actual Martian ice by other intrepid bots.
The success of the rovers—and the increasingly tepid public response to shuttle launches or to the astonishing fact that there is a space station orbiting the planet—has called into question the relevance of astronauts. Moonbase Alpha, in its own small way, only hurts the case for humans in space. If the game featured an all-bot lunar mining facility, players would be spared the burden of gradually, tediously fixing a life-support system. Critical decisions such as whether to carry a wrench or a welder (apparently, NASA doesn’t plan on producing a moon-worthy toolbox by 2025) could be replaced with, say, a simulation of the powerful, spider-like ATHLETE robot’s perilous navigation of craters on the dark side of the moon. Instead of being given control of the array of awe-inspiring bots currently in NASA’s labs, such as the humanoid Robonaut 2, players can deploy toylike rovers whose arms and integrated welders make the astronauts piloting them even more redundant.
Apparently, he suffers from the exploration delusion. If it’s only about exploration, then yes, robots are more cost effective (though not more generally effective). But when you start to say that robots can do it better, it begs the question of what it is that they’re better at. While they can be good helpmates, they are ultimately useless for allowing humans to experience space first hand, and that’s ultimately the real market for human spaceflight, albeit not government human spaceflight. Robots can make it easier for humans to go but they don’t make them superfluous. He also has bought into the popular perception of the new policy:
Even if it was possible to build an astronaut game that’s both exciting and realistic, why bother? It will be more than a decade before humans even attempt another trip outside of Earth’s orbit. If NASA wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts and engineers, its games should focus on the real winners of the space race—the robots.
No one knows when we’ll go beyond earth orbit again, but a decade is a long time. When I see the kind of progress that SpaceX has made in seven years, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t private trips at least around the moon, if not landing, by 2020. Of course, the new policy makes that more likely than the previous one did, and the previous policy hadn’t a prayer, or even a plan, to meet President Bush’s original VSE goals. And the notion that government ten-year plans are the key to opening up space is one that should have died with Apollo, which wasn’t at all about opening up space. I’ll also say that if robots are really the “winners of the space race,” we’re all losers.
Killing Us Slowly
Why it’s a bad idea to put the government in charge of our nutrition (and health care in general):
According to Scientific American, growing research into carbohydrate-based diets has demonstrated that the medical establishment may have harmed Americans by steering them toward carbs. Research by Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, concludes that diets rich in carbohydrates that are quickly digestible—that is, with a high glycemic index, like potatoes, white rice, and white bread—give people an insulin boost that increases the risk of diabetes and makes them far more likely to contract cardiovascular disease than those who eat moderate amounts of meat and fewer carbs. Though federal guidelines now emphasize eating more fiber-rich carbohydrates, which take longer to digest, the incessant message over the last 30 years to substitute carbs for meat appears to have done significant damage. And it doesn’t appear that the government will change its approach this time around. The preliminary recommendations of a panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines urge people to shift to “plant-based” diets and to consume “only moderate amounts of lean meats, poultry and eggs.”
This seems like part of the general war on science. I think that the disastrous FDA food pyramid is driven by a combination of political correctness (it’s evil to use grain to feed cattle when children are starving in India), and corporate lobbying by Big Grain (funded by us, of course, via farm subsidies). But it’s one thing to have FDA recommend things — we can always ignore them if we inform ourselves. Much more troubling is having fascist nannies like Nurse Bloomberg force us to follow their recommendations.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Glenn has a question:
In an age when aggressive government agencies in places like New York City seek a greater hand in shaping Americans’ diets, the next set of guidelines, published later this year, could prove more controversial than usual because increasing scientific evidence suggests that some current federal recommendations have simply been wrong. Will a public-health establishment that has been slow to admit its mistakes over the years acknowledge the new research and shift direction? Or will it stubbornly stick to its obsolete guidelines?
Can we sue them and jail their executives, like we’d do if they were drug companies . . . .?
No, because you see, the drug companies are all about corporate greed and profits, whereas the bureaucrats have nothing in mind but our good health.