Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

First Gun Buybacks

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…and now extending the idiocy to cars:

Turn in old cars. It’s long been a talking point of liberals and environmentalists that cars older than a given age should be removed from the highways. The usual mantra goes “The government should buy all cars older than X and pay the owner $750. Then the owner could go out and buy a newer, cleaner, more efficient car.” The advocates for this position either fail or refuse to understand that the owners will not be able to find a car to buy with their $750. Basic economics.

At least the gun buybacks, stupid as they are, offer a reasonable amount of money for the hardware, particularly given that many of those turned in are non functional. I suspect that if the government implements such a program for cars, they’ll get a lot of undriveable clunkers, but very few useful automobiles.

Unless, of course, they make us an offer we can’t refuse. That would, after all, be the Chicago way.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Ideology That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Who owns socialism?

As Confucius said, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

One of the insidious tactics of the left over the decades has been to debase the currency of the language, calling themselves “liberals” and “progressives,” and accusing those who disagree with them as “racists,” and “haters.” I refuse to bow to their politically corrosive sophistry. What we are seeing in Washington today is socialism, and fascism, and the two are not opposites, but are in fact closely related.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg has similar thoughts today at USA Today:

The whole spectacle was just too funny for liberal observers. Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News & World Report’s opinion editor, was a typical giggler. He chortled, “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”

Putting aside the funny and scary notion that it’s “funny and scary” for political professionals to take weighty political issues seriously, there are some fundamental problems with all of this disdain. For starters, why do liberals routinely suggest, even hope, that Obama and the Democrats are leading us into an age of socialism, or social democracy or democratic socialism? (One source of confusion is that these terms are routinely used interchangeably.)

For instance, in (another) fawning interview with President Obama, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocks Obama’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” This, of course, would be the same Jon Meacham who last February co-authored a cover story with Newsweek’s editor at large (and grandson of the six-time presidential candidate for the American Socialist Part) Evan Thomas titled — wait for it — “We Are All Socialists Now,” in which they argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country.

Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to “social democracy.” Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.” Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor “capitalism” over “socialism” by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?

No, it’s not crazy talk. Except when “right wingers” talk about it, of course.

But as he notes, “corporatism” (the economic philosophy of fascism) is the best term for it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Advice To The Tea Partiers

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They should ask, “What would Reagan do“?

Conservatives are dismayed and baffled at the sight of Obama’s Latin American-style personality cult and at poll results showing astonishing erosion in public support for free markets and limited government. “This is a center-right nation,” conservatives continue to insist. To be sure, Reagan and the conservative movement stoked the populist flames from the 1970s through the 1990s, with considerable success. But conservatives became too comfortable with the thought that populism would remain a reliable conservative force in American politics, and largely lost or disdained the art of constitutional argument.

Madison and Tocqueville knew better (as Mansfield has warned us repeatedly over the last two decades), and would not have been surprised by the present crisis. The other person who would not have been surprised is Ronald Reagan. This sunny optimist also warned repeatedly that “freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” Reagan’s greatest frustration as president was his inability to control spending. In contrast to Pres. George W. Bush, Reagan vetoed several “budget-busting” bills in the course of his presidency, only to see many Republican members of Congress join Democrats in overriding his vetoes. This led Reagan, late in his second term, to recognize the wisdom of Mansfield’s Razor and to embrace a bold constitutional strategy that no one much remembers today.

We need to get people to talk about the Constitution much more.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

An Interesting Quote

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On the economics of fascism, from self-declared fascist Lawrence Dennis:

Thus we shall see what fascism has to do to make a system of private ownership and management workable, so far as arrangements involving capital income or reward are concerned. The ruling principle must be that capital and management reward must be kept in continuous and flexible adjustment with economic possibilities, and that legal and institutional arrangements—like loan contracts, bonds, legal concepts of just compensation, due process of law, and confiscation—must not obstruct executive action of government to maintain this adjustment otherwise than by the present devices of bankruptcy, foreclosures, reorganization, and cycles of booms and depressions. [Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper & Bros., 1936 ), Ch. V. “Can We Reorganize the Present System?”]

Emphasis mine. As Jonah notes, it seems very familiar, somehow.

Economics, Political Commentary, Space

DIRECT Rebuttal Thoughts

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I had missed this when they were posted, but the Chair Force Engineer had some thoughts on DIRECT a couple weeks ago, here and here.

“Wow.” Are we to believe that ESAS was designed with little or no consideration of what the supporting infrastructure would cost? It would certainly explain why we’re stuck with the unaffordable Ares I and Ares V.

I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but sadly, I’m not.

Further NASA statements such as “Ares I + Ares V uses 15 SRB segments, while two Jupiter 232’s use 16 segments” also reveal an incredibly simplistic approach to cost estimation. Such simple methods might be appropriate for pre-algebra students. Professional cost estimators ought to know better. That’s why cost estimation is so difficult; there may literally be thousands of dependent and independent variables that make up the true cost of the system over its lifetime. Saving a few million in rocket hardware may have bigger reprocussions with development dollars, standing army costs, and infrastructure costs. It’s best summed up on Slide 26, where Jupiter’s higher launch costs (measured in tens of millions per launch) are offset by the savings of billions in development costs.

We’d have to see a full life-cycle cost accounting with assumptions to know whether or not it’s a good saving to cut development cost at the price of higher ops costs. It depends on how much you’re going to fly. But I suspect that it probably is, because the up-front costs are in expensive near-term dollars whereas the flight costs are down stream and discounted, and the flight rate will probably never get big enough to justify spending more on development to reduce marginal cost per flight. That’s always the problem with expendables.

I really need to write up my talk on marginal costs from Space Access.