Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Where Is The Pencil Czar?

24 Comments

George Will has more on economic ignorance:

The indignant student, who had first gone to Home Depot for a flashlight, says it “didn’t try to rip us off.” It was, however, out of flashlights. Ruth suggests that the reason Big Box had flashlights was that its prices were high. If prices were left at regular levels, the people who would have got the flashlights would have been those who got to the store first. With the higher prices, “someone who had candles at home decided to do without the flashlight and left it there for you on the shelf.” Neither Home Depot nor the student who was angry at Big Box had benefited from Home Depot’s price restraint.

Capitalism, Ruth reminds him, is a profit and loss system.Corfam–Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s–and the Edsel quickly vanished. But, Ruth notes, “the post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.

The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation–the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize–is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.

Yes, an exaggeration that is reinforced by the propaganda inculcated into people by government schools.

Political Commentary

Meet The New Change

9 Comments

…same as the old change.

I’ve been amused, or at least bemused, for many months that Barack Obama has gotten away with pretending that his stale, failed collectivist policies represent something “new.” So has Michael Ledeen:

Once upon a time, Obama’s vision of “change”-which is based on class structure and top-down collective enterprises-was not only contemporary but exciting. It inspired a generation of Americans to create the welfare state. But then the welfare state aged, and now, in the wild-west world of globalization, instant communication, the blogosphere and so forth, it is very old hat. The ideas are still hanging around, however.

Bill Clinton understood that, and since he wasn’t really committed to any particular political agenda aside from his own success, he was able to grab many of his opponents’ ideas and use them. I remember poor Bob Dole complaining that Clinton was stealing his ideas, and he was right.

Obama doesn’t get that, I suspect because he really believes those old, now-failed ideas. He can’t bring himself to say that the collectivist projects of the sort he promoted in Chicago are bad for the poor, although when pressed he ootches toward more sensible positions (as when, in Saddleback, he confessed that he had probably been a bit too negative about welfare reform). We’ve all noticed that Obama keeps moving toward McCain’s positions on many issues, even on the basic one: the war.

If you hold ideas that no longer work (and indeed don’t even explain anything contemporary), it’s hard to conduct an inspirational political campaign, and Obama, like almost all the other Democrats, is stuck with the knowledge that he’s going to lose most of the policy debates. But he still wants to win. And the only way he CAN win is to destroy his opponents, which is the strategy the left is pursuing, ever more frantically.

Of course, I would be more amused if so many people didn’t seem to fall for the schtick. But fortunately, it looks like a sufficient number are on to him that he won’t get to implement his “change.” As Bill Whittle wrote, Sarah took away his glamour, and now John McCain is purloining his “change” mantra, which was never much, but it was all that he had left.

[Update a few minutes later]

It occurs to me that one of the reasons that young people are susceptible to Barack Obama’s “change” hokum is that they have no sense of history. To them, all is new, and only George Bush’s policies are old.

Political Commentary, Space

How Screwed Up Is Milspace?

11 Comments

This screwed up:

After trying unsuccessfully for years to build its own radar satellite, the Pentagon is now turning to its allies for help and has been presented with a plan that would see it buy a clone of Canada’s highly successful Radarsat-2 spacecraft.

The U.S. Defence Department asked for and received information this week from a number of foreign satellite consortiums on how they could help the Pentagon meet its surveillance needs for the future.

Isn’t there anybody here who knows how to play this game?

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

What A Mess

9 Comments

I’m looking at reporting from what looks like the Sheraton in Clear Lake, and there are reports of furniture with NASA logos floating in the bay. Gotta think that some of the JSC facilities were flooded.

If space were important, we wouldn’t have mission control in an area susceptible to floods and hurricanes. The Cape has some geographical reasons for its location, but the only reason that JSC is in Houston is because Johnson wanted it there, and the land was free.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s more on NASA’s fragile infrastructure. The agency’s ground facilities are just as non-robust as its space transportation system.

Here is how it seems to work: a hurricane threatens JSC – so NASA shuts off email and other services to a large chunk of the agency. Why? Because NASA deliberately set the system up such that other NASA centers – some of which are thousands of miles away and poised to offer assistance and keep the rest of the agency operating – have their email and other services routed out of JSC – and only JSC (or so it would seem). A few critical users have some service, but everyone else is out of luck for at least 48 hours. Would any self-respecting, profitable, commercial communications company do something as silly as this? No. They’d never stay in business. Only NASA would come up with such a flawed and stupid plan.

That’s too harsh. I can imagine the FAA, or DHS doing exactly the same thing.

It’s just more of that wise, foresightful government thing.

[Update about 1:30 PM EDT]

Jeff Masters says that Galveston lucked out:

Although Ike caused heavy damage by flooding Galveston with a 12-foot storm surge, the city escaped destruction thanks to its 15.6-foot sea wall (the wall was built 17 feet high, but has since subsided about 2 feet). The surge was able to flow into Galveston Bay and flood the city from behind, but the wall prevented a head-on battering by the surge from the ocean side. Galveston was fortunate that Ike hit the city head-on, rather than just to the south. Ike’s highest storm surge occurred about 50 miles to the northeast of Galveston, over a lightly-populated stretch of coast. Galveston was also lucky that Ike did not have another 12-24 hours over water. In the 12 hours prior to landfall, Ike’s central pressure dropped 6 mb, and the storm began to rapidly organize and form a new eyewall. If Ike had had another 12-24 hours to complete this process, it would have been a Category 4 hurricane with 135-145 mph winds that likely would have destroyed Galveston. The GFDL model was consistently advertising this possibility, and it wasn’t far off the mark. It was not clear to me until late last night that Ike would not destroy Galveston and kill thousands of people. Other hurricane scientists I conversed with yesterday were of the same opinion.

And of course, the lesson that the people who stayed behind will take is not that they were lucky and foolhardy, but that the weather forecasters overhyped the storm, and they’ll be even less likely to evacuate the next time. And one of these times their luck will run out, as it did for their ancestors a few generations ago, when thousands were killed by a hurricane in Galveston.

[Update mid afternoon]

Sounds like things could have been a lot worse at NASA, too.

NASA had feared that a storm surge from Galveston Bay would flood some
buildings on the 1,600-acre Space Center. Its southeast boundary is near
Clear Lake, which is connected to Galveston Bay. However, the water did
not rise that high.

Apparently the Guppy hangar at Ellington was destroyed, but it was never much of a hangar–more like a big tent.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Economic Ignorami

32 Comments

George Bush’s announcement this morning that the administration was concerned about “gouging” reminded me of why I wish that we’d had better options in the last two elections (and still do). I expect that kind of nonsense from Democrats, but you’d think that someone who was supposedly a businessman would know better. Or perhaps he does, and is just pandering. I’m not sure which is worse.

Every time we have a natural disaster like this, this idiotic topic comes up, and we once again have to explain Econ 101 to the products of our public school system, probably in futility. This time, it’s Rich Hailey’s turn.

Here’s what I wrote about it a three years ago, in the wake of Katrina.

[Update late morning]

Jeez, I thought that David Asman was smarter than that. Now he’s telling Fox viewers to take pictures of stations with high gas prices so that they can be reported to authorities. It’s hard for me to believe that Neal Cavuto would do that.

[Another update a minute or so later]

You know, I think that this is an explanation for socialism and collectivism’s continuing grip on the public mind, despite its long history of unending failure. There’s just something in human psychology to which it naturally appeals, and rationality just can’t break through. It just “feels” unfair for prices to go up in an emergency, regardless of the demonstrably bad consequences of attempting to legislate them.

[Late afternoon update]

Shannon Love explains how the gas station business works:

I’ll say it one more time for those who can’t be bothered to actually ask someone who owns a gas station. Gas stations set prices for the gas they sell today based on the wholesale price of the gas they will have to buy to replace it. Get it? The price you pay for a gallon today is the cost of the gallon the station will have buy to replace the one you just bought.

Gas stations sell gas at or near cost, so if they did not use replacement pricing any sudden spike in gas prices would shut them down and you couldn’t get any gas. I simply do not know why our public and private talking heads cannot understand and communicate this simple fact.

Because either they don’t know it, or they think that people don’t want to hear it. They operate on razor-thin margins, and can’t afford to hand out subsidized gas as charity, even if that wouldn’t screw up the market. And note, for those who say it’s “big oil” that is “maximizing profits” in the face of a national emergency, even if that were true (it’s not) “big oil” isn’t threatened with jail for “gouging.” It’s the gas station owner, who has no control over his wholesale gas costs. So people who demand that we crack down on gougers are essentially demanding that the station operators either operate at a loss, or pay fines, or go to jail. I don’t know why anyone would want to be in that business in the face of so much public ignorance about it.

Political Commentary

Wile E. Obama

14 Comments

Supergenius?

OK, so you’re running against a guy who for recreation (though not his) used to have his arms tied together at the wrists behind his back, and hang from them for hours, a result of which is that he can no longer raise them above his head. Or other things:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes.

And the Obama campaign is making fun of him for not knowing how to email?

When these guys lose, there will be many reasons why.

[Update late Friday evening]

Glenn has a more. A lot more, with lots of links. This one may have legs.

[Late night update]

One more update from Jonah.

As he says, bogus as it gets.

[Late evening update]

Iowahawk (who else!) picks up on the theme. Hilarity ensues.

[Saturday morning update]

Roger Kimball wonders who is sabotaging the Obama campaign?

Hey, as I say in comments, the guy has problems finding good help. Just who we want for president.

Political Commentary, Space

NASA Infighting

15 Comments

An interview with Tom Jones on the subject, over at Popular Mechanics. Note that he doesn’t point out that no one ordered Mike Griffin to develop Ares, which is the biggest reason that Orion is delayed and that NASA doesn’t have enough funding. He also has too much faith in Orion flying before something else (particularly given the Ares problems). I’m sure we could put up a capsule on an Atlas long before 2014, whether Dragon or something else, if we made it a priority.