Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Does The Recovery Continue To Suck?

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No, AP, it’s not the technology, stupid:

Technological innovation has always eliminated jobs, a fact for which we should be thankful: our ancestors were brick-makers, arrow fletchers and animal skinners. It has also created wealth, and that wealth has been invested in new ventures, using new technologies, that have created new jobs. This has been true for thousands of years. So what has seemingly changed so suddenly? It seems obvious that in the U.S., the game-changer is metastasizing government spending, much of it wasteful, combined with trillions of dollars in government borrowing and oppressive regulation, which together have suppressed the wealth creation and investment that normally would have created millions of new jobs, along with trillions in new economic output.

In other words, the current recovery is uniquely awful because we have never before had such a left-wing federal government.

Or as large a one.

Business, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Grounding Of The Dreamliner

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…is a sign of a threat to innovation:

The Dreamliner’s troubles reflect a wider trend. Innovation in mature economies such as America’s seems stuck in a perpetual holding pattern.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has warned about this slowdown for years.

“There is so much incrementalism now,” Thiel said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “Even back in the ’90s there were companies like Amazon that were willing to do big things. That has gone out of fashion now.”

Thiel points to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the electric car company Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), both run by Elon Musk, as the rare examples of recent attempts to leap forward boldly. Yet Musk often gets portrayed as a quixotic dreamer.

“I think this reflects the insanity of our country, that anything non-incremental is seen as insane,” Thiel says.

Who’s responsible for this perceived downturn in innovation? One obvious target is overweening government. Some Boeing defenders have charged that the FAA wildly overreacted by grounding the Dreamliner.

“They are trying to make us too risk-averse,” says Gordon Bethune, a retired airline executive who worked for Boeing and later ran Continental Airlines. “The FAA is teaching Boeing something. Are we sending the right signals to our innovators in automobiles, airplanes, appliances, that the heavy hand of God is going to come down on you if you have so much as one question wrong in a hundred-question exam?”

Yet an even more important factor than excessive regulation is that the public markets simply don’t reward big risks. While going public theoretically should give companies more access to capital to finance research and development, it turns out that an initial public offering actually tends to discourage bold bets.

More than 20 years of patent citations show that on average in the five years after a company stages an IPO there’s a 40 percent drop in the quality of innovation, says Shai Bernstein, an assistant finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who has studied the trend.

I think this is why Elon has backed off on what were originally rumored to be his plans for an IPO this year.

Gee, someone should write a book about the consequences of extreme risk aversion for human spaceflight.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Intrinsically Marxist Nature Of Gun Control

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I was going to write a piece on this theme, but (recovering Leftist) David Mamet does it much better than I could hope to:

Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.

Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.

But President Obama, it seems, does.

He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family protection, around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He, evidently, feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of course, he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.

For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun ownership based on its assessment of needs.

…The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Yes.

Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Hazards Of Scientific Research

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A plane has gone down with three on board in Antarctica.

How could they have let them fly in that kind of weather? NASA would never have taken such a risk, because space research is much less important than Antarctic research.

[Update a few minutes later]

So, if they don’t survive, will Antarctic researchers shut down all operations until they’ve had a national commission investigate it, perhaps for years? That’s what NASA/Congress would do.

In my book, I go through the litany of the number of problems they’ve had at Scott-Amundsen Station, and conclude:

…despite all of these problems, one of them fatal (and Nielsen might have lived longer had she gotten better treatment sooner) there has never been a call by anyone to spend billions of dollars on a unique specialized emergency vehicle to provide 24/7/365 access to and from the Antarctic station, though given sufficient resources some clever engineers could probably come up with such a thing. And unlike NASA, the National Science Foundation has (sensibly) never gotten those kinds of resources. Because we recognize that sometimes research is worth taking risks for, and that the lives of the researchers do not have infinite value, or even billions of dollars worth of value. Except, inexplicably, when it comes to space research.

I may add this incident to the book.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Hillary Lied

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And she’s still lying:

When asked about the claim that the attack was sparked by a protest over a video, she responded, “I did not say . . . that it was about the video for Libya.”

That’s simply untrue. When she stood by the caskets of the four Americans killed in Libya, she directly blamed an “awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Afterward, she reportedly told the father of Tyrone Woods, the former Navy SEAL who was killed in the attack, “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Why tell the man that if the video had nothing to do with it?

Moreover, Clinton was part of an administration that crafted an entire PR strategy to blame these attacks on “an awful Internet video.” White House press secretary Jay Carney was unequivocal: This was a “response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” In his address to the United Nations, President Obama mentioned the video six times but al-Qaeda once. When he appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, he blamed the video directly. U.N. ambassador Susan Rice went on five Sunday shows blaming the video. All of this happened when they already knew it was not true on the day of the attack, and even the president of Libya had publicly called the protest explanation ridiculous.

As I said, this is no surprise to anyone who’s been observing her throughout her career.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Peak Oil

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…has been delayed again:

It’s not clear yet how much oil is recoverable, but even at the low end the field would include as much shale oil as America’s Bakken formation, which has helped transform U.S. energy production and the global energy landscape. If higher estimates prove more accurate, Australia could join the U.S. as one of the world’s top oil producers.

Good news for the world. Bad news for OPEC (and those who want to fund Islamism). And for global-warming hysterics.