Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Forget Church And State

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Let’s have separation of the economy and state:

The government has no Constitutional, moral, or economic basis for controlling the economy. We seek to revoke its power to manipulate interest rates, debase the currency, manage the practice of medicine, restrict practical sources of energy, or rob Peter to pay for Paul’s house, financial institution, or automaker.

We identify government control of the economy as the cause of our current financial crisis, and argue that removing this cancer is the only solution.

Some will say that separation of economy and state is too radical a goal. To be sure, this goal will take time—and a roadmap—to reach. But it is the only valid destination. Where liberty is concerned, “moderation” is suicide. Patrick Henry did not say “Give me a small rollback in government or give me death.” He said: give me liberty. So should we.

Unfortunately, too many people don’t seem to want to be free, or responsible for their own lives.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cost Of Cap And Trade

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Bob Zubrin:

Burning one ton of coal produces about three tons of CO2. So a tax of $15 per ton of CO2 emitted is equivalent to a tax of $45/ton on coal. The price of Eastern anthracite coal runs in the neighborhood of $45/ton, so under the proposed system, such coal would be taxed at a rate of about 100 percent. The price of Western bituminous coal is currently about $12/ton. This coal would therefore be taxed at a rate of almost 400 percent. Coal provides half of America’s electricity, so such extraordinary imposts could easily double the electric bills paid by consumers and businesses across half the nation. In addition, many businesses, such as the metals and chemical industries, use a great deal of coal directly. By doubling or potentially even quadrupling the cost of their most basic feedstock, the cap-and-trade system’s indulgence fees could make many such businesses uncompetitive and ultimately throw millions of working men and women onto the unemployment lines.

It’s OK. Even if they have paychecks, they won’t be able to afford to eat any more, anyway, after the price of food skyrockets. And it will solve that pesky population problem in the third world.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Let’s Put The Government In Charge Of Health Care

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Charles Murray (who by the way co-wrote one of the best histories of Apollo):

You want to know what a Medicare identification card is like? It is a little larger than the standard size for credit cards and driver’s licenses. (Of course. Couldn’t have the federal government make a card that will fit in a stack with all the other cards you use.) It has no magnetic strip. It is plain vanilla text and fonts—no security features whatsoever. It could be counterfeited by a sixth-grader with a scanner. It is made out of flimsy paper that would barely qualify for a really cheap business card. This, for Medicare benefits, for Pete’s sake. It’s pathetic.

Actually, it is shoddy and incompetent, as are so many things that the federal government does.

Let’s hope they’ll stick to making little cars.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Example Of How Lucky We Have It

30 Comments

The worst job they could come up with:

I’ve held my silence for long enough, but my true identity (for about 2 months) was the bird at Red Robin – Red, he really has a name. It was horrible, you could only be out in the restaurant getting poked and stepped on by little kids for 15-20 minutes at a time- at which point you would overheat and the staff would waddle you back to the huge meat freezer to cool off and start all over again. Perk: free steak fries and soda.

Boo. Hoo.

I don’t want to get into a Monty Python “we had to live in a cardboard box and get killed by our father every morning, and be grateful that we had the luxury of a box” sort of thing, but I’ve had worse jobs.

But I’m not going to bother to talk about them, because I know that at the worst, I lived in a paradise compared to many millions in the world. For example, consider the people who have to work in real sweat shops, where you don’t get a break every 15-20 minutes.

But even there, I don’t think it compares to a “job” in North Korea, where your job is to go out and find something to eat that will be worth the energy that it took you to find it — forget about whether or not it will feed your family.

These people have no conception of what bad jobs are. And the frightening thing is that they may find out before the reign of The One, who many of them voted for, is over, because he seems to think that state planning, as occurs in the extreme there, should reign over the market.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Cultural Imperalism

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How McDonalds conquered France:

In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a McDonald’s in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no match for Le Big Mac. The first round of the presidential election was held on April 22, and Bové finished an embarrassing tenth, garnering barely 1 percent of the total vote. By then, McDonald’s had eleven hundred restaurants in France, three hundred more than it had had when Bové gave new meaning to the term “drive-through.” The company was pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald’s, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald’s, Bové had lost in a landslide.

As Hitler discovered, it helps a lot to have Frenchmen on your side. It’s a very entertaining read.

[Via Veronique]

[Update a couple minutes later]

The best take, from Michael Goldfarb:

In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

Even better than the smell of napalm in the morning.

[Via Mark Hemingway]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Catastrophe Avoidance

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…is not a one-sided threat. For those people who don’t understand discount rates, a graphical presentation.

This is a problem that just begs to have a regret analysis performed on it. Of course, we have a media that can’t even do simple division, so why would we expect them to understand net present value?

[Update on Tuesday morning]

It’s the economic growth, stupid:

Here are some other metrics. The percentage of the world’s population that is at risk for coastal flooding is well under 1% in the baseline, and is not projected to rise close to 1% in any scenario within the 95-year forecast. Malaria deaths have historically been in effect eliminated by societies that achieve several thousand dollars per year of per capita income — the key risk here is once again slower economic growth that keeps parts of the developing world poorer longer.

Again and again, we see the same pattern: At least for the next century, changes in human welfare, even on metrics that are not purely economic, are fundamentally driven by changes in economic development, not AGW damages. This is why it makes sense to be focused acutely on risks to economic growth when considering the overall effects of any emissions-mitigation program.

Most people who advocate nonsense like cap and trade are ignorant of the science, but even more are ignorant of economics, including the “scientists.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Democrats’ War On Science

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The EPA has quashed a politically incorrect study. Meanwhile, Jim Hansen, non-climate scientist, goes around shouting from the rooftops that he’s being silenced.

More here:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward…and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

After all the complaints about the Bush administration’s “war on science,” the self-righteous hypocrisy of these people is sickening.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Albany/Trenton/Sacramento Disease

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As go the “progressive” states, so will go the nation, if this keeps up:

President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

These states have been models of “progressive” policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government “investments,” heavy unionization and a large government role in health care…

…Mr. Obama believes union power is a ticket to the middle class. The middle class is getting creamed in all three of these “progressive” states, where organized labor is king. The unionized share of the workforce is 20% in California, 19% in New Jersey and 27% in New York compared to 13% across the country. All three are non-right-to-work states, have super-minimum wage requirements and provide among the nation’s most generous public-employee pensions.

Workers in these paradises are indeed uniting — by leaving. New York ranks first, California second and New Jersey third in moving vans leaving the state. A study by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research found that over the past decade these and other high-union states (mostly in the Northeast) had one-third the job growth of states with low union penetration.

This is why we have federalism, folks. And you know the state that’s doing well? Texas. Why doesn’t Washington try emulating that? Including a part-time legislature (though as fast as these vandals rush bills through, they can do a lot of damage even if they only meet for a month).