Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman
I'm Fed Up with Santa Obama and Crony Uncle Ben
A private newsletter perfectly summarizes my point of view:
It's funny how nobody ever talks about the move Bernanke could make that would truly improve the outlook for the U.S. economy: Resign and put a sign on the front door that says, "Closed forever."Bernanke and the rest of the Fed
Peter Schiff (below) basically argues that the real problem is well-intended but dysfunctional public policy, e.g., the minimum wage. Inflation essentially lowers the cost of labor. Schiff doesn't explicitly say this, but we could get the same result without a de facto regressive tax of inflation by simply restoring economic liberty: eliminating government policies that raise the cost of doing business.
Susan Rice Drops Out of the Race for Secretary of State
Now if she'll only resign from her day job... I'll have to say when I first saw a relevant email that just had her surname I thought, "Oh, was Condi Rice on his list?" I am direct myself, but when I deal with managers and clients I avoid judgmental rhetoric {which would be suicidal) and look for face-saving ways to get my point across.
The Gray Lady buys into the disingenuous Obama foreign policy spin that Obama expedited the Bush withdrawal from Iraq--in fact, Obama wanted but failed to extend the withdrawal schedule (Bush did, too), however, Obama has more than doubled American casualties in Afghanistan in less time and has radically expanded use of drones without Congressional approval; he's put interventionist policy on steroids.The fact Rice was influential in these decisions is not reassuring.
But when Susan Rice misled the American people by blaming a Youtube video for the Benghazi consulate attack, I don't care whether she was simply the mouthpiece for an incompetent President. I once got an IBM manager to back down by agreeing to do what he asked against my advice, but I would file a statement disclaiming responsibility. (He backed down.) I regard what Rice did as as violation of professional ethics; I would have resigned rather than do what she did.
Obama has been irritated by criticism of Rice, insisting they direct their criticisms at him. No problem, tough guy. But I stand by my condemnation of a disastrous, seat of the pants foreign policy, and all the people involved--including Clinton and Rice.
Business-Unfriendly States Lose Residents
Even in a tough labor market, I routinely turn away recruiters presenting California and New York City area opportunities. Public policy and the high cost of living have a lot to do with it. One of my favorite war stories from New York was when I worked for a college software vendor in 2008, shortly before starting my blog. I did a gig at one of the community colleges on Long Island. My business unit was rolling out an operational data store (think of it as a conduit between a production database and a data warehouse).
In practice, the ODS was a more user-friendly, static database refreshed nightly with daily changed data from the production database. Now this college (as well as others) had a policy of not closing out students whom haven't graduated, say if you took a course in progressive economics in 1983. The way our design (i was not responsible for product design) worked the ODS would generate relevant student records every academic term since 1983. This resulted in unusually large databases.
Here's the point: one of the fires I had to put out while I was on my final gig (on the West Coast) (besides the fact that the college DBA I was training to administer the ODS was either falling asleep or leaving training for other priorities--no, it wasn't me: there were others in training): there was a state agency responsible for doing backups argued that the client's database was "too big" for their backups and demanded that we accordingly shrink the database; she volunteered to replace the current database with one from several days back that fit their scheme. I find these Procrustean approaches not atypical of government bureaucrats I've dealt with at cities, counties, states and the Feds. Her "solution" was to restore an obsolete database with no recent data, totally unusable for the clients
Matk Perry of Carpe Diem used the following exhibit to show net worker migration from crony unionist states like California, New York and New Jersey to more business-friendly states like Texas and Florida.
