Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them;
but do not let them master you. Let them teach you
- patience,
- sweetness,
- insight.
Confusion Over Crony Capitalism
A few posts back I warned about Greenbackers infiltrating the Tea Party movement. Among other things, Greenbackers demonize the institution of banking. Within the libertarians there's a split between left-libertarians and right-libertarians A comprehensive distinction beyond the scope of this segment; suffice it to say in perhaps an oversimplified fashion that left-libertarians tend to have a more nuanced take on property ownership and they tend to distrust scale regardless of its source, government or business; a number are anarchists, believing even things like defense and justice can be privately sourced. Right-libertarians are more likely minarchists, we focus on a limited set of State powers. We are not as much worried about scale or bigness in the private sector (for example, we see economies of scale can be a good thing that benefit consumers, and we don't believe in punishing economic success). We do worry about the scale of government because it constrains economic growth; yes, we worry about any corrupt relationship between business and government, i.e., crony capitalism. For instance, a special interest can advocate higher regulations, the costs of which a big business can spread more easily than smaller competitors. But not all economically successful companies seek to impair competitors through force (regulation) through government..
We want to eliminate the possibility of corruption by design. For example, the left is obsessed with lobbyists and/or campaign finance, but part of the reason for lobbyists is because they can influence legislation for their own interests. If there was a policy against special-interest tax gimmicks, or if we abolished seniority rules for committee leadership or imposed limited terms for public office, many perceived abuses would melt away.Instead, left-wingers are addicted to vicious cycles of regulation, absolutely clueless their own policies are contributing to the problem.
Take banks; if they had to worry about depositors concerned about risking investments affecting the security of their deposits, But when nearly every bank has a deposit guarantee, it is a lot easier for banks to take on risky business, and bank customers don't need to shop around for safe banks. They know the government has their back. You can argue all you want about those nefarious banks, but it would be better off if customers were vested in bank selection (beyond, which one has an ATM closest to my house or do I get a premium for opening an account). That's why I say government is part of the problem.
(We see a similar thing with health insurance the use it or lose it mentality. For example, I'm entitled to a "free" office visit; if I had to pay for the visit out of my own pocket, I might not go. The problem is that this type behavior exacerbates cost pressures. The answer is to treat consumers like adults and vest them in the transaction.)
In any event I was on a libertarian GOP website I've occasionally referenced in other posts. This one editor started discussing Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and others as "left-libertarian". I posted the following comment:
Apparently being a "left-libertarian" to the editor means anyone whom doesn't share his foreign interventionist perspective--he also classifies reason.com, etc. Left-libertarians are more like left-wing activists skeptical of big government (and big anything, especially business), more anarchist than minarchist. Ron Paul, Rockwell, and others (including me) simply are more consistent, like the Old Right prior to the 1950's. We don't believe in Big Defense but aren't anti-military; we are more reformist. Now clearly if Ulbricht intended to kill another person, it violates our common belief in the unalienable right to live. It is no reflection on Paul's libertarian-conservative positions. (For a more appropriate discussions of left-libertarisns, see, e.g., leftlibertarian.org.)Over the weekend, someone had responded to one of my FB comments and about a third way through his diatribe, he started ranting on corporations. I think Ron Paul contributes to the problem by using the term 'corporatism' to describe crony capitalism or corrupt relationships between business and government. Ron Paul went over the concept in one of his weekly podcasts. and explicitly pointed to a couple of large IT corporations which did not rely on government favors to achieve economic success. It suddenly dawned on me the respondent was either a left-libertarian or a progressive troll.
Tyranny of the White House
How aware are you of this story via MyGovCost:
When the Obama administration acted to furlough 815,239 federal government employees as part of the partial shutdown of the U.S. government in the absence of having passed a budget or a continuing resolution to continue funding government operations, just under half of that number, 400,000, came from the Department of Defense’s civilian labor force.
With the passage of the “Pay Our Military Act”, the Obama administration should never have targeted so many of these not so non-essential government workers with furlough notices. Many of the furloughed defense employees work in repair and maintenance functions that directly support military activities and operations, while many others inspect work done by defense contractors, ensuring that work meets required specifications.
That the Obama administration acted to furlough so many of these employees, in spite of the law that President Obama signed just days ago, speaks to its desire to inflict as much pain as possible upon the U.S. economy to achieve its political aims.It's bad enough that the Tyrant-in-Chief does find the manpower to bar disabled vets from memorials on public property that they risked their lives and health for or that residents on leased federal land are evicted from their homes and businesses
ObamaCare Roundup
Some copies of user comments on an ObamaCare FB page, via an investment newsletter:
From Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt from National Review:
Last week we heard from NR Cruiser Bruce Webster, whose professional work is in analyzing large organizations, large projects, and complicated IT projects..
News reports I've seen since then indicate that its problems are systemic and not merely due to web traffic (cf. the reports that 99% of the 'applications' being forwarded to insurance companies are incomplete or corrupted). And, really, 7 million visitors in two days is pretty light-weight compared to a lot of commercial websites these days.
Having done detailed reviews of troubled IT projects, including ones bigger than this (I spent three months leading a review a major re-engineering project at Fannie Mae that had taken 4 years and $500 million and wasn't even close to going into production), I suspect the issues here aren't going to go away with a few overnight bug-fixing sessions. My prediction -- with caveats that I've been wrong before -- is that sometime this week, HHS will take Healthcare.gov down completely (at least, the 'Apply Now!' portion; they can leave the 'Learn More' portion up), and it will be offline until at least November. (Here are a few other recent posts on my professional blogs -- neither written with Healthcare.gov in mind -- that nevertheless may have some bearing on its current problems: here and here.)
At least, that's what they would do if they were smart, but if they were smart, they wouldn't have gone live with the current system in its current condition.
The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff talks to Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics, an application management company, that handles software for companies like NetFlix.
S.K: The Obama administration has said that all these problems are happening because of overwhelming traffic. How good of an explanation is that?
JB: That seems like not a very good excuse to me. In sites like these there's a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that's how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time.
Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak, so you can go through and remove glitches. [See my (RAG) FB discussion below.] I'm a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don't buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.A clipping from an ObamaCare website (would you apply for a job with the understand "we do not have benefits or pay information available at this time?)
T"he marketplace opened Oct. 1 to help you apply for tax credits and apply for eligibility to use the marketplace. We do not have the benefit or rate detail at this time, but we hope to have these in the coming weeks. Once the information is available online, you'll be able to shop, compare and select plans through our portal. We apologize for the inconvenience."I had mentioned in a recent post a Facebook thread started by an IT professional relative the day after the grand opening. This particular statement made me cringe:
"As a computer person, I can tell you that there are few, if any, websites or networks that could handle the President and every news channel telling tens of millions of people to "go check out this website today."
There are technical solutions to the problems [relative] is discussing. Among other things, the workload can be distributed (by hardware and/or software) among large numbers of middle-tier servers. How do you think web businesses manage to handle their user loads, when outages can mean losing millions of dollars? This is gross mismanagement by horrible IT management in the public sector, and I've had to deal with some of these bozos. [relative] is right in the sense that these thing happen in poorly designed systems, but these idiots have had 4 years to plan for accommodating yesterday. The problems [relative] discussed can be simulated--there are IT solutions for that. I know [relative] isn't trying to excuse these idiots; that people will wait until the last minute is also totally predictable. But let's be clear: there is no excuse for what happened. I have done lots of go-lives over the past 2 decades, and we drilled so many times that we never ran into these type issuesI talked about related technology: just to throw out a couple of name products used by former clients (no intent to exclude competitive vendors, but simply to exemplify for the unfamiliar reader): F5 Load Balancer and HP/Mercury Interactive LoadRunner:
HP LoadRunner can simulate thousands of concurrent users to put the application through the rigors of real-life user loads, while collecting information from key infrastructure components (Web servers, database servers etc.)[2] The results can then be analyzed in detail, to explore the reasons for particular behavior.Facebook Corner
Some progressive troll left this propaganda image for the LFC group on FB:
We were invited to respond:
First, as commented below, many of these were already highly regulated. Second, there are usually legal remedies for damage to people or property. Third, with respect to AIG, most libertarians object to the AIG bailout. Fourth, with respect to sweatshops, there are paternalistic comparisons made; no one is conscripted to work in a sweatshop, which have to offer sufficient compensation to attract voluntary workers. Minarchists usually recognize some minimal level of regulation--the problem is a diminishing marginal benefit to regulation. I regard the best regulation is transparency and a free press. More importantly, we need to flip the question on the often incompetent and ineffectual government regulators: who protects us from force-wielding government malpractice? Capitalism relies on voluntary transactions; An enterprise has a vested interest in its own survival to fulfill a customer's needs, to protect its reputation.D'Accord
I came out strongly against the retroactive pay packagefor furloughed personnel passed without dissent over the weekend. I have to admit that I was disappointed that I didn't see at least a protest vote by Amash or Massie. I didn't see anyone else expressing similar thoughts; was I like the boy noticing the emperor was wearing no clothes. Never fear. A published comment from Lew Rockwell on Facebook is more strident on the issue:
"The Republican-controlled House has passed the 'Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act' to provide 'for compensation of federal employees furloughed due to any lapse in appropriations that begins on or about October 1, 2013, for the period of such lapse in appropriations.'
The vote was 417-0. This means that every Republican in the House that voted (13 Republicans did not vote), voted for the bill. Forget all their talk about fiscal conservatism, reining in government spending, eliminating unnecessary government programs and agencies, limited government, etc., etc., etc. The Republican Party is pure evil (just like the Democratic Party). It cannot be reformed. It cannot be taken over. It cannot be made libertarian. It cannot be restored. It should be abandoned. There is no difference between the parties when it comes to our life, liberty, and property.
No, I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for overpaid, underworked, and unnecessary federal workers, 95 percent of whom help carry out unconstitutional activities of the federal government," says Laurence Vance.I think this was all about politics. I think the GOP is trying to anticipate and preempt predictable Dem responses: I think that's clear from the flurry of the piecemeal funding proposals being passed. I understand why they are doing it, but I would rather that they do the right thing.
Political Humor
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie and Townhall |
Musical Interlude: Motown
Smokey Robinaon & the Miracles, "Tears of a Clown"
