If I had my life to live over again,
I'd be a plumber.
Albert Einstein
Image of the Day
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| Via Drudge Report |
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| Via Citizens Against Government Waste |
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| Courtesy of the original artist via Carpe Diem |
Persnickety Piketty
A few posts back I did an initial comment on the French socialist's income-inequality tome, the latest rage of the "progressive" cocktail circuit, quoting or paraphrasing Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek. This follow-up focuses on Bob Murphy, an Austrian School economist recently interviewed on Tom Woods' May 16 podcast.
I'll simply provide a summary of posts Murphy made about a relevant comment from economy PhD student Matt Rognlie and critiques from sympathetic critics Brad Delong and Larry Summers. I don't want to get into the economic weeds of this discussion, but Rognlie points out that Piketty does a bit of "some magic happens" in arguing this escalating rate of return to capitalists, requiring the government intervention of a confiscatory wealth tax. In particular, Piketty seems to be confounding a gross production function with a net production function. This is significant because depreciation, an issue in net income determination, is nontrivial. Basically, there are diminishing returns to capital accumulation, just as we would expect the labor rate to fall if the labor pool increases. Piketty wants to argue that the rate decrease is small enough to ensure the share of income attributable to capital is still increasing at the expense of income allocated to labor. But this demands an elasticity of substitution (capital relative to labor) > 1. Piketty wants to argue the economics literature talks about elasticities of as high as 1.25. The depreciation factor really means we need to see twice the elasticity Piketty is using to make his point; under more realistic models, we would expect to see labor's share of income to increase considering the fact of depreciation/diminishing rates of return of capital, which is inconsistent with Piketty's income-inequality thesis.
I myself have never understood how Piketty's model is consistent with the increasing standard of living with the fact of our economy, say, during the Gilded Age, with rising incomes and economic growth without government intervention, or, for example, the recent decades of an exploding middle class in China and India under more liberalized economies....
Facebook Corner
(Cato Institute). "The United States can have a smaller government and freer immigration."
Note that we real pro-liberty conservatives support liberalized immigration of all types of workers, from all the nations of the earth, of all cultures and creeds. We celebrate the same dreams that motivated our forefathers to migrate to this land of freedom and opportunity (in my ancestors' case, emigration from French Canada, attracted by opportunites in New England like textile mills and lumber).
We reject the toxic legacy of the Know Nothings and KKK, the xenophobes and racists, the economically-illiterate labor protectionists, the government intervention in labor markets. We reject the toxic angry rhetoric of those unprincipled populists and their nefarious pledges, whom have all but killed the cause of liberalized economies and market-friendly politics in the People's Republic of California and are attempting to extend by default the cause of "progressive" policies. Keep in mind the same dysfunctional government which has led to Food Stamp Nation, decades of failing public schools and unconscionable debt and other liabilities for future generations is no better at regulating immigration policy. We need a pro-growth liberalized immigration policy; we need to reject the past century of shameful restrictions which have harmed our economy..
(National Review). Would you be in favor of a drone strike on Boko Haram?
No! This would be unconstitutional, unauthorized by Congress. This does not directly involve our own national security. We are not the world's policeman. Not to mention that we would be morally responsible for the collateral damage to innocent civilians whom had nothing to do with this atrocity.
(National Review). Charles Cooke writes that if Harry Reid wants to restrict freedom of speech beyond recognition, he’s welcome to try.
Money is not Speech. Corporations are not people. Not every issue is a partisan issue.
I am so tired of crackpot "progressive" trolls uttering that corporations are not people, that money is not speech, etc. Corporations are voluntary associations of people; these people do not lose their right to speak, just because they lack a "progressive" sugar daddy like George Soros backing their smug, self-superior fascist policies. They imagine crackpot business conspiracies, while backing legalized plunder and redistribution, mandatory Ponzi schemes, promoting individual dependency on Leviathan.
A constitutional amendment to restrict political speech will never reach the necessary super-majority in either chamber of Congress. It is dead on arrival.
(Reason). Hello fetus, goodbye civil liberties
No one is arguing that pregnant women should not be fully advised of the potential effects of their behavior on the unborn child. But nothing is more morally reprehensible than for a mother to terminate her child's life to avert State prosecution.
(The Independent Institute). Research Fellow Vicki Alger: "For the nation, this family’s saga serves as refresher course on the true origins of our fundamental rights. We are endowed by our Creator — not government — with certain unalienable rights, including the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. An administration that would deport a family for doing just that should leave all Americans unsettled." [This involves a German immigrant family wanting to home-school their kids, not allowed under the German government; the family seems to have lost its battle to stay here.]
Apparently educational choice is not a priority of The One's core special interest teacher union constituency. Shameful departure from the principles of our pro-immigrant principled foundation.
(Cato Institute). "The H-2A visa is stymied by regulations promulgated and “enforced” by four different federal agencies."
This reinforces the fact that "pro-immigrant" Dems like The One are not principled but trying to split the difference between their civil rights Latino constituency and their Big Labor protectionist constituency. Artificially low temporary worker caps are an unconscionable infringement on the small business owner to engage in pro-growth win-win contracts. Quotas are economically vacuous policies, whether we are talking for temporary workers or those seeking permanent status. We need to stop counterproductive government interference in the economy, and that includes immigration policy.
(CAGW). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues its attempts to impose more restrictions and regulations on the Internet. Instead of focusing on real problems that the Internet is facing, the FCC is pushing for policies that have already failed twice. http://ccagw.org/media/press-releases/ccagw-frustrated-fcc%E2%80%99s-ruling-net-neutrality-proposal. SHARE if you agree: The government should not control the Internet!
Big corporations aren't any better than govt control.
Big corporations are vulnerable to innovation, creative destruction. Look at how the USPS' monopoly over first-class mail has been undermined by advances in high tech.
(Reason). Stricter new requirements may sound reasonable, but they're not reasonable for everyone—or reasonable for democracy.
It is amazing to me that anyone would trust the integrity of our elections on the mere assertion of government, which unlike the private sector, is not vested in fraud protection--there's not only Medicare fraud, but all sorts of misconduct at lower levels of government. I've worked at locations which operated on biometrics, like fingerprint readers and iris scans. Most jobs require at least one form of photo ID.
Just because some urban populations may have large percentages of non-drivers and hence may feel a disparate effect, I am not convinced. You have to provide ID when you start a job, get medications, cash a check, pick up mail at the post office, etc. Presumably an eligible voter, to establish citizenship requirements for voting, must present a birth certificate, naturalization papers, etc. An ID could be provided free of charge on a needs basis at the time of registration. Let's not confound the issue of registration with identification.
There are a number of things inconvenient about voting. I've often been on the road at election time, so yes, I've had to vote absentee, not to mention I've had to get drivers licenses in each state I've lived (including 4 times in TX). But waiting until the last minute to vote should be a red flag; prospective voters have months or years to register for an election. Inconvenience is an excuse.
Because voting is a RIGHT. Every American has the right to vote. There is NO proof that voting under another person's name is a "huge problem." It is nothing more than one party trying to fix the elections in their favor. If your tribalism is so entrenched that you actually support taking away Constitutional rights so "your side" can win, then you should move to a dictatorship. It is patently un-American.
First of all, let us all agree that no political whore is worthy of or can be elected by one marginal vote.
Second, as a former professor, I personally caught several students engaging in academic dishonesty, more than all my colleagues put together--yet I was convinced for everyone I caught, many more went uncaught. There were all sorts of obstacles: there was a time limit for me to file a charge, there were due process rules that blatantly favored the student (e.g., one student claimed that I had orally contradicted my specific written policy and claimed she had "witnesses"), universities would fail to enforce written policy, and I became the target of certain powerful faculty and administrators claiming I was "sabotaging" their recruitment processes, a problem especially if you are a junior, untenured faculty member. And the reactions of the students whom got caught were not contrite; they wanted to know how I caught them so they could get away with it next time. (In one case, I happened to remember a passage from a book I read years earlier.) The point is if you lower the barrier to fraud, you will get more fraud. I had to spend an ungodly amount of time; if you are accepting statistics based on assuming all acts of voter fraud are detected, you are in a state of denial. We've all heard anecdotal accounts of precincts with more votes than voters, of votes cast in alphabetic order, notorious cases of dead people voting: those are simply the most incontrovertible types of fraud, of precincts showing a highly improbable case of unanimous votes against a candidate, unlike historical vote patterns.
Just a casual observation here: my former MBA finance professor gave killer multiple choice exams. I had aced my course and was trying to help an officemate whom was an MBA student taking the same professor. I felt bad for the guy; he couldn't compute the simplest NPV problems. But apparently the prof would recycle past exams, and some students acquired past copies and sold them--not enough to tip off the class or the professor. So when I asked my friend how he did on the exam, he mentioned buying a past exam, how he finished his in 5 minutes and purposefully missed a couple of questions and waited a half hour before turning in his exam so as not to tip off the professor. Some time later I ran into my former prof and told him that there were rumors some of his old exams were being sold, he had a reputation of reusing exams, and the correct answers were memorized. He initially shrugged his shoulders and said, "How industrious of them!" I was shocked because I had earned my mark the hard way and asked him if he ever thought of having his whiz bang students show their work in front of the class how they solved the problem....
There was a notorious attempt in 2000 for the losing Presidential candidate whom had lost two machine counts of Florida votes to seek enough rejected votes in Democrat-controlled precincts to reverse the election results. There were two prominent Washington and Minnesota statewide elections where suspicious last-minute ballot boxes favoring the Democrats swerved election results.
There is no moral justification for requiring less identification to cast a ballot than to cash a check at your bank or to satisfy I-9 requirements for payroll processing. Fraud goes beyond voting multiple times at one precinct; there have been cases of students double-dipping, voting from their home and their college addresses, etc.
The bottom line is that fraud, especially in a close election, undermines the integrity of our democracy. Since our Constitution already outlaws a poll tax, states maintaining a more robust voting regimen must provide alternative free identification certification for those not having an acceptable form of picture ID like a driver's license.
(Judge Napolitano). Why is POTUS allowing immigrants convicted of serious crimes to go free? I discuss w/ Fox & Friends at 6:45a!
I think the story confounds criminal status with immigration status. The story doesn't explain how a criminal who has served his time hasn't had his immigration case adjudicated by the time he's released. We don't know from the story how many releases were at ICE's discretion vs. judicial order, and we should have rule of law. We do know that ICE's rationalization for prioritization for deportation was to focus on those whom were breaking the law, so certainly we have a credibility issue here. And we do know there was a cluster of releases around the time of the sequester. I'm more concerned about the perception of the rule of man vs. the rule of law, i.e., the Obama Administration's apparent abuse of discretion.
Because he and the Democrats need their votes and cheap, slave labor.
Do not blame immigration for economically illiterate wage controls. Not to mention voter registration requires proof of citizenship.
(Reason). This is what's wrong with the collectivist logic of "public health" [talking about alleged e-cigarette experimentation on our kids].
What about the effects of spendthrift governments and government-style Ponzi schemes (you "invest" at the point of a gun on past wasteful spending) on newer generations? Ah, the slippery slopes and domino theories of paternalistic government... Next thing you know, they'll be requiring you to be licensed to have a family..
You said collectivist logic.
Oxymoron
(IPI) Mandating that employers pay more not only dampens future job growth, it also throws the lowest-skilled workers into the ranks of the unemployed or shuts them out of the labor market altogether. In fact, a recent government report estimates that 500,000 to up to 1 million could be thrown into the ranks of the unemployed as a direct result of increasing the minimum wage.
A wage increase creates more spending power. And the wage increase is passed on to the consumer not the company. However when wages go up at the bottom they go up at the top. If this was true wouldn't dropping pay to $1 an hour increase job growth? No why no buying power with huge poverty. Cost of living has risen over the last 10 years pay hasn't. However poverty has do u see the conection?
A wage increase not justified by increased productivity (as in the 98% of above-minimum wage jobs) does not make for a viable business model. Wage controls are economic folly, period. This megalomaniac economic policy is a vain attempt to punitively tax lower-skilled labor. Employers certainly won't be tempted to hire the surplus of low-skilled workers, priced out of the market, counterproductive in this weak economy with a high unemployment rate in certain socioeconomic groups. Employers are likely to trim lower-income hiring, increase their production expectations for existing lower-wage workers, reduce work hours, shift funds from other compensation categories, etc.
The only legitimate public policy is for government to get out of the way of employers, workers and their right to contract without some political whore picking a wage floor out of his incompetent ass.
Still More Love and Marriage
Every once in a while I get fixated on a theme; I love creativity and often wonder how I would approach asking the question.
Oh, my goodness... The worst version anywhere of "My Girl"....
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson via Townhall |
Dexys Midnight Runners, "Come On, Eileen"
