Quote of the Day
A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life.Charles Darwin
Image of the Day
Guest Quotation of the Day
“It ought to be recollected that each merchant knows his own business better than the government can do; that the whole nation’s productive power is limited; that in a given time, it has but a given number of hands, and a given quantity of capital; that by forcing it to enter upon a kind of work which it did not previously execute, we almost always at the same time force it to abandon a kind of work which it did execute; whilst the most probable result of such a change is the abandonment of a more lucrative manufacture for another which is less so, and which personal interest had designedly overlooked.” - Jean Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (HT Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek)Not Made in Today's Politically Correct Hollywood
Chart of the Day
 |
| Courtesy of Market Authority |
Let us keep in mind before the 9/11 attacks, we had had decades of peaceful American airline passengers without a single act of terrorism--without a government official groping young children and grandmas or touching a man's junk or damaging catheters. In the aftermath, we have seen knee-jerk reactionary TSA responses like a cumulative day-late, dollar-short Whac-a-Mole to isolated incidents (to mention one not listed below: examination of women's breasts after a couple of female terrorists in Russia had set off explosives strapped to their chests). Even though most suicidal terrorists are from a certain background, political correctness dictates we need to expose over 99% of domestic passengers--senior citizens, children, families on vacation, church groups, sport teams, business road warriors, etc.--to unconscionable delays, violations of human dignity, harassment and intimidation, unreasonable searches. We have been taught to consider other Americans as potential terrorists. And basically it's all a Kabuki dance or, as Bruce Schneier below says, from a 2012 debate, "security theater" (HT Reason):
- In the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.
- The [second, more dangerous type of terrorist] is the well-briefed, well-financed and much rarer plotters. Do you really expect TSA screeners, who are busy confiscating water bottles and making people remove their belts and shoes, to stop the latter sort? The "good catches" are forbidden items carried by mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people—the sorts of guns and knives that would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. Not that the TSA is expert at that; it regularly misses guns and bombs in tests and real life. Even its top "good catch"—a passenger with C4 explosives—was caught on his return flight; TSA agents missed it the first time through. If the TSA ever caught anything even remotely resembling a terrorist, it would be holding press conferences and petitioning Congress for a bigger budget?
- Because the TSA's policies are based on looking backwards at previously tried tactics, it fails against professionals. Consider this century's history of aircraft terrorism. We screened for guns and bombs, so the terrorists used box cutters. We confiscated box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screened footwear, so they tried to use liquids. We confiscated liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We rolled out full-body scanners, even though they would not have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We banned printer cartridges over 16 ounces—the level of magical thinking here is amazing—and surely in the future they will do something else. If there were only a dozen potential terrorist tactics and a hundred possible targets, then protecting against particular plots might make us safer. But there are hundreds of possible tactics and millions of possible targets. Spending billions to force the terrorists to alter their plans in one particular way does not make us safer.
- Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. If we truly want to be safer, we should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and spend the savings on intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
Don't forget: even with the shale oil boom, we still import over a third of our oil. Why wouldn't we want to continue to rely on the volatile Gulf region? No doubt the Obama/neocon decision to arm the Syrian resistance has come back to haunt them, as the radicals are using such weapons to attack Iraqi forces, folding like a cheap suit; sound familiar? From a financial newsletter:
Elsewhere in the energy patch, Canada is moving to send some of its oil sands energy to China. Yesterday, the government approved plans by the big pipeline firm Enbridge to build the Northern Gateway pipeline -- stretching from the Alberta oil sands to British Columbia's Pacific Coast. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government has been pushing for the project while President Obama hems and haws about the Keystone XL pipeline extension that would bring Alberta oil down to the Gulf Coast.The Washington Redskins and USPTO
I used to work as one of the 2 contractor data warehouse DBA's at the Patent Trademark Office. So I was more than intrigued when PTO today abused its authority to effectively extort the Redskins organization into changing the team's name by canceling half a dozen relevant trademarks. In essence, this means that the organization could not sue copycat vendors from selling cheap knockoffs of official Redskins merchandise.
The team's response is, effectively, been there, done that; this happened under the President Zipper regime and was reversed in 2003 by a federal judge. The name was not regarded as politically incorrect at the time of the team's origin, and they are vested in the tradition of this franchise; how is any judge going to argue the facts had changed over the past 11 years? They point out that they will continue to protect their distinctive images, etc., and I suspect any vendor selling or distributing unlicensed merchandise will find itself sued.
I have a nuanced position on intellectual property (I don't like anticompetitive activities, trolls for submarine patents pursuing independent developers of related constructs, or unacknowledged/uncompensated use of the efforts of other peoples' work, beyond a fair use construct to facilitate innovation, scholarship and value-added efforts in a manner which does not preempt commensurate compensation for the owner's nontrivial time and effort), but what we have is yet another lawless abuse of power by the Obama regime violating the concept of the rule of law in their unauthorized application of political correctness. I'm absolutely certain that USPTO knew of the 2003 court ruling reinstating the team's rights to their marks.
The political correctness perspective doesn't even make sense. It's not like we're naming an Obama Administration intramural sports team the Bureaucratic Parasites or the Jackasses (even though, in reality, that's what they are...) When sports teams take on the name of American Indian archetypes, it reflects positive characteristics, not negative ones, of the referenced peoples. Some American Franco-Americans regard the use of the term 'Canuck' as a slur; I've never been called a Canuck, probably because most Texans have probably never met others like us, and many Franco-Americans have darker skin, brown eyes and darker hair, whereas most of my family has blond or light brown hair, fair complexion and blue or green eyes. But it doesn't bother me one bit that an NHL team is called the Canucks. I consider the name as a type of honor for my ethnic heritage.
Consider this excerpt:
Dodson is a full-blooded American Inuit chief originally from the Aleutian Tribes of Alaska, and said he was tired of being spoken for as a Native American.Here is another relevant discussion:
“People are speaking for Native Americans that aren’t Native American. Being a full-blooded Indian with my whole family behind me, we had a big problem with all the things that were coming out [of the discussion],” he said. “I think they were basically saying that we were offended, our people were offended, and they were misrepresenting the Native American nation.
“We don’t have a problem with [the name] at all; in fact we’re honored. We’re quite honored.”
As the eldest member of his blood line, Dodson represents more than 700 remaining tribe members and talked to Redskins Nation about the positive power of the Redskins’ name.
“It’s actually a term of endearment that we would refer to each other as,” he explained. “When we were on the reservation, we would call each other, ‘Hey, what’s up redskin?’ We would nickname it just ‘skins.’”
“‘Redskin’ isn’t something given to us by the white man or the blue eyes, it was something in the Native American community that was taken from us. [It’s] used also as a term of respect, because that’s how we were. We respected each other with that term.”
“Let me remind you, this is the name of a football team, a football team that’s had that name for 80 years and has presented the name in a way that is honored — that has honored Native Americans,” Goodell said in response to a question from USA Today’s Jim Corbett. “We recognize that there are some that don’t agree with the name, and we have listened and respected that. But if you look at the numbers, including in the Native American communities. In a Native American community poll nine out of 10 supported the name and eight out of 10 in the general population would not like us to change the name, so we’re listening and being respectful for those who disagree but let’s not forget this is the name of a football team.”The Koch Brother's Favorite Economist?
Anyway, in that thread I tried to defend Tyler Cowen as one of us and not just another vulgar Keynesian, but I admitted I found the essay enigmatic. I wrote an email to Don Boudreaux of the nature of "Say it ain't so, (Shoeless) Joe"; I suspect that he is not going to publicly flame his George Mason colleague. What I will say is that he called attention to a comment by "Chris" at Marginal Revolution which basically made reference to Bastiat's theme of things seen vs. unseen. Chris basically argues that the basic development of new weapons technology, like certain jets, already existed by 1930's, and the war simply at most accelerated relevant production runs. If anything, the need to rush conventional weapons/aircraft into production within the wartime timetable may have delayed introduction of innovative weapons/aircraft technology.
In any event, Gary North, the self-titled Tea Party economist, himself raised the broken window fallacy in this piece (and gives a "Chris"-like rebuttal of his own):
[Cowen] Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.
But, no, the author assures us, this is not Keynesian at all. "This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work."
If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it takes a lot of evidence for me to conclude that it is not a duck. When it is in the The New Duck Times, that pretty well confirms it.
It was written by Tyler Cowen, who teaches economics at George Mason University. He is regarded as a free market economist. I do not know why.He then points out that George Mason's Mercatus Center is a beneficiary of Koch Brother money, worries about the motivation behind Koch protege economist Cowen's "War Keynesianism":
The Kochs have a reputation of being staunch libertarians. Then why fund an organization run by someone who believes that government spending on the military is a source of economic growth? This is Keynesianism, pure and simple. This is big government conservatism.I don't share North's sense of conspiracy; I think Cowen is a polymath and a non-ideological thinker, but I have to say I don't see how he can argue under war conditions the State is more effective; I think mistakes under the chaos of war are more likely. I don't find his arguments or evidence compelling. He'll have to come up with a more convincing case than this one essay.
Keynesian economists get enough support from the Establishment. They provide the intellectual justification for the Establishment. They don’t need Koch money to get a hearing.
Facebook Corner
(Bastiat Institute). #Cronyism comes in many forms. "The Palm Beach Post reported in an exclusive story two weeks ago that while Scott divested his interest in Solantic in January, the controlling shares went to a trust in his wife's name." http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/business/gov-rick-scotts-drug-testing-policy-stirs-suspicio/nLq8f/
A so-called fiscal conservative whose program costs more to administer than saves the taxpayer.
(Bastiat Institute). ""...the Transportation Department will have full oversight over apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze...Some tech firms have loudly protested the pending legislation. They argue the laws would be impractical to enforce in a rapidly changing market with tens of thousands of navigation apps."
Government can't coach a sports team better than sports coaches, and it can't run a business better than entrepreneurs.
The government in charge of infrastructure finds its "free" roads, bridges, etc. poorly designed and congested, ill-maintained--and yet these string-pushing bureaucrats want to control related software and services: what could possibly go wrong with innovation in the high tech sector?
(Reason). Hillary Clinton: "We cannot let a minority of people—and that's what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people."
Why should I be surprised by an incompetent, unaccomplished, politically correct hypocritical authoritarian marketing her "progressive" groupthink doublespeak of "tolerance"? This is a political whore willing to exploit the mass murder of children for her unambiguous ambition to strip other people of liberties.
(LFC). See cartoon at the top of the post.
The result in socialism and capitalism is the same: a hand full of greedy men running the state/society.
The ramblings of an idiotic troll. The US with its liberalized economy accounts for a disproportionate amount of global GDP; it has some of the world's finest hospitals and universities and dominates emerging technologies and innovative medicines. Yes, I agree that the US, headed by a hopelessly incompetent President, has been handicapping its economy by trying to imitate the failed socioeconomic policies of an aging Europe and Japan, but more and more people every day are coming to question the economic fascist policies of Washington DC.
(Catholic Libertarian). Matt Walsh has clearly been reading my stuff! This is #epic: http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/06/17/satan-liberal/
In fact, many of these people have been held indefinitely without formal charges and due process, which is a violation of their fundamental rights. Prisoners should be handed back to their home countries, and Gitmo closed forever.
What is with "Reason"'s irrational scapegoating of Cantor? First of all, the guy has an ACU lifetime rating of 95, no RINO, and that's with the sacrificial votes he had to do as part of leadership. Do you think, for instance, that Pelosi, who as Speaker pushed hard for an ObamaCare "public option", wanted to settle for the corrupt Senate bargain? In fact, Cantor was the media's scapegoat for the brief government shutdown a little back--and whereas there's only so much the House can do given a spendthrift Senate and veto-bearing President, Cantor has been largely responsible for keeping Obama in a fiscal straitjacket and making Obama go nuts over the sequester.
Yes, I, as a libertarian-conservative, will regret seeing Cantor go, and so your piece fails. Do I agree with all his positions and actions? No, I'm more of a Justin Amash supporter. But making him a poster boy for everything wrong with DC is opportunistic, intellectually dishonest piling on. I find it much more troubling that an alleged free market economist would play up anti-immigrant populism.
(Lew Rockwell). Glenn Beck gets it wrong. Liberals and virtually all of the left opposed US aggression against Iraq only because it was a Republican war. They have defended Obama’s wars. What Beck should be saying is, “Ron Paul, you were right about Republican and Democratic wars. Indeed, you are right about a non-interventionist foreign policy.”
First of all, Don Boudreaux is right; "liberals" are not pro-liberty; they are authoritarian. They love the use of government force, both domestically and internationally: recall Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK/LBJ got us into the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century.
Second, let's not forget that President Zipper signed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act that said "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
Third, there was the 1994 "Dr. Jekyll" Dick Cheney vs. "Mr. Hyde" VP, whom declared :
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad [i.e., at the conclusion of the first Gulf War]?A: No.Q: Why not?A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.My Greatest Hits: June 2014
The other thing was casualties... how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."
- Miscellany: 6/12/14
- Miscellany: 5/24/14
- Miscellany: 6/02/14
- Miscellany: 6/17/14
- SCOTUS, the Voting Rights Act and a Rant
Political Cartoon
I've been waiting for some cartoonist to say, "Let's check with the NSA..."
 |
| Courtesy of the original artist via IPI |
Vicky Leandros/Claudine Longet, "L'amour Est Bleu"
