Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
N. Bohr
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
The Self-Serve Beer Machine at the MLB All-Star Game in Minnesota
Familiar readers may know I'm a long-suffering Twin/Viking fan whom never set foot in Minnesota until an academic conference while I was on the UWM faculty. (Weird story of how I got hooked on the Twins: I was on a 1-19 Little League namesake team and got kicked off the team when some 8-year-old started heckling me over having a (nonexistent) girlfriend. You know boys at that age. I confronted him and told him to knock it off; I found myself physically thrown out of the dugout by the coach and told to go home. We were playing my little brother's team, the (undefeated?) Yankees, and instead of going home, I went into the stands and cheered for my brother. My coach caught a glimpse of me and cut me from the team. He held a grudge, too; the highlight of the season was a post-season fried chicken banquet featuring native son Bobby Richardson, All-Star Yankee second baseman when they won 3 of 7 World Series in a string starting in 1957 (except for 1959). I desperately wanted to go to the banquet and meet a real (retired) major league player, but my former coach vetoed the idea, despite my folks' best attempts.)
No, I don't think this self-service machine will commiserate with your woman problems, and Big Nanny still requires an ID check and caps the number of ounces that can be dispensed with the RFID device. A separate transaction is necessary to buy a pre-loaded RFID card/wristband for use with the machine and/or a reloadable RFID loyalty card, say secured by a credit card. (Actually, I haven't seen much discussion of the latter point in posts, but I've used Mobil gas speedpasses/fobs, rechargeable EZPasses and Metro cards, and that technology has been available for years.)
By the way, the AL All-Stars beat the NL All-Stars tonight 5-3. (Thumbs UP!)
Image of the Day
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| Via Carpe Diem |
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| Via Liberty Vital |
Gold Star Kid Pays It Forward
Tweet of the Day
Fed Chair Janet Yellen:"We [in public policy] can help to make the world a better place." STOP THE PRESSES(AND ZIRP)! http://t.co/392smdjoVz
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) July 15, 2014
"But who will build the roads?" Braley (D-IA) wants to know why a therapist's chicken crossed the road. http://t.co/g9hKU68zbW
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) July 16, 2014
The War on Parents, Children and Dogs- The Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the [9-year-old] girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead. Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a "splash pad," and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied. The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl "abandoned" and proceeded to arrest the mother.
- A mother in Bristol, Connecticut, was charged with leaving a child unsupervised in a car Wednesday. How old was the helpless tyke?
- Eleven.
- Why was she in the car? She asked her mom if she could stay there. When officers opened the car doors, they said the child was responsive and not in distress, and that the car was not "excessively hot".
- A York County mom is accused of leaving her two kids and a friend's child in the car at a grocery store. An employee saw the children in the car, parked outside of the Food Lion on Main Street.
- Milem and her sister-in-law had taken six kids including her 2 and 1 year old to the park. On the way home she needed to get ointment for her son's injured hand, so she ran in while her sister-in- law stayed outside, parked behind her car with 3 kids inside, so she says they didn't believe they did anything wrong.
- "No, no we had air on, the cars was running. I was back and forth between the cars, I was out there with them. I could see both cars checking on all the kids, they were all sleeping," said the sister-in-law.
- At the time Coffee County deputies caught up with [Christopher Barnett, the alleged armed robber and cop shooter], he was allegedly making "friendly conversation with some of the residents" and "trying to blend in." That's when, according to Sheriff Doyle Wooten, a dog ran up to a deputy. The passive voice comes up a lot at this point, with WALB reporting "The deputy's gun fired one shot, missing the dog and hitting [10-year-old Dakota] Corbitt."
- In Henrico, Va., 33-year-old Ricky Ellerbe was shot to death for the $15 he had on his person. This is a horrible thing and no mistake. But the story gets more horrible yet. As The Richmond Times-Dispatch recounted in a news story, a police officer and a detective went to the man’s home to inform his relatives—and killed the family dog. Another police officer shot Scout, a German Shepherd that got out of its yard in Prince William, Va. In Austin, Texas, a woman who thought her house might have been broken into called the authorities. The responding officer ended up shooting her 8-year-old dog, Papa, who was restrained in the back yard. Around the same time, an NYPD officer shot a dog that was barking outside a restaurant in Midtown (that dog lived), Florida officers shot and killed three dogs in Loxahatchee, and so on. Incidents such as these are so common at least a couple of Facebook pages track them: “Mr. Policeman, Don’t Shoot My Dog,” and “Dogs Shot by Police.”
According to Reuters:
The Federal Reserve will still need to deliver "unusually accommodative" monetary policy even once the U.S. economy returns to "where we want it to be," Fed Chair Janet Yellen was quoted as saying in a magazine article.This goes so far beyond hubris and borders on the delusional. There are a couple of good reflections from Dan Amoss and David Stockman. Before proceeding further, let us point out that money is not intrinsically of value:
"I come from an intellectual tradition where public policy is important, it can make a positive contribution, it’s our social obligation to do this," she says in an online version of the article. "We can help to make the world a better place."
Say's law, or the law of market, is an economic principle of classical economics named after the French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), who stated that "products are paid for with products" and "a glut can take place only when there are too many means of production applied to one kind of product and not enough to another". In Say's view, a rational businessman will never hoard money; he will promptly spend any money he gets "for the value of money is also perishable."I'm not going to get into the weeds of the arcane arguments of classical vs Keynesian economics, but this short piece explains Say's work in context. But here's a key point: we had extraordinary economic growth in the nineteenth century without micromanaging central bankers; we had occasional panics and recessions that were short-lived and had a robust, stable dollar over the first century-plus of the country's history without self-congratulatory, megalomaniac activist monetary policy.
Some notable excerpts:
The financial crisis was caused by the Fed, and then became an excuse for extending and intensifying an interest rate pegging regime that has been in place for 27 years — essentially since the Greenspan Fed panicked after the Black Monday stock market meltdown in October 1987. (S)
After a temporary but unsustainable spurt in capital expenditures (CapEx) during the Greenspan tech bubble, net investment after allowance for capital consumption in the current reporting period has been dismal for 17-years. And the relevant figure is net investment, not the Keynesian measure of gross capital spending embodied in the GDP equation and endlessly jabbered about on bubblevision.
Likewise, notwithstanding last Friday’s swell jobs report headlines, the level of full-time, family supporting “breadwinner” jobs in the US economy is still 4.4 % below the 2007 peak; and the ballyhooed June number was actually 4 million below the level attained way back in early 2001.
In fact, the above graphs make absolutely clear that low interest rates did not stimulate capital spending or real job creation. What pick-up in activity that did occur under these foundational headings represented the ordinary workings of the capitalist economy.
As defective as it is, even the real GDP measure doesn’t lie. During the last 14 years, real GDP growth has averaged only 1.8 percent annually or barely half of the trend during the prior 50-years.
So maybe its time for a new version of the old regime at the Fed. That is, for the Eccles Building to eschew interest rate-pegging and ZIRP entirely, and thereby allow financial markets to once again engage in honest price discovery and two-way trading; and to allow the natural business cycle to meander along its own capitalist path as determined not by the 12 members of the monetary politburo, but the 317 million consumers, producers, investors, entrepreneurs and even speculators who comprise the real main street economy.
In 2012, money mandarins running the European Union chose stagnation over restructuring. Relentless bond buying has resulted in remarkably low bond yields for countries with junky credit profiles.Eventually, the real economy in peripheral Europe needs to recover in order to support large, mounting government debts. And it’s not recovering… Industrial production frequently disappoints; tax rates can go no higher; manufacturers are not competitive; important export markets including China have slowed down; and most importantly, EU bureaucrats have wasted scarce resources to sustain an unsustainable euro system. (A)
After credit booms peak, bankers do everything they can to delay writing off bad loans, hoping to “earn their way out” of capital shortfalls by making new loans and booking carry trade profits. Central banks slash interest rates, which lowers the banks’ funding costs. Draghi bought the EU banks a few years of time by engineering a massive carry trade in sovereign bonds. But that trade looks over. So where will EU banks find profits to offset the loan losses they’re slowly confessing?
Central bankers are following the zero interest rate policy (“ZIRP”) playbook to ease the pain from popped credit bubbles. But years into a global ZIRP experiment, it’s becoming clear that propping up the old, busted banks is actually preventing a real recovery.
By pushing interest rates down to artificially low levels, the Fed inflated the U.S. mortgage bubble and the inevitable 2008 crash. But unfortunately, that capitalism-damaging, boom-bust cycle did not spur the Fed to self-reflect and reform. Incredibly, the Fed emerged from the crisis as a hero!Facebook Corner
So it doubled down on ZIRP, resulting in asset inflation for the rich and stagflation for the middle class. Asset inflation has not boosted the real economy (as planned by the Bernanke Fed). Quantitative easing (QE) has only deepened income inequality, worsened economic imbalances and eased pressure on government budgets.
(Drudge Report). THE RAND PAUL PILE-ON…
I know that the neo-cons dominate most of the Drudge Report threads, but what should be clear is that red-meat conservatives like Ted Cruz may well win the base, but they will not win the swing states. The neo-cons are Big Government Defense advocates in an age of massive, unsustainable deficits; we've spent over $1T on dubious missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing over 8000 young men and thousands more with catastrophic injuries, multiple times the casualties on 9/11. This is not working, folks; one of Romney's strategic mistakes in 2012 was not throwing both Bush and Obama under the bus for massive overspending and unpopular foreign adventures.
We cannot continue to rerun the election of 1980. If we are going to win in 2016, we need someone to lead us whom brings fresh ideas and a different vision, someone whom can argue for a change from the Bush-Clinton-Obama generation-plus. I suspect Rand Paul will be that fresh face, and I think he will find appeal among independents and Democrats whom see Hillary Clinton as more of the same.
(IPI). Cook County residents got more bad news last week when Fitch Ratings, the global rating agency, downgraded Cook County’s debt to A+ from AA-.
The rating agency cited skyrocketing pension costs as one of the key reasons for the credit downgrade.
The only reason they have skyrocketing pension costs is because they spent the money we put in and didn't put their portion in when it was supposed to go in.
Not quite. Skyrocketing pension costs have to do with the Baby Boomer retirement tsunami already in process. I agree they did not contribute enough, but pension promises were unsustainable to begin with; people are living longer in retirement; many distributions are close to, if not exceeding younger active worker salaries and higher than the highest social security payout, etc. I assume 'spending the money we put in' must be pension bonds, but you're in the same boat with anybody holding Illinois obligations.
Some difficult choices will have to be made because taxpayers are not going to be happy with pension outflows crowding out government services, and Illinois already has an uncompetitive tax burden. As IPI suggests, we need to move towards maybe more of a 401K system and personally-controlled retirement assets. In terms of grandfathered pensioners, there will need to be some adjustments, like deferral of eligibility, means-testing, distribution caps, cost of living adjustments, etc. I doubt the unions are ready to face reality; but it would be smarter to make the adjustments before cities declare bankruptcy, and a federal judge imposes changes on them.
(Reason). The unaccompanied foreign kids arriving at our doorstep are refugees of America's drug war that respects no nation's borders or sovereignty.
Agreed. Is this what America has come to? Scapegoating kids as if they were responsible for drug consumption/prohibition, vs. the victims. They are the collateral damage in this nation's failed war on drugs. They are also not responsible for our corrupt welfare state. I can never feeling so ashamed of being an American as when I saw nativists blocking buses; the ones who should be deported are the nativists...
I also diverge from libertarianism on this issue. How is the welfare state not hurting thousands of citizens?
Just like all the inconsistent libertarians like Milton Friedman...
(IPI). An important debate about the future of the Export-Import Bank of the United States is raging in Congress and in the media. The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing last month to ask if the bank was “corporate necessity or corporate welfare?”
The Ex-Im Bank originated as a New Deal-era program, financing loans to international companies to purchase goods from American corporations.
The fact is, anyone who cares about corporate cronyism, good government and wasteful spending should hope for the demise of the Ex-Im Bank.
This is a litmus test issue for anyone bitching about corporate welfare. End the Export-Import Bank NOW. By the way, notice how all the hypocritical "progressive" creeps like Schumer are up for protecting Boeing's bank? Why should taxpayers be guaranteeing loans for exporter sales? Were there no American exports before the corrupt FDR Administration?
This article fails to mention the subsidies competing companies such as Airbus and Komatsu receive. It also ignores that the Ex-Im bank brings money into the treasury. This is not as simple of an issue as this article made it seem.
Yes it is. Anyone with a scintilla of economic knowledge knows, if necessary, we should declare unilateral free trade. Arguing that foreign countries have moron leaders is not justification for doing something anti-consumer.
(IPI). A host of newcomers—immigrants and transplants from around the United States—agree. Houston's low cost of living and high rate of job growth have made the city and its surrounding metro region attractive to young families.
According to Pitney Bowes, Houston will enjoy the highest growth in new households of any major city between 2014 and 2017.
A recent U.S. Council of Mayors study predicted that the American urban order will become increasingly Texan, with Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth both growing larger than Chicago by 2050.
My home for 7 years, where I earned my last two graduate degrees. Great city.
My Greatest Hits: July 2014
More Marriage Proposals
One of my beloved nieces is getting married this weekend, which is why I've been fixated on marriage proposals recently
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne via Reason |
Anne Murray, "Lucky Me"
