Miscellany: 10/06/14

Quote of the Day
I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is,
the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.
Clint Eastwood

Sarcastic Political Ad of the Day

HT Libertarian Republican



Dumb Poll of the Day: Is This an Episode of Jaywalking?

From CNN:

The poll shows that two-thirds of Americans describe President Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as a dove, while 29% consider him a hawk.

Image of the Day

Via LFC

Devon Still (Cincinnati Bengals Father of 4-Year-Old Daughter With Cancer) Gets Tribute From New England Patriots

A Paralyzed Bride Walks Down the Aisle

The Half-Million a Year Public Pensioner Retired College Professor

From the NY Post (my edits, HT Carpe Diem):

Retired Queens College history professor Edgar J. McManus, 90, who has written groundbreaking books on slavery, retired in February 2012 after teaching history and constitutional law for more than 50 years gets a city pension of $561,286 a year; his final salary was $116,364. “They don’t pay you much when you’re working, but the pension is certainly good,” McManus told The Post. “Darn right I deserve it.” The city’s second-biggest pension, $308,358, goes to Alvin Marty, a Baruch College economics professor who retired after 55 years in 2008. Fifteen other retirees collect more than $200,000 a year, and 1,796 retired educators get more than $100,000 a year.

SCOTUS' Intellectual Cowardice on State Regulation of Marriage

I'm not going to write a long rant about this.  I've been a forceful critic of Justice Anthony Kennedy's logically incoherent "gay marriage" decision: he did not rule a constitutional right for gays to "marry". (Keep in mind SCOTUS had upheld the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in Reynolds vs. US. "The principle that a person could only be married singly, not plurally, existed since the times of King James I of England in English law, upon which United States law was based." I further submit that that marriage was between a man and a woman.) What I found completely objectionable is that he effectively ruled that California Proposition 8, reinstating the original definition of marriage to the State of California Constitution, was overturned because then Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown (in acts I consider both a violation of their oaths of office and professional ethics) refused to defend the passed measure which made it impossible for surrogates defending the proposition to claim legal standing. Look, either states have the right to regulate marriage or they don't. Were state propositions/referendums on the traditional definition of marriage valid or not? Were over two centuries of state marriage laws invalid, never mind English legal history through the colonies? At what point did the majority of people in a state lose the right to define marriage?

It is clear that Kennedy refused to hear the appeals of 5 states (including conservative Utah, Indiana, and Oklahoma), thereby sustaining judicial activist lower court rulings striking the states' definition of marriage. Thus, at least 6 states have had their duly established marriage laws overturned, a violation of the people's right to decide the issue. This is an abomination.

Facebook Corner

(Being Classically Liberal). I'm a libertarian (classical liberal) because I think gay people should not only be able to get married, but also defend their marijuana fields with "assault weapons" while drinking raw milk. I also hate roads. What about you?
There's a difference between the right of gays to associate in their own relationships, which is a legitimate concern of libertarians, and quite another thing for Statist courts to intervene in the social heterogeneous construct of marriage. If I choose to live in a state whose laws reflect traditional social norms, that is my right of association. Let the states compete to attract the 4% of the population which is gay and has been predominantly promiscuous. I'm not a hypocritical libertarian praising unprincipled judicial whores imposing politically correct values.

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "When October Goes". Tomorrow's post will include the final song in the Manilow series, his last top 10 adult contemporary hit (from 1989). My next two performers in the series have been forced to retire because of serious health issues, Linda Ronstadt and Glen Campbell.

Miscellany: 10/05/14

Quote of the Day
Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Image of the Day

Foroohar, Free Trade vs. Managed Trade, and the Coalition of the Unwilling

After having already written a rant on another Foroohar piece, I was digging through a pile of mail and came across another Foroohar piece from an unread July issue; this one speculated on an odd coalition from the left and the right on various political causes, particularly on fast track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

A basic clarification: free trade basically allows the same kind of voluntary transactions (buying or selling goods/services) to take place across borders as within borders. There are no limits/quotas of goods sold; there are no arificial restrictions that have the effect of blocking the sale of foreign-made goods. Just to raise a simple example: when I lived in Wisconsin, there was a kerfuffle over "genuine 100% Wisconsin cheese", an ingredient in a prominent local brand frozen pizza; when a national brand food company sought to acquire the brand, there was concern that the food company would replace Wisconsin cheese of the pizzas with its own "inferior" branded cheese made elsewhere. Any kind of impediment to the sales of pizzas made outside of Wisconsin and/or requiring Wisconsin-sourced cheese, a discriminatory surtax on non-Wisconsin cheese, requiring the labeling of cheese source, etc. would violate free market principles.

When you get to managed trade, what is at stake might be allegations of dumped goods at artificially low prices, e.g., subsidies, low commodity labor rates and developing countries which do not adopt costly pollution control standards, which may allow a foreign producer to sell at lower prices in scale,  allegedly driving the trader countries' own suppliers out of business. You have the bogeyman of "predatory pricing" (which I won't discuss here, but I believe that Mark Perry of Carpe Diem has discussed recently). The bottom line is that the US and/or other countries are trying to negotiate policies that impose higher costs on other countries to make competing products less competitive, while they continue to subsidize farming or slap punitive tariffs, say on Brazilian ethanol.

It really doesn't take a lot to have genuine free trade; you simply get out of the way of voluntary cross-border transactions--let the consumers decide. What's going on in TPP is a Kabuki dance of political posturing, so all the negotiating partners go home telling people they won conditions on balance favoring their own produced goods and services. The Hamiltonian protectionists won't be satisfied; neither will we free traders--but we choose to see it as a glass half-full.

I have issues that reflect a confounding of left vs. right-wing concerns:                  

What Brat’s victory really highlights is a quirk in our politics that is bringing the far right and far left into a series of unexpected alignments. In addition to being anti-Establishment, Brat’s speeches are often anti-immigration and antiglobalization. But when it comes to such economic-policy issues as taxes, free trade and corporate welfare, a lot of Democrats are, more or less, in agreement with him. (Brat’s office did not respond to interview requests.)
Brat, along with many members of the Tea Party and plenty of people on the far left, would like to see some bankers thrown into jail for their role in the financial crisis. These critics argue that corporations benefit unfairly from government subsidies. (Cantor was a booster of the Export-Import Bank, which Boeing’s foreign customers can tap for U.S. taxpayer–subsidized loans.) They believe the rules of free trade are no longer working when China and others can flout them without consequence. And they’d like to see a tax code that doesn’t explicitly favor the superrich.

I don't speak for Brat, but I'm fairly certain he would reject this characterization of his views. And Ms. Foroohar incompetently confounds free with managed trade and the Tea Party movement; we also need to distinguish between process and substance objections.

Let's start with a distinction between pro-market and pro-business (e.g., Big Business). It is not true, as Foroohar attempts to suggest, "That’s another topic that the flanks in both parties largely agree on–the people who caused the pain of the past six years still haven’t paid for it. “Those guys [meaning financiers] should have gone to jail,” said Brat in the run-up to the Virginia primary. “Instead of going to jail, they went into Eric Cantor’s Rolodex.”" I think here Brat is simply trying to politicize TARP, a Bush initiative that Cantor as part of the House leadership had to support. In fact, the original idea was to use taxpayer money to purchase troubled assets, say bad subprime loans, and there was a bait and switch by Paulson after consultation with the Fed to shore up banks, most of which didn't want or need the money. In fact, most of the actual users of TARP were AIG, the GSE's and the car companies. But most of  us from the right weren't demonizing bankers; we felt that if you made bad transactions, you should have been allowed to fail. We actually felt that Fed loose money policy and bad laws encouraging lending to riskier applicants had more to do with the housing bubble--not the populist conspiracy of the "plutocrats".

Now many of us see the corruptibility of government to be proportional to its size; cronyism is an artifact. Many Big Businesses will try to co-opt government's power and resources to their competitive advantage and protection. But many conservatives and libertarians don't subscribe to the Politics of Envy. It is true that we free market guys don't believe in what we see as protectionist policies, including the implicit subsidization of major exporters through the Export-Import Bank; this blog has repeatedly called for it to end.

As a free market guy I would argue for unilateral free trade; I do not like managed trades (with side agreements on,  say, labor and environmental policy), which is really a form of neomercantilism. However to the extent trade between both sides is liberalized, I see it as win-win. I do believe most Tea Partiers want a more liberalized global environment:

We have two terms worth of voting records to help us understand the impact of the tea party on trade politics in Washington. The “tea party class” of House and Senate freshmen from 2010 voted strongly in favor of the last three trade agreements, along with the rest of the Republican caucus. More importantly, members most closely aligned with the tea party movement have been much more likely than other Republicans to support opening the U.S. market without the need for reciprocal trade agreements.
These members stood out last term for their principled opposition to popular bipartisan trade initiatives. Members like Tim Huelskamp, Justin Amash, Jeff Flake and Mike Lee broke with their Republican colleagues when Congress voted to expand subsidies from the Export-Import Bank, to impose tariffs on all goods from China under the pretext of currency rebalancing, and to exacerbate protectionist antidumping laws. They were joined by conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth that condemned these programs as harmful corporate welfare and economic interventionism.

There are conservatives (in particular, paleoconservatives, e.g., Pat Buchanan) who oppose free trade; they will attempt to characterize their position as "genuinely free" or "fair"--see this classification from the Alexander Hamilton Institute for International Trade; Hamilton, of course, was pro-industrial/mercantilist.

Finally, some Constitutionalists, like the Pauls, oppose the process of fast track for its ceding too much power to the Presidency, the lack of transparency, and the nature of take-it-or-leave-it policy changes. Of course, you still need a super-majority two-thirds approval of the Senate.

Generally, the managed trade pacts, imperfect as they may be, are to the benefit of both sides, with lowered tariff and other trade obstacles, and I support giving Obama fast track authority.

Facebook Corner

(LFC). Criticisms against Austrian Economic methodology/epistemology. Discuss.
Does anyone want to take issue with Mises' failed policy prescriptions for Dolfuss during the Depression? http://fraughtwithperil.com/cholte/2009/11/29/von-mises-and-economic-anarchism/

As for critiques of Austrian theory, here is one blogger who has written dozens of relevant posts: http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

(National Review). Following a new ruling in California, religious clubs on campus cannot require their leaders to be religious.
When academia substitutes political correctness for freedom of expression and association, its undermines its own principles and integrity; academic freedom bcomes a sham. Academia finds itself hostage to special interests imposing what they can't win in a free exchange of ideas, a sophistic Trojan horse of victimology.

Proposals









Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow & Dionne Warwick, "Run to Me". In a rare duet, Barry remakes my favorite Bee Gee's song.

Miscellany: 10/04/14

Quote of the Day
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie

Image of the Day

Via Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Via Dollar Vigilante

Chart of the Day

Via LFC

The Minimum Wage: Gateway to Unemployment

HT Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek



Choose Life: No Further Comment Necessary

From the Chicago Tribune via LifeSiteNews

Jennifer Cramblett, of Uniontown, Ohio, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank sent her the vials of an African-American donor's sperm in September 2011 instead of those of a white donor that she and her white partner had ordered. After searching through pages of comprehensive histories for their top three donors, the lawsuit claims, Cramblett and her domestic partner, Amanda Zinkon, chose donor No. 380, who was also white. Their doctor in Ohio received vials from donor No. 330, who is African-American, the lawsuit said. Cramblett, 36, learned of the mistake in April 2012, when she was pregnant and ordering more vials so that the couple could have another child with sperm from the same donor, according to the lawsuit.

I have 3 grandnephews and 1  grandniece from racially/ethnically-mixed marriages; they are beautiful gifts from God.

Very Good Overview of How Public Sector Pensions Became an Unsustainable Mess



Encore: My New Favorite Song: Glen Campbell's Final Single



I'm Not Going to Miss You
by Julian Raymond and Glen Campbell  (about Glen's experience with Alzheimer's)

I'm still here, but yet I'm gone
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end
You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not gonna to miss you.
Not gonna miss you.
I'm never gonna hold you like I did
Or say I love you to the kids
You're never gonna see it in my eyes
It's not gonna hurt me when you cry
I'm never gonna know what you go through
All the things I say or do
All the hurt and all the pain
One thing selfishly remains
I'm not gonna miss you
I'm not gonna miss you

Facebook Corner

(Reason). Public-employee pensions are not protected when a city goes belly-up, according to a ruling Wednesday by the judge overseeing Stockton’s much-watched federal bankruptcy case.
The problem is that many employees paid little, if anything into those plans, they have never been adequately funded, and they are asking for future taxpayers for a bailout. We've had changing longetivy numbers, and even a figure of $80K is far more than the median household with active workers. In many cases we are looking at over $1M per employee in retirement. That's simply unsustainable in a low-growth economy.

As for contracts, so do all vendors have a stake in city/state reimbursement. Why are exactly are public employees "more equal"?

(Being Classically Liberal). Being Liberal, FDR was a tyrant more than anything else. Burning crops to boost food prices during a period of mass hunger, throwing over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps because of their ethnicity, and trying to pack the supreme court in order to get New Deal legislation approved as constitutional were all disgusting actions.

I am wondering, if he were a libertarian, would you still have this animus towards him?
The "progressive" troll doesn't get the fact that his beloved fascist government creates uncertainties that obfuscate the activities of private sector charities, churches, mutual aid and fraternal societies. When government intervenes, it creates a self-serving, inefficient, ineffective bureaucracy and moral hazard. The government impedes innovation, business growth and employment. What has the "progressive" government done? It's managed to create a permanent underclass dependent on handouts, it creates ruinous cycles of asset bubbles by monetary interventions, it engages in constant foreign interventions, it creates unsustainable liabilities which dwarf federal revenues, not to mention the highest fiscal debt in world history, it subsidizes transportation systems in constant state of disrepair, the "land of the free" boasts one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and almost everything it touches--healthcare, education, college loans, etc.--turns to inflation-bound mediocre crap. Any more questions? 

Getting back to perhaps the worst president ever, FDR, go back to his 1932 campaign, where he ran on what most people would regard as a conservative platform; it was one of the biggest "bait and switch" electoral scams in world history; he put interventionist Hoover policies on steroids.

More Proposals









Political Cartoon

Courtesy of the original artist via Libertian Republicans

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "Read 'Em and Weep"

Miscellany: 10/03/14

Quote of the Day
Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
Richard Nixon

Earlier One-Off Post: The Week's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Blogger

Image of the Day

Via Being Classically Liberal

Via Sal DiIorio

Where's a Helicopter When You Need It?

Chart of the Day: Government Exploits Pro Athletes

Via Dollar Vigilante

It's Time to End Corrupt USPS Labor Pacts and to Privatize the USPS

From the Washington Examiner:

The U.S. Postal Service must hire 9,000 employees over the next three months to staff regional part-time post offices as part of a settlement it negotiated with the American Postal Workers Union. The new postal employees will be working at offices that are open for four to six hours a day. The basic deal, reached through an arbitration judge, was that the hours at the regional offices would be limited but the workers must all be APWU members and at least a third must be full-time employees. "We haven't had APWU members in most of these offices in decades, and now to have to have full-time positions in six-hour offices — that's phenomenal."

The piece didn't identify the judicial whore, but I have a new Bad Judge of the Year nominee. The USPS is hamstrung by multi-billion dollar deficits, absurdly noncompetitive labor costs, and a mature, obsolete cash cow monopoly business which has already been analogously spun off/privatized by most of our trading partners. To make things worse, even though many, if not most post offices and/or distribution centers lose money, USPS management finds itself blocked by political whores in DC protecting the facilities in their districts or states, even blocking managerial actions to implement cost-saving measures, modify operating hours, or set prices. Not to mention corrupt public sector unionist pacts that essentially give management little control over their biggest cost.

Fracking and Crackpot Environmentalist Fearmongering



Love Is the Answer



Educational Choice



Facebook Corner

(IPI). "No one should ever be forced to financially support an organization that they fundamentally disagree with...
However, in 23 states and Washington, D.C., government workers can be forced to join a union and have mandatory dues deducted from their paychecks."
The example of working rules reminds me of a Wisconsin project I once worked on. I had to walk a county DBA through a test upgrade project. She had taken off without telling me in the early afternoon to have her dog's nails clipped. At 5PM I was at her desk when her (non-technical) boss stopped at her desk, gave me the evil eye, and specifically told her she didn't have to stay, she could go home for the day... I was contractually required to be at the facility from 7:30AM-7PM (longer if I had software patching to do), could only bill 8 hours, and never got paid a dime for overtime. I've worked on a number of projects where we contractors (vs. civil servants) did the real work while earning less total compensation (with benefits).
They dont have to join the union they can go work somewhere else
That union fascists can steal from their pockets via government-sanctioned plunder and a local government monopoly on public schools is fundamentally unjust. Self-serving union parasites not only deprive other people from making a living without sacrificing their political speech and liberty, they fundamentally are breaching their professional responsibilities with their customers, the taxpayers and their children.

(Reason). Which state would you kick out of the union?
A good start: the Left Coast, VT, Taxachusetts, DC, NY, MD, IL, HI...

Proposals









Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Patriot Post

Courtesy of the original artist via Patriot Post

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "Some Kind of a Friend"

The Week's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Blogger

I used to be a print subscriber to The Week; I liked it as a readable, interesting digest of a variety of news sources (including international). Like most mainstream news magazines, it is slanted to a left/center perspective, which dismays but does not surprise me; I often read material challenging my point of view.

I have sometimes taken exception enough to various podcasts (say, a Bill O'Reilly talking point) or op-ed (more recently, Time columnists) to publish a one-off rant. This is one of those cases where the heading itself is so over the top, it basically serves as a lightning rod for libertarian blowback: "Libertarianism's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea It's called "spontaneous order." And it's eminently stupid. By Damon Linker". I'm actually in the fusion libertarian-conservative camp, and my purpose in this post is not to eviscerate Linker point-by-point as might an anarcho-capitalist in the Austrian School economic tradition (see here for one such sample critique).  I simply want to make a couple of points: (1) before writing an article like this, an author should be very careful in describing the salient construct (spontaneous order), not creating a straw man that reflects badly on one's competence and credibility; (2) I want to use this as a teaching moment. There are more detailed and rigorous explanations  (I'll provide a sample starting point for the interested reader); I want to provide a more readable, practical introduction to the concept, hopefully without oversimplifying the concept.

It's not unusual that Linker joins a crowd, e.g., of former libertarians bashing the ideology in Salon (here, here, here, and here). The basic theme is that libertarians are dangerous, almost cultlike with naive, oversimplified notions, that we would live in a lawless world of survival of the fittest/wealthiest, where businesses would pollute with reckless abandon, infrastructure would never be built or maintained, etc. In fact, classical liberals like Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer had developed   sophisticated moral philosophies; I talk about the Hofstadter caricature of Spencer's alleged social darwinism here (see also this related discussion). [A typical smear of Spencer is this PBS excerpt: "It was Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest," using it to apply to the fate of rich and poor in a laissez faire capitalist society.". In fact, Spencer's relevant work and concept of evolution was distinct from and preceded Darwin's natural selection work; a more correct description (W): "Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or firms improve the well being of the rest of society."]

"Spontaneous order" is "an order which emerges as result of the voluntary activities of individuals and not one which is created by a government" or "most of those things of general benefit in a social system are the product of spontaneous forces that are beyond the direct control of man." Contrast that with Linker's description: "Simply stated, the idea holds that when groups of individuals are left alone, without government oversight or regulation, they will spontaneously form a social and economic order that is superior in organization, efficiency, and the conveyance of information than an order arranged from the top down through centralized planning." It refers not to the artificial construction of a rational order by human design/fiat (e.g., by some government)  or some natural phenomenon but from from some unregulated but compatible/consistent pattern of voluntary human activities, based on the limited, situationally nuanced perspectives of participants.

I'm not going to describe here the ideas of "spontaneous order" which some (e.g., here) have traced back as least as far back as the Spanish scholastics and have been infamously referenced in Adam Smith's notion of the "invisible hand" and more recently in the work of Hayek. But it is difficult to see how any elite group of people could possibly have the economic, legal, social and situational context knowledge to design such an unknowable master plan, but the net effect of voluntary exchanges among people with limited perspectives is to achieve a mechanism for fulfilling individual/social needs without some preexisting plan, just as farmers were able to grow ample, diverse supplies of crops without top-down marketing orders, motivated by pricing mechanisms.

Now do I think spontaneous order provides better outcomes than the government? Generally, that's true when we implement the principle of Subsidiarity and limit the constraints on the market to things like protection of basic rights, public safety and enforcement of contracts. Government actions often have unintended consequences; for example, in the example of ObamaCare, we've seen some providers scale back their charitable work, many people have found they are paying higher prices even when transitioning to higher-deductible plans, and government program enrollees are finding it difficult to find a provider willing to accept them. We saw the Internet economy boom only after there was privatization of the Internet.   And that's even before we consider the problems of incompetent, inexperienced leadership, political corruption, regulatory capture, mercantilistic populism, etc. The government burden of taxation and regulation unnecessarily constrains voluntary fulfillment of individual/social wants/needs.

Linker's post then pooh-poohs the concept of spontaneous order as "Utter fiction. A fairy tale." Tell that to smartphone users when 30 years ago regulators were obsessed with the long distance wars and the concentration of local phone providers; tell that to IT consumers and web businesses that have developed in spite of, not because of government involvement. Tell that to consumers less dependent on oil from the world's most volatile region and where cheap, abundant natural gas has drastically cut down US generation of C02 emissions, despite of, not because of the current Administration.  Obama's point that "business didn't build that" is "indisputable"? On the contrary: the private sector funded its own infrastructure, built private charities, hospitals, and schools,  provided security and arbitration services, staffed volunteer firehouses, etc. He talks about public safety functions but fails to mention violations of individual rights, he assumes that the Fed's manipulation of fiat currency doesn't result in malinvestments and serial asset bubbles. He talks about our dubious meddling in the overthrow of the dictators of Iraq and Libya as something spontaneous order could have never done; let's be clear: dictatorial regimes impeded spontaneous order, and our meddling never stabilized the situation. If there was a black market to alleviate, say, shortages in a command-and-control economy, you are seeing spontaneous order. When you see organizations and countries sending medical/other volunteers and relief supplies to refugee camps, you are seeing spontaneous order. What Linker is attacking is a caricature.

Miscellany: 10/02/14

Quote of the Day
You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.
Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Image of the Day

Would Aliens From Other Worlds Find Intelligent Life in DC?



Glen Campbell's Final Single

For those readers who don't kow, Glen Campbell's Alzheimer's is rapidly progressing. I'm a huge Glen Campbell fan. He'll be the next featured male vocalist in my Musical Interlude series.



Jay Leno and Political Humor

I haven't formally counted up the lines I've ad-libbed to in my Political Humor segment, but Leno was in his own league on top, and Fallon is probably a distant second (Seth Meyers has gotten quite a few covered in my feature. The faithful reader may have noticed, though, that the segment hasn't appeared as frequently in the post-Leno era.



Bad, Bad Jerry Brown
Baddest Governor in All the Land
Bought a Super-Train Near Fresno Going Anywhere
Won't Break Even, No Matter What the Fare

Jerry Brown isn't just breaking windows in boondoggle spending; now why do California taxpayers have to pay for a train from Los Angeles Fresno to San Francisco when private money will build one between Houston and Dallas? And why is union crony Jerry Brown paying above-market wages when some 90% of workers in Califonia don't belong to unions?

Facebook Corner

(Reason). Yesterday U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein’s told the California Public Employees’ Retirement System that in the case of a bankrupt city, pensions can be cut just like any other debt. That’s what the bankruptcy process is for.
It's about time that the double standard of obligations which favors the corrupt political/government class vs. the real economy came to an end. What a concept--that those who participated in a government gone bankrupt should have skin in the game! Remember there were no bailouts of Enron employees/investors, many of whom lost their retirement nest eggs. Here's an idea: why don't government employees take control of their own retirements in defined contribution plans?

(IPI). Illinois’ five state pension systems collectively have only $0.41 on hand for every dollar they need to pay for future benefits. In the private sector, such a low funding level would mean bankruptcy.
Many government workers only want to keep this politician-run pension system because they’ve been told there is no viable alternative.
But there is a viable and widely popular alternative to politician-run pensions: 401(k)-style retirement plans. These plans take politicians out of the retirement business and put workers in control.
When I was a visiting professor at ISU in the early 1990's, I'm sure they had a 403B plan because I participated in it...
 If the pension fund managers were honest, then the pensions would actually be more unfunded 
then 41 cents on the dollar.
And how do you know this ?
[OP], the mindless "progressive" troll doesn't know anything. You should know that by now. Most of these public pension scams assume investment refunds of 8%--which is nearly twice private-sector pensions (endangered species) do. What this means is that the more realistic private-sector employer has to kick more into the plan. The scary part is that if you have some pensions at 40% or below at a Fed-induced market peak, what happens when the market gets hit with, say, a 20% correction--not to mention what happens to government tax collections during a recession?

More Proposals







Oh my God!


Political Humor

After all the recent security breaches at the White House, Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, resigned today. She said she'll miss being in the White House, but knowing the Secret Service, she should be able to come back any time she wants. The door is always open, literally. - Jimmy Fallon

[No doubt Obama will replace her with an experienced Border Patrol agent...]

Today the director of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, resigned. She’s being replaced by the White House’s new state-of-the-art security system — a scarecrow. - Seth Meyers

[She is proud of her record--not even one Republican set his foot in the Oval Office during her tenure.]

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via Townhall

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "Memory"

Miscellany: 10/01/14

Quote of the Day
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is 
the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell

PGTV's Michelle Fields Pokes a Bear: RFK, Jr. Loses His Mind in a Koch Brother Rant

(HT Carpe Diem). The myth of American royalty, Camelot, and the Kennedy clan. It is sad and pathetic to see. RFK, Jr. becomes a caricature as a left-wing nut job, in response to Fields' suggestions that he and other protesters are being hypocritical in speaking out against the conventional sources of energy making. Nothing new here: just the same old crackpot nonsense about America's wars being over "oil", how a command-and-control economy can transform an economy by mere fiat (instead of creative destruction in a liberalized economy--see below). He has Koch brother derangement syndrome. RFK's "people" are the 1 in 5 "progressives" brainwashed by academia and the Hollywood elite, seeded by Soros and others. In fact, the Koch brothers are libertarians, non-interventionists; and America has hardly benefited from Iraq or Iran's oil wealth. We in fact have spent billions rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. The Koch brothers vastly expanded their father's domestic enterprises; ironically, their conservative/libertarian roots had their inspiration in their father's experience working in pre-WWII Stalinist Russia.




It's the End of Fiscal Year "Use It or Lose It" Federal Spendathon!

• the IRS spent $2,410,000 on "toner products" in a single purchase.
• the Department of Homeland Security paid $251,016 for "Aeron Mesh Task Chairs" and $15,198 for two pianos. 
• the State Department obligated $24,969 for a "50 inch LED HD TV" for the embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, the total booze tab for the State Department to nearly $100,000 for the month of September
• the Department of Veterans Affairs spent over $1.8 million on artwork, including $375,000 for a "Lobby Piece" and $285,000 on a "parking structure facade project" for the Public Artwork Commissioned Project at the Polytrauma & Blind Rehabilitation Center in Palo Alto.
• A 2013 National Bureau of Economic Research study by Harvard professor Jeffrey Liebman and Stanford professor Neale Mahoney found that federal spending on contracts in the last week of the year is five times higher than the weekly average.

Obviously unusual spending patterns should be carefully reviewed by government auditors. Diana Furchtgott-Roth suggests vesting federal managers and employees in budget savings through bonuses or raises.

The VA Harasses a Widow Over a 59 Cent Debt

About 6 weeks back, I was in a Texas military medical facility and accompanied a widowed mother to a meeting with a counselor, literally minutes after her husband was declared dead. Just 2 days earlier, her husband, who had had successful back surgery, had just transferred to a rehabilitation center and reportedly had a positive first therapy session. She had just stepped out to grab a bite to eat when her world went upside-down: her husband was suddenly fighting for his life, and the center had called for an ambulance. No doubt the woman, who probably had been looking forward to a major anniversary just a few weeks away, now was focused on making arrangements; she knew a funeral home near her home, but they couldn't accommodate her. The meeting focused on the need to process paperwork with various bureaucrats, how many certificates of death she wanted to order to all related paperwork. What I personally found rather obnoxious was when he started talking about refunding the government for the unexpired portion of August's transfer payments (e.g., military pension,   social security payment, etc.)

The USA Today piece reports on an unrelated widow whom found the VA mailed a letter to be opened by her late husband only, asking  him to furnish a copy of his own death certificate. Days later, her husband got a letter demanding immediate payment of a 59 cent debt or a late penalty would be assessed; no doubt the processing costs exceeded the amount owed. She got a note reminding her husband get his flu shot and another one scolding him for no-showing a hearing disability  meeting without notification (which had been done). Just your well-integrated federal bureaucracy as usual....

Creative Destruction and Blood Tests

I've had more than a few blood tests,  each requiring multiple vials, over the past few years, including once being charged full list price of $300-450 back in the Chicago area; I was under insurance at the time and got them to sharply discount the price. Business Insider has covered one of the newest billionaires, Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout and CEO of Theranos, which boasts a technology that requires a painless drop vs. vials which costs 40% or more less than established labs (see a sample pricelist here)  through partners like Walgreens. (I find some of the competitor lab reactions interesting, claiming they do more or less the same already, don't require vials, etc., that most of the cost is in lab overhead (which presumably Theranos also has to cover). What particularly grabbed my attention is that Theranos' prices are much lower than government reimbursement prices,  which yet again reveals the folly of government price-fixing. Once again, true healthcare reform consists in liberalizing the sector from government domination.

For Once, Two Good Judicial Decisions

An Oklahoma federal district judge basically argued that "the IRS rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law",  The IRS rule is that federally-operated ObamaCare exchanges are eligible. It is feared that the similar DC Court Halbig finding may be reversed by the full liberal court, but this independent finding may assure SCOTUS decides the issue.

In a second critical case, a  federal bankruptcy court has decided that Stockton, CA may be able to cut state pension obligations which may compromise crony unionist reliance on state constitution guarantees that pension obligations are more equal.

Facebook Corner

(Being Classically Liberal). Ok suppose Rand Paul is the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. Do you vote for him, the Libertarian party candidate (probably Gary Johnson again), or not vote at all?
Rand Paul, although I've been concerned about his pragmatic attempts to distance himself from the bogus charges of isolationism and open immigration. I think what will be important is to define a positive vision of a liberalized economy from the shackles of heavy taxation, unsustainable entitlements, unprincipled monetary and costly military interventionism, and innovation/competition-killing regulation. Rand Paul should address a bipartisan agenda on privacy and prison reform, demilitarizarion of police powers, opening constructive alternatives to government monopoly/price-fixing policies in education and healthcare, etc.
I'm assuming no one here would vote democrat, but if you would feel free to leave a comment.
Classical liberalism in the Democratic Party basically died in the Democratic Party with FDR's bait-and-switch campaign. There is no one I know of in the Democratic Party behind sound money, fiscal conservativism, the principles of federalism. free markets and banking, etc. I do think Jerry Brown in the early 1990's had some Laffer-like tax policies, some eclectic fiscal conservatism, and you could fuse those with with an anti-war/pro civil-liberties and pro-immigration perspective, but no candidacy could ever survive the progressive litmus tests and commitments to radically expanding the State.


(Being Classically Liberal). I'm an atheist and I feel no need to defend Christianity but I do enjoy pointing out the hypocrisy of "tolerant progressives" from time to time. To be fair, most progressives probably don't despise Christianity, but a very vocal minority certainly does.
I think the issue is more about the prohibition of religious speech or symbols (crosses, Nativity sets, Ten Commmandments displays, etc.) in the public arena. In one prominent recent case, a Forest Service employee told the father of a young girl killed in 2010 by a falling chunk of ice at a cave site that he needed to remove a simple pink cross with her name.

There's a lot of in-your-face opposition to the point of demanding "equal" treatment of pagan or other symbols (e.g., Nativity scenes), where even one crackpot objector can trump displays of even nominally or general/generic religious symbology. Whereas I am Christian and support independence of church and state, I do not support prohibitionary policies, but policies should not be arbitrarily exclusionary (e.g., allow a cross but bar a star of David).

http://www.kirotv.com/.../forest-service-asks.../nhKM4/

The best policy is rule of law, limited, knowable and general in scope.

(Lew Rockwell). "What would conservatives do without liberals to compare themselves to? Have you ever noticed the subjects of most books by conservatives? They are usually something to do with liberals or liberalism or Democrats. How hard is it to look good by comparing yourself to a liberal? Not very. And don’t forget that Republicans had a majority in Congress under Bush for over four years and choose to destroy the country," says Laurence Vance.
As a fusion libertarian-conservative, I see conservativism in the context of a specific tradition, e.g., republicanism, classical liberalism. I see political constructs in the more global social context, including individualist virtues. If we look at a Hamilton/Jefferson dichotomy, I think social liberalism is actually an extension of Hamiltonian centralism and mercantilism and conservatism is closer to the so-called Old Right, the resistance to FDR domestic/foreign interventionism. FDR had pulled off the ultimate bait-and-switch, running on Jeffersonian Democrat principles but embracing Hooverism on steroids.
(other comment)
I think this is really a shallow analysis; Bush never had a strong enough majority to make his modest tax cuts permanent or even achieve modest social security reform. However, the GOP did manage to derail Clinton's plans for government expansion and achieve the most sustained budget balance in recent history. "The Republicans" chose to destroy the country? Over the top.

More Proposals










Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Barry Manilow, "Let's Hang On"