Category Archives: Capitalism

The Goods On Gas

Capitalism, Energy, Free Markets, The State

From my latest WND column, “The Goods On Gas”:

“The Mouths on television tell you to blame gas speculators, ‘profiteers’ or foreign producers for gas prices—anyone but your government. By their post hoc illogic, the price of fuel is causing prices to rise.

Fuel is fueling, but not causing, price hikes.

The deliberate and destructive policies of deficit spending are responsible for the steady rise in the prices of all commodities, crude included. This is so because deficit spending is “accompanied by an enormous increase in the stock of money…”

The general trend, then, of price increases is a consequence of government-generated inflation and the $9.5 trillion trifle known as the national debt. Unless these are curtailed, the trend will persist.

The particular price of fuel, concomitantly, is determined by supply and demand. … Absent legislative barriers to exploration, enterprising capitalists would have defied central planners and turned from tinkering with ethanol to drilling for—and refining—oil…”

Ultimately, “The more efficient the source of energy, the less waste and pollution are involved in its conversion into energy. Think of the totality of the production process! The fewer resources expended in bringing a fuel to market, the cleaner and cheaper is the process.”

Comments are welcome.

Update # IV: Exporting Women To Make Benefit Glorious Nation of USA

Ann Coulter, Capitalism, China, Democracy, Family, Feminism, Free Markets, Gender, Intelligence, Pop-Culture

It transpires that Chinese leader Mao Zedong once proposed to export 10 million Chinese women to the United States:
In a long conversation that stretched way past midnight at Mao’s residence on February 17, 1973, the cigar-chomping Chinese leader referred to the dismal trade between the two countries, saying China was a “very poor country” and “what we have in excess is women.
Smart man. I think that’s one idea we ought to adopt. Think about it.
Or take a trip around Costco. You’ll see what I’m speaking about. I’ve become an expert at racing my cart through that fabulous store, weaving between walls of stupid female flesh. Only women can cause traffic jams with supermarket trolleys. It’s something to behold.
Give it some thought. If we exported women, politics would begin to move to the right again. Oprah would go out of business slowly. You’d hear less of that staccato tart tone:
“And he was like, ‘come here’; and I was like, ‘No’; and he was like, ‘You’re amazing’; and I was like, ‘I know.’”
What would you do to hear less of that voice and mannerisms?
Greg Gutfeld described the sound emitted from Lauren Caitlin Upton, of the Miss Teen USA fame, as having “that profoundly irritating voice that combines the worst of Southern California with South Carolina—a hybrid that squeezes out anything smart from both places, leaving only a ditz-filled diaper.”
Yes, sans so many dames, it would become possible to rehabilitate English as our official language. Think less small-minded pettiness and jealousy (how I’ve suffered personally from that aspect of the female character). The possibilities are endless.
Women who come to this site are excluded, of course. Ilana’s ladies are fabulous.
I said once that I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.
Are there any other benefits, incidental to the export of women, that you can think of?
If the Idiocracy should stumble upon this post, then chill, please; it’s called satire, humor, reductio ad absurdum (and a bit of wishful thinking).
Update # I (Feb. 14): To the perplexed: Good satire is always based on a kernel of truth; ask Ali G., or Borat. Just because Ann Coulter would agree with this post, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That’s woman logic.
Ann Coulter is right about very many things; it’s a shame she rarely writes about the things she’s right about. That’s the secret to success: keep the masses euphoric and moronic. (This last and the tart talk have gone to our “Quotables.” Check them out sometime.)
Update # II: See my related bimbos-instead-of-bombs suggestion in the next post, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: America’s Shame.”
Update # III: Fewer females means there will be fewer “Skanks in the Sky,” and not as many men weighed down by “cranky kids” and a “papoose strapped to a sunken chest.”

Update # IV: Barbara, who has just started her own blog (I’m allowing it, provided she doesn’t neglect us), comments on the shrews that sully my favorite store, Costco.
On approaching a display, let’s say the tomatoes, and out of courtesy to other shoppers—not wanting to impede access—I’ll park the cart out of the way, and then approach the produce. Not the CCs (Costco Cows). They straddle the length of the counter with their carts and creepy kids and block anyone from approaching. Because brain size is inversely proportional to sense of importance, they might make time for a quick call on the cell as other more demure ladies wait to take tomatoes.
Trader Joe bitches are way worse; they imagine they’re the crème de la crème (of what? Provincial America?) Pity the patron who wants only to grab some zucchini and flee, but must circumnavigate a Trader Joe Mom mid-lesson—in other words laboring to make the zucchini purchase a “learning experience” for her malevolent little mutants. The only thing these beasts manage to teach their brats is that they, like their ugly moms, are the center of the universe. Screw the rest.
When I used to take my now grown-up baby shopping, I always found time to teach her courtesy. You don’t run through the place; you give way to older people—when you’re 3, that’s practically everyone—apologize if you bump into someone, pick up what you made them drop; don’t scream. Tantrums never occurred.
My saving grace at Costco: I shop only on the outskirts of the store. I go there for the best produce, poultry and fish you can get. The behemoths of Costco do not buy produce, or fresh fish and meat. How do I know? Standing in the queue to pay, I’ve noticed that the women have nothing but boxes in their carts. Piles of boxes packed with, it would seem, synthetic, preservative-laden, ready made food (frozen pizza, etc.) Women are poisoning America with more than just stupidity. Not one item of fresh food stuff for the brood and the bread winner.
I was once asked by a sullen, if rather pretty, slim lady—a rarity there—what I do with all the berries I buy. I said: “eat them.” She asked: “how.” I was going to say, “With my mouth,” and point, but had a change of heart. It looked like I might be able to do some good. And she was interested.
“Every morning,” I told her, “I go through the time-consuming exercise of making a mega fruit salad for me and the Ungrateful Other (who also gets his morning coffee in bed and his clothes laid out for the day; he’s a hopeless dresser). Like teens, we are both bad in the mornings—completely non compus mentis until late mornings. Fruit is the best antidote to our fragile morning state.
Costco is the kind of shop that allows one to eat the best for the least. Every single day, irrespective of the season, you can enjoy a fruit bowl packed with kiwi, berries—straw, black, blue and raspberries—orange, grapefruit, banana, pear. I may have left out something. You name it. A five-star hotel would not serve such produce.
Ladies, if you lose the boxes, you’ll easily afford fresh food. Keep your Costco fruit purchase in the fridge, and apportion daily. You’ll find it goes a long way.
My interlocutor nodded. And then asked where in the store she could find berries; she had never been into the enormous cold storage, which is the culinary equivalent of Ali Baba’s cave.

Update #2: Complicated China

Capitalism, China, Communism, Socialism

In my last column, “Stop Stimulating in Public,” I praised the Chinese for their habit of saving. Whatever their economic and political system, unlike the American government and people, the Chinese and their overlords do not see in debt a virtue to be compensated for, subsidized, and forgiven—in essence what American politicians are busying themselves with right now.
To say that the strength of the Chinese economy is derived, unilaterally, from that government’s exploitation of its people is to err on the side of social determinism—something Americans are increasingly prone to. It’s a view “liberty lovers” of the Beltway and their Objectivist tagalongs promote by default in their enthusiasm for going around the world rescuing the unfortunate. People can rescue themselves.
Social determinism is anti-individualism. In this context it implies that unless individuals have a certain political system (usually courtesy of the American taxpayer), they’ll never transcend their circumstances. History teaches us otherwise. People are driven to self-actualization no matter what. (Do read about Viktor E. Frankl, in this context.)
It’s also a mark of the cloistered American, dismissive of the drive individual Chinese display, and the skill they are capable of acquiring. China is not Africa! Each year, China graduates the number of engineers the US has in total: approximately 300,000. Since our state and its apparatus are accreting, we’re in the unproductive business of lawyering up; they’re making things. As Sean, who has traveled to China tells me, they’re still largely in the imitation phase, but, boy, do they learn fast.
All economic indicators rate Hong Kong as the freest spot in the world. Go live there, if they’ll let you—and if you’re able to afford housing, and stomach the climate (I’m Heidi of the North-West) and the customs.
Mainland China, of course, is another matter. Still, China is not what the backward Sinophobes in the US depict it to be. The latter have usually never been out of the country. Massive economic restructuring and market reforms have created a 300 million strong Chinese middle class. Poverty levels have gone from “53% in 1981 to 8% in 2001… Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70% of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” Underway are “the foundation of a diversified banking system, the development of stock markets; [and] the rapid growth of the non-state sector.”
An important point to make is that “although the government still dominates the economy in parts, the extent of its control has been limited by the sheer volume of economic activity.” Again, individual human action overwhelms state destruction.
To say, moreover, that private property is non-existent in China is also no longer true (to the extent we’re able to ferret out untruths, we don’t countenance them here on Barely a Blog). “Following the Chinese Communist Party’s Third Plenum, held in October 2003, Chinese legislators unveiled several proposed amendments to the state constitution. One of the most significant was a proposal to provide protection for private property rights.” The Chinese financial system is also being liberalized, so that to assert that Chinese can’t own stocks and shares is, again, simply untrue.
Sounds like they’re catching up while we’re falling behind—their people, like East Europeans, want economic freedom; ours crave controls. That’s really the danger.
Another distortion in need of dispelling: The Chinese suffer because they’re a source of cheap labor. As I’ve written in “Free Trade, Not the WTO, Will Enrich the Third World,” “Nike [for example] is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival. This franchise would find it hard to attract workers if the case was that it was offering less, or the same as other companies. It must be then that Nike, and Starbucks are benefactors that offer the kind of wage unavailable [in poor countries] prior to their arrival.”
The Chinese call their economic system “Socialism with Chinese characteristic.” We call our economic reality free-market capitalism, but it is also a Third Way system: “Socialism with American characteristics.”
As for the importance of a political system: what a joke. Voting is a joke. If the American government kept its mitts off my bank account and property, I would not care one whit whether they called themselves, more honestly, socialists, or, dishonestly, capitalists. China at least is honest about its economic system, and, it appears, about the benefits of liberalizing it.
The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty shoji screens is complex. But the trend is unmistakable: China is becoming more, not less, liberal.

Update I: My tolerance for displays of the Fabian mindset on a free-market blog is low these days. I am not going to give space to the commie nonsense of income gap or economic disparities as indicators of injustice. We are not social levelers here; nor egalitarians. If you don’t know that this is the essence of commie claptrap, then read up. I’ve provide a reading list. My essays in the “Economy” and “Sod Off Uncle Sam” Archives also cover free-market fallacies. Start with “Slouching Toward Socialism.”

Update #II: In reply to Alex’s response to my first update: It’s scarier than you think. Banging on about income inequality as an indicator of an unjust society is very much part of the conservative nomenclature these days—as is global warming hallucinations, amnesty for any and all, etc. I can go on and list a host of issues over which there has been a complete convergence between contemporary “conservatives” and the liberal-left. On second thought, given that you bested my efforts on the State of Disunion, you could too. We are all left-liberals now!

Updated: The Hildebeest to Level the Lending Industry

Business, Capitalism, Constitution, Economy, Feminism, Free Markets, Hillary Clinton, Socialism

The Hildebeest wants to make it easier for debt-laden borrowers to borrow money they can’t repay. She wants those who don’t spend money they don’t have, to subsidize those who do. The latter are called, euphemistically “at-risk borrowers.” So now we are medicalizing fraud! Defraud the lender and it is not he and his investment that are at risk, but you the defrauder. As for the money lending industry: hey toots, what do you think mortgage companies will do if you force them to throw good money after bad? Go bankrupt!

Tightening credit conditions and foreclosures signal to this silly socialist one and one thing only: the lending industry is not yet egalitarian enough; it has not yet been forced to lend to all equally. The insurance industry already gets sued to bits when it refuses to pay out to the barely insured for homes that were swept away by Katrina, but were never insured against floods. This woman is so dim. Like so many women, Hillary just doesn’t understand money or free markets. Here I include the war harpies. They cheer on the spending in Iraq, which contributes to our economic straits—to the promiscuous money printing and the devaluation of the dollar. As I once said on a libertarian discussion list, I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.

The worst part of all this is how Hillary audaciously framers her Fabian plank as quintessential Americanism: “We need to secure the marketplace and put reforms in place right now… [do] what America has always done in times of difficulty…,” IT announced.

Practically every initiative Hillary touts as part of her platform is grounded in spending money not hers. Hey toots, you haven’t even been elected yet! Enough already! I’m being unfair. Instead of a slap on the face to calm the cow down, Barak Hussein Obama is matching Hillary word-for-word. He has also promised to curb “abusive practices,” by which he presumably means the mortgage company’s practice of charging a higher interest rate for loans to less credit-worthy borrowers.

This is sick. It’s socialism.

Updated (March 29, 2008): Yesterday Hillary reiterated her intent to level another industry: health insurance. This time her mandate came from the … Constitution. We were all prohibited under the Constitution, said she, from discriminating on the basis of age, sex, race, etc. So why should the insurance industry be exempt? Why should it be permitted to discriminate between people based on health status (largely under the individual’s control)? Hillary wanted to know. Aware as I am that Hillary is such a strict constructionist (sarcasm alert), please enlighten me as to the clause in the Constitution upon which Hillary bases her latest Fabian impetus. It’s obvious that the woman could never fathom what it is that the actuary does.