Category Archives: Economy

Updated: Cash-For-Clunkers Cry Babies (& The Tragedy Of The Commons)

Conservatism, Constitution, Economy, Political Economy, Private Property, Republicans, Socialism

I don’t feel sorry for the many car dealers who opted to take taxpayer funds, via the government, and lure equally greedy and gormless customers into junking perfectly good rides, purchasing new ones instead, and taking on more debt. I’m not in the least sorry for them, now that Uncle Sam has stiffed them, no Sirree.

Ridiculous too is the incredulity the auto dealers are feigning at being stiffed (if you can call it that) by their paymaster. “We just expect the same sort of courtesy and treatment from the federal government,” they whimper. Boohoo.

“Dealers across the state are owed more than $3.6 million, according to a dealers’ group which says that so far Uncle Sam has only written three checks totaling about $14,000.”

And:

“You simply can’t ask businesses to front $200,000, $300,000 for any period of time,’ Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., told KRQE News 13. ‘These applications are simply not being processed fast enough.'”

You don’t say!

Equally stupid is the only deduction conservatives can muster: If the government can’t manage the CFC scam, how will it run the unconstitutional, confiscatory, immoral healthcare undertaking.

Of course, they omit the key phrases I just used—“scam, unconstitutional, confiscatory, immoral”—these are nowhere apparent in the debate; although Hitler is. A pretty—and pretty dumb—townhaller, taking her cues from Rush, paired health care and Hitler. Good job.)

There’s a lot conservatives can’t find words for: private property, for one. Principles is another. Nothing works in government because there is no private property. If you were given something to manage that you don’t own, have no stake in, on behalf of millions of people you don’t know, and who have no recourse against your mismanagement, except to whine like wimps—how well would you perform? Why are privately owned homes cared for and public housing trashed? Why don’t Republican and conservative bimbos and beaus of the media ever open a book and learn a few concepts.

Okay make it one crucial concept: the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

Update: To the comment below: The “calculation problem” means nothing to the lay reader. Private property means everything—or ought to. It should be understood to those who bandy about the “calculation problem” that the reason there cannot be rational allocation of resources in a state bureaucracy is because there is no private property. In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in a nationalized system there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misallocation of capital is inevitable.

Property precedes all else.

Unemployment Worse Than They’re Letting On

Economy, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Propaganda

The Center for Immigration Studies: “While the current high rate of official unemployment is well known, it only includes those who have looked for work in the last four weeks. There is a broader measure of employment, referred to by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as U-6, which includes the unemployed and people who would like to work, but who have not looked for a job recently, as well as those involuntarily working part-time. This report examines the U-6 measure and finds that things are much worse than the official unemployment numbers imply. The situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants—legal and illegal. (All figures in this report are seasonally unadjusted and are from June 2009.)

Among the findings: * As of June 2009, the overall unemployment rate for native-born Americans is 9.7 percent, but the broader U-6 measure shows it as 16.3 percent. There are 12.7 million unemployed natives, but using the U-6 measure it is 21.7 million. … ”

I reported this earlier this month.

Happy Days Are Here Again … La, La, La

Business, Debt, Economy, Labor

The economic experts who’ve got a lot riding on the recovery ass, now measure recovery by the slowing rate of job losses. Employers laid off fewer workers in July—247,000 as opposed to 443,000 in June. “The jobless rate dipped for the first time in 15 months to 9.4 percent in July, from 9.5 percent the previous month, and workers’ hours and pay edged upward,” reports the AP.

But, “the main reason the unemployment rate declined last month was not an inspiring one.” What that ass with ears Obama doesn’t divulge is this:

Hundreds of thousands of people, some discouraged by their failed job searches, left the labor force. The labor force includes only those who are either employed or are looking for work.

If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included the unemployment rate would have been 16.3 percent in July. All told, 14.5 million were out of work in July.

Job-seekers are finding it harder to get work because there are so few openings. A record 4.97 million people had been unemployed six months or longer in July. And the average length of unemployment grew to 25.1 weeks, also a record.

Recovery cannot commence until the government stops cold turkey the reckless, unconstitutional, immoral measures that are worsening the economy.

What are those? No great mystery there; they are the exact actions that would worsen your personal finances were you to indulge as the government does: Digging yourself deeper into to debt by spending yourself into oblivion. Bailing out debtors, restructuring their mortgages, reducing their payments, forestalling foreclosures, making borrowing artificially even cheaper when it should be expensive, penalizing banks for trying to lend conservatively, creating more and more government-sector jobs, which are supported by taxpayers, are a drain on the economy and create no economic value whatsoever—all the stuff the Obama Administration is championing as a matter of policy, all the while printing money non-stop.

There’s one good sign that Americans have parted company from the government in cultivating more frugal habits: “consumers paid down credit cards and reduced other debt in June for the fifth straight month.”

Update III: Ass-troturfers

Conspiracy, Democrats, Economy, Healthcare, Media, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason, Socialism

I’m talking about the media. The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that end up becoming part of the narrative and serving to fuse fact with fancy. I refer to the way town hall attendees against Obama Care are being discounted as stooges for “corporate interests.”

It was wicked when the neocons presented antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as something other than what she was. And it is execrable now that MSNBC is tarring impassioned Americans on the Right as something other than what they are. It doesn’t matter with which small or large groups these protesters, left and right, seek solidarity and solace. What matters is the case they present against socializing medicine. The rest is just ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US is at.
I don’t care if George Soros, as alleged by this neocon outfit , came to back Sheehan. Her cause was just. She spoke extremely well against the ongoing travesty in Iraq.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow intoned like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their little foot soldiers conspiring against state health care. The forces of darkness against the forces of light. She arrived at her scoop by following a few links on the internet and ominously reading out some posts, which she framed as secret memos. Unlike comrade Keith, at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of those evil corporatists. And how delightful he turned out to be. “Do the oil companies fund us? No, but I’d love them to. I urge them to support us.” And so he went.

She looked confused. (Rachel’s inner voice: “When will all this free exchange of funds be outlawed? Oh pretty please, Obamby.”) But at least she was a good sport, which is more than one can say about Chris Trickle-Down-The-Leg-For-Obama Matthews and other Obamaheads.

I must say, Maddow is so smarmy and self-satisfied. I can’t bear to watch her coiling and uncoiling as she expounds ominously on conspiracies that are really unremarkable events and associations.

Update I (August 10): The woman of the frozen face and equally unsupple mind—Nancy Pelosi—has teamed up with the Ring Leader, Steny Hoyer (House majority leader), to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American.” As if the number of podiums the parasitical class monopolizes were not enough, the parrot press has given another sizable platform to this excuse of a team: “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Pay attention to how the dastardly duo:

• Conflates the political will with the will of the people. (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care.”)
• Dishonestly fails to acknowledge that the protests mirror the polls:

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that more Americans disapprove (50%) than approve (44%) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy. There is a tremendous partisan gap in these views, with 74% of Democrats but only 11% of Republicans approving. Independents are more likely to disapprove than to approve of Obama’s work on healthcare.

• Contends that health care drives our economy. In truth, production should drive a healthy economy, not consumption of services. The former enables the latter.
• Sell yet another government program as salvation for the nation’s ills. If you believe them, you deserve what they dish. The problem is, you intend to force your choice on me and mine; sell me into serfdom, using the power of the state to get your way.

Update II (August 11): SVENGALI SHIFTS INTO CAMPAIGN MODE. Obama showed his hand by emphasizing during his Town Hall that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group of people.

Naturally, MSNBC took him at his word, reporting enthusiastically on how little resistance BO met. Outside the Obama town hall the country was roiling—still is. Inside the Barack Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brain waves.

Tucker Carlson, who works for MSNBC and has certainly worked the political system, was unable to back-up the line the Obama organ—also his employers—was peddling. Most presidential town halls are screened and packed with supported, said Carlson. BO has just joined the rest in lying about the practice.

As BO’s charmed political life continues—suspended as he is in a third dimension—one of the few honest Republicans, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, confronted a more realistic setting. I say honest, because all Republicans bar a handful fit in the camp to which Specter defected.

In any event, Specter provided some much-needed comic relief. When asked by a patriot what he was going to do “to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution,” Specter replied: “When you ask me to defend the Constitution, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

That’s rich.

Note how Specter, like a true pol, “vowed he would never support any bill that increased the federal deficit or took away a person’s right to choose their health care coverage.”

And indeed, once the lumbering juggernaut of government-run health care becomes a fait accompli, Specter and his ilk will be perfectly correct to say that when they signed off on this violation of rights and usurpation of authority, he was promised the “reform” would not become a public plan.

This is just how the Hildebeest and her Democratic warmongers excused their vote to give George authority to go to war in Iraq: “We were betrayed; we had been told the power would not be abused.”

These people are beyond contempt.

Update III (August 12): TAMRON TITS-HALL is an MSNBC host. Tits-Hall’s beauty is inversely related to her brain power. (The combination of beauty and brains is as rare as it is lethal, I paraphrase Peter Brimelow.) But in the Age of the Idiot she fits right in. (Whereas some MSNBC babes are lovely, Foxette News anchors, I would argue, sport the porn look. They are molded in the Hugh Hefner mold: vulgar but fit for You Know What. This Fox News aesthetic is one of the few issues of disagreement with my good friend, Prof. Paul Gottfried. I think the pea brain Kirsten Powers is a dreadfully plain girl. Alex Witt, on the other hand, has going for her that Lara loveliness from “Dr. Zhivago.”)
But I digress. Here is Tamron; a beauty. Here are her fans; brainless..

I arrive, after that bit of titillation, at Tamron’s portion of the week (that’s what we Jews call a weekly segment read from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue). First she and David Shyster peddled the propaganda that healthcare protesters had been bussed in by political operatives. Now they concede that these angry “un-American” Americans are simply stupid. Tits-Hall, who could never be called simple (read what her fans say about her clever cleavage), believes “these people,” clearly alien to a member of the “multicultural noise machine,” don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are run by government; and they don’t get that INsurance (why do Americans place the emphasis incorrectly on the first syllable of this word?) is a third-party entity.

And this is reportage in the age of the idiot.

Your retort to Tits-Hall:

• From the fact that VA hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that incorporating more of the industry into the state gulag is insignificant, negligible, or that protest is rendered meaningless. Tits-Hall is one big non sequitur, which should be your most used word in the Age of the Idiot.
• The fact that there is already one mediating entity between doctor and patient does not mean that another, subject to all the wrong incentives, ought to be introduced.

Don’t count on Tits-Hall or Shyster to comprehend a reasoned argument.