Category Archives: Economy

UPDATED: Kill #Amtrak For It Will Kill AGAIN

Business, Economy, Government, Labor, The State

Amtrak is a government-run entity. As such, it answers not to the consumer but to politicians and union bosses. Nor does the National Railroad Passenger Corporation respond to the laws of economics. Despite running at an annual loss—is it more than half a billion dollars annually?—it never “fails” or goes belly up, for the taxpayer is forced to fund it.

Whether you use it or not; approve of it or not—government takes from you to give to the Amtrak financial and operational train wreck. In fact, the worse it does—the more people it kills—the greater its rewards: the louder the calls for Amtrak’s funding. Whereas a business that squanders lives and money would go under; a state enterprise will only grow under the same conditions. Let me put it this way: Try and withhold your fungible tax dollars, and you’ll be staring down the barrel of a gun.

In state-run entities liability is socialized and limited by the power of legislation—isn’t it great to be able to legislate yourself a Get Out of Jail Free card? Socialized liability means that the costs of any criminal or tort action will be borne by government, which is funded by YOU, its victim; the taxpayer.

These are just some of the inverted incentives that make Amtrak go off the rails, again and again.

Amtrak can no more be reformed than the Soviet Union’s communistic economy could be. It can only be liquidated, wrote Gregory Bresiger.

The latest on the “catastrophic train derailment near Philadelphia this week that killed at least eight passengers and injured more than 200 others,” via the New York Times.

UPDATE: It is true that the Dutch, for example, have tremendous pride in their infrastructure. So do the Germans. But this too will pass once European sense of nationhood is dissolved beyond repair by the supra-state, the EU.

‘Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly’ In The Ivy League

Economy, Labor

“Economic malpractice” in the Ivy League is nothing new. In promoting minimum wage laws, hundreds of so-called top economists have defied the “law known as the first fundamental law of demand.”

The law states that the higher the price of something the less people will take of it and vice versa.

Alas, members of “the brie, tofu, and champagne circuit” regularly pretend that this natural law, “to which there are no known real-world exceptions,” is unaffected by minimum wage legislation.

Now comes news that a California city is to raise its minimum wage to $16.00. This unemployment-causing folly is a good opportunity to revisit WALTER E. WILLIAMS’ magnificent, ongoing efforts to “embarrass the economists” who lie about the costs of raising the price of unskilled labor:

… Some people suggest that if the price of something is raised, buyers will take more or the same amount. That’s silly because there’d be no limit to the price that sellers would charge. For example, if a grocer knew he would sell more — or the same amount of — milk at $8 a gallon than at $4 a gallon, why in the world would he sell it at $4? Then the question becomes: Why would he sell it at $8 if people would buy the same amount at a higher price?

There are economists, most notably Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who suggest that the law of demand applies to everything except labor prices (wages) of low-skilled workers.

Krugman says that paying fast-food workers $15 an hour wouldn’t cause big companies such as McDonald’s to cut jobs. In other words, Krugman argues that raising the minimum wage doesn’t change employer behavior.

Before we address Krugman’s fallacious argument, think about this: One of Galileo’s laws says the influence of gravity on a falling body in a vacuum is to cause it to accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. That applies to a falling rock, steel ball or feather. What would you think of the reasoning capacity of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who’d argue that because human beings are not rocks, steel balls or feathers, Galileo’s law of falling bodies doesn’t apply to them? …

MORE.

Spain And Portugal Pumped With Funny Money

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe

“The ingenuity, industry and activity of the ancient Greeks have nothing in common with the stupidity and indolence of the present inhabitants of those regions.” So said philosopher David Hume about modern-day Creeks.

The “land of moussaka, moochers and looters” and their Marxist leaders refuse to cease living on money borrowed from the more productive EU countries (Germany) .

“Greece,” marvels the Wall Street Journal, “has largely based its brinkmanship on an assumption that the eurozone will ultimately capitulate to its demands to prevent chaos spreading across the currency bloc.”

“Both Spain and Portugal are at risk from a Greek eurozone exit, but they have confidence their economies can withstand the shock.”

Yes, pumping funny money into the money markets has a way of inflating confidences.

Hillary’s Trust Issue

Economy, Ethics, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Taxation

Not content with acquiring wealth through the dishonest, predatory process of politics (to contrast with the honest, productive, economic means of earning a living)—Hillary Clinton and husband have protected their ill-gotten gains from the taxman through trusts. These are “common among multimillionaires, and help shield some of their estate from the [inheritance] tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.” BloombergBusiness:

Among the tax advantages of such trusts is that any appreciation in the [asset’s] value can happen outside their taxable estate. The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes …

The height of Hillary’s hypocrisy, however, is that, while she “shields her own wealth from it,” she recommended, during her last campaign, that estate taxes be further raised on Americans who’ve managed to amass more than $3.5 million.

… Clinton supported making wealthier people pay more estate tax by capping the per-person exemption at $3.5 million and setting the top rate at 45 percent, a policy Obama still supports. Congress decided to go in the other direction and Obama went along as part of a broader compromise. The per-person exemption is now $5.34 million..

Clinton has referred to estate tax as a “wealth tax.”

To say that she has a trust issue is to minimize how repulsive these people truly are.