Category Archives: Free Markets

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.

Borrowing From … Brazil

America, Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Inflation, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

Did you know that Brazil “is now the United States’s fourth-largest creditor”? They’ve been increasing their wealth, which has afforded the US the opportunity to spread its debt.

This according to a book by Larry Rohter, BRAZIL ON THE RISE: The story of a country transformed, reviewed in the June 17, 2011 issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

To read between the lines, Brazil is changing from a crappy country to a not-so crappy country. Given Rohter’s retarded analysis—Brazil’s improvement he puts down, in part, to wise “cash-transfer social programmes”—it’s hard to know what’s afoot. The Left truly feels—for they don’t think—that moving money from wealth creators to wealth consumers generates plenty.

It’s safer to say that, as in Chile, freeing markets has generated greater prosperity for Brazil.

Like white on rice, the Us in on any country with “significant foreign currency reserves.”

The Israel-Kinect Connection

Business, Economy, Education, Family, Free Markets, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Media, Regulation, Science, Socialism, Technology

Who do you think invented Microsoft’s “Kinect,” which is in the Guinness Book of Records as the “Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device” ever? Microsoft would like to claim the credit, but it belongs to an Israeli outfit called PrimeSense.

It’s my guess—and CNN’s Zombie Zakaria might wish to investigate this—that, overall, those who invent these silly contraptions are not necessarily the same sort of people who use them obsessively. (I recently watched a boy bob up-and-down and sideways like an automaton for over an hour in front of the Kinect. Back in the day, my own, now-grown girl would have been building Lego, painting, reading, or “inventing” creative games in the yard.)

Yes, the fogies of “60 Minutes” are obsessed with kids; errant American adults cater to, and worship, but never guide, their kids. The outcome of deification without direction is that the current crop of fattened little Buddhas is not that great.

Truth be told, the hybrid, hi-tech workforce—comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent—is manned, generally, by terribly smart, much older people with advanced engineering degrees. (That’s too much like hard work which is hardly “fun.”) The truth is that the people designing gadgets for America’s (face it, dumb) kids are older and highly educated. Some are Americans; others are Asians (South more than East, but both) and Israelis. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about the older generation—veteran techies—uniting to supply their young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.

Back to the point: Some of my readers refer to Israel’s economy as a socialistic one, a fact that could reflect a general media bias (against Israel, not socialism). Although Israel’s economy is by no means unfettered, it is not much different from Western Europe’s Third-Way, mixed economies, with a respectable per capita GDP. Warren Buffett has invested billions in Israel’s private sector, with good returns. The country’s high-tech industry has certainly been on the cutting edge for sometime.

Significant is the trend. And it is unmistakable: “Emerging markets,” as Israel is, are becoming freer, whereas America is becoming less free. The devil is in this detail.

I am affiliated with the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Those who’re interested in tracking the effort to liberalize Israel’s economy will get a good idea by following JIMS’ remarkable work out of Jerusalem.

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For a third day in a row, my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, is Amazon’s #1 in the category on Social Policy. The Publisher (link here) is not charging for shipping. This is valuable for our South African readers. Kindle will be up by, I am told by the best man possible, early this week, probably tomorrow.

A Pit Of Perverse Incentives

Free Markets, Government, Political Economy, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Any government-controlled system is a pit of perverse incentives. It’s hard to get kinkier than to make failure tantamount to success. If an airplane crashes, in the US, because an air-traffic controller was napping, his bosses have cause to celebrate. Why? Because they will be rewarded with more funds to ostensibly “fix the problem,” and more staff, whether they need it or not. Failure is defined as success in a socialized system.

No wonder the FAA, and Ray LaHood, the US transportation secretary, flailed about aimlessly when a US air traffic controller was caught sleeping “while a medical flight was landing in the state of Nevada, marking the fifth lapse so far this year among controllers at American airports.” They faffed because they have no way of “diagnosing” the problem in an unaccountable system, which is not subject to the controls imposed by private property: an owner furious at the looming loss of contracts, law suits, and bankruptcy.

Show me a company in the private sector (which is not the recipient of government handouts) that is shielded from bankruptcy. An audit would reveal that most government departments, the FAA included, are insolvent, yet the fact that the taxpayer is forced to bankroll them indefinitely with tax dollars, immunizes these systems against all forms of accountability, fiscal and other.

Why do some of you want your doctor operating under the same set of incentives, where the doctor gets off scotfree for the odd slip of the scalpel; the taxpayer (you) pays.