TED KENNEDY is back with a posse. “Beaches around Chatham, Mass., remain closed because of shark sightings made in the Cape Cod area before the busy holiday weekend. Reports of the sightings and closures — as well as the tagging by scientists of two great white sharks — make national news.”
In any event—and as I argued in “Animals Gone Wild”—“Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller Jaws is an infinitely better Guide For the Perplexed than the shark experts”:
The latter “insist that, if presented with a menu, sharks will choose fish over folks. (‘Too tough and chewy,’ confirmed a spokesfish for the shark community.)”
Dare I say that the alleged culinary preferences of sharks are because there are more fish in the sea than people? If the oceans were peopled more plentifully, sharks would adapt their refined taste buds to human flesh in a flash. A witness—a brave surfer who paddled to the rescue—confirmed that Sharky didn’t seem remotely put off, and was doing what powerful, flesh-eating animals with sharp teeth do: tucking in.
“Apparently, the bears and the sharks haven’t had the benefit of liberal expert propaganda.”
Following the deductive genius of Austrian economics, many of us have been warning that Obama’s policies are plunging the country into a depression. The best book on the topic, of course, is America’s Great Depression By Murray N. Rothbard. Now, in a study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute contend that Obama’s “policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century.”
According to the British Telegraph, “There are ‘troubling similarities’ between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.”
“… the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.
“The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the US recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s. The authors say: ‘[Franklin D Roosevelt’s] interventionist policies and draconian tax increases delayed full economic recovery by several years by exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows.'”
The researchers err in their support for “the Federal Reserve’s moves to slash interest rates to just above zero and embark on quantitative easing, pumping cash directly into the system.” That goes against the grain of what the authors have contended.
Truly scary, but nothing that Austrians have not been bracing for, is the warning “that greater intervention could set the US back further. It is also not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron.”
“The paper … recommends that the US return to a more laissez-faire economic system rather than intervening further in activity.” Dah!
SaidJames Buchanan: “We have learned some things from comparable experiences of the 1930s’ Great Depression, perhaps enough to reduce the severity of the current contraction. But we have made no progress toward putting limits on political leaders, who act out their natural proclivities without any basic understanding of what makes capitalism work.”
GOVERNMENT IS. “The government will have to hire some 600,000 people during the four years of President Obama’s term. That would bump up the current workforce by a third,” reports MSNBC.
The New York Times informs that, “While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs, according to a report issued Thursday by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.”
It then adds a stupendously silly afterthought:
“Government jobs are always more stable than private sector jobs during downturns, but their ability to weather the current deep recession startled Donald J. Boyd, the senior fellow at the institute who wrote the report.”
[SNIP]
Government jobs come into being by political fiat, not by market forces or necessity. Political will is what sustains them; it is state force that accounts for their stability and longevity. This is why these jobs, so to speak, “write” their own conditions of employment.
“Government job creation schemes are predicated on government taxing, borrowing or inflating the money supply—activities that reduce capital available to the private sector. Such programs are politically popular because they are visible. However, for every job ‘created’ by government, an unidentifiable job will be destroyed in the private sector.”
It’s a zero-sum game: The parasite is sucking the lifeblood of the host. The larger he gets, the weaker the host grows.
The growth of government, of course, means that many more leaches will be implementing onerous rules and regulations that make it even harder for the struggling private economy to recover.
Still, the Times is perplexed at “the disparity between the public and private sector job market.”
Update I: “CANADA’S private sector added 49,200 workers in August, the first time they have hired more than fired since September,”reports the AP.
Of greater interest is the fact that, “while the U.S. has seen 81 banks fail in 2009 alone, Canada has not experienced the failure of any major financial institution. There has been no crippling mortgage meltdown or banking crisis north of the border, where the financial sector is dominated by five large banks.”
Update II (Sept. 5): MILTON FRIEDMAN (Via Roy B.) on the fallacy of government as an agent of wealth creation and on needing production—goods and services—not spending:
Update III (Sept. Eighth): SWITZERLAND HAS “knocked the United States off the position as the world’s most competitive economy” (via Reuters & Drudge).
The U.S. as the world’s largest economy lost last year’s strong lead, slipping to number two for the first time since the introduction of the index in its current form in 2004.
The study also factors in a survey among business leaders, assessing for example the government’s efficiency or the flexibility of the labor market. …
The WEF applauded Switzerland for its capacity to innovate, sophisticated business culture, effective public services, excellent infrastructure and well-functioning goods markets.
If to go by the report, the depression is some kind of swine flu, which randomly infects some, but not other, banks. However, American banks were leveraged like no other financial institutions in the world. (I’m not including Zimbabwe’s banks, although maybe I should, given how close the US is to Tanzania with respect to the soundness of its banks: “In the assessment of banks’ soundness, the Alpine country still ranked 44th. U.S. banks fell to 108 — right behind Tanzania — and British banks to 126 in the ranking, now topped by Canada’s banks.”)
Wait until the insurance industry collapses because of an Obama decree against “discrimination” based on health status. This is the very definition of insurance. Remove the costs of risk taking and you remove the incentives to avoid risks. Doesn’t Dipstick associate this incentive structure with his oft-repeated objective: inculcating healthy habits in the population? Moreover, unless the industry can charge premiums based on risk, it becomes a non-profit. Remove profit from the insurance equation, and the industry will be on its way to croaking.
Spare me a repeat performance of the Jeremiah Wright farce, only with Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, substituting for the Obamas’ preacher; and surfacing in YouTube clips while delivering Wright-like jeremiads lambasting white men and Western civilization, as every liberal lunatic and wimpish WASP pretends Obamby hardly knew the jejune Jones.
Can we skip this? Can this country’s anointed cognoscenti at least pretend to be familiar with the concept of a learning curve?
“[a] top environmental official of the Obama administration issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into “evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur.”
Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is Number 46 of the petitioners from the so-called “Truther” movement which suggests that people in the administration of President George W. Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of “the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”
He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition. A source said Jones did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.
It’s one thing to have voted for Obama; it’s quite another to walk around in a daze pretending the man has no relationship to the entourage of crazies that has been catapulted to power with him.
Incidentally, I am less perturbed by Jones’ affinity with 9/11 conspirators than with the vertiginous ignorance of economics that accompanies his green faith. The man’s mandate is to do serious damage.
Just as Obama intended.
Here’s a prophetic prediction (NOT): There are many Van Jones’ in the Obama administration. You’ll meet them in the fullness of time. Quit feigning surprise when they crawl out from their dank corners.
Update I (Sept.4): I TOLD YOU SO. The predictable LiveLeak and YouTube clips are surfacing showcasing this apparent anomaly in the Obama administration: a black man who is every bit as cynical and smug as Jeremiah Wright, and like him is consumed by savage rage and envy. But like Obama’s confidant and reverend of 20 years, Van Jones is somehow treated atomistically. Conservatives too are positing only whether he has a future; will he be fired, and what kind of vetting did he undergo. It is manifestly obvious to these pundits that Obama could not possibly have approved of such a man.
Update II: THE REAL STORY is this, courtesy of Byron York:
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.
Update III (Sept. 6): JONES FALLS ON HIS SWORD so that Obamby may retain his porcelainized image. My Way News:
“President Barack Obama’s adviser Van Jones has resigned amid controversy over past inflammatory statements, the White House said early Sunday.
Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.”
