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Samizdata sports an interesting analysis on current U. S. politics from a Brit who has never visited, but shows some insight. We attached some comments. We’ll see if they continue to be interesting.
… Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, there had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards. …
Mark Steyn selects an article from the archives that is still relevant today: problems with big government.
…Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions.
The first is the reason America is one of the few large countries that hasn’t disintegrated. If it were as centrally governed as the USSR or Yugoslavia, it would have bust up in the early 19th century. And, while the Obama Administration is certainly testing that proposition to the limits, they’re hardly starting from scratch. I’m a big fan of Laura Bush, and found her utterly charming on the one occasion we met, but I can think of no good reason why taxpayers should fund a “Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program”. Sample disbursement: $420,000 to the State Library of Illinois to fund a program to help its employees master “social networking” tools such as Facebook and Blogger. Across the land, every illiterate and innumerate Third Grader can master Facebook and Blogger without getting the best part of half a million taxpayer bucks. But apparently it would be unreasonable to expect a state library to get the hang of it without a massive federal program. …
…The other obstacle to effective localism is unionization. …whatever the arguments for private sector unionization as a protection against the robber barons of capitalism red in tooth and claw, there is no justification whatsoever for public sector unions. After all, government is a monopoly: Even if it goes bankrupt, it’s never going to go out of business, much as one might long to see the “Final Liquidation. Everything Must Go” shingles hanging in the windows in Sacramento and Albany. A snapshot of America in the 21st century would show a motivated can-do,small businessman working round the clock till he’s 78 to pay for a government worker who retires at 52 with pension and other benefits the private sector schmuck could never dream of. That’s why Big Government produces no economies of scale. The bigger the government the more everything it does costs…
…The metastasization of the public-sector workforce eventually becomes an existential threat to democracy. One in every eight workers in New York State – or 1.2 million – is a unionized government employee, and thus a reliable vote for the Democrats, the Party of Government. Recently I heard Herbert London of the Hudson Institute put it this way – that, on the first day of any Empire State election campaign, the Democrat starts with those 1.2 million votes and the Republican starts with zero and attempts to play catch-up. It’s hardly surprising very few do. …
Charles Gasparino, in the NY Post, looks at similarities and differences between the housing bubble and the bond bubble.
…The municipal-bond market’s assumption is that cities and states won’t default on their debt because they need to keep selling bonds to build roads and bridges. Investors will keep buying munis because they think the state will always make good on its obligations (and with the added incentive that these bonds are free of state, local and federal taxes).
But suppose taxes are so high that people leave cities or states in droves, depleting the pool of revenue need to pay bondholders? Suppose these states have so many other obligations — from federal mandates, massive “guaranteed” pensions to government workers and more — that they can’t or won’t make the vast cuts needed to keep paying on their bonds?
…Sure, a huge degree of paranoia is sweeping the muni market. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a wide examination of whether states and cities are properly disclosing budget issues to investors in municipal debt.
That review is prudent because even a few defaults would hit average investors hard. Munis, more than other bonds, are overwhelmingly held by individuals, not institutions.
Prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney (who accurately predicted the banking crisis in late 2007) recently warned that 50 to 100 municipal-bond defaults will happen over the next year, likely amounting to more than $100 billion in defaulted debt. …
There are so many ways Paul Krugman is stupid. This dimming star of the fading NY Times firmament lately has been pounded for his comments on the Tucson shooting. Now John Tamny in Forbes takes on a Krugman column about commodity prices.
… In a New York Times column titled “The Finite World”, Krugman reminds the mildly sentient among us that history always repeats itself in ways that fool the gullible.
In an article meant to explain the ongoing commodity boom, Krugman argues that it has “no bearing, one way or the other, on U.S. monetary policy.” To him the run-up is firstly the result of a “global recovery”, but more to the point, he asserts that “the commodity markets are telling us we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices.”
Specifically Krugman notes that “Oil is back above $90 a barrel” as evidence supporting his claim of a global scarcity, but the problem for him is that $90 oil wrecks the very foundation of his argument. Had he simply bothered to do a currency comparison of oil prices he would know that oil’s rise in recent months is once again a dollar phenomenon; thus exposing as false his suggestion that the commodity boom is unrelated to U.S. monetary policy.
Sure enough, since the middle of 2010 the Australian dollar has risen 27% against our wilting greenback. During that time oil has risen 33% in dollars against a fairly pedestrian 6% increase in the cost of crude measured in Aussie dollars. The recent commodity spike that Krugman deems global has in fact confined itself to the countries that have mimicked our devaluation. …
In the National Review, Matthew Shaffer talks with meteorologist Joe Bastardi about global warming inaccuracies, and where global temps are actually headed.
…But unlike most climate skeptics, Bastardi is in a position to change the conversation. He’s a meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather, and he proposes a wager of sorts. “The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.” …
…What’s his reasoning? Here are some specific topics on which Bastardi disagrees with mainstream climate scientists:
… Third, Bastardi sees modern climate scientists as inordinately fixated on carbon dioxide at the expense of other major factors (an example of their narrow, model-focused approaches, versus his tendency toward holistic empirical observation). “It’s almost the equivalent of saying, ‘Your big toe runs your body,’” he says. “Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.”
…he notes that in recent years, “CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.”
…Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere…I get calls from companies when money is on the line.” …