Category: economics

economics

Vote Cthulhu

Why vote for the lesser evil? If you vote Democrat, you vote for the branch of the Cathedral’s public relations department that specializes in moving the left edge of the Overton window leftwards If you vote Republican, you vote for the branch of the Cathedral’s public relations department that specializes in moving the right edge of the Overton window leftwards. A vote for Romney will slow the destruction of the …

economics

How to fire big bird

Romney has promised to defund the Public Broadcasting System. Reagan promised to defund the left, and did not seriously try it. If Reagan did not, what chance Romney? But if Romney is serious about it, which I doubt, here is how to do it: The Public Broadcasting System is, in large part, half a billion dollars paying media people to be left wing, which includes paying them to be nasty …

economics

the gimmedat party

Today, you can predict pretty accurately how someone will vote from which interest group she belongs to. I say “she”, not out of political correctness, but because this is most obvious for females. The gimmedat party is non whites and single white females. And it has a majority in the US. Thus, Obama and Romney pander to it to precisely equal degrees. This is the end state of democracy, for …

economics

Deregulation

A lot of people, including pretty much everyone in academia, including supposed libertarians in academia, agree that deregulation has been happening. Everyone agrees that the US banks were “deregulated” – in that a seventeen page law governing their permitted activities was replaced by three thousand pages of laws governing their activities, which three thousand pages were not so much laws, as headings for regulators to title their decisions. It is …

economics

Decline of the west

According to official statistics, living standards are rising, inflation is low, and unemployment is falling. If living standards are rising, why are people eating less meat and buying fewer cars? [In the comments Bill makes a telling rebuttal:  That people are eating less meat and buying fewer cars because of increasing inequality accurately reported by the official statistics: that the decline in equality renders official statistics compatible with consumption statistics …

economics

Not the cognitive elite

Government has accomplished some mighty impressive things, the most impressive being the Manhattan project (nuclear bombs and nuclear energy), and the second most impressive being the landing on the moon. After Hiroshima, and before the moon landing, people said “Why don’t we (meaning government) have a Manhattan project to do X” After the landing on the moon, people said “If we (meaning government) can put a man on the moon, …

economics

Krugman on supply side

By and large, the elite ignores the argument that our economic crisis is supply side, as if no one could possibly be so crazy, ignorant and stupid as to make such an obviously silly argument. However, when Professor Pedro Schwartz argued that the problem is supply side, Krugman responded passionately rather than ignoring and mischaracterizing the argument.: