But it is in sight. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but we have had a lot of ruin. The US government lacks cohesion, and is insolvent. Lack of cohesion means that in a crisis it is apt to disappear, dissolve into its parts, with each part seeking its own interest. Insolvency means a crisis is looming. I would expect the Euro to collapse before the US dollar, and the Euro is not going to collapse all …
Category: economics
Who rules the world?
Tracing rulers academic connections yields an interesting picture. Thus Mugabe, like so many third world rulers, comes from the London School of Economics, but Harry Lee Kuan Yew was educated in Singapore. And lo and behold, Mugabe was installed in power by the “international community†aka the tranzis, while Harry Lee Kuan Yew was installed in power by Singaporeans. A similar trace is visible in the Ivory Coast, where shortly before I wrote this, the “international community†held a blatantly …
Conservative bloggers declare victory
According to Strata and others, the outcome of the budget negotiations (to reduce by one percent spending that was recently increased by by thirty percent) was a mighty victory. By a vote of approximately ten to one, the US House of Representatives voted to continue at slightly lower speed on a course that leads to bankruptcy, hyperinflation, social collapse, and, if we are lucky, civil war in the next decade or two.
Laffer curve
If the government taxes 0% of GDP, it will not get any money. If it attempts to tax 100% of GDP it will not get any money either, since there will be no above ground wealth. So somewhere between 0% and 100% is the tax that maximizes revenue. Genghis Kahn and Raffles believed that the tax that maximizes revenue is quite low, close to 0%. Today’s politician’s believe it is quite high, somewhere close to 100%. I suppose that in …
“Deep Cutsâ€
Harry Reid, leader of the RepublicanDemocratic party in the Senate, attacks the Republican party because some far right extremists want to make “deep cuts†in government spending Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) accused Tea Party lawmakers of destroying budget negotiations “We’ve tried to wait patiently for them … but our patience and the American people’s patience is wearing very thin,” “Tea Party Republicans are scrapping all the progress we have made and threatening to shut down the government if …
The coming collapse
Under the old US constitution, around 2000 or so, in order for the bureaucrats to spend money on something the house of representatives, the senate, and the president, had to agreed to spend money. Thus in order to do stuff, politicians had to pass a budget, and bureaucrats had to spend within that budget. Passing the budget was power, and politicians were eager to work on the budget, each one wanted a budget, so he could get his own fingerprints …
Radiation levels normal and falling at Fukushima nuke reactor
NPR, usually the first to panic about evil nuclear energy, is reporting some very undramatic numbers from the Fukushima reactor Radiation inside the plant is arguably dangerous, but radiation at the plants main gate is 0.647 milliserverts per hour. By comparison, when you take a flight, you get about 0.04 milliserverts per hour from cosmic rays, so standing at the main gate is fifteen times worse than flying. So someone who flies to Japan from New York, and then wanders …
Reactor disaster
The television is full of panic stricken horror about the supposedly horrible horrible horrible horrible nuclear disaster in Japan. This disaster looks like being worse than three mile island, but not nearly as bad as Chernobyl. How many died as a result of Chernobyl? Sixty people died.  Pretty similar compared to coal mining disasters, of which there are many each year, killing in total world wide thousands of people every year, usually without making much news. People have been trying …
Untitled
I see it regularly claimed that financial crisis reflected de-regulation. I was mighty puzzled. Deregulation? Has not Basel been a spectacular landslide of regulation, with massive apocalyptic government takeover of the financial system, with government deciding who shall be winners and who shall be losers, with government allocating lending to favored groups and away from disfavored groups? Eventually I discovered that this “deregulation†was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Bill, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, a bill three …
Bryan Caplan’s challenge
if Egypt gets democracy, will suffer war and economic disaster, both of which will be blamed on Jews. Democracy with universal franchise does not work. It works worse with Muslims. No Muslim should be allowed to vote anywhere, especially in countries with substantial numbers of Muslims