Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language– serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
Category: economics
Real GDP growth
GDP is an ill defined quantity, for it counts cars produced, official credit ratings produced, and regulators producing regulation. With the best will in the world, it is hard to say how it is changing, and lately we have been seeing some pretty bad will. Attempting to calculate GDP is worse than adding apples to oranges, it is adding apples to moonbeams. Supposedly GDP is growing, and growing fast – …
Financial Reform
TheMoneyIllusion nicely summarizes the financial reform legislation. He misses, however, the biggest failure of the financial reform legislation – that the NRSROs are still in business, rather than in jail.
Green Jobs
Abengoa SA was offered a $1.45 billion loan guarantee by the U.S. Department of Energy to build a 250-megawatt solar plant in Arizona, and Abound Solar Manufacturing was offered a $400 million loan guarantee toward two plants where thin-solar panels will be manufactured. The guarantees through the Recovery Act and other measures are expected by the awardees to create more than 5,000 jobs, according to a statement from the White …
China continues moving to the free market
The greatest limitation on the economic liberty of Chinese was capital controls. Recently the party took a big step away from capital controls by allowing ordinary Chinese to buy and sell gold as an investment. As Europe and the US moves towards capital controls, the party continues to move away from capital controls. The Central Bank of China has announced: Starting from July 21, 2005, China has moved into a …
Doomsday postponed for a short time
As I write this, Spain just ran out of money. Presumably the European central bank is going to print up a whole lot of fresh money and bail them out, if it has not done so already. If they are not swiftly bailed out, there will be a run on the Spanish banks, and the Spanish deficit will be instafixed as the government loses the ability to pay most people. …
The coming collapse
perverse incentives make collapse inevitable
Minority mortgage meldown and diversity recession
People are starting to realize wonder where all the money was pissed away to. The answer, of course, is that most of it was pissed away on affirmative action loans to members of protected minorities. Whose fault is this? Steve Sailer blames primarily Karl Rove and George Bush There is much truth in this, but I would primarily blame Basel. Under Basel, what matters to a financial institution is not …
Mission accomplished
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010. But has everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it will all be blamed on free markets, despite …
How to fix the financial crisis
Proposed reforms, both left and right, are unlikely to have any effect on the continuing massive misappropriation from the financial system. It is absurd that people are discussing obscure details of the credit swap market. To fix the financial crisis, we have to revoke, or at least denounce and denigrate, Marie Curie’s Nobel prize. When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt …