If you discover more than ten years of reserves, politicians are apt to take it away from you. So for the last hundred years or so, the world has only had ten years worth of proven oil reserves left and has been about to run out in ten years or so. In fact the world has only had about ten years of anything left for the past hundred years or …
Category: economics
Not a dog barked
Remember all those mighty and entirely spontaneous protests demanding that the Obama regime do what it quite obviously wanted to do and was quite obviously looking for justifications for doing, protests demanding that the government block every form of energy production in every white country, which obstructions have made the US into an energy importer for sixty years or so. And, of course, with deep reluctance the Obama regime would …
The bitcoin crisis
There can only be one. There can only be one money, at the root of all others. Money is a measure of value, a store of value, and a medium of exchange, and you want to uses the same medium of exchange and measure of value as everyone else. At the very beginning, I said the trouble with bitcoin, as originally designed, is that it does not scale. Everyone, to …
The true cost of renewable energy
Because the cost of renewables is falsified, installation of renewables causes power crises. Renewables are installed. The cost of renewables is hidden in some other part of the system, renewables continue to be installed, that part of the system does not get increased funding, collapses, blackouts and brownouts ensue. Fixing the blackouts and brownouts costs money, the cost of electricity then rises to reflect the actual cost of renewables that …
Trumpcare passes the house
Still has to pass the Senate, but already the Democrats are terrified. The essential and important feature of Trumpcare is that it “denies insurance to millions of Americans”. In other words, when you seek medical care, when those who pay for and operate our system of medical care seek medical care, they will not find one hundred drug addicts looking for free drugs and one hundred bums looking for free …
Fixing healthcare
Obamacare is in a death spiral. Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but then ran dead on it, allowing Ryancare to fail and washing his hands of it. Trump then announces he has to compromise with the Democrats on medicine. Single payer for everyone, as in Britain and Canada, is a horrible disaster, but despite being a disaster, once in place it seems impossible to remove. If we get …
Congressman Steve King’s solution to healthcare
Instead of having a plan developed behind closed doors and then you have to vote for it to find out what is in it, you legislate the old fashioned way, congressional vote by vote. “A return to regular order“. The great advantage of this is its great disadvantage. Congress cannot centrally plan the economy, or any significant part of the economy. No one central plan can receive a majority vote, …
Why Ryancare will not work
Ryancare, like Obamacare, involves cross subsidies. Some people wind up subsidizing other people. The resulting landslide of rules and regulations will shut down competition, with the result that everyone plus the government winds up paying unreasonable prices. Ryancare requires that insurance cover people with pre-existing conditions. That is not insurance, that is a handout. If the government is going to give people handouts, should be done openly through government funded …
The cost disease part 2
Costs of many important things, in particular education, housing, and healthcare are rising in ways that create artificial first world poverty, the inability to afford a wife and children. Scott Alexander wrote a superficially thoughtful and well informed examination of these problems, which analysis was made stupid by crimestop. A lot of high intelligent well informed people responded with explanations of the problem which accurately described parts and details of …
The cost disease
Some leftists and a PC libertarian have noticed that progress is not progressing: Education, healthcare, and infrastructure is getting much more expensive without improving in quality, and in many respects declining in quality. Doctors no longer make house calls. Education teaches ignorance and stupidity. Infrastructure has brutalist architecture. Naturally they are completely mystified about what is causing it because crimestop makes them stupid. First world poverty – the inability to …