Megan McArdle puts Mitt Romney’s ‘business experience’ under a microscope.

Perhaps awed by this résumé, his debate opponents all failed to offer the obvious rebuttal: If he loved the private sector, why did he ditch it to seek public office? Romney’s last immersion in business was more than a decade ago; his last full-time job was as governor of one of the most liberal states in the country. The other Republicans onstage didn’t dare ask the question that ran through my mind as I watched this performance: How, exactly, did almost 25 years with Bain prepare Romney for the presidency?

Now consider what a consultant does. Consultants are, as any firm will tell you, the “best and the brightest,” culled from elite undergraduate and graduate programs. But they rarely lead anything larger than a small team; the average Army second lieutenant nine months out of a third-tier state college probably has more direct reports, and more deliverables.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

The notion of an executive washroom with its own special key now seems mostly ludicrous, but it was an actual thing–and I’m not sure that giving executives special bathrooms is actually noticeably less corrosive to social cohesion and personal happiness than giving them fatter pay packets.

It suddenly occurred to me that this is a standard feature of the work lives of blue state elites–(Update:  By which I mean, affluent people who attended elite schools, not “high income people who live in blue states”):  almost all of their contact is with people just like them.  Same education, usually the same few states of origin, and a pretty uniformly shared set of values about what work is for and how it should be done.

These people tend to vote Democratic.  Small-business owners, who work in much more diverse environments, tend to vote Republican.  I’m not going to speculate on why this might be so–but I suspect that it matters.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball pees all over the new Jobs biography … with (I think) good reason.

Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were.

If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.

Jobs, like Henry Ford, was a genius-level synthesist — taking stuff that was already out there in a rough form and fitting it all together in a way that made it available (and acceptable, which is an oft-neglected essential factor) to a large number of people.

Fresh back from Iraq, Smitty at The Other McCain pulls no punches.

The mental disease that is modern liberalism starts at an early age, with sports, before reaching full bloom in adulthood, when the modern liberal goes into government and starts to sodomize the economy.

Apparently, in the name of ‘equality’, gender differentiation in high school sports is not permitted, so boys are joining the ‘girls’ team and kicking ass. And the girls are calling ‘No fair!’ As well they might. But the problem is the government that mandates the situation, and that’s where they ought to be pointing the finger.

Read it.

Ford essentially argues that we have hit an inflection point at which technology destroys jobs faster than it creates them. Kling writes (at length, but it’s worth reading): “The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class … gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements [may] accrue to an economic elite … we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services.”

To what extent are our existing social frameworks dependent on structural friction? The whole distinction between a republic and a democracy is based on the thought that the latter is impractical — we can’t all vote on every question that comes up, so we elect representatives who do these silly thing so we don’t have to. With information flow becoming more and more frictionless, does that assumption still apply? Applied to employment, this becomes the now-getting-old notion of ‘disintermediation’ — in times past you needed middlemen to handle distribution, and customers are becoming more and more able to connect directly with suppliers. And ‘middle management’ in companies has been dissolving for decades, ‘flattening hierarchies’ being a corporate buzz-phrase for almost as long.

The takeaway thought seems to be that if you have a job that can be automated — and look around at the jobs that people thought could never be automated that (surprise!) actually have been once we have the breakthrough technology — you’re in trouble and had better be prepared to jump from the roof of the train before the tunnel mouth gets here. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Scientism is “the uncritical application of scientific or quasi-scientific methods to inappropriate fields of study or investigation.” When scientists proclaim truths outside the realm of their expertise, they are guilty of practicing scientism. Two notable scientistic scientists, of whom I have written several times (e.g., here and here), are Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. It is unsurprising that Dawkins and Singer are practitioners of scientism. Both are strident atheists, and a strident atheists, as I have said,  “merely practice a ‘religion’ of their own. They have neither logic nor science nor evidence on their side — and eons of belief against them.”

I would have to disagree with the last sentence. The problem is epistemology — how do we know what we know? Atheists, especially ‘scientistic’ atheists, take the position that the modern scientific methodology of observation, measurement, and extrapolation from observation and measurement, is sufficient to detect anything that Really Exists — and that the burden of proof is on those who propose that something Really Exists that cannot be reliably observed and measured; which is of course impossible within that mental framework. They have plenty of logic and science on their side, and their ‘evidence’ is the commonly-accepted maxim that it is impossible to prove a negative.

Religious people, of course, rarely try to tackle scientists on their own ground, perhaps feeling (naturally enough) that the ground is grossly slanted against their position. I think that a large part of it is the pervasive ‘scientism’ that underlies the modern world — science has given us all these wonderful toys, so it must be the way to go, right? — so religious people just refuse to enter the ring, so to speak, since they know how it comes out and aren’t going to wast their time in an effort doomed to failure.

This strikes me as a mistake. The medieval scholastics certainly had no hesitation using the tools of science (to the extent that they had any) to develop their religious viewpoints; Thomas Aquinas is the obvious poster child here, but this sort of thing was the chief intellectual product of the university system for upwards of 400 years.

Their approach was fairly straightforward and ‘scientific’: Certain things happened in times past that are outside the observable, measurable operation of the natural world, and for which we have multiple eyewitness accounts; we go with the traditional explanation until somebody comes up with an alternative the fits the facts (as they saw them) better. If you see a guy in a red and blue suit faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound — a lot of people will, absent any other explanation of how he can do that, take him at face value as Superman. Similarly, if a Jewish carpenter of no known special talents works a bunch of miracles and, when tortured to death by the government, comes back to life, there are people who are willing to take His word for it that he can do all this because He’s the Son of God, since they can’t come up with a ‘scientific’ explanation. As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, if you’ve eliminated the impossible, what’s left, however improbable, is likely to be the truth.

The distinguishing characteristic of ‘scientistic’ atheists, of course, is that they start from the a priori assumption that non-natural explanations of such phenomena are on the realm of the impossible rather than the realm of the improbable, thereby constricting (plainly tendentiously) the circle of ‘acceptable proof’ to exclude their religious opponents on the definitional level. When you define your opponents’ position as incorrect, then you win by default every time; and there’s a lot of justice in said opponents’ cry of ‘Hey! That’s not fair!’ But the ‘fairness’ of that approach is something that the religious and the irreligious will never agree on, so we’re stuck with permanently incompatible viewpoints.

Read it.

Pretty perceptive. But that raises the obvious question of ‘Why?’

Are there just ‘fashions’ in movie poster arrangements? Is it all based on some sort of fad or trend?

Or is it just an indication of the ongoing development of a set of conventions in movie making (note that the author never has to hunt for a ‘tag’ to sum up the sort of films being advertised), like the ‘genre’ tags used in book publishing?

Or is there something deeper going on there, some reflection of universal design principles dictating that, in order to sell a movie of a particular type, the visual elements have to be arranged in a certain way?

I’m sure there’s a film major somewhere working under a government grant to answer these questions. I hope she publishes her results.

James Altucher allows us to profit from his mistakes. Don’t forget to say Thank You.

I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.

Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing.

My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan is definitely getting impeached this time.” And I visited his dad’s mansion over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A) graduate early and B) pay my personal expenses and when I would run into him he had long hair and would nod about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest treated ones—the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And that’s politics in college.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading; he is involved with a new project, which this article introduces.

In our attempt to look at the emerging world order, we have followed the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s notion that ethnic and cultural ties are more important than geographic patterns or levels of economic development. In history, shared values have been critical to the rise of spheres of influence across the world. Those that have projected power broadly – the Greek, Roman, Arab, Chinese, Mongol and British empires – shared intense ties of kinship and common cultural origins. As Ibn Khaldun observed: “Only tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in a desert.”

One would think that increasing globalization would be dissolving (or perhaps expanding would be a better word) local ties, and when it comes to commerce that’s pretty much true. But on the other hand, in the political sphere, the tendency seems to be toward fragmentation — the attempt to unify Europe is coming apart as we watch, and even such formerly tightly-integrated countries as Britain and Spain are feeling devolutionary pressures.

The prospects for the last great global grouping, the Anglosphere, are far stronger than many expect. Born out of the British Empire, and then the late 20th Century, the Anglosphere may be losing its claim to global hegemony, but it remains the first among the world’s ethnic networks in terms of everything from language and global culture to technology. More than the Indian Sphere and Sinosphere, the Anglosphere has shown a remarkable ability to incorporate other cultures and people.

Read it.

I’m sure this weighs heavily on your mind, as it does on mine. And Slate‘s, too, of course. I’m glad at least one Voice of the Crust is willing to write about such serious concerns.

Read it.

We’d get rid of a lot of ‘crime’ by legalizing certain recreational drugs. Never did understand that.

Read it.

To me, the real and practical problem of grade inflation is that it causes students to alter their choices, away from fields with tougher grading, like the sciences and economics, and toward fields with easier grading.

But, of course, since we don’t know the students involved, we’re not entitled to speculate about their motives, the poor babies.

Read it.

Why is it that Japanese, Chinese, and Indian people whose families have been in this country for two generations can speak perfectly understandable English, while black people whose families have been here for three hundred years can’t?

David Brooks lays out the party line.

Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”

Of course, the key step-back question here is, ‘Acceptable to whom?’ And Brooks, the Crust’s official pet ‘conservative’, actually has to lay out the official establishment road map.

The amusing part is that whether or not a particular form of inequality is ‘acceptable’ or not is entirely a First World problem; the rest of the world has more real-world concerns to occupy their minds.

Read it.

The thing is, a government is like a rifle: there are certain tasks for which no other tool will do. There are certain tasks you can do with other tools, but the rifle does them better if used with care, so using it is wise. But there’s a world of tasks out there that it’s terrible for, and trying to use it for those purposes will end up breaking the thing you want to fix and catching your neighbors in the stray fire. So you keep careful track of where you point the thing, and keep your finger off the damn trigger.

So I don’t hate government any more than I hate rifles, but I respect the damage both can do, and insist on keeping strict muzzle and trigger discipline. When you’ve built a government with a hundred-thousand employee strong bureau dedicated to regulating every aspect of agriculture and food, with an attitude of such pervasive, granular control that it thinks nothing of creating a “Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force” to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States”, you’re waving your damn rifle around with your booger-hook on the bang-switch, and other people on the firing line are right to be concerned.

Extending the analogy, there are people in the world who long to get control of the government because that way they can have things done their way, just as the guy with the rifle will often think that it makes him the boss. But simply being the boss doesn’t make you the smartest guy in the room, it just makes you the most powerful, which is why we need some serious controls on the people with rifles (government).

And the rifle makes a good synecdoche, as well, because the essential function of government is the sort of thing best done with rifles, i.e. defending people against thieves and murderers, both domestic and foreign. Once you get beyond that and use rifles for other purposes, such as forcing people to Do Things Your Way, you’re getting into Opression Territory, and you need to learn not to  go there.

And there are other problems as well, per Freeberg:

There’s unfortunately even more to add on. Government does not fire at a target, miss, and try again. Every time the weapon is discharged, what our government is doing is “legislating” that a round will be fired at such-and-such a direction every year from now until the end of time. In other words, if another bullet is fired in some different direction, with the intent of hitting exactly the same target, and that one is a hit, our government doesn’t have the inclination or the incentive or the track record of going back and saying “Okay, the target is over there…so that legislation obliging us to fire in this direction, to hit that target, is wrong. No need to argue this point, it’s an established fact. We need to repeal that legislation and stop firing over here.” Can’t do that. Because the bad legislation is “law,” you see. It’s also a jobs program.

Megan McArdle is pretty much always worth reading.

Democratic governments cannot do even obvious right things if the public will not tolerate it.  Even dictators have interest groups whose support they must buy.
This has come home to me forcefully several times over the last few years, but never more than now.  The leaders of the eurozone have a dual mandate to keep the euro intact, and to not do the things which could keep the euro intact.  They cannot fiscally integrate to the extent necessary because, as I wrote for the Daily the other day, the Greeks do not want to act like Germans, and the Germans do not want to share their credit rating with anyone who won’t.

Government, like Soylent Green, is people. And people are not always rational.

Read it.

They could do worse. Hell, we could do worse — there’s nothing wrong with dysfunctional American cities that a million extra ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix. Turn Detroit or Los Angeles into Singapore? I’m so there….

Megan McArdle looks at looks at our system where the cream is supposed to rise to the top, and discovers that there isn’t a lot of cream there to rise.

I don’t care about income inequality.  I care about the absolute condition of the poor–whether they are hungry, cold, and sick.  But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.  Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett’s incomes to mine.  And I’m not sure why anyone should.  Other than pure envy, it’s hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates’ income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

Well, it is envy — envy deliberately stoked by ‘progressives’ because that is how they do their ‘community organizing’ and get the mob behind them to effect change — and the kind of change doesn’t matter, so long as it’s change, because ‘progressives’ believe that progress is inevitable, and therefore any change is good change because it will inevitably lead to progress. Unless things are changing, ‘progressives’ are unhappy.

Arguably, this is just what they’ve done.  Rocked by the shattering forces of the Depression and World War II (and flush with the prosperity of the postwar years), the old moneyed elites of the Northeast and Midwest did something really remarkable: they voluntarily abdicated their position.  Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd.  The old WASP bastions democratized or were swept away by nimbler competitors who didn’t scruple to sacrifice profits because it might look bad to the boys in the club.  First Jews, Irish, and Italians, and then later blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, burst through doors that had once been reserved for the sort of people who got married and buried at St. Thomas Church.  They were joined by the children of undistinguished WASP families from America’s small towns, suburbs, and tenements.

The architects of the transition envisioned a shift to a new meritocratic society in which the circumstances of one’s birth didn’t matter–only hard work and talent.  But that hasn’t happened.  Instead, we have a system that has less mobility than the old, forthrightly aristocratic version.

And the characteristics used to promote ‘diversity’ are often insane. Having a dark skin or being sexually abnormal or coming from a foreign background might make you more interesting but it doesn’t make you a better person — what the Crust calls ‘diversity’ is only diversity from the point of view of the Crust.

Who gets the benefit of ‘diversity’ having black kids at Harvard? Not the black kids — they see all the black kids they want to, every day, and if they want to see white kids they can just watch TV. It’s there to benefit the white kids. These ‘diversity’ quotas are play-toys for the offspring of the white liberal establishment, the way Irish and Scottish gentry used to send their children to be fostered by crofters until they were old enough to be useful.

The only ‘diversity’ that can’t get its foot in the door is diversity of ideas — because that’s threatening. After all, nobody is going to persuade your white kid to become a black kid (although they may be persuaded to act that way), nor persuade your American kid to become a Mexican kid, nor is your straight white kid going to be persuaded to become homosexual (probably). But they might be persuaded to become a Mormon, or an entrepreneur, or (God forbid) even a Republican — and that the Crust cannot allow. Hence all of the colors and all of the sexual preferences and all of the accents at college speak the same Party Line.

Read it.

You hear this argument all the time from people in New York.  “Rich?  Hah!  We’ve got four people in 1600 square feet, and our school bills are going to put us into bankruptcy.”  Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from “really rich” people, natch).  Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them “reasonably sized” apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn’t afford to live in New York.

There’s a sort of irritating supposition in all of this that living in New York (or San Francisco, or Boston) is something that just happens to you, like getting cholera.  And that therefore high incomes, expensive real estate, and so forth, somehow don’t count for the purposes of assessing how well off you are relative to the rest of society.  In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships.

Thomas speaks for me.

I am a pro-defense, conservative libertarian.

By conservative libertarian, I mean that I am a libertarian who understands that liberty depends on the preservation of the traditional institutions of civil society (e.g., marriage, religion, voluntary charity) because it is those institutions that make possible mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. And it is those things that enable a people to coexist peacefully and cooperatively, to their mutual benefit. It is those things — not the statutes, ordinances, codes, and regulations that may be overlaid on them — which constitute the rule of law. Without the rule of law, liberty and the enjoyment of its fruits is impossible.

Read The Whole Thing.

Read it.

Since John is a Crustian leftist, this is a dependable answer to the question “Who’s the biggest RINO of them all?”

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

School was a bubble of instant academic and athletic validation, full of prizes, accolades, awards.  We weren’t just successful adolescents for getting there, we were successful there too.  Look at our resumes.  We’re all successes.  But school has to end at some point–though many of us give the impression that it is possible to continue to “be educated” ad infinitum–and so we were foisted on the real world.  What happened then?  It was 2008 or 2009, the economy was a disaster and nothing we anticipated seemed to be coming our way.  Experts in art history ended up folding jeans.  Animal rights activists ended up at a hunting non-profits. There were jobs, just not ones that matched any of our skills or interests.

We were deceived.  There had been a tacit promise throughout our twenty years of schooling that good grades and meaningful activities would conspire to produce a satisfying existence.  Was it the system–the teachers, coaches, parents–that fooled us or did we fool ourselves?  Either way, we were gypped.

So the ‘Occupy’ movement represents an outburst of Lost Boy angst, a great cry from the heart ‘I Won’t Grow Up!’ Unfortunately, the world has a very quick and brutal way of dealing with those sorts of sentiments. Never Never Land doesn’t exist, but Captain Hook does, and he’s waiting.

Read it.

There are two challenges. One is the sheer speed of adjustment. In a hyper-Schumpeterian economy, the main work consists of destroying someone else’s job. Garett Jones has pointed out that the typical worker today does not produce widgets but instead builds organizational capital. The problem is that building organizational capital in one company serves to depreciate the organizational capital somewhere else. Blockbuster video adversely affected the capital of movie theaters, Netflix adversely affected the capital of Blockbuster, and the combination of faster Internet speeds and tablet devices may depreciate the organizational capital of Netflix.

The second challenge is the nature of the emerging skills mismatch. People who are self-directed and cognitively capable can keep adding to their advantages. People who lack those traits cannot simply be exhorted into obtaining them. The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class. Instead, if the trend documented by Autor for the period 1999-2007 were to continue, most of the new jobs would be low-end service jobs, for which competition will tend to keep wages low.

The recent trend in job polarization raises the possibility that gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements will accrue to an economic elite. Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age. Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music.

And there stands the plot of about half a dozen science fiction dystopias I could mention, starting with the books of Mack Reynolds.

The chief problem would appear to be for the people on the left side of the bell curve. Such people traditionally get jobs where physical strength but not much brain is required. What do they do when all such jobs are performed by machines? The best they can hope for is temporary employment during the time it takes to design and build the machine that will ultimately replace them.

And even ‘smart’ people will have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. As a lazy smart person, I don’t much like that idea, and I’m tremendously glad that I’m not in my twenties these days.

On the other hand, this may just represent the speed at which evolution works in a technologically sophisticated world. We’ve almost completely eliminated the frictional barriers to the flow of information; perhaps we’ve effectively done the same with whatever frictional barriers there are to the activity of evolution.

Walter Williams, a Real Economist, explains some inconvenient truth.

Let’s look at corporate taxes and ask, “Who pays them?”

Virginia has a car tax. Does the car pay the tax? In most political jurisdictions, there’s a property tax. Does property pay the tax? You say: “Williams, that’s lunacy. Neither a car nor property pays taxes. Only flesh-and-blood people pay taxes!”

What about a corporation? As it turns out, a corporation is an artificial creation of the legal system and, as such, a legal fiction. A corporation is not a person and therefore cannot pay taxes. When tax is levied on a corporation, who pays it?

Hint: Where do corporations get their money?

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. These reasons are applicable to a generic competent President (such as Hillary, or any of the front-rank Republican candidates), but the Obamateur not only thinks outside the box, he’s set up housekeeping so far outside the box it’s barely within hailing distance.

Biggest real reason: If he throws the dice bombing Iran and it actually works, it’s his best chance for re-election. That’s logic that he can appreciate.

Read it.

Sure, 7 billion is a big number. But most serious demographers, economists and population specialists rarely use the term “overpopulation” — because there is no clear demographic definition.

Read it.

And the people who thought of it taken out into the courtyard and shot, with their bodies left for the dogs to feast on.

Read it.

There wouldn’t be a bunch of smelly people running around in masks, for one thing.

Steve Hayward at Power Line takes on the Myth of Camelot.

 JFK’s supposed “cool handling” of the missile crisis is probably the greatest enduring myth of JFK’s presidency.  Yes, it was good that we avoided World War III, but aside from that just about every common judgment about the missile crisis is wrong.  It was both a political and military defeat for the United States, but the great Kennedy spin machine managed from the first moments to convey the exact opposite impression.  And the whole matter arose precisely because the Soviet Union perceived JFK’s weakness.

This fact was not generally recognized because key concessions from Kennedy were kept secret from the American people and even from most of Kennedy’s top advisers at the time.  Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Greece and Turkey, something he had publicly stated he would not do when the Soviets demanded it.  (When this concession leaked out years later, it was said the missiles were “obsolete” and unimportant, though the Soviets did not share this view.)  The biggest public concession was Kennedy’s pledge that the U.S. would cease attempting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.

Kennedy was in many respects the proto-Obama … and the proto-Clinton.

John Stossel lays out what everybody ought to be able to figure out on their own but typically can’t be bothered with.

“Buy American” is a dumb idea. It would not only not create prosperity, it would cost jobs and make us all poorer. David R. Henderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution, explained why.

“Almost all economists say it’s nonsense,” he said. “And the reason is: We should buy things where they’re cheapest. That frees up more of our resources to buy other things, and other Americans get jobs producing those things.”

This is what people always forget. Anytime we can use fewer resources and less labor to produce one thing, that leaves more for other things we can’t afford. If we save money buying abroad, we can make and buy other products.

The nonsense of “Buy American” can be seen if you trace out the logic.

“If it’s good to Buy American,” Henderson said, “why isn’t it good to have Buy Alabaman? And if it’s good to have Buy Alabaman, why isn’t it good to have Buy Montgomery, Ala.? And if it’s good to have Buy Montgomery, Ala. …”

You get the idea. You wouldn’t get very good stuff if everything you bought came Montgomery, Ala.

Read it.

In his book, Eker lists seventeen ways in which the financial blueprints of the rich differ from those of the poor and the middle-class. According to him:

1. Rich people believe: “I create my life.” Poor people believe: “Life happens to me.”
2. Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.
3. Rich people are committed to being rich. Poor people want to be rich.
4. Rich people think big. Poor people think small.
5. Rich people focus on opportunities. Poor people focus on obstacles.
6. Rich people admire other rich and successful people. Poor people resent rich and successful people.
7. Rich people associate with positive, successful people. Poor people associate with negative or unsuccessful people.
8. Rich people are willing to promote themselves and their value. Poor people think negatively about selling and promotion.
9. Rich people are bigger than their problems. Poor people are smaller than their problems.
10. Rich people are excellent receivers. Poor people are poor receivers.
11. Rich people choose to get paid based on results. Poor people choose to get paid based on time.
12. Rich people think “both”. Poor people think “either/or”.
13. Rich people focus on their net worth. Poor people focus on their working income.
14. Rich people manage their money well. Poor people mismanage their money well.
15. Rich people have their money work hard for them. Poor people work hard for their money.
16. Rich people act in spite of fear. Poor people let fear stop them.
17. Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.

Richard Epstein is a smart guy who realizes that there are no quick fixes available for our economy.

The constant question of the audience members was what could be done for them in the short run. That sentiment was captured by Shaila Dewan, a New York Times reporter present at the debate, who, to great applause, wanted to know “what do you do in the short run” to help the unemployed?

It is never fun to be the bearer of bad tidings, but the blunt truth is that Obama’s jobs plan will not work. The audience, however, was in no mood to acknowledge that there is no magic short-term fix of the sort that Zandi and Rouse promised. Indeed, the full set of proposals in the Obama jobs plan is likely to set matters back even further. Zandi and Rouse’s misguided optimism demonstrates everything wrong in today’s thinking about job creation in the United States.

The only way to fix the short-term unemployment problem is by fixing the long-term issues that have fallen into treacherous disrepair over the past decade. Several long-term issues that must be fixed include, for starters, minimum wage legislation, unionization, and employer health-care mandates. Then, once we get an improved business environment, investors and employers will come off the sidelines and start investing and hiring. But without that change, prudent investors will shy away from productive ventures, preferring to hoard their money in treasury bills. The longer we wait to implement these overdue reforms, the more delayed the recovery will be.

We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not going to get away from here overnight. But in this modern instant-gratification culture, that’s not a message to which people’s ears are tuned.

Steve Sailer routinely picks up issues that others ignore.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and I’ve come to the conclusion that population control was a very big deal in the press back when Protestants were worried that Irish Catholics were going to swamp them. As soon as that threat disappeared, Protestants lost interest in the whole question, and we rapidly moved to today’s situation where only crimethinkers publicly suggest that maybe some of those 10,000 NGOs in Haiti should provide Depo Provera shots.

Read it.

Remember the woman in the YouTube video who was convinced that, once Barack Obama was president, she would no longer have to pay to gas up her car? She pretty well summed up the intellectual basis for Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Love the cartoon.

Kenneth Anderson has some interesting thoughts on the occupation.

 Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay.  The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.”

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors.  It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined.  As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two.  As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first  – but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy.  Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access.

And Megan McArdle takes the ball and runs it down field:

 We have no hereditary aristocracy; all fortunes originated, fairly recently, in “trade”.  Except for a small and peculiar class of people in relatively old coastal cities, we don’t celebrate people who “don’t have to work”–and don’t.  And though I have been surprisingly* often consulted by panicked people worried about “using the wrong fork”**, the class markers are mostly different.  But there are still all sorts of hidden cultural signifiers that tell us, yes, we’re still in the elite, we know that Formula One is cool and NASCAR isn’t (unless you’re watching it ironically.)

Orwell’s next passage points out that it is the lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen.  And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent.  One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people.   I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.

Smitty from The Other McCain looks at what sort of people petition the Obamessiah.

It is not a pretty sight. But it gets pretty funny.

The man has iron self-control.

Read it.

The practitioners of the Multicultural Arts are at least subliminally aware that the basic assumptions of their dogma cannot stand up to close scrutiny. This is why the proponents of PC/MC tend to respond to reasonable criticism with accusations of “racism”, vicious ad-hominem attacks, and physical violence. They fear that the edifice in which they have invested so much emotional and physical energy may in fact be spun from pure gossamer. Fear generates anger, and their fury demands the destruction of those who would expose their delusions.

The other day former British prime minister Tony Blair invoked one of the major unexamined premises of Multiculturalism while defending his party’s immigration policy during his time in office: “Britain cannot succeed unless it opens its borders to more people from different backgrounds.”

In what ways was Britain unsuccessful while it was still, well, British? In what ways is it more successful now?

Read it.

This is the way lawyers do it, and they do it this way because the courts require it, and the courts require it because that’s the way the judges and clerks learned it in law school, and they learned it that way in law school because the Blue Book said to, and the Blue Book is published by the Law Review editors at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

A quarter of ebook readers are too embarrassed to tell the truth about the ebooks they are reading, a poll of British readers has found.

Read it.

At last — somebody at the New York Times gets a clue.

It’s readership (as reflected in the comments), on the other hand, remain stuck in another universe.

But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.

And let’s ask how many of these folks are registered Democrats, shall we?

The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?

There’s no room in the box — the ambiguity has put on weight.

Read it.

Read it.

Not if the Democrats have anything to say about it. Their ability to tax and regulate American labor into uncompetitiveness is without peer, and their ability to pander to let’s-cancel-the-2oth-century envirofascists is second to none. If it ever looks as if American labor is becoming competitive, or American sources of energy productive, the Obamanation will swing into action to return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Jeff Jarvis is always worth reading.

I wrote a book about sharing. But a book is a bad form for sharing.

Read it.

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

Thomas understands the dialectic.

Government has essentially one legitimate function, which is to protect citizens from predators, foreign and domestic. That covers national defense and domestic justice (including the enforcement of contracts and prosecution of fraud). Those functions could be provided by private agencies, but — because of the danger of warlordism — they are best provided by government and funded from a true flat tax.

A very elegant statement of the position of the righteous.

A proper division of labor would place defense in the hands of the national government and justice in the hands of State and local governments. This would eliminate the ability of the national government to criminalize conduct for the sake of imposing its will on everyone. For the same reason, the provision of justice should be devolved to the lowest possible level within each State.

Some very good ideas here. Read the whole thing.

Read it.

Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase.  If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future.  Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.

Read it.

Read it.

We live in the age where we make a living by doing things more efficiently than others. We blame other countries like China for taking our jobs but we are all doing it ourselves. When you learn how to use computer programs like Excel, Word, and Photoshop, you are eliminating other people’s jobs. What used to require a team of people to produce, you now can do it all by yourself using these programs. In other words, you are profiting from the loss of other people’s jobs. That’s how we survive in today’s world. We struggle every day to avoid being the one whose job is eliminated by the efficiency of someone else.

The key is to focus on jobs that machines can’t do. Journalists are in trouble; plumbers aren’t.

David Bernstein boils it down into a single pithy paragraph.

At some point, however, a contradiction became apparent: if I didn’t trust the government to competently run, say, public schools, what made me think that the the government, subject to the same public-choicey and other constraints, would be competent at handling the much more complex task of remaking other societies in America’s image?

And that’s the question that faces us all. Every time a statist pushes for another government program, the question needs to be: What if this is run like the Post Office? ‘Cause it’s gonna be; history is quite clear on that.