Year: 2012

Italy and National Debt and Everyone Else

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Economics, Politics , , , , ,

I have been inactive. Some catching up to do. I will go straight to the Italian situation because I don’t see it addressed in the media with anything resembling insight based on good information. I am it by default.

It’s human nature I suppose to want simple solutions to complex problems and easy solutions to hard problems. Italy is out of the swamp and therefore, the Euro is saved and therefore, the sterco is not going to hit the fan on this side of the Atlantic. Reason: Old bad boy Silvio Berlusconi resigned. Not much analysis, not much going below the surface by the American press. I have to do their elementary work for them.

First, I suspect there is a monstrous confusion in the minds of many in the media between the accounts of Italy, the state, the Italian republic on the one hand, and the figures pertaining to the Italian economy, on the other hand. The Italian economy comprises a few highly visible major corporations such as Fiat and myriads of small businesses.

The Italian Republic is in debt. The Italian economy is doing well. It’s on the healthy side of economies of developed countries. It’s a lot better than Japan’s for instance. It’s also true that, as elsewhere in Europe, the budget of the state is large relative to the national economy. My bet is that it is smaller than say, in France, or in Sweden, or even in Germany, because the black economy in Italy is so large. The Italian government is just not able to get its grubby little hands on much of what’s generated within Italy. Nevertheless, it’s true that the government budget and the private sector economy influence each other in Italy, as they do elsewhere. That’s not excuse to confuse the one with the other. My wife and I influence each other. It does no mean that we are one and the same. (For one thing, she is both attractive and intelligent.)

Berlusconi did not accumulate the large sovereign debt of the Italian Republic. The debt goes back a long way, some say to the aftermath of WWII. Successive governments just left it alone or they contributed to it. Continue reading →

Racial Profiling at its Best

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , , , ,

Here is a story and a sociological essay all rolled into one.

My son the recent college graduate only thinks about cooking. I encourage his inclination, of course. Compulsion does not work. Most people do well only what they like to do. Besides, I am an immigrant from France. Scabs of French pessimism stick to my brain. I don’t know how long the current economic crisis will last. In Japan, there were ten dead years, a full decade lost. I tell myself that cooks never go hungry and neither do those who are close to them. I adore my son’s girlfriend. I want her to have enough to eat, happen what may. I used to work in kitchens myself, around the 18th century. I believe that even the leavings from the average restaurant kitchen will keep you pleasantly fat forever. Go for it, I tell him.

My son has been cooking part-time since he was a teenager and throughout the embarrassingly long years it took him to complete his political science major. He has experience in a variety of fairly humble kitchen positions. I also think he has some talent. I don’t say this because he is my son. I am a mean father by California standards, a stern figure more or less from the Old Testament, you might say. Not long ago, I thought my son was worse than worthless. I am not afraid to be “judgmental,” bet on it! But he has changed. His brain has caught up with his glands at last. Having finished college, he is naturally looking for a full-time position, or better. He is meeting with an obstacle we did not expect but that was expectable if we had thought about it: He is not Mexican.

In California, where I live, everywhere in California, I think, during the fat cow years, immigrants from Mexico took over nearly all the kitchen jobs, Those are mostly hard jobs, stressful jobs offering low pay. The native-born young shunned them in favor of retail “sales associates” positions that are easy and allow for a fair margin of laziness although they don’t pay any better. The Mexican take-over began with Taco Bells and private tamales stands, and, naturally, taco shops. But immigrants are predictable. Many went considerably further. Continue reading →

The Curious Case of the Bourgeois Bubble Boy

Brandon Christensen Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

Since Ron Paul’s fantastic, spontaneous, incredible 2008 presidential campaign libertarianism has become a hot topic among the brightest people throughout the world. This is not a coincidence or an act of God, I think. The recent peak in interest of libertarian alternatives has to do with the sometimes sorry state that our world always seems to be in.  As somebody who came from the hard, anarchist, collectivist Left, I can assess that the libertarian alternative has been given a fair shake by a broad swathe of the American public.  However, on the hard Left, there has been bitter hostility towards anything remotely libertarian in American political discourse.  Most of this is envy, I think; a primitive form of envy that always forms when competition arises to challenge the orthodox opinions and mores of a society.

More on this is just a minute, but first: although there are indeed many problems facing the world today, we are living in a time of great abundance and peace. Furthermore, the periodic mass starvations in East Africa and the short, intense outbursts of small wars are both relatively simple to fix and uncommon (which is why they make the news). These are facts that we would do well to remember. Back to the hard, bitter Left.
Continue reading →

Elites and Housing Segregation: What Gives?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links , , , ,

Virginia Postrel has a provocative post on How Elites Built America’s Economic Wall up at Bloomberg (ht Wilson Mixon). The gist of the post is summed up as follows:

Housing prices have always been steeper in high-income places, but the difference is much greater than it used to be […] This segregation has social and political consequences, as it shapes perceptions — and misperceptions — of one’s fellow citizens and “normal” American life. It also has direct and indirect economic effects. “It’s a definite productivity loss,” Shoag says. “If there weren’t restrictions and you could build everywhere, it would be productive for people to move. You do make more as a waiter in LA than you do in Ohio. Preventing people from having that opportunity to move to these high-income places, making it so expensive to live there, is a loss.” That’s true not only for less-educated workers but for lower earners of all sorts, including the artists and writers who traditionally made places like New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe cultural centers.

This excerpt gets a high place for my Obvious Statement of the Year Award, but are elites listening? Government regulations hurt workers and drive out competition. This is a given, but I have some questions I thought readers could help me answer.

My questions are both broad and messy: Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , ,

Isn’t California broke?

Savage Continent. European women and their Nazi boyfriends.

A Family-Plus Outing. Islam at the Beach: Santa Cruz edition.

As I keep saying, this election is Romney’s to lose.

Sorry ’bout the short posts from me lately. I hope everybody is enjoying their summer!

Rights of “Occupy” Crowd Violated

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

The First Amendment specifies that “Congress” shall make no law interfering with the right of citizens “peaceably to assemble.” The Bill of Rights of the State of New York contains no such provision. I have no legal training but I deplore admitting that it sounds to me as if the city police of New York faces no constitutional impediment when it orders the “Occupy” movement to stop camping on that private park where they have been for weeks.

I deplore this reading of the law because I believe, by instinct, and possibly by a common misreading of the Constitution, that the right of all and any Americans to assemble is central, absolute and all too often stepped on by local authorities and by petty tyrants. All too often, I see locally or, indirectly, everywhere through the national press, the nuisances crowds create used to interfere radically with what I take to be the right of assembly.

Whenever this happens, it disturbs me that many of my fellow conservatives seem to buy the authorities’ reasoning. Here, locally, in Santa Cruz, the reasons local power gives to begin dismantling the “Occupy” encampment are fire risk and public health. The way I understand it, this does not make moral sense to me. I don’t like the “Occupy” crowd, I have expressed why in previous postings.

But my dislikes have nothing to do with my understanding of the guarantees under which we live. Or they should have nothing to do with this understanding. Continue reading →

Sexual Harassment, Sex, Politics, and Herman Cain

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

Herman Cain, the GOP candidate who both speaks the conservative talk and is good-looking is the subject of accusations of sexual harassment. It was bound to happen sooner or later because Democrats, the only authorized party of oppressed minorities, cannot allow a successful member of the largest oppressed minority to give the lie to their lies. The particular nature of the attack was also predictable. Liberals are not sophisticated by and large. Plus, half of the Democratic Party used to be in the Jim Crow South. There are collective memories: Black men in general have a trouble controlling their sexual urges; it’s a well-known fact.

Do I think there were sexual harassment complaints against Herman Cain when he was a powerful, highly visible official of an association? I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. I would be surprised instead if there were a single man corresponding to that description anywhere, anytime in the past thirty years against whom there were no such complaints at all. They go with the territory. Create new grounds to blackmail and there will be more blackmailers.

Do I think he did it? Yes, I do. I mean by this that Herman Cain almost certainly engaged repeatedly in behavior that someone somewhere would call sexual harassment. And since juries can be fickle, unpredictable, it’s rational (although detestable) for companies to settle. It’s especially tempting if they can settle on the cheap: $10,000 is “five figures.” I also mean something you all already know about sexual harassment but that you may have forgotten because of the pounding of dozens of years of political correctness. Continue reading →

Radioactive Debris Floats on to Alaska Beach (?)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , ,

I think I have seen everything in terms of media mendacity and in terms of media gullibility and then, something happens to make me realize I haven’t seen s…!

Today, as I am stepping high on the elliptical as I do several days a week (thank you for asking), CNN announces that debris from last year’s tsunami in Japan is reaching North America. The announcer switches  to the CNN special envoy on a deserted un-indentified Alaska beach.

The special envoy  is dressed in Alaska- suitable foul-weather gear although the sun is shining brightly on the beach. One shot shows him dramatically as if holding in his arms about twenty large objects. They are meant to identify the kind of garbage torn off the Alaskan coastline by the tsunami and floated to the western hemisphere. (But there is more, wait a minute).

I have a problem with what’s shown by CNN as washed off debris from Japan. Every item of that debris could have come off a fishing boat; most of the items shown had to come from a boat.

Two implications:

First, boats, including Japanese fishing boats, can operate 200 miles or less from the Alaskan coast. I am not denying that some coastal debris could  float from Japan. I just dislike false reports especially when they come from a news organization. Continue reading →

“Occupy ….”: An Unintended Experiment in Libertarianism

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

The Occupy movement is, among other things and a little paradoxically, another experiment with libertarian ideas. One crucial question is this; Who performs services we have come to consider necessary when no one has taxing authority?

The Occupy encampment in Santa Cruz displays about forty tents. As I have said before, it would be foolish to deduce any sort of precise estimate of the actual population of campers from this figure. (“Woman’s Mind; The Mysteries of Occupy….”). You can’t even assume that there is one camper per tent. Some campers go home and leave their tent behind when it gets cold at night.

Whatever the case may be, in the course, of twenty-four hours, there is enough human traffic to necessitate access to a toilet. The county authorities may have discouraged the use of country building toilets or else, the campers took it to heart to demonstrate that they are responsible and self-sufficient. At any rate, there is, or there was, on the camping site a Porta-Pottie-type booth sitting (so to speak ) on a trailer. The trailer itself is, or was, hooked to a pick-up truck. For five days, there was a big hand-painted sign on the booth saying, “Dump ride needed.” I think five days is too long to wait unlike someone had the foresight to make th request well in advance of objective need. I am not expert but I don’t think the capacity of the contraption much exceeds five days even of light use. Are you with me?

To go back to my original question about libertarianism, of course, I believe that in time someone would offer the dumping service for pay. With a multiplication of sites in need, the service delivery would become more efficient and cheaper. Competition would arise, insuring a fair price (There is no other definition of “fair,” I think.) However this non-authoritarian, market response would require that someone, or some ones, pay the honey-dippers’ bill. And if you passed the hat around, there would be a chance that only the richest, or only the individuals with the most sensitive noses, or with the greatest concern for hygiene, would contribute.

And, here you go, with the “free rider problem,” the single most common justification for the existence of coerced payments that is, for taxes. Note that the last sentence in the last paragraph above points to an especially vexing implication of the free rider problem. It’s the likelihood that the virtuous would end paying the fare of the moral swines that oink among us.

American Independence Day and The Supreme Court Decision

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, History, Law , ,

There has been enough time now, the dust has settled around the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, the US-wide health care reform passed by Congress and signed into law more than two years ago.

Note: Today, I am going to be very explicit because I flatter myself that I have readers around the world who may not be completely familiar with American politics or with American political processes.

As usual, Rush Limbaugh, the much insulted, much decried and always underestimated conservative talk-show host has instantly demonstrated more lucidity that did pundits with better intellectual credentials: There is no silver lining, my friends.

Don’t confuse my meaning with others’. I think American society will survive well the disorder and the increase in cost of living the Obama health care reform will impose. I think health care will cost more and be of poorer quality for almost all Americans. The alleged uninsured were never really uncared for so, ObamaCare was a solution to a non-problem in this respect. The most heart rendering parts of the descriptions justifying the reform in the first place turn out to be also urban myths. The main one concerns people with a pre-existing condition who couldn’t get coverage and therefore care. Never happened except in tiny numbers that could have been dealt with a with a simple high-risk insurance pool as those that states maintained for horrible drivers.

Yet, as I said, this is a prosperous society even in a period of crisis such as this one. The economy will not collapse. We will just all be a little less prosperous than we should have been. Our children will not experience the subtle optimism that comes from living in times of growth. But, I am still waiting for someone with a bucket and some rags to walk up to my door and to propose to clean all my windows for a set fee. And farmers in my area complain that they don’t have enough people to harvest their crops. Reports say that good pickers earn $12 -13/hour, far above the minimum wage, by the way. We are not poor by any standard. The worst application of ObamaCare set of bad ideas is not going to make us poor, by any standard. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lots of great stuff I’ve been meaning to link to lately.

A historian from Hillsdale College, Paul Moreno, has a piece in the WSJ about Congress’s power to tax.

Some sexy chick (also from the WSJ) writes about Obama’s Imperial Presidency. Again, this is in the Wall Street Journal.

A quick heads up on pieces in the Wall Street Journal. Usually, when you click on the link it says access is restricted, but if you copy and paste the title of the piece into a Google search bar then you will be able to access the entire article. Cool, huh?

Obama’s Scramble for Africa. From AntiWar.com.

An economist at Cal State Northridge has a great piece on damn lies and statistics. It’s also about the Obama administration. (h/t Steve Horwitz).

Bernard K. Gordon writes in Foreign Affairs about the necessity of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And in a prophetic piece (ie it was written in 1991-92) by former Secretary of State James Baker, this very good lawyer sizes up the situation in Asia. Also from Foreign Affairs.

Archaeology is Cool

Brandon Christensen History, Law , , , ,

I spend my summers homeless and sneaking from one spot on campus to another to avoid security. This will be my last year as undergraduate but, if my luck holds on just a little longer, I will be able to graduate with no debt. What I have done this summer to pass the time that is not spent working or doing homework is begin a little pet research project that has been a long time coming.

Do you all remember that movie The Gods Must be Crazy? Me neither, but I hear it was a big hit. It was about a “Bushman” from the Kalahari region who encounters a Coke bottle falling from sky and gets caught up in the nasty war between SWAPO and South Africa. Anyway, the portrayal of the “Bushman” caught a lot of flack from anthropologists in some quarters. There is good reason for this flack, and I can assure you that it is not just another attempt to force Political Correctness onto everybody. Land policies and other government programs have removed many “Bushmen” from their homes, and the justifications for such policies is often that the “Bushmen” have no concept of private property rights, or that they have no conception of history. They are the Indians of the New World. Anyway, a lot of new archaeological evidence has lent credence to the anthropologists who have claimed that the image of the “Bushman” as a primitive hunter-gatherer is a myth created by anthropologists themselves. Robert Gordon writes the following: Continue reading →

Immigration, Libertarianism and the “T” Word

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , ,

As a rule of thumb, Americans libertarians generally welcome immigration into the republic. However, among the more Right-leaning factions within libertarianism there are a couple of branches that have argued (and continue to argue) that immigration is not as good for the republic as economists say it is.

One branch of the anti-immigration crowd comes from the Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell camp, the “paleolibertarians”. Prior to his 2008 presidential campaign, Ron Paul had been quoted as saying that an increase in supply of workers from Mexico would decrease the wages of native workers in the American republic.

Since the presidential election of 2008, however, the “paleo” camp has been much more open to an open borders policy. Indeed, Lew Rockwell himself seems to have backtracked from the paleo camp’s previous position. In 2009, after RP’s presidential campaign had come to an end, he wrote: Continue reading →

Woman’s Mind; The Mysteries of “Occupy;” the Libertarian Side of the Movement; Syrians

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

My wife of more years than she cares to remember just told me calmly that I had “low standards” in “women and in food.” It seems that she thinks I could have done better than her. Makes me think because, by and large, I trust that woman’s judgment. Got to take a second look at myself. As far as the food is concerned, she had a conflict of interest when she made the statement. Recently, she bought some expensive rice than I am not allowed to eat because, she says I “would not appreciate it.”

I keep learning about those fascinating creatures. It’s never boring, not ever or not yet! Feminists will maintain with a straight face that this kind of stuff never happens, that it’s all in my mind. Normal women, on the other hand, don’t even raise an eyebrow at this kind of story. “Been there, done it,” their impassiveness seems to say. (And, contrasting feminists with normal women was not a slip of the tongue. I barely ever have those. If you follow my musings, you will realize that I am coldly calculating.)

I keep an eye on the “Occupy Santa Cruz “ street site. (See my posting on this: “Occupy Wall Street, and Santa Cruz, and Democrat Electoral Desperation,” from October 11) I noticed today that there were three times more people there at 11 AM than at 10 AM. Why would that be? As a far as I know this differential showing corresponds to no major work schedule.

Another source of puzzlement: There are more “Occupy” tents than there are ever occupiers present on the site where all the signs are stored or shown. Some of the tents can shelter more than one person. How can this be? Do some tent dwellers go to their job in the morning and come back in the evening to demonstrate against inequality and against the corporations by sleeping in a tent? Too many unanswered questions. Continue reading →

Who Stole Our Trillions?

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics , ,

When asked about the recent bankruptcy of the City of San Bernardino, California Governor Jerry Brown had this to say:  “We have to realize this country has been dealt a very heavy blow: trillions and trillions of dollars in the wealth of America has been destroyed by very powerful people, some of whom have never been punished.”

Let’s see what sense we can make of this.  “Wealth of America” presumably means real assets: homes, businesses, land, etc.  Taken literally, this makes no sense.  Where are the smoldering ruins?  The financial crisis did a lot of damage but little or no physical damage.  What did happen is that malinvestments were revealed.  Tracts of houses built in places like the California Central Valley on the presumption that home values could never decline were left empty or unfinished.  Wealth was indeed destroyed: not tangible wealth but wealth in the sense of people’s expectations of ever-rising future house prices.

The housing crash was a necessary if painful cleanup of the damage done by policies that created the boom in the first place.  What were those policies? A rough summary:

  • Government policies aimed at expanding homeownership.  Loans to marginal buyers were encouraged by government-sponsored entities, particularly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  • Low interest rates engineered by the Greenspan Fed during 2001-2005.
  • Tax deductions for mortgage interest.
  • And yes, private greed.  Institutions like Countrywide were churning out low-doc loans, no-doc loans, neg-am loans and God knows what else in defiance of common sense.  They were, of course, responding to incentives as a dog would respond to a piece of meat left on the kitchen counter.  But they are not dogs and should have known better.

Now, what about those trillions and trillions?  Indeed, total real (inflation-adjusted) household wealth has fallen by moImagere than a trillion in the last few years – all the way back to 2005 levels.  In other words, a lot of illusory “wealth” that was the result of the government-created boom has been taken off the books.  Painful?  Sure, you can no longr refi and take cash out for a vacation.  Your house is no longer an ATM.  We’ve sobered up and that’s good.

It’s so easy for a politician like Brown to spout sound-bite demagoguery and get away with it.  The majority of voters, full of nonsense fed to them by public mis-education, lap it up.  The truth is often complicated and ill-suited to sound bites.  That’s why economics can be both frustrating and satisfying.  Personally, I find it satisfying to try to understand the truth and convey it in class or in a blog.   I urge bright young people to consider economics as a career and consider people like GMU professor and prolific writer Don Boudreaux as a role model.