Current Events

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.

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.

Occupy Wall Street; Don’t Attack Grandma: The New Class Struggle

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

Behind the verbal incoherence, behind the posturing, behind the bad children’s tantrum, behind the trash, behind the grotesque self-regard of those who would borrow $120,000 to earn a degree in “German Studies,” there may be legitimate resentment in the “Occupy” movement. It’s true that it’s difficult to get from the demonstrators an answer to a straight question that does not make you laugh or cry, or both. However, you may not have to await their answer to understand.

To the extent that you can trust television cameras at all, they seem to show largely demonstrators between their mid-twenties and their mid-thirties. That would be people born between 1975 and 1985. Those cohorts had only known ease and prosperity until 2008. They were brought up by easy-going parents who sent them, or allowed them to attend schools that nurtured self-indulgence more than intellectual curiosity. I have two children near the younger edge of these age groups. I am guilty too. When they were playing soccer, they never heard anything from coaches except “Good try.” I remember clearly one little kid ( not one of mine, God forbid!) garnering this very accolade after he had marked a goal against his own team. (Would I make this up?) These American cohorts were not in any way prepared for a world where jobs are difficult to get because companies are not hiring and where the jobs you get don’t pay well because companies don’t have to pay well since they won’t invest in you for the long-term because there is no long-term they can see. Continue reading →

The UN, Our Beacon of Humanity

Jacques Delacroix Current Events ,

I keep wondering why any serious people right or left take seriously the United Nations General Assembly’s pretense of being a quasi-world parliament and the UN Security Council’s pretense of being a responsible world executive. Neither claim makes sense on its face.

Yesterday or today, the French centrist and generally responsible newspaper Le Figaro reported that the Syrian security forces had killed about 250 Syrians in the preceding night, almost all civilians. That’s what Le Figaro asserts. How do I judge whether it’s true or not? The Syrian Minister of Information declared that the anti-government insurgents themselves has mortared civilians in Homs to give the Assad regime a bad name! Do I need more evidence?

Human Rights Watch, which I generally trust with figures, has not had time to say anything about this number. Yet, the organization endorses the general figure of 5400 Syria dead for the year 2011 announced by the UN General Commissioner before he stopped counting. As I have said before, that figure is pretty much like 40,000 victims would be in the US.

Now, when any part of the UN insults Israel, no one is surprised because holding that country of fewer than 7 million responsible for all the ills of the Arab World has been one of the UN’s areas of consistency. That’s together with incompetent and impotent “peace keeping.” This time, the UN slapped the Arab League, no less, in the face. Normally, the UN General Assembly does anything the Arab Leagues wants, no matter how absurd, grotesque, or dishonest. Nowadays however the Arab League often finds itself on the side of common sense and of humanity. So, all bets are off. Continue reading →

Around the Web: Left and Right Edition

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

Some sense is finally being made on foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal (h/t Jacques)

Jury nullification in New Hampshire!?! Please buh-lieve it!

When Left links up with Right

Will Wilkinson (of the Economist) and Nick Gillespie (of Reason) take turns ganging up on a recent hit piece of libertarianism in the New York Times. Libertarianism, if you will remember, is the best of both the Left and the Right (with none of the nastiness).

And on Leftist-but-realist (a rarity I assure you!) Stephen Walt’s blog over at Foreign Policy, a Cato Institute foreign policy wonk gets his due.

The French Presidentials and Cinco de Mayo

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

I have been busy producing a legible and clean copy of my memoirs: “I Used to Be French….” It’s an endless process. By the way, if you are an agent, don’t be shy about asking to read this remarkable and witty document.

While my back was turned, the world continued to turn. The French lost the battle of Puebla and they lost an election, all in the same day.

People in California celebrate Cinco de Mayo with beer and more expensive stuff. Few know what they are celebrating, Anglos, never, children of Mexicans, seldom, Mexican immigrants, often but not always. Myself, I celebrate too because I like beer, Mexicans and Mexican beer. I celebrate discretely though.

In the battle of Puebla, in 1862, under the presidency of Benito Juarez, a Mexican army achieved victory over a French expeditionary forces against all expectations. What happened is that the French thought they were on their way to Prussia to beat on that emerging power before it was too late. They turned right instead of left outside Paris by mistake. Somehow, they ended up in Mexico and the rest is history, mostly forgotten history. They left behind in Mexico, probably pan dulces, and less probably, the name for roving musicians in charro costumes, mariachis (“marriage”). Continue reading →

Somaliland in the News

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law , , , , , , , ,

Reports the BBC:

Leaders from Somalia and Somaliland have held their first formal discussions on the future of the self-proclaimed Somaliland republic.

It broke away in 1991 and wants to be a separate country – but it has not been internationally recognised.

Mogadishu wants the northern territory to be part of a single Somali state.

Since declaring independence, Somaliland has enjoyed relative peace in contrast to the rest of Somalia, which has been plagued by conflict […]

It was the first time in 21 years that there had been formal, direct contact between the authorities in Mogadishu, and the Somaliland administration, which used to be a British colony, whereas southern Somalia was governed by Italy.

The two sides agreed the talks should continue and, in a declaration, they called on their respective presidents to meet as soon as possible – this could be as early as next week in Dubai.

They also called on the international community to help provide experts on legal, economic and security matters, which our correspondent says are all issues that will need to be addressed in clarifying the future relationship between Somalia and Somaliland.

This is great news! Continue reading →

Lost in the Hulaballoo

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Links, Politics , , , , ,

…was Ron Paul’s hearing on fractional reserve banking. Between the health insurance ruling and AG Holder’s scandal this excellent use of congressional air time has gone largely unnoticed. Congressman Paul brought three well-known economists to testify and I have linked to all three of their testimonies below (I haven’t read all of them yet).

If you manage to finish them soon, feel free to post what you got from them in the comments section.

Around the Web: ObamaCare Edition (Part 2)

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

There is a lot of great stuff out there on the recent ruling. Here are a few I found interesting:

I think I’m done blogging about this whole mess…phlegh!