From “The Testament of Dr Mabuse” the 1933 Fritz Lang classic nightmare prophecy about a world that eternally seems to be on the point of arriving and in some places has, just not here yet. Not yet.
Picked up at Five Feet of Fury.
It was the headline that got me:
Now that would be interesting. As any good Keynesian would know, it is hoarding cash that is the evidence of consumers going into a bunker. So I looked at the article, which is a very long article, and finally found the actual statement about cash. I have added the bolding below:
HOARDING CASH: Looking for safety for their money, households in the six biggest developed economies added $3.3 trillion, or 15 percent, to their cash holdings in the five years after the crisis, slightly more than they did in the five years before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The growth of cash is remarkable because millions more were unemployed, wages grew slowly and people diverted billions to pay down their debts. They also poured money into bank accounts knowing they would earn little interest on their deposits, often too little to keep up with inflation.
People holding slightly more cash in the most recent five years in comparison with the previous five years is not headline news. It is what will happen anywhere as population and inflation rise. People hold more cash because the prices they are paying are going up more or less at the same rate as their nominal wages are going up. Slowly, but slightly higher all the same. What a useless measure but it does remind me once again how useless a Keynesian approach is in understanding what’s going on.
The article does, however, paint a grim portrait of the economic world in which we live. Things are going nowhere and living standards are falling. And why that is could not be more easily explained although not by using a modern macro text. Governments have taken over the spending from the private sector and the result is as dismal as one ought to expect. Governments only waste. Governments only divert resources into sub-optimal forms of production. Governments only follow, never innovate. Increased government spending in absolute terms and as a proportion of total national outlays will make an economy poorer and then if kept up long enough actually poor. This is such obvious common sense that you would have to be a Treasury Secretary not to understand what is going on right before your eyes.
These are Civil War photos that have been colourized which makes them alive where the black and white originals are shadows of their potential. This is only one of a quite extraordinary collection from The Daily Mail.
From Powerline where other similar links to colourized photos are found.
The American system treats its people worse than it treats its animals in the woods. If by some personal disaster you become dependent on the state in the US, the odds that you will ever make it on your own thereafter become long indeed. The theory of welfare dependency is clear enough, as is the evidence, but for those who fall into the trap, their only option, they feel, is to continue to vote for a living for the rest of their lives.
I was drawn to this article by Andrew Bolt which is from The Age. “What the Left Need to Do” is the point, how the left can recapture governments in the Westminster systems of our Anglosphere democracies. As our author laments, poor soul, “every major advanced Westminster democracy in the world – Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and Australia – now has a conservative-led government.”
And the US would as well if they had a Parliamentary system too since the equivalent to our House of Representatives here in Australia is, strangely enough, the House of Representatives in the United States. But it is a Republican system with a separate elected president which allows for an immense number of irrelevant issues to determine the outcome. Republican governments are poorly designed and aside from the United States, every republic has at one time or another fallen into some form of dictatorship because of the way in which power is concentrated at the top.
I think the problem with left of centre governments is that they are incompetent, that their reach exceeds the resources of a nation and they accordingly direct the economies they run into a ditch. Whatever reason it was that John Howard lost in 2007, it was not because the economy was failing and living standards were going down. But the author of the article, however, thinks the problem is as follows:
Meanwhile progressive parties make a more sophisticated but politically difficult argument: that it is in the national interest to improve health, education, infrastructure and social security – underpinned by a healthy level of progressive taxation. Sometimes this works; witness the high degree of public support in Australia for disability care or the national broadband network. Often it does not; witness the travails of the mining tax and carbon pricing.
Talk about sophisticated! Everybody wants more than they have and the collective desires of the Australian community would easily pass 200% of the available product (2000%?). And everyone wants the ends listed although not necessarily as freebies handed out by the political class. Political judgment is about knowing which of the many possible and desirable objectives to pursue. Labor lost because they wanted carbon taxes (which are, of course, not even in the least desirable), increased taxes on the mining industry, industrial regulation that make industry uncompetitive, school halls, insulation and the list goes on. Meanwhile they impoverish the people they pretend to be helping. They lost because in the end most people could see that Labor policies were making things worse, not better.
The point is that the arguments of the left are not more sophisticated. They merely peddle greed and envy. You should have more even if you didn’t earn it and those over there with more than you have should have less. Not really all that sophisticated at all.
But there are other things he can do and he’s doing them. This is so brazen that Obama obviously could not care less who you are or what you do. If you are his enemy then you will be done over and what are you or anyone else going to do about it?
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that the IRS audit of Dr. Ben Carson can’t be a mere coincidence. . . .
Carson on Wednesday told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that the IRS began examining his real estate holdings after his speech to the National Prayer Breakfast in February, in which he used tithing in the Bible to make a compelling case against progressive taxation. A humiliated Obama sat steaming a couple of seats away.
Then there’s the NSA Surveillance program that not only can but does track phone calls and emails. I just tried googling “NSA Surveillance” to find a statement of the problems it causes and it creeps me out to find that I could not easily locate a posting that was critical of the program. This is the best I could find and this was in an article defending the NSA:
The NSA has been in the centre of a firestorm since the Snowden leaks, which revealed wide-ranging programs which scoop up data on telephone calls and Internet activity.
I’m sure we all feel protected by governments that know what we are saying to each other by phone, fax or email.
And then, with the closing of non-essential government services there are many instances just like this:
The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.
‘It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,’ an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. ‘We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.’
Sure it’s disgusting but it’s not just politics as usual or at least it wasn’t until now. The full resources of the American government are being used in a punitive way against individuals and groups, against American citizens who disagree with the President. In reading not just the American media but even the right side blogs, the most astonishing part is the absence of expressions of genuine outrage. Maybe with the American media as latently totalitarian as it is there is nothing that can be done, and maybe no one writing a blog wants to be done over by the tax office, but if it doesn’t make you seriously angry, and not just a little frightened, I don’t know what would.
It obviously hasn’t been sitting in a bank vault for 500 years but that’s where it was found. They had always had the sketch. Now they have the painting that came with it.
After seeing the drawing he produced, the marquesa wrote to the artist, imploring him to produce a full-blown painting.
But shortly afterwards he embarked on one of his largest works, The Battle of Anghiari on the walls of Florence’s town hall, and then, in 1503, started working on the Mona Lisa.
Art historians had long believed he simply ran out of time — or lost interest — in completing the commission for Isabella d’Este.
Now it appears that he did in fact manage to finish the project — perhaps when he encountered the aristocrat, one of the most influential female figures of her day, in Rome in 1514.
Whatever, whenever, it is an amazing picture and even in profile she does have that smile.
The economy continues to sink. Even as the new Abbott government begins to clean out the stables, there is this report which I hope more will be made of. Via The Australian we are led to this report prepared by Australian Development Strategies Pty Ltd which is run by a former ALP Senator. This is how it starts:
The Australian economy has been generating jobs for only half the new entrants to the Labor market since early 2012.
The Labour underutilisation rate is now at 13.5 percent, virtually the same as the 13.6 percent we saw during the worst of the GFC in mid-2009.
While blue collar jobs in manufacturing continued to contract during the past six years of Labor Governments, jobs which were either funded or regulated by Government rose to unprecedented levels. [Bolding added]
They attribute this deterioration in the labour market to the new industrial relations laws which is, of course, a major part of the story. But what they do not attribute this to is the “stimulus” which re-directed our resources away from value-adding production towards the useless junk Labor is famous for funding. The last of the three points made above ought to drive home where the problems lie.
Leave the economy to find its way. Just cut spending and balance the budget as soon as you can. The rest will take care of itself.
Andrew Bolt drew attention to an article by Keith Windschuttle that discussed the views of the historian Stuart Macintyre. In his article, Windschuttle wrote:
Macintyre also harbours a deep distaste for this country’s British heritage. In the concluding chapter of A Concise History of Australia (1999), he is comforted by the prediction that, just as the Romans were displaced in Britain, Aborigines and Asians will eventually supplant the colonisers of British descent in Australia. Just as the only remnant of the Roman empire in Britain is ‘a thin slice of the island’s multi-layered past’, so too will the British colonisation be overlaid by the culture and practices of other peoples.
The belief that Western culture, our heritage, is the great scourge of the earth, and that the planet would be a better place if we were more or less displaced by others, is a persistent meme on the left. I have heard this sentiment in various forms from a number of my leftist associates. How to deal with it, defeat it, roll it back, is the great question for which I have no answer. I fear that for all our technical sophistication, a great dark age may be coming. We have opened our borders and elect our enemies to positions of high authority. The commanding heights of elite positions in our academic, media and political worlds are filled with many who hate the West but love its benefits which they hope to continue to receive no matter what goes on below. Their aim is to remain amongst those elites even as the rest of society sinks into an abyss for which they will take no responsibility but nevertheless hope to escape the consequences which will be dire for anyone who finds they are part of the dependent classes.
This is probably my favourite baseball moment of all time (except for watching my children play). It is the first game of the 1963 World Series, played astonishingly 50 years ago today. But it is the game in which Sandy Koufax struck out the first five Yankees he faced and in which he eventually struck out 15 of the 27 outs over the whole of the game to set the record. I can still remember watching it on the set. There really never has been a pitcher quite like Koufax.
Law of Markets 