Author Archives: lawofmarkets

We’re from the government and we’re here to pick your pockets

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From a Government’s perspective, there are only two things they want: your votes and your money. The rest is just rhetoric to get you to vote for them and to make sure you pay every last cent of your tax bill fully and on time. From Instapundit.

LAURENCE KOTLIKOFF: Did The Supreme Court Potentially Bankrupt Tens Of Thousands Of Small Online Businesses?

Small business is supposed to be the engine of economic growth and the internet is now the engine of small business growth. Today’s Supreme Court’s decision is potentially the engine of small business death. This plus the looming global trade war may be more than enough to pull the plug on our economic recovery.

Yes, we’ve very badly needed to rationalize state-business taxation. But what was and is needed is a system in which a company can file one and only one unified state sales and income tax return, pay one and only one tax bill and then have the states divvy up the proceeds. This will no doubt require federal legislation. Absent such a solution, the little engine that could — small online business — may immediately become the little engine that can’t.

The Powers That Be seem ready to rein in the Internet, whether it’s free speech or free enterprise.

What’s this word “free” I keep hearing? If it’s from the Government, the last thing it will be is free, as in there is no such thing as free lunches, health care or education.  

The Australian Deep State

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An article in the AFR today, with Gareth Evans, the day-before-yesterday’s man and then some, writing on How we should manage Donald Trump’s meltdown world. But what he most clearly gets across is what a breath of fresh air PDT is and why you cannot trust the ALP. This is how he starts:

The assumptions that have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown.

Oh dear, please tell us more.

The post-Second World War global order – an open, rules-based system underpinned by a robust network of security alliances, and by effective multilateral institutions in which rules could be agreed and norms reinforced – is the only one we have known in our modern history. Its maintenance has depended more than anything else on American belief in the liberal norms laid out in the San Francisco peace treaty and the Bretton Woods organisations.

You mean the peace treaty that ended World War II in 1945? You mean the Bretton Woods agreement that was signed in 1944? Breaking down are they? How about a bit of clarity over just which issues are so important and at risk. It’s about Donald Trump, of course. And what is he doing now, you might ask?

He is walking away from painfully negotiated international agreements – above all the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords – in a way that has left America’s word in doubt and its soft power in tatters.

Doesn’t seem such a worry to me, but let’s continue. What about Korea, for example; that went from flaming volcano to the most quiescent period in our relations with the communist north in seventy years?

Even when this President does the right thing – as with the circuit breaking Singapore summit with Kim Jong-Un – it is manifestly with such superficial understanding of the issues, indifference to process, and fragility of temperament that it is hard for anyone to be confident that the ultimate outcome, which will necessarily involve protracted multilateral diplomacy will be triumph or disaster.

Yes, all his predecessors built such a solid foundation before PDT got there which gave no one any confidence in at all, but which apparently, in Gareth’s view, the current President has now put that nuclear house of cards in tremendous jeopardy. Could be, but this is mere assertion from someone who thinks process is what matters and not results.

And with that same President involved in a global power display of American might in every part of the globe, from the China Sea to the Middle East, Evans is worried that “the US will return to the kind of isolationism that prevailed earlier this century”, that is the isolationism of the 1920s and 30s, in the period right after World War I when America was involved to the hilt.

And what is his sage advice: to restructure our foreign policy so that it is, “as he has argued for some time”:

“Less America. More Asia. More Self Reliance.”

Moronus maximus duplicitus!!! What a sell-out to our enemies. And he finishes by telling us that there is about to be a meeting at the university that has self-declared itself unwilling to defend Western Civilisation, that there will be an “ANU Leadership Forum” involving the AFR, Business Council, academics and the public service – that is, a meeting of socialists and their crony-capitalist beneficiaries – to discuss our foreign policy future.

Or in other words, it is a meeting of the Australian Deep State, who should not be trusted by so much as an inch. You should, of course, be wary of the Libs, but you should be far far more wary of the ALP. It makes me sick to read such idiocies and fills me with fear as well.

Canadians do not like PDT’s America First policies

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Not much of a surprise really, since they prefer Canada First policies, though why they elected Justin Trudeau if that was in their minds is beyond me. Via my refugee ex-mate from communist Hungary, who is now more socialist than the communist leaders when the soviets ran the place: Canadians overwhelmingly disapprove of Donald Trump, poll says. Not quite, since the article is about trade alone, but why expect a journalist to get things right?

Four out of five Canadians disapprove of U.S. President Donald Trump in the wake of an escalating trade war with Canada, a new poll has found.

The Campaign Research survey also found 72 per cent believe Trump’s protectionist policies have “harmed” the Canadian economy, while only three per cent said they have “helped.”

It may come as a surprise that it is not the role of the United States government to put the interests of non-Americans ahead of the interests of Americans. Although when you watch the Democrats dealing with their border wars to the south, you have to wonder if the media and the Dems even know what American’s own interests are.

“Australia’s pitiless migrant policy”

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Unfortunately behind a paywall but sent to me by my moronic former mate who now breathes the air in Silicon Valley and drives three Mercedes and a Porsche. The article is also from the Financial Times in the UK which, as we know, is a model to us all.

Australia’s pitiless migrant policy no model for the EU

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, has provoked outrage across Europe with his refusal to let the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying hundreds of migrants, dock in an Italian port. The Spanish government has had to step in to give the boat a safe harbour.

Mr Salvini’s move has been described as unprecedented. But for watchers of Australian politics, it is alarmingly familiar. During a tumultuous Australian election in 2001, a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued more than 400 distressed asylum seekers in international waters. John Howard, the then prime minister, refused the captain permission to enter Australian waters, and ordered special forces to seize the vessel when he did so anyway.

The “Tampa affair” stands out as a moment when Canberra explicitly adopted the view that Australia could no longer afford to observe humanitarian norms. Within a few months, the first elements of the Pacific solution, which involved forcing boats back to Indonesia and detaining asylum seekers in Nauru, an island nation 750 miles offshore, were in place.

There are worrying signs — beyond the eerie Aquarius-Tampa parallel — that the EU is heading down a similar path. Last year, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, floated the idea of keeping migrants away from Europe by creating “hotspots” to handle asylum requests in north Africa. The German interior ministry has also mooted the advantages of eliminating “the prospect of reaching the European coast”.

The temptations of such a policy for European politicians are clear. A steady stream of refugees to Europe has fed the rise of populist parties, including Mr Salvini’s League and Alternative for Germany. Meanwhile, Australia’s policy has largely achieved its objective: to “stop the boats”. European leaders are drawn to the humanitarian defence for this hardline approach: that stopping the boats means fewer drownings.

They should resist. Australia’s refugee policy has become notorious for its brutality. The Nauru detention centre has seen hunger strikes, suicides and hundreds of accusations of abuse. A separate centre on Manus Island last year had its water and power cut off. Amnesty International has called the policy a “human rights catastrophe”.

Few in the EU would defend the extreme brutality of Australia’s system — but in 2001 not many Australians would have either. The logic of deterrence naturally escalates: Australia introduced mandatory detention of “unlawful non-citizens” in 1992 and, ever since, has been gradually stepping up the degree of hostility needed to, in the words of several past and present immigration ministers, “take the sugar off the table”.

Escalation can happen for two reasons. The welfare of refugees receives less attention when they are processed offshore, far from the eyes of journalists or the public. When abuses are noticed, they are defended as life-saving deterrence. In 2015, then-prime minister Tony Abbott called a report highlighting abuses of children in offshore detention “a transparent stitch-up”. A few months later he said he would not “succumb to the cries of the human rights lawyers”.

The turning back of the Aquarius could have several consequences. It might reinvigorate EU efforts to share the burden of processing refugees and address Italian and Greek complaints about how much they have borne alone. It could also spur a serious attempt at a regional solution, working with North African states.

The other, darker scenario is that Europe will opt for an Australian solution, turning back boats and warehousing refugees in poorer neighbouring countries. Mr Salvini’s rhetoric is prompting outrage, but it is the plans of the EU’s more high-minded leaders that pose the real threat to the bloc’s self-image as a human rights champion.

It fundamentally alters the character of the invaded nation

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This is from Instapundit from which I have taken up one of the comments.

THE INTENSITY OF THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE, EXPLAINED:

Across the West, existing voters won’t give the left the power it wants, so they’re importing new ones.

And this is the comment that puts its finger right on the issue:

It’s not just votes, it fundamentally alters the character of the invaded nation, which is even better. It dovetails with their assault on Christianity, if they can also destroy the European nature of the West it will never recover.

They hate themselves and they hate you as well, whatever else they may say.

Something interesting happened in Canada!

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The vid above is about policing in the most woke (= idiotic) city on earth in the most woke (= insane) province in Canada’s fair domain. The rest is about energy policies which provides a lesson to us all.

Ontario was once the wealthiest province in Canada, but is in the process of proving that while there may be much ruin in a great nation, eventually you really can ruin the place if you work at it long enough and hard enough. Here is a cautionary tale proving there are some people for whom no level of ruin is ever enough: $312 Billion: Green Energy Makes Ontario the Most Debt-Ridden Province on Earth. Not long, worth your time, in my view, but here is something to get you started.

A major issue has been crippling energy and environmental policies. It began when, in 1992, then-premier Bob Rae appointed businessman and former UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong to be chairman of Ontario Hydro. At the time, Ontario was a prosperous, economically sound province. Strong changed that when he applied the energy and environmental policies he proposed for the entire world. In 1992, he introduced them through his creation of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and the conference he chaired in Rio de Janeiro.

At the conference, Strong introduced his creation of Agenda 21, a global energy and environment policy of world-shattering implications, and got it ratified. It was at the same conference that world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC set the ground rules for the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In Article 1 of the UNFCCC treaty, it specified:

“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.

It is a definition that predetermines the outcome of the IPCC’s work. You cannot isolate human causes of climate change without knowledge and understanding of natural changes and mechanisms. The fact that we cannot forecast the weather beyond 72 hours demonstrates how little we understand about natural climate change and its causes. Accurate forecasts require accurate science, and yet the science is still highly immature.

To further his anti-development agenda, Strong needed “science” to isolate and prove that increasing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity, a natural outcome of increasing production, would cause runaway global warming. Once the science was determined, the bureaucracies of national weather offices such as Environment Canada (EC) could push policies to cripple energy production, industry, and development. It is not coincidental that Gordon McBean, later assistant deputy minister of EC, chaired the founding meeting of the IPCC in 1985. Other countries and regions were slow to adopt these principles, but in Ontario, Strong was able to use his position at Ontario Hydro to implement with impunity the crippling policies he orchestrated in Rio.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

 

The economic role of saving

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There are two ways to understand the word “saving”. It is either:

(1) deferring the use of one’s purchasing power to a later date

OR

(2) that part of the capital, labour and other existing resources of a community that are used to maintain and extend the productive apparatus of an economy.

If you confuse (1) with (2) you will never understand how an economy works. (1) is of course modern and Keynesian, while (2) is classical and Austrian.

But these things are very very difficult to keep straight in the midst of analysis unless you really have the distinction absolutely clear.

Let me therefore take you to a sad example of how these issues became muddled in the midst of an interview with an Austrian economist who was trying to explain (2) to someone who thinks only in terms of (1). This is the title, Our Obsession with Consumption — while Ignoring Saving and Investment — Is a Big Problem. I have adopted his explanation from his Austrian treatment and translated into how things would be looked at from a classical perspective.

In economics today very little attention is given to the role of savings. This is a very curious situation.

There can be no production without prior saving.

Nature on its own provides us with only very few consumer goods eg apples on a tree.

For anything more, we must first produce the goods that we then afterwards can consume.

But to produce these goods we must first devise and construct tools, instruments or machines.

But to devise and construct tools, instruments or machines we already need a stock of already existing tools, instruments or machines. This stock is what is meant by “saving”.

Without prior savings no increase of future consumption is possible.

But then the interviewer asks this question, which transfers the issue from (2) to (1).

Do the current saving systems for retirement in the West work? If not, with what should they be replaced?

Suddenly the issue is about the future real potential purchasing power that lies behind money saving in the present. And from there the conversation never gets back to the need to widen and deepen our productive capabilities. They do go on to discuss who should make the decisions on what capital to build but by then it is too late.

The real problem for me is that even the interviewer, who was trying to provide soft questions so that the issues could be explained clearly, was too muddled himself and never allowed the interview to go where it needed to go, so another opportunity to make things clear disappeared.

Jordan Peterson discusses the campus left

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And he means the faculty! The text that comes with the vid:

Dangerous people are filling the heads of young people with dangerous nonsense. Who are these people? They are what Jordan Peterson calls “the post-modernists:” neo-Marxist professors who dominate our colleges and universities. And here’s the worst part: we are financing these nihilists with tax dollars, alumni gifts and tuition payments. Time to wise up.

Seaward bound and unbound

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Let’s first define seaward: “the direction or side away from land and toward the open sea”. Seems pretty innocuous, yet there has been quite a disturbance in the force over the use of just this word the other day. And it is being commented on very sharply at Powerline here under the heading, Ammo Grrrll finds no limits in THE THIRD RAIL. Read it all since the scum on the left know no bounds to their vile subnormal behaviour. For some idea of what you will find at the link, I will just quote this and let you see for yourself what comes before and after.

The late, psychotic, plug-ugly dwarf Charles Manson shared his secret formula for getting a sizable harem of young women to do his bidding. Make them perform humiliating and deviant sex acts that break down all inhibitions and violate civilized norms. In no time, you will have a cult of lost, broken souls who are capable of slaughtering a 9-months pregnant woman. Yes, yes, I know that one person’s “deviant” act is another’s pleasure. I’m not talking about a wide range of “normal.” I’m talking about violating all borders and boundaries of human decency.

Women publicly calling another woman vile names and men tittering about it instead of defending the slandered woman as a gentleman would is a marker on the steep slide to Perdition, a breakdown of civilized norms.

People who fret over the effect on “Gaia” Mother Earth from SUVs do not think for a minute about how fragile “civilization” can be. Civilizations have come and gone. If you separate sex not only from procreation but even from loving intimacy, you have one ingredient for disaster. Demonizing normal, robust masculinity as “toxic” while unleashing enraged, unhinged, unfeminine women, immune to any criticism, is another way to hasten societal collapse.

The American left have gone insane. And if you have never heard the story of Andrew Jackson and the duel he fought, this is the place to find out. There are many reasons to compare PDT to AJ, this being just one.

Public choice theory and the American president

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These are from the comments on an Instapundit post on public choice. Brings to mind the ridiculous notion that PDT may be the first politician in who knows how long to have nothing personal to gain from holding office nor does he owe anyone anything for getting him there. A once in a lifetime opportunity. Anyway, from the comments.

Public choice theory explains how government bureaucrats are captured by their constituent private sector companies the bureaucrats are supposedly regulating.

Leftists think that regulatory capture results in the regulators not regulating enough.

People such as you and I might have understood from even a young age about regulatory capture, but most academics didn’t, and in fact, many still don’t. How do we know that they don’t? Because goddamn academics are always proposing Yet Another Bureaucracy to regulate this, that or some other thing, and they’re invariably surprised (genuinely – ie, we’re talking the true nature of the Intellectual Yet Idiot class here) when they get results nothing like what they thought would happen, and often the exact opposite of what they thought would happen. eg, Obamacare and insurance rates. eg2: Obamacare and hospital wait times. eg3: Investment banks and the SEC. I could go on, and I’m sure you could name fifty examples yourself. The origin of Public Choice Theory came out of the time in the UK when the unions, the bureaucracy and academia were pushing the UK off a cliff into a permanent swamp of self-serving stupidity. Thatcher came along and reversed a great deal of that, and PCT played a part in that – Thatcher didn’t just make war on the unions, she also went after the bureaucracy and the academic/bureaucracy axis of government.

Without belaboring the issue with economic cant, it comes down to this. Bureaucrats and bureaucracies never will allow politicians to reduce the scope, size and cost of government, because the bureaucracy is enriching themselves (on a personal basis) by preventing actual cuts in budgets and staffs. The way that bureaucracies prevent cuts is to make lots of busywork, which masks their do-nothing results, but they use their constituent private sector companies and business sectors to help support their own existence. The nut of PCT is this: Bureaucracies are staffed with people who have discovered that by pulling the correct levers in regulations, obscure policy proposals and arcane budgetary rules, that they can become quite well off without having to do anything that resembles actual work as we in the private sector recognize it. The question you should always ask whenever you see a bureaucrat or his organization make a rule change or an enforcement action is “cui bono?” and you should look first and most directly at the bureaucrats advocating the rule change or enforcement action. For example: The SEC doesn’t rock the boat too hard on rule enforcement, because most of the people employed by the SEC are looking for future jobs with the investment banks they’re pretending to regulate.

The reason why government gets bigger is that it is in the personal, direct, financial interests of bureaucrats at an individual level to make it bigger. In other words, the bureaucracy wills it to happen – at every choice, in every action they take.