From a new group blog at the PJ Tatler: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.”
On balance I'd tend to agree, but there are new thought leaders like William Easterly and others who are pushing for change from the ground up and recognizing the power of commerce over subsidies and entitlements in the developing world and for those who seek a better life.
A reminder courtesy of Thomas Thwaites of the manufacturing technology and ideas that go into producing simple as "simple" as a toaster - from scratch:
Yeah, yeah, I'll get to more substantive posts soon enough. Quips are so easy to post though (Clayton Cramer via The Thinker):
“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln
Instapundit on the hunting and eating of invasive species:
I think when we message space aliens, the first question we should ask is, “Do you taste like chicken?”
Found by a friend, Zoe L on Facebook:
Success at writing comes from 3% effort and 97% avoiding the internet.
It it stupefying how out of touch some politicians and their constituents are when it comes to believing that jobs can be created by governments buying and regulating them into existence. Victor Davis Hanson captures this frustration perfectly (Pajamasmedia via Instapundit):
Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at “them.” Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned—but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.Read the whole thing.
The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.
The last few months have been transitional. I'd apologize for taking an unannounced break from blogging, but it happens. There's a lot of pent up blogging that I want to do time permitting but I've also taken on a few new large projects as I pivot with changing responsibilities at the company that I have been building over the past several years.
As I continue to get my bearings, check out think tank/marketing firm JWT's 100 Things to Watch in 2011 (Slidewatch via Paul Kedrosky):
H/T Brian J (fb). While I enjoyed this, I confess if I were in the middle of it, I suspect I'd probably be that one surly impatient guy just trying to get out of there - I can only imagine the level of coordination that had to have gone into this:
You can be pretty certain that anyone who frets about how attack ads are nasty or that politics is divisive - at least when it comes to the American politics has little historical context or engaging in demagoguery. From Reason.com:
Argues John Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in the WSJ - "The Chinese government's accumulation of U.S. debt represents a tragic investment decision, not a currency-manipulation effort":
What's the right policy toward China? They put a few trillion dollars worth of stuff on boats and sent it to us in exchange for U.S. government bonds. Those bonds lost a lot of value when the dollar fell relative to the euro and other currencies. Then they put more stuff on boats and took in ever more dubious debt in exchange. We're in the process of devaluing again. The Chinese government's accumulation of U.S. debt represents a tragic investment decision, not a currency-manipulation effort. The right policy is flowers and chocolates, or at least a polite thank-you note.
Yet Mr. Geithner thinks that the Chinese somehow hurt us. There is at work here a strange marriage of Keynesianism and mercantilism—the view that U.S. consumers supported the world economy by spending beyond our means, so that other people could have the pleasure of sending things in exchange for pieces of paper.
This is all as fuzzy as it seems. Markets and exchange rates are not always right. But it is a pipe dream that busybodies at the IMF can find "imbalances," properly diagnose "overvalued" exchange rates, then "coordinate" structural, fiscal and exchange rate policies to "facilitate an orderly rebalancing of global demand," especially using "medium-term targets" rather than concrete actions. The German economics minister, Rainer Brüderle, called this "planned economy thinking." He was being generous. Planners have a clearer idea of what they are doing.
Katie Couric is quoted as calling middle America "This Great Unwashed Middle of the Country"
Jim Treacher, a conservative commentator retorts, noting her plummeting ratings (the Daily Caller), calls her the "the great unwatched".
I've never really understood California. For as much as you get the beach bum 'live and let live' type vibe when you're there and for all the technological innovation being churned out in silicon valley, the people seem to consistently elect politicians who have this affinity for unions, regulations and bigger government.
Here's how TechCrunch describes a potentially disruptive business under attack:
Last week San Francisco car matching startup UberCab was served a cease and desist order by the city of San Francisco because it did not have taxi licenses or taxi insurance and went beyond the normal scope of a limo service by picking people up right away.Michael Arrington inked an editorial that noted out "The outpouring of support from the community will be huge. And given that this model has potential to shake up the industry is all the major metropolitan areas across the country, there’s going to be a ton of interest in this case from all around. And UberCab will bathe in free publicity."
As UberCab (which has now changed its name to Uber) serves primarily tech industry elite, there is much Internet debate over whether this is another case of “Innovation vs. Establishment” or a startup just straight up breaking the law.
“Given the cease-and-desist [orders], it’s been a busy week,” laughs Kalanick. “We’ve seen waves of social media interest. We were a trending topic on Twitter. It’s business as usual at this point, but with a lot more attention and activity.”
It’s great news for a company that right now has plans to move into new markets, including New York and Los Angeles, and will undoubtedly be facing knockoffs if it doesn’t hustle.
In what Greg Mankiw calls "Austan Goolsbee deconstructed" - in case you've had doubts about how bad the Bush administration's economic policies actually were and how good the Obama administration's economic policies have been:
An employer cuts healthcare coverage for employees in anticipation of the healthcare reform act (BusinessInsider):
When they wrote this year’s legislation, policymakers had a choice: They could emphasize near-universal coverage, or they could emphasize controlling costs. They opted for near-universal coverage. As a result, business owners and higher income Americans (many of whom, like me, are one and the same) will soon pay an array of higher taxes to finance the broader coverage that President Obama and congressional Democrats mandated.Read the whole thing.
So I now find myself responsible for paying for health insurance for more than 30 million strangers. Yet the cash needs of my business, which is growing despite the difficult economy of the past few years, are not going to decline. Nor are my personal financial commitments going to decrease. The only way to make financial room for those 30 million strangers is to stop paying for insurance for the 20 people I work with every day.
Politics mandated that Obama and his fellow Democrats at least pretend that their legislation will constrain runaway spending. The new law’s very name is part of that pretense. But there is little in the actual legislation that has any real prospect of controlling spending; instead, the law attempts to control premiums by fiat through new regulations and oversight. Government may be able to prevent insurers from pricing policies in ways that make sense, but it can’t force them to operate at a loss. The other shoe, in the form of higher premium prices or a rollback of the new law’s mandates, is certain to drop. Higher prices are the more likely outcome. [...]
The law’s supporters will portray employers like me as bad guys who are using the new law as a smokescreen to make changes we wanted to make anyway. Though the accusation is false, it has a germ of truth: Runaway health insurance costs have been a burden for every business that pays them. Every sensible manager has at least considered steps to stem this financial hemorrhage. Many of us were just holding on so as not to disrupt employees’ lives while we waited for policymakers to do something.
Now they have done something, and it only made the problem worse. There is no longer any reason to wait.
Catarina Fake (Swiss Miss via Lifehacker):
Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
via Instapundit quoting Milton Friedman:
People have a great misconception in this way they think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It's nice to elect the right people but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
The CEO of Cisco and President of Oracle present an interesting solution developmentin a WSJ OpEd:
One trillion dollars is roughly the amount of earnings that American companies have in their foreign operations—and that they could repatriate to the United States. That money, in turn, could be invested in U.S. jobs, capital assets, research and development, and more.The upside is that the investments made by these companies would almost certainly be invested more efficiently and on more sustainable businesses than the US government spends. The downside, is exposure to the demagoguery of activists who decry supposed tax breaks for the rich and corporations. More cynically, what Chambers and Katz haven't quite considered, is that if it's companies who invest and repatriate money then politicians no longer have the control - and to date, that's seemed to be an influential consideration in stimulus spending. If only we lived in a more rational world...
But for U.S companies such repatriation of earnings carries a significant penalty: a federal tax of up to 35%. This means that U.S. companies can, without significant consequence, use their foreign earnings to invest in any country in the world—except here. [...]
By permitting companies to repatriate foreign earnings at a low tax rate—say, 5%—Congress and the president could create a privately funded stimulus of up to a trillion dollars. They could also raise up to $50 billion in federal tax revenue. That's money the economy would not otherwise receive.
More on that theme that capitalism doesn't require nearly as much capital anymore. It turns out that the cost of doing biotech is falling - in some cases dramatically to the point that it's possible to do research in your bedroom/basement (naturenews):
Carlson penned essays and articles that fanned the embers of the idea. "The era of garage biology is upon us," he wrote in a 2005 article in the technology magazine Wired. "Want to participate?" The democratization of science, he reasoned, would bring in new talent to build and improve scientific instrumentation, and maybe help to uncover new industrial applications for biotechnology. Eventually, he decided to follow his own advice, setting up a garage lab in 2005. "I made the prediction," he says, "so I figured maybe I should do the experiment."Despite the discomfort of thinking that your neighbours next door could be brewing anthrax, that's always been the risk. They could be making fertilizer bombs now for all I know but the potential rewards and potential breakthroughs are substantial as more amateurs consider new ways to solve real problems - and that's the essence of markets and capitalism.
Carlson is not alone. Would-be 'biohackers' around the world are setting up labs in their garages, closets and kitchens — from professional scientists keeping a side project at home to individuals who have never used a pipette before. They buy used lab equipment online, convert webcams into US$10 microscopes and incubate tubes of genetically engineered Escherichia coli in their armpits. (It's cheaper than shelling out $100 or more on a 37 °C incubator.) Some share protocols and ideas in open forums. Others prefer to keep their labs under wraps, concerned that authorities will take one look at the gear in their garages and label them as bioterrorists. [...]
Still, five years after taking science into his garage, Carlson says he's convinced that biohacking has the potential to trigger a technological revolution. "We're going to see a lot more at the garage level that will produce a variety of products in the marketplace, one way or another," he says.
From Rich Lowry, National Review:
Texas already looms large in its own imagination. Its elevated self-image didn’t need this: More than half of the net new jobs in the U.S. during the past 12 months were created in the Lone Star State.More (10/20): Here (WILLisms) with a comparison to California.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.
What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, “Open for Business.”
