Minsky, Creativity, AI Koan

Marvin Minsky and the Creative Economic Mind:

This one is worth reading all of!

Marvin Minsky observations are common in physics books I like to read -- "Time Reborn" that I'm finishing up now has many.

The AI Koan covered in the column is:

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. 

“What are you doing?” asked Minsky.

 “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe,” Sussman replied.  

“Why is the net wired randomly?” asked Minsky. 

 “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play,” Sussman said.  

Minsky then shut his eyes.  

“Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher.

 “So that the room will be empty.”  

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Are you enlightened? It's a Koan ...

The column links together a lot of topics that I think are interesting, but the big points at the end are that government has a strong history of slowing down creativity and business in many and varied ways. He has a quote I think is worth remembering:

Government is what happens when the power to say no meets the power to move slow.

I'd argue that quote is only true relative to productivity and growth. Government can move VERY fast when increasing it's own power and destroying individual liberty!

He discusses the removal of the "Prudent Man Rule" in '79 which allowed a burst of venture capital to be unleashed, and the allowing radio spectrum to be used under Reagan, which gave us cellular phones and WiFi.

He sums it up at the end with a paragraph that is worth pondering for a bit ...

Our current national mood is very grim: anti-immigration, because we fear foreigners will steal our jobs; anti–Big Business, which wants to help foreigners steal our jobs; anti-finance, because we fear Wall Street will somehow figure out a way to make money stealing our jobs; anti-technology, because we fear that robots will steal our jobs. And we are, too often, anti-entrepreneur, too, resentfully suspecting that somehow the men and women who create the things that we do not want to live without are somehow getting over on us.

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Government For Government's Sake, Ground Hog Eve

Global factories parched for demand, need stimulus | Reuters:

The linked article is a rundown of the generally bad global economic conditions, but the bottom line is the heading -- demand is low,  government needs to provide more stimulus!

When IBM got to the point in the late 1980's that the average "span of control" (people per manager) was 7, I used to comment that we had "management for management's sake". We had completely forgotten what the business of the company was -- PRODUCING innovative and high quality solutions that customers wanted to buy, and were instead bogged down in "process, corporate programs, tracking and bureaucracy".

By '93 when they brought in Gerstner we were bleeding red ink and rapidly nearing death. We now have arrived at "government for government's sake".

US GDP percentage officially spent by federal, state and local government is supposed to be around 35% now -- it was 40%+ in like '09-'10. In Europe and elsewhere it stays over 40%. I'm not really sure ANYONE has a good idea of how much of "production" is now government "stimulus".

In the 1980's, Ronald Reagan revved up the "engine of capitalism" for what might have been it's last run, and we grew nearly continuously from '82 until 2000. Does anyone remember capitalism? It gets a lot of blame now, but in '08 and '09 especially we took that golden goose of capitalism into the DC operating room and it didn't come out -- but it still gets blamed a lot.

As near as I can figure, the "new goose" is government. It prints money and shits it out all over the landscape, the sheep run out and gather up as much of it as they can, and try to buy a few things from the remaining evil "businesses". You know, those idiots that are taxed and maligned every day for doing grubby work of growing, cooking, building, etc.  They might WANT to be "capitalists", but between BOcare, EPA, IRS, AMT, minimum wage, etc, they are basically just "undocumented government workers".

The geniuses in DC seem to have stuffed the old capitalist goose,  dressed him up in a top hat like Scrooge McDuck, put him in a window on Wall Street and claim he is alive. They sprayed some extra cash around the street to keep the folks moving the money from one stack to another happy, with the agreement they would send some piles back to the politicians in DC for the favor.

We have an old hag worth $50-$100 million stumbling around the country cackling about "income inequality" -- she was a bag lady delivering cash to Wall Street and a good deal of her pile comes from having sticky fingers (no, not like the Stones, that is her husband).

The richest guys in the US, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, regularly go out and lament "income inequality" as well,  the public loves it and sees no problem with it. It gives the sheep something to do rather than listen to speeches about "the greatest problem of our generation" (climate change), or watching reality TV -- or politics, but I repeat myself.

They don't really need to do that anymore either though, because there is a new reality TV show that is pretty high in the ratings called "Running for Emperor" starring Donald Trump, that is picking up solid ratings. It's an odd time, one never knows what people will watch anymore.

Oh, and I heard that Doc Brown from Back to the Future, got lost in time, fried his brain on a Mr Fusion overload and is promising to use a "flux capacitor" to power the dollar presses to hyperspeed so EVERYONE can be rich! In the future, everyone is rich -- it's the only fair thing to do!

and that's the way it is, Ground Hogs Eve, 2016.



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Negative Interest Rates

Negative Interest Rates - Bloomberg QuickTake:

This past Friday, Japan took their interest rates negative and world markets reacted positively. Europe has been doing this for a year and a half now, even though Japan has been in economic recession for over a quarter of a century now and is possibly more desperate than Europe.

The move came 1 1/2 years after the European Central Bank became the first major central bank to venture below zero. With the fallout limited so far, policy makers are more willing to accept sub-zero rates. The ECB cut a key rate further into negative territory Dec. 3, even though President Mario Draghi earlier said it had hit the “lower bound.” It now charges banks 0.3 percent to hold their cash overnight. Sweden also has negative rates, Denmark used them to protect its currency’s peg to the euro and Switzerland moved its deposit rate below zero for the first time since the 1970s. Since central banks provide a benchmark for all borrowing costs, negative rates spread to a range of fixed-income securities. By the end of 2015, about a third of the debt issued by euro zone governments had negative yields. That means investors holding to maturity won’t get all their money back.

Even the linked Bloomberg article has no trouble pointing out that negative interest is DESPERATION!

Negative interest rates are a sign of desperation, a signal that traditional policy options have proved ineffective and new limits need to be explored. They punish banks that hoard cash ...

In case some US folks have the idea that "it can't happen here" ...

Janet Yellen, the U.S. Federal Reserve chair, said at her confirmation hearing in November 2013 that even a deposit rate that’s positive but close to zero could disrupt the money markets that help fund financial institutions. Two years later, she said that a change in economic circumstances could put negative rates “on the table” in the U.S. Deutsche Bank economists note that negative rates haven’t sparked the bank runs or cash hoarding some had feared, in part because banks haven’t passed them on to their customers.

We have a STRANGE situation going on.

•  Growth is low to non-existent ... and even that is cooked. 
• Inflation is SUPPOSED to be low, but that is cooked as well! 
• The global economy weak in Europe, Japan, and looking like China as well! 

It appears that "make sure you have a stockpile of food, water and ammo" situation that we suspected might happen in 2009 is returning for a fresh visitation!

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Inflation, NOT CPI !

If You Want To Know The Real Rate Of Inflation, Don't Bother With The CPI - Forbes:

The whole article is worth reading, but this part of it is so obvious it is worth a dope slap if you haven't realized it:

The CPI is tied to the incomes of about 80 million Americans, specifically: Social Security beneficiaries, food stamp recipients, military and federal Civil Service retirees and survivors, and children on school lunch programs. The higher the CPI, the more money the government needs to spend on these income payments to keep pace with the cost of living. However, this same government is about $17 trillion in debt. If the CPI is low, the less money the government needs to spend on cost of living adjustments, something seniors are astutely aware of.

Is it REALLY surprising that the largest debtor out there who ALSO has to pay a bunch of benefits and salaries that are supposed to be "inflation adjusted" would be interested in making the number artificially low?  They LOVE inflation (pay back debt with cheaper dollars), but why not have their cake and eat it too? If there was "inflation", they would have to pay a bunch of money on "inflation adjusted government bonds". When you leave the fox in charge of the henhouse, is it REALLY surprising that the chicken count is "suspect"?

Since retiring and paying more attention to SPENDING money than to MAKING money, it is become rather obvious to me that "real inflation" as in, "the cost of things you regularly buy" is and has been MUCH higher than what is being reported.

The more money that’s created and put into circulation, the less valuable it becomes. And the Fed has created a lot of money recently. The Fed’s unprecedented bond buying program, Quantitative Easing, created $116 million an hour for the entire year last year. It doesn’t make sense that the BLS’s measurement of inflation was only 1.5% last year, while at the same time, monetary inflation grew 4.9%.*

We are being told by the government that inflation is so low no COLA adjustments are needed. I know the MSM and D's have found the US government to be absolutely trustworthy the past 7 years, but let's see if there is an alternate view on these inflation numbers ...

Been out to eat lately? Pay for medical insurance, co-payments? Pay for your cell phone, internet, electricity, property taxes ... ??? I submit that blue line is MUCH closer to reality than the red one ... hmm, reality of "Red Lines"?

I think anyone with a moderate level of intelligence and common sense as been SURPRISED that things "seem to not be going as horribly as we would think" given the policies of the BO administration and the vast government bureaucracy that is a Democrat / Union hegemony.

The GDP numbers are fiction. It looks like the inflation numbers are fiction.

We know we have been had, but I'm beginning to think that the magnitude of the debacle is WAY beyond what we have been aware of!

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Friedman, Why Not Use Spoons?

Milton Friedman and the economy of spoons:

There is going to be an economic series of posts here with Japan going to negative interest, Marvin Minsky dying, Sanders running, and me running into things I thought I had posted on -- but hadn't. I read WAY more than I write (and that is a GOOD thing), but sometimes I forget what is only in my head rather than having found it's way to text. To wit, the linked article is on Milton Friedman, written before the 2012 election, but unfortunately even more appropriate today <go see if I have posted on Negative Interest yet>:

When he was told by government officials that it was better to dig ditches with shovels than bulldozers, because more jobs were created that way, Friedman asked, “Why not use spoons?” In no corner of the Earth, from alabaster Washington to the filthiest dungeon state, have central planners ever been able to answer that question. If Friedman had lived long enough to hear Barack Obama blame high unemployment on automated teller machines, he would have recognized a student in dire need of his teachings. 

As the rest of us watch the edifice of statist economics crumble, and prepare to rescue our nation from its tumbling wreckage, we could do worse than “Why not use spoons?” as our battle cry.

They can't answer because Milton is talking about reality and Socialism is a fantasy. It can only "answer" by silencing it's critics, which it has done many times, and we increasingly see yet again in this country in ever more cases.

Friedman is among the finest teachers for learning that everything government does is a form of compulsion. The acolytes of Big Government are always desperate to claim otherwise – they just want togive you stuff! They want to secure your “rights” to “access” goods and services they have deemed vital. They’re just looking to collect a “fair share” from those who would otherwise steal public resources and abuse them to create obscene profits. The public language of statism is always about giving, providing, and ensuring. Pains are taken to hide the taking and destroying.

Compulsion is not good or evil -- we are compelled to breathe, we are compelled to reproduce -- fortunately with less force than to breathe! Hiding the FACT of compulsion as well as it's source,  and calling it "giving, providing, insuring" is evil in the sense that all lies are evil. It prevents decent reasonable people from being able to make rational and informed choices.

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Of Kickers, CEOs, Bananas and Magicians

Vikings kicker Blair Walsh tells 1st-graders he'll 'cherish' their cards forever - StarTribune.com:

I'm fine with kids being nice to Blair Walsh. I'd be fine even if the muff had happened to a Packer kicker in a big game -- it's part of football, part of being a kicker, and life is CERTAINLY more than football. It is also fine that the Star Trib covers it ... heartwarming article.

As near as I could find out on the web, an NFL kicker in 1965 made about $35K ... that was pretty good cabbage back then. When I started at IBM in 1978 I made $15,500 and that was considered an excellent starting salary. A starting teacher got like $9K in '78.

Walsh made $3,250,000 last year. That is a little less than 100x what a kicker made in 1965. Aaron Rodgers made $19.1 million for comparison.

We all know about the biggest CEO packages, but looking around the web I ran into a "real jobs site" in REAL CEO pay ... not the "Top 400 companies". It's kind of a laugher ... $160K average, $460K "high". The average for CEOs is $15.1 million, counting the big guys. So Aaron Rodgers makes $4 million more a year than the average CEO.

We KNOW what the Star Trib thinks of CEO pay, and we KNOW what they would say about a $3 Million a year CEO whose company lost money! I hate to tell them, but just as making kicks is not guaranteed in football, making money is not guaranteed in business!

I believe that all of us at some level are a little aware that "value" and "markets" are complicated and have WIDE variance. You can go down to Kwik Trip and grab a banana for about a dime, then walk over and grab a bottle of water for a little over a buck.

The banana grew on a tree somewhere in Central America, somebody cut it down, trucked it to some city, put it in a big container, put it on a banana boat, it showed up on likely the Gulf Coast, went through a shipping center or two, a truck or two, and found it's way over a couple thousand land miles to your Kwik Trip shelf. Simple.

The water probably came out of the ground within a few hundred miles and ended up in the close to zero cost plastic bottle in a palletized flat with nary a human hand touching it and was trucked to the same store.

The difference is of course "markets and marketing". The banana is a pure commodity. The water likely is too -- but it is getting a halo effect from the marketing of other bottled water. "Perrier, Dasani" ... you may not be able to recall them, but they are in your head, trust me!

The reason you think as you do about CEO pay differently than you think about Blair Walsh is the same as the reason that water and bananas are priced differently. Marketing. (or "propaganda" if you want to give it a more sinister spin)

You have seen hundreds ... maybe thousands of headlines, articles, political statements, digs in entertainment, etc on the horror of high CEO compensation. ALL of those statements focus on the very highest of CEO pay and the most egregious of CEO excess. CEOs, and corporations in general have been demonized more than the Nazi's were in WWII.

Why? They are MARKETED as "An enemy of The Party (TP-D)" ... and therefore "the common man". TP is ALL about "the common man" --  like the millions of blacks living in hopeless inner city poverty and 6K young black men gunned down in the street every year. They would be very happy for you to become their wards just like blacks already are! Just vote for them!

 Just as TP isn't really a "friend to the common man",  Corporations and CEOs aren't really enemies of TP -- CEOS and Corporations donate 10's of millions to TP, but what part of MARKETING don't you get? That bottled water at the Kwik Trip isn't any better than what you could have drank from a free water fountain, but you still bought it didn't you?

TP needs "enemies" like Hitler needed the Jews. Scapegoats. As I cover here regularly, "truth" is a very early casualty of the slide to one party rule. Constant control of the "message/narrative" keeps the masses of the sheeple firmly in the grasp of "the world according to TP".

The vast majority of the country and really the entire west is like an audience watching a magician on stage perform "amazing acts". I've come to believe that in this life, Christian faith provided the massive advantage to the western mind of making the masses of people skeptical of the claims of man and governments. "Render unto Caesar"  indicated that government had a role, but that role was LIMITED and should always be viewed as SUBJECT TO GOD! TP has made sure that the masses have gotten "smarter" than to believe in the sovereignty of God vs TP.

In our souls, we all know this story, but given our nature, and the nature of evil, we forget it. We should all watch the following every now and then. This isn't so hard to understand -- GOD is the Master, we are the Apprentice and government, is the "servant" broomstick .... there is a tendency for our "servants" to get out of hand if you don't remember the "spell" to shut them down!

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Everyone Gets $4.3 Million

Powerball Meme Mathematical Illiteracy Illustrates Bernie Sanders' Appeal - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

I sincerely hope that this meme was put up by somebody just having fun rather than being serious, but it is certainly going around.

Of course, everyone actually gets $4.30 ... sort of.

What is REALLY scary is that if you DID get $4 MILLION as a young person and decided to "live off the interest" from an FDIC account you would get LESS than 1% ... so < $10K per million, or a total of $40K a year -- less than the median income! Talk about "living like a millionaire"!

So most of us have a lot of money in market index funds and bonds. To the extent that the "BO economy" has done ANYTHING the past 7 years, it has pumped up those funds with a lot of freshly printed money. Take a look at China, take a look at the stock market so far this year -- or go back and look at 2009. You can do MUCH worse than a 1% return on your money!

Royal Bank of Scotland says to sell everything! Are they right?

Walter Russel Mead has some sobering coverage of what is going on in China. He believes that the reason that we see the commodity market crash is that China is already trying to do what the US did in the 1980's ... move from a manufacturing economy to a service / knowledge / financial economy.

As I've said a number of times, the "bottom bottom" line is always the same -- the MAJORITY of the population has to be involved in MAKING (building, inventing, manufacturing, writing, growing, producing, etc) something that OTHERS WANT TO BUY.

AND ... in order to continue to be prosperous, INVESTING a significant portion of the value of that production in SOMETHING THAT GOES UP IN VALUE!

Taking stuff out of some peoples pockets and putting it in other peoples pockets, printing money, giving speeches, passing laws, "regulating",  having "programs", etc serve the same function as the scantily clad magicians assistant. They draw your attention so the house (government) can fleece you a bit more while the ship sinks.

The top linked article closes with the following and some of the problem is simply that "millions and billions" are just too large for the human brain to deal with ... let alone trillions and if you combine debt and unfunded entitlements, approaching 100 Trillion!

There's a relevant Richard Feynman quotes about big numbers. "There are 1011 stars in the galaxy," Feynman once said. "That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." That was at least three decades ago—the annual deficit is at about a trillion now. 

People have trouble conceptualizing numbers as big as a thousand, let alone a million, billion, or trillion. They listen to Bernie Sanders and come to the conclusion if only government took more money from "billionaires" it could fund everything for everyone. Appeals to reason and math are discounted as right-wing propaganda.

Let's face it, any appeal to reality is "right wing propaganda" these days!

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Assortive Marriage

The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality - The New York Times:

Marriage is a giant problem for the left since it is adaptive -- meaning "it works" to create better health, greater happiness, better outcomes for children, better societies and communities, and yes, higher incomes and wealth. I've covered this in more detail before.

It is also exceedingly old news that the biggest determinants of wealth and poverty in the US are:

1. Delaying having children until after marriage
2. Finishing High School
3. Staying married to the same spouse

The left doesn't much like to talk about these facts because their idea is that people have no responsibility for outcomes in their lives and the job of government is to randomize incentives and disincentives so people end up in the same economic state no matter what choices they make.

Naturally, like all ideas of the left, reality continues to cause them problems. It turns out that when it comes to marriage, once you have created a whole bunch of highly educated career women, they have a nasty tendency to marry some guy that is similar to them in education and income! Who could have imagined such a thing! They call this phenomenon "Assortive Marriage"

The numbers show that assortative mating really matters. One studyindicated that combined family decisions on assortative mating, divorce and female labor supply accounted for about one-third of the increase in income inequality from 1960 to 2005. That result is from the economist Jeremy Greenwood, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and other co-authors.

This is startling news to "liberals". It "creates inequality", DAMN!

They don't indicate what they want to try to DO about this ... for fairly obvious reasons. Arranged marriages maybe? 100% tax rate on one partner working over a certain income level? Since they WANT higher income women, perhaps they will declare that the husband of a woman that makes over say "$50 or $100K" can't work -- or just gets taxed at 100%?

No doubt their fertile minds are hard at work to make all equally miserable!


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The U Shaped Curve

Yes, America's middle class has been disappearing....into higher income groups - AEI | Carpe Diem Blog » AEIdeas:

The linked article is worth reading ... yes, the middle class is shrinking, BUT it is shrinking because people are BOTH falling and rising! The bottom grew from 25 to 29% since 1971, the top grew from 14 to 21% ... so 4 points for poverty, 7 points for wealth!

We should also note that the lower middle and upper middle stayed basically constant -- so all the "middle flight" was to the extremes.

We are heading toward a classic U shaped curve -- the opposite of "the standard curve", or the "bell shaped curve" -- the "normal distribution". In the U-curve the action is at the extremes, the UNnatural curve.

I did a LITTLE research on it, and ran into Francis Galton, an interesting guy who came up with a machine that would show the normal distribution, but also came up with one of the first U shaped curves relative to "consumption" ... "wasting away", normally from cancer, but they didn't know what in those days.

One of the other references referred to the U shaped curve as "the hard math class curve" -- the one where the good mathematicians excel of course, but one that is advanced enough that the vast majority of people know not to get in the class, so the "middle" bows out -- only the foolish, those with inflated opinions of themselves, etc also enter and fail miserably. Thus the "U".

Nobody really "knows" why this is happening ... the article just focuses on the good news that more people are rising than falling, but "nature" would expect a BELL with tails at the ends and nearly 70% clustered in the middle, with tails on either end dividing the rest. Both "poor" and "rich" would hold 2.27% each, with lower middle and upper middle holding 13.59% each.

My reasoning as to possible reasons is the following:

• Technology is leverage. Those that are able to use it excel, those who do not tend to fall -- a long way. 
• Technology allows "mass everything" ... those that win, win A LOT, those that don't win fall to the bottom. 
• The vast increase in government means that the lower class is subsidized, but both the middle and upper classes are penalized. Our two IBM incomes made us "upper". We are now falling to being "middle to upper middle" ... we were HEAVILY penalized for being "upper",  and the penalties continue and are rising as we fall -- huge deductibles on our insurance for higher cost insurance, and always taxes, taxes, taxes. 
• The previous point creates a "step function" ... if you can stay below the point at which you lose government benefits and start paying taxes, it is a big benefit. If you want to stay at the upper level, it takes A LOT of effort, income, risk taking, etc, **AND** you pay HUGE penalties for all that work! Because of the technology leverage, there are more people that CAN achieve that level, but it takes a toll, and after a certain length of time (the voice of experience speaking here), they just get tired of running the rat race and paying the penalties ... so they slide down the scale, PLUS government policy hastens their slide as it sucks away the assets / pension that they have built. 
• Given the previous two points, the vast majority of the population "wises up" ... "you can't fight city hall", let alone Uncle Sam! College doesn't pay, and even learning a trade means you have to get up and go to work every day. Father a couple kids out of wedlock, live with some single mother on welfare -- move around a bit. Tomcats do it, why not people? (covered here)

I could keep going, but the point is that unless we change the course of the nation, I'd expect this trend to continue and become a "backward J" with a large number of people on the low end and less and less on the high. One might call that "The Statist Curve" ... less and less people willing and able to take the risks, work hard enough, and pay the penalties required to support those at the bottom, and more and more than either burn out, get old, see that both the "deck" and the sanctions of their nation are stacked against moving up the income ladder.

The UNnatural curve is a sign that nature is not taking it's course -- the average are not excelling to the best of their ability while being led (and provided workplaces) by the few able to achieve at the very high level, with only a small set (the same as the upper set) falling to the bottom unable to cope with the environment. For the moment we are moving slightly toward a "J-shape" since more have moved  to the top since '71, but 29% at bottom and 21% at top tells me that this hopeful trend will not likely continue. I predict the bottom is going to grow more and the top will slow down.

Were trends to continue with more rising than falling, perhaps a U-shaped curve could continue, but it seems unlikely to me. I suspect that the left is fine with a slightly tilted U (more at the bottom) as we have now, or even the reverse J with LOTS at the bottom voting for "The Party", and a tiny minority at the top "happily" paying the freight for all the "free stuff".

Interesting none the less ... not the kind of info you see much of in "The Party" controlled media!

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The Have Less Crisis

WSJ Middle Class Squeeze

An excellent but somewhat long article on the state of the malaise of the world economic system.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-08, which Western leader could boast of spreading ownership in any important way? In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”

I think the summary of the state of affairs is stated well here.

The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade. Which means that the mass bourgeoisie (a phrase that Marx and Engels would have thought a contradiction in terms) start to feel like the new proletariat.

I'm not sure how learned the author of the column really is, but he said a HUGE mouthful there!

First, everyone knows that "morality" is a very difficult term in our current world. What do we "value"? As traditional morals of chastity, truthfulness, thrift, prudence, hard work, honor, trustworthiness, meekness, temperance,  etc. have fallen from favor to become terms of derision hurled at some "hypocrites" who still "bitterly cling" to such. The very concept of "morality" has left the building -- and "money" has become a primary "value" in itself -- of both good and ill. "The Party" TP-D  getting lots of funding for a campaign? GOOD ... Koch brothers providing lots of money for an R? EVIL ... Lots of money poured into TP teachers unions? GOOD ... lots of money for a CEO? EVIL ... and on it goes. "Morals" relative to your POV -- the essence of the "all things are relative" view.

So to Marx, the "bourgeoisie" were the evil -- the owners of capital. The shop, farm and factory owners -- those that hired and fired and "leeched" off from labor -- the "proletariat" who were trapped and basically slaves.

The column goes on.

But pretty much the whole of the developed world is still in the convalescent ward, and no one is sure whether the wonder drug of quantitative easing can yet be abandoned, or even whether it does no more than suppress the symptoms of disease. Despite years of supposed austerity, debt is still strikingly high. It remains possible that banks, or even whole countries in the eurozone, could collapse. And who knows whether or not China’s big banks are bust? 

There is clearly an unmet need for a politics that goes beyond mere grievance-peddling to develop a new way of thinking about what makes a society free and secure at the same time. If this were easy, we would have heard more of it by now, and I won’t pretend to have the answers. But certain basic principles seem like the proper foundation.

He is brilliant up to here, but then goes on to pretty standard ideas, that while good in general, don't really make one feel "he's got it" -- get markets working better, get stock ownership to be more responsible, get a better balance between globalization and nationalism ... not wrong, but not really a clear marching order.

I'm going to throw out a couple of generalities here, but I think the BIG deal of this article is that it does a good job of stating the core of the problem -- We have lost our moral compass and are adrift. Until we fix that, all activity is pretty much just churn! We are also very vulnerable -- to attack from without or within.

I'm working on my review of "Closing of the American Mind" -- hopefully more detail there, but I think the big point is that as the Roman Empire, and to a lesser extent, the British Empire,  found "well fed ease and leisure" is not a meaningful goal for mankind. Everyone has to believe in something and really DO something in service to that belief in order to be happy! "I believe I'll have another beer" is a cynical JOKE ... but right now it is more in keeping with the "values" of Europe, America and Japan than anything else.

 Conquest, exploration, saving souls, moral perfection, defeating evil, "truth, beauty and the American Way", etc ... those have been and in some cases still are worthy goals. Certainly ISIS believes that they are undertaking a "conquest for saving souls" -- their own, and the infidels they convert to what they see as the truth. They are "defeating evil" from their perspective -- but we are "the evil", and we have decided to stop resisting as much as we can.  It seems the Putin also sees himself as restoring Russia to it's "rightful place". I suspect that China is also in this camp.

Real morals and values are DANGEROUS! They MEAN SOMETHING! Because they move people -- and nations, and potentially worlds. The Bible as always has pure truth on this -- "Man does not live by bread alone" -- without spiritual meaning, man dies. "Without vision the people perish" ... this article does a good job of pointing out how we are perishing --- not so much how to LIVE!

We need to figure out what is worth not perishing for, if we truly want abandon the terminally ill patient that is Western Civilization -- that is unless we just want to continue to kill ourselves.

63% Inflation, 234% College Inflation

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/were-making-life-too-hard-for-millennials.html

Hopefully I can manage to clip a chart from the article at some point and insert it here -- but for now you will have to either believe me or go look at the article. It is the NYTs, they didn't really mean to make the point they made, but here it is:

• Inflation since '93 is 63% ... so your '93 buck is worth .37 cents. That is what a debtor nation calls LOW inflation! 
• College costs have gone up 234% since '93! Think about this for a moment. College is HEAVILY state sponsored, HEAVILY regulated, nearly 100% UNIONIZED, 99% DEMOCRAT in administration as well as educators, etc. Do you REALLY want to give the government MORE things to manage???? 

The government is a huge debtor, so it wants LOW INTEREST and HIGH INFLATION ... the number that counts is really the DIFFERENCE between the interest rate and the inflation rate. Inflation seems "low" at "a couple % a year", but the interest rate being paid on savings is actually less than the inflation rate! Just like it was under Jimmuh Carter. 

The difference -- as some of the charts show, is that nobody is making any money because we have no growth. "The problem is the recession" the article says -- the recession supposedly ended in June of 2009! The PROBLEM is that the "recovery" has been "tepid" to say the least -- and if they hadn't fudged the numbers, we would be in a new recession right now! (2 consecutive quarters of negative growth). 

If we had a Republican in the WH the NYTs would be APOCALYPTIC about this economy -- not just feeling a bit sorry for a few "millennials"!

Harvard Discovers BOcare -- Spending Money Like Trophy Wives

Whining Harvard Professors Discover Obamacare - Bloomberg View:

The Harvard Faculty is up in arms after discovering that BOcare applies to THEM! Oh the humanity!

One more reason the reflect on wisdom of the William F. Buckley quote: "I'd rather be governed by the first 2K names in the Boston Phonebook than the Harvard Faculty".

The quote has naturally received a lot of charges of "anti-intellectualism" and "know nothingism" relative to the Right, which yet again makes one wonder if those making the charge knew who Buckley was, or are just intent to prove his point.

The point of the quote is that being book smart has nothing to do with having any wisdom at all, or even common sense. The Harvard Faculty's  appreciation for the real world is very limited, and they are far more certain of their own superiority than anything else in their comprehension.

The Wisdom of PJ O'Rourke on how money is spent  is quoted in the article, but then a big hunk of the meaning of the quote is not understood:

1. You spend your money on yourself. You're motivated to get the thing you want most at the best price. This is the way middle-aged men haggle with Porsche dealers. 

2. You spend your money on other people. You still want a bargain, but you're less interested in pleasing the recipient of your largesse. This is why children get underwear at Christmas. 

3. You spend other people's money on yourself. You get what you want but price no longer matters. The second wives who ride around with the middle-aged men in the Porsches do this kind of spending at Neiman Marcus. 

4. You spend other people's money on other people. And in this case, who gives a damn?

The Harvard Faculty are indeed unhappy because they moved a tiny tiny bit from 3 to 1, which is actually FINE with those of us opposed to Government, and thus more in favor of reality.

The PROBLEM is that BOcare (and even Medicaid) is largely #4! The GOVERNMENT spends other people's money (ours) on other people, and how much they care about either those providing the money or those receiving the "benefit" is often very evident.

Worse yet,  due to the government aided monopoly aspects of health care, the insurance and the government,the whole unholy trinity  lives at 3 and 4 -- they do everything with other people's money, including paying themselves!  At least 2nd wives have some competition!

Remember, the real purpose of BOcare is to move to "single payer", which means a total lock for government at 3 and 4 (where it always is, which is why it MUST be made SMALLER!), and getting rid of the insurance companies so government and health care can divide up the spoils, happily pay themselves whatever they want, and just not give a damn!

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Law, Morality, Flat Tax

BO's unilateral action creates a precedent. In the SCOTUS, conservative judges have tended to be very reticent to undo precedent -- seeing it as only slightly more egregious that that original usurpation of the Constitution that created the precedent. Roe V Wade being the standard example.

The expected conservative opinion on BO's action would be that a conservative president ought not do the same thing -- wrong is wrong, and two wrongs don't make a right. However, I think we can all agree that BO has created a template here that WILL be re-used by left leaning presidents. After a midterm election, with a lame duck congress, decree some major action and have two years for it to become the de-facto law of the land before anyone really has a shot at changing it.

I'd argue, as I think many conservative / libertarians would, that our existing "progressive" tax system is one of the greatest abuses of freedom to date in the US. Private property is the cornerstone of freedom, and while to the founders, that primarily meant land, in the modern world it is investment and income. ANY suspension of equal protection is noxious to freedom, the equal protection attack on private property, has been and continues to be devastating.

So conservatives have a dilemma. The evil genie of monarchical decree, once released, is certain to be used again and again by the freedom destroying forces of collectivism and "progressivism"  as a powerful nuclear tool doing maximum damage to the fabric of the nation. Do we unilaterally disarm, or make use of this force to attempt good?

Imagine a Flat Tax, of say "25%" that replaced all other taxes including FICA. Income tax forms would be on a post card. ALL people would pay the same rate on ALL income.  If put in place in the same way that BO has just done, there would be a FULL THREE YEARS (providing the president made it retroactive when he decreed it), since even after the next election, the new president / congress would not take office until it was too late to enact anything for the subsequent election year taxes. By that time, the unholy alliance between accountants / lawyers / tax preparers and the IRS would have been broken -- those folks would have been forced to find new work. Their legions of tax code svengalis adding and modifying loopholes like demons in Dante's Hell would have moved on.

Yes, such change is likely to cause havoc in the economy, but make no mistake, since the genie is now released, we all have to expect changes as egregious and worse after every midterm election. In fact, taking the bull by the horns and going big fairly early may allow conservatives a chance to tilt the table in the favor of the nation.

We owe it to the future of America to give this serious thought. It is one of the few remaining ways I can see that we can turn the tide before the last wisps of inadequate restraint on Leviathan are fully released.

"Fair Share", By Quintile -- Killing Success

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/11/203641-2-chart-new-definition-fair-share-20-americans-pay-almost-100-everything/

As of 2011, the quintiles for US income were:
0  -  $20K
$20K - $38K
$38K - $62K
$62K  - $102K
$102K and up

"Quintile" means divide the population up into 5 equal sized groups using a variable -- in this case income. The same number of Americans are in each of those 5 groups, roughly 64 million people each.

This chart makes the decline of America extremely easy to understand. Want to place any bets on how "sustainable" this is?

On average, if you make much over $100K, you pay something just below $50K into the FEDERAL government. What the chart doesn't show is that you ALSO pay something close to 10% of your income into the STATE if you live in a blue or purple state.  If you don't feel like a tax slave, you need to look at the chart a while longer.

Any one having trouble understanding why our workforce participation rate is the lowest since the '70s? People pull that train for a few years and they figure out that the cars behind are a lot more comfortable than the providing pedal power for engine.

Other small fact -- notice that "The Party" (TP-D)  doesn't throw the most money to the bottom -- the votes are in the 2nd and 3rd quintiles! The folks at the very bottom are often too old or too unmotivated to even do the handed to them mail in vote, so the money goes to those that make from $20-$62K ... the fact that more per capita goes to the $38K-$62K group than to the 0-$20K group would be especially galling to anyone that cared about "the poor" more than votes!

I case you are reading this and saying "but I pay income taxes", remember that this is NET -- if you get FICA, housing assistance, BOcare, Earned Income Credit, etc, that is deducted from what you "pay".

The linked article has one more fact worth repeating --- 40% of US households now get more than HALF of their income from transfer payments! 

WMD, Ebola, Economic Collapse, Global Warming, The Price of Propoganda

Bush Didn’t Lie | National Review Online:

I'm not going to go through the whole titular list here in detail, but propaganda takes many forms and ultimately it always has a very high cost for the people that become anesthetized to the always complicated, uncertain, and messy world of actual data and information. I will return to the specific of WMD.

We tend to think of propaganda in only the most blatant forms -- the old Tariq Aziz "Iraq is winning the war", or USSR claims of superior production, science, medicine, etc. The slightly more subtle forms are even more dangerous because they prevent large masses of people from dealing with a closer model of reality that could allow them to advance, or at least stave off the myriad disasters that result from not dealing with the real world.

When someone says "settled science", "Bush lied, people died", "We won't see Ebola in the US", and a broad range of other simple pronouncements, they are dealing in propaganda -- maybe because they are directly trying to mislead you, maybe because they themselves are under the spell already, or most likely because they have nothing that transcends the very broken and imperfect reality of the real world and DESPERATELY want to believe that "there are experts / power / government / science / ???" that have managed to make this mortal coil into a meaningful and understood reality that they can bank on.

But in their soul, they know it is not so, so they fight those that deal with reality as it is -- messy, largely unknown, meaningless (when taken in only it's own context), unpredictable, capricious, dangerous and totally uncaring.

Paradoxically, nobody can deal with reality as it is without having something that transcends it, so they can achieve enough distance to allow objectivity -- for thousands of years, religion was that mechanism, with various philosophies providing a weak second place, and Christianity being the undisputed ruler as to actually SUCCESSFULLY allowing reality to be managed and often subdued in the service of the transcendent infinite.

In the past few days, more information has been coming out ( http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html) on what was known to widely read conservative readers and readers of this blog for a long time http://bilber99.blogspot.com/2006/06/of-course-iraq-had-wmd.html.

BUT, for propaganda to really fog the brain, it must create a MYTH , which is actually the only way we ever  relate to the world, it has just been given a bad name by the myth-makers on the left scurrying to replace the "myths" of religion, western culture, classical Greece and Rome, science (the ordered universe) with the "models" of today's "sciences" -- humans ONLY operate in the world of model/mythology, as in "a simplified story about the world that is explanatory enough to allow people to operate successfully, but is less than fully "factual" in it's detail".

I deal with computers with a more complete model than "95%+" of the rest of the world because I studied computer science and worked in the field for 30 years which included low level boot operations, assembly language programming and machine language patches. The ESSENCE of successful modern economics is SPECIALIZATION driven by private property and Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. I was able to apply my specialized skill and be paid for it, so 95% of the rest of the world can deal with computers with a MUCH less detailed model (myth).

We all deal with 99.999% of the world at a pretty high level model -- which is all we can do given our limited brains and the overall complexity of the world, but it can trip us up very badly when the models we are presented are architected to be false. The core of the "Bush Lied" statement is the myth (this one based on very very little fact) that W went to war ONLY over "AN ACTIVE WEAPONS PROGRAM" -- the basis of this lie is covered in detail in this article http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352462.php ... essentially we went to war because we KNEW Saddam had WMD, and HE DID ... thousands of rounds of it, not the hundreds that were disclosed. So why didn't the W administration publish this information?

My guess is that the major reason is the same one that caused Reagan to never try to combat the "Reagan sleeps in meetings" myth (he was the boss, if he was tired, he cancels the meeting), or W to combat the "Mission Accomplished" myth (the banner was the ships, not Ws). When the opposition controls 90%+ of the press / education / entertainment storytelling industry and is actively on the job creating their mythology, whatever you say is only going to get people to revisit the media mythology and ignore the facts of the day going forward more than they are already. One of the highest costs of having a party as dominant as TP is that the healthy give and take of real complex information vs one-liner myths is effectively suppressed long before the dominant party reaches total control.

Trying to make the "we told you so" case would not have worked at all for the "50%+" of people that were NOT going to buy that we went to war because we KNEW that Saddam had WMD and we were of course CORRECT -- because he did, everyone in the world knew it because he had used them, and stockpiles of thousands of rounds were and still are being discovered. This is no surprise to those that deal in reality and it is only another cause for myth-making in the case of "news" outlets like the NYTs ... the myth has to be updated a bit to " focus on we ONLY were told that we were going to war because of an ACTIVE WMD program".

People are very unwilling to give up their myths ... to those already in the thrall of "Bush Lied", there are no facts that will change their mind -- not even 100K dead in a US city due to sarin from Saddam's stockpiles, because in their minds, ONLY "active weapons program" sarin would count as having been a reason to invade Iraq!

The current level of media bias, plus the level of public willingness to believe in the "myth of the day" prevents us from taking reasonable actions (like a temporary flight ban) to prevent ebola from killing people in the US, continual tax and spend policies that destroy our economy, and focus on warming that "may happen" in 100 years ... although hasn't happened as predicted in the past 15, rather than energy policies for the present good. The list is much longer -- as we slide to one party rule with a media in lock step, the set of issues over which rational discussion is effectively suppressed becomes ever larger, and our exposure to reality "surprising us" increases proportionally.

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A Nice Simple Diagram of Liberal Inconsistency

The Law of Supply and Demand In One Venn Diagram | Power Line:

Replace "Krugman" with "liberals" and it just about covers it. It is much worse than this picture -- liberals are consistently inconsistent because they believe that they can take all sorts of actions in the real world and somehow pick and choose the results -- often claiming they will achieve the exact opposite result of what their actions are guaranteed to achieve in the real world. Or, they know what they are doing and simply want to create a dependent voter population that will keep them in power.

Thus, on one hand they claim that the ONLY effect of raising the minimum wage will be to help minimum wage workers by giving them more per hour. However, when the price of something is raised (labor), the demand for it WILL go down -- the only question is how much, which economists attempt to answer by "elasticity". Demand for cigarettes was often used as an example when I was taking economics, however there isn't anything that is perfectly inelastic -- it would have to have no substitutes and all consumers would have to have infinite wealth relative to the price of the commodity -- ie. be ABLE to pay whatever the price rose to.

But I digress. The fast food market is quite elastic and there are lots of substitutes -- technology being the obvious one, less people eating more expensive fast food, etc. Raising the minimum wage always reduces the number of people working -- a win-win for Democrats, since both the minimum wage workers and the unemployed tend to vote Democrat. BUT, the fiction given to the public is that raising the minimum wage will not cause more unemployment, when it is a given that it will.

Which as the chart points out, might mean that people that don't understand economics are fooled -- but the flip side means that can't be true. Cap and trade argues that "supply and demand works!" -- that by raising the price of using carbon, the demand for carbon will fall.

So if liberals were reality based, they would say that they are fine with the economy being vastly slowed by taxes and fees on carbon, because they care about warming in 100 years more than they do about jobs, income, etc today.

On the raising the minimum wage they would admit they are fine with a LOT less people having jobs as long as a few can have higher wages.. Or they would admit that they are absolutely fine with the lowering of productivity and national wealth via high taxes on corporate and personal income, because having everyone's standard of living being generally lowered by redistributing income so they are more government dependent is perfectly in line with their strategy to be a one party socialist state!

The left is well on it's way to achieving it's goals -- inconsistency and force are the two cornerstones of leftward thought.
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Income Inequality, Working Poor, Wealthy, The Party

This is a topic that I run into in my personal life, and one which I see articles on that claim to be causes, but are actually effects. "Jobs moved overseas" is a great example -- companies don't move jobs overseas because they somehow "hate American workers", they move them there because American workers have become non-competitive due to policies of the government or decisions that the workers have made.

I suspect this topic will take more than one blog post, and I'll be looking for articles in support, but I'd like to get a start at the big picture framework -- my order or precedence may well change as I move through the topic (sometimes I change my blog posts after they have been posted).

My top level simple summary is that we have vast income inequality and working poor because runaway consumption fueled by debt and orchestrated by politicians seeking to buy votes from an ever larger dependent class creates few winners and many losers. 

Those that provide the consumables, the credit (usually backed and/or aided by the government in one way or another) and orchestrate the politically favored wealth transfers become wealthy, while those that borrow and consume become poor -- so poor that even though they typically have a house, a car, smartphones, flat screen TV, internet, eat out regularly, gamble, etc, they are so cash strapped that they have to resort to payday loans, food pantries, etc to cover the most basic of needs at times.

They are marketed and sold a lifestyle that they are supposed to be "entitled to", taught nothing of delayed gratification and thrift, then further lied to with assurances that their problems are due to "the wealthy", "the 1%", etc. and will be "solved" by some version of government transfer payments.

That is the simple sound-bite answer, now for a tiny bit more depth on specifically how we got here.

1. The Consumer Society -- During the latter half of the 20th century, America became a country based on CONSUMPTION. There are lots of things a country can be focused on -- excellence, personal responsibility, independence, learning, beauty, cleanliness, godliness, future generations, thrift, competitiveness ... the list is endless, but the US managed to make a very clear choice, and with the advent of radio, TV and finally the internet, this choice became so ubiquitous that most Americans are like fish in water relative to it -- not aware they are wet. We used to be a nation of fiercely independent hard workers with pride in quality output, now we are a nation of "consumers".
   
   Entertainment is part of that consumption. Americans have next to zero attention span these days, which makes any sort of understanding of any issue by any significant number of them to be nearly impossible. The vast bulk of people have arrived at the state where life involves constant entertainment -- sports, music, TV, web surfing, smart phones, etc, all of which is laced with sophisticated advertising telling them to buy, buy, buy. "Work" if they do it, is a nasty necessity where many of them want to stay plugged in to at least music, if not continued web surfing or other distractions while they bide their time at a job that they see as a "necessary evil". Working is seen as an obstacle to constant entertainment and consumption.
   
   Our nation is focused on a vicious cycle of advertising laced entertainment encouraging more buying that consumes more of the life of the "consumer" -- Americans have largely been converted to 24x7 consuming devices rather than people.


2. Credit -- Shakespeare says "Neither a borrower or a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry". America is sad proof of that maxim, and our knowledge of "husbandry", or wise use of resources, is so dull as to be non-existent. Not only have we been told to consume, consume, consume, but the primary means for that consumption is borrow, borrow, borrow -- as individuals and as a nation we are awash in debt and show no signs of any ability to extricate ourselves.
   
   Indeed, given the consumptive base of the economy, it is hard for most to even visualize an alternative. Mortgage, auto, consumer debt always flirt with new all-time highs, and Americans borrowing and spending more is considered "good news". Local, state and federal government run up ever more massive debt in numbers too big to even really fathom -- hundreds of billions a year, trillions a year, 17 trillion in debt, 60 trillion in unfunded liabilities for FICA, Medicare, and now BOcare. The total red ink hemorrhages to levels where it makes us sick to even consider it -- so we don't, and "nobody can explain" why we have "income inequality" and "working poor".
   
   The most basic reason is because the folks providing the consumables and the credit to the "consumers" build wealth,  while the consumers get "stuff" (soon worthless) and debt. Anyone who consumes all they make are effectively "the working poor", those that consume MORE than they make (debt) are even poorer. No matter how high the income, they are a paycheck away from financial disaster, and no matter how big their home, shiny their car, large their TV, etc, they are actually poor. The typical dual income "good job" US family is a microcosm  of how our government operates -- over extended with ever ballooning payments due.
   
   
3. Government -- The big daddy in all this is bloated government at all levels. Government is an EXPENSE. It produces nothing on it's own, and right now the layers of government in the US are taking something around 40% of our GDP and rising. Most of our population has consumed itself into being working poor, and the government that is somehow supposed to "fix this" is poor as well.
   
   Ah you say, the government is the "only friend of the average American". Well, yes if you consider the pimp, the pusher and the loan shark to be "friends" of those that believe themselves in "need"  of those services. In fact, when I was watching TV as a child in the '60s Dragnet, Streets of San Francisco and such often arrested guys "running the numbers" -- today, the states "run the numbers" in lotteries as one more way to fleece their citizens.
   
   The primary business of government in the US today is the transfer of payments from the pockets of one set of people (mostly the young) to another set of people (mostly the old) -- entitlements are 75%+ of current US government "spending" -- which is essentially calling what Jessie James and Billy the Kid did "spending" rather than stealing. Stealing is taking money from one person by force and allowing another person to decide what to do with it. The purpose of government transfers is to buy votes for the ruling party (TP "The Party, Democrat), so the allocation of the funds is random to completely adverse to actual productivity. Productivity which would build capital, lower prices and provide the hope of an actually better future is replaced by an economy of buying more power for TP.
   
   The price of everything purchased is increased by government -- regulations, fees, taxes, licenses, permits ... each is a cost and each is added to the cost of the product. One of the larger lies of government is the constant direct or indirect promise of a "free lunch" -- as in raising the minimum wage. When the wage is increased, the price of the product goes up, labor is reduced by automation or less service, or the production moves offshore ... most likely some combination of all three.
   
   What about the businessman making less profit? Very unlikely -- most small businesses are largely based on the idea of building up equity in a going concern. The dream that they can work hard, not take much income out, plow profits back into improving the business and build a better future. Government is certainly fine with killing that dream and putting another entrepreneur out of business ('you didn't build that"), but for those that had the gumption to go into business in the first place, it is a hard dream to kill -- they will try to raise the prices or increase efficiency.
   
   It works no better for the large business. Increase the cost of production in the US, tax profit, etc and first the jobs leave the US, and eventually the entire business (see Burger King moving to Canada, Medtronic and many others). The government policies make the US a poor place to invest, so the business goes elsewhere and the US has less jobs. Another win for TP since DEPENDENCE ON GOVERNMENT is what the TP agenda is all about!
   
    Prior to FDR, a common view of financial life for a person in the US was "work hard, spend less than you make, and invest the difference in something that goes up in value". Such a view is likely to create largely successful people and a largely successful nation over time, which makes it a hated view for TP.  TP grows in power by the creation of ever more dependence and resentment in a greater and greater percentage of the population. That is their bread and butter in building their majority and power.
   
   Replacing "work hard, control spending and invest wisely" with "join a union, spend everything you make, and the government will take care of you when you are old" was and is the core brilliance of TP in gaining power. As unions and government priced the American worker out of the world market with ever higher wages, more benefits and more restrictive work rules, TP faced a challenge. Their solution has been brilliant -- ever increasing unemployment benefits, re-training payments, "disability" payments and out and out income support for less and less output (Earned Income Credit). Over 50% of our population is now receiving a government payment of one sort or another -- the TP voting bloc is ever more secure.

I see those three legs of the stool of dependence, debt, poverty and eventual economic collapse as being the main aspects that need to be understood in approximately that order -- one could argue that government is #1, and that 1 and 2 are EFFECTS of the designs of TP as well, I'm not really that concerned about the order, because all three legs have to be basically repudiated for the nation to move forward, and they are all very much linked ... and largely unknown to the average constantly entertained "consumer", more and more afraid and "bitterly clinging" to the supposed safety promised by their keepers -- TP, and it's wealthy elite. 

Who and where are "the wealthy" in all of this? The favorite bogymen of TP? In general, they are quite happy members of TP -- unless you are a VERY brave wealthy person, you nearly have to be lest the IRS, Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, one of the myriad of anti-discrimination agencies, or some other in the alphabet soup of TP enforcers takes you down -- HARD! So the Gates, Buffets, lawyers, finance and entertainment types play the TP game -- let "the marks", the consumer debtors believe that TP is somehow "hard on the rich" if it makes them feel better. There are only 1% of them anyway ... they have control of education, the media and largely the political discourse except for FOX news, talk radio and some renegade bloggers, so it is very easy to control the story line that the typical low information voter is indoctrinated with.

The way out of this morass is simple, however the hole that has been dug is massive. As individuals and as a nation we need to work hard, consume less than we make and invest the difference in things that go up in value. At a basic level, I believe we all know this -- it is one of the reasons that the constant distraction of the media machine is so critical to the continued power of TP.

TP and it's supporters will naturally scream "well, EVERYONE CAN'T do this" ... Indeed. Much as the old joke of the two folks facing a bear when one guy starts putting on tennis shoes. The other says "You don't really think you can outrun that bear do you?" The guy with the tennis shoes says "I don't have to outrun the bear, only you!"

How cruel you say. Indeed, it is a joke of course, but the message is that winners and losers are inevitable. Right now TP and the 1% are the ever increasing winners and the 99% are being eaten by the bear. Break the stranglehold of TP, consumption and debt, and something like 80-90% of the population and the nation as a whole become far wealthier, the future begins to look like prospects of ever increasing wealth, and the US becomes ever more competitive against "the bears" on the world stage. The BIG loser is TP and the current 1% -- who will be replaced by a different set of 1, 10, 20, 30%ers with far more wealth than the current concentration enjoys.

Ah, but what about "the bottom"? As Jesus said "the poor will always be with us", BUT, rather than 40, 50% and much more of the population living from hand to mouth and demanding help from TP and it's minions, 10 or 20% will still be at food pantries and needing support -- there will just be a lot more REAL resources (not borrowed) to provide them with true basics -- not continued consumption and dulling mindless entertainment to be "consumed".

Much like what it used to mean to "grow up", being an adult in a non-TP America would mean focusing on responsibilities vs "rights".  We have lost our way, but the way out is actually far more meaningful and conducive to human happiness and growth than the false narrative that has been sold to most of us by TP in it's drive to destroy the fabric of America to be replaced with their own raw power. 

How Leftists Fly

GOP Crocodile Tears Over Jobs | RealClearPolitics:

Since natural laws don't apply on the left, they simply grab their bootstraps and pull ... and then they fly! If you don't believe they fly, you are obviously a "denier" and should perhaps have your taxes audited!

See, the Republicans are complaining that the CBO says that raising the minimum wage will cost 500K jobs. They believe in the old time economics where each person employed has to bring in enough money to cover their wages, government mandated taxes, possible government mandated benefits or fines like BOcare, PLUS add enough profit to the bottom line to make it worthwhile to hire them.

In the modern Democrat universe however that is "foolish". Even though we have been following their policies since '09, and really '07 when they took over congress, we have 8 million LESS people employed than we did in '07!!!

But here is how they propose to "improve the economy" via the bootstraps from here:

The first thing to do is extend the long-term unemployment benefits that expired at the end of last year. According to the CBO -- whose word, apparently, is now holy writ among Republicans -- this simple measure would add 200,000 jobs, perhaps as many as 300,000. 

Then ... 

The CBO has estimated that canceling the across-the-board reductions in federal spending known as "sequestration" would preserve 900,000 jobs a year. 

and top it all off ...

That gives us more than 1 million jobs to replace the 500,000 lost from hiking the minimum wage. But Republicans wouldn't want to stop there. To maximize employment, putting as many people to work as possible, the GOP should obviously begin designing a new economic stimulus package, much like the stimulus Obama convinced Congress to approve five years ago. 

According to the CBO, the $800 billion stimulus -- much maligned by Republicans as a waste of money -- created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs per year from 2009 through 2012. Now that most of the money is spent and the impact of the stimulus is waning, clearly it's time to give job-creation another boost.

Got that??? We have EIGHT MILLION LESS people employed than we did at the top of the last cycle, with millions more americans in the workforce, at least partially due to the policies that Democrats think are "helpful", and the way to get more jobs is to just spend more and more government money! You CAN fly by pulling on your bootstraps!! 

If only Democrats would become so convinced of their wisdom that they would jump off a cliff tugging on their bootstraps one by one until somebody had a "learning moment"!

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Liberty, Mills, and Lying to Ourselves

Three Cheers for the Nanny State - NYTimes.com:

Reading this article reminded me of the old "Everything I say is a lie" ... "I'm lying". Wrestle with that for awhile if you choose, but the lady that wrote this ought to pay more attention. If everything I say is a lie, then me telling you "that was a lie"... but if that is a lie, then ...

"We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty, and, barring natural disasters, we’ll end up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision, one that makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it’s false."

"WE have a vision of ourselves" ... well, some of us do. Primarily the folks that are like the lady writing the article. True Christians certainly don't have that vision -- they believe that both their heart and their reason are extremely self oriented and deceitful.

But those cheering for the Nanny State certainly DO believe that THEY, and the "proper authorities" have that vision and it is CORRECT! John Stewart Mill, Augustine, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, etc were all wrong, but the Statists are RIGHT! It is amazing how "refined" the human species has become in just a few thousand years. It must be because ONLY the "liberals" have gotten smarter through "natural selection", and the poor folks that don't see their brilliance have been "left behind".

Mill was wrong about that, though. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.

Yup, Mill was wrong ... err, actually, maybe MOST people have a terrible idea of "how to get there", but if you allow liberty, SOME will figure out ways that work, and they may well be REWARDED because MOST were wrong, but since ALL had liberty, SOME figured out things that worked! In biology it is called "evolution" ... make a lot of tries and the ones that work WIN! 

The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. It’s not quite the simple ignorance Mill was talking about, but it turns out that our minds are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the guy about to step through the hole in the bridge, we need help.

Yup, that is A "crucial point" ... in fact the STANDARD "progressive" problem in almost all situations is confusing ends with means and failing to get the means right, then not realizing it and running everything into the ditch. Eventually, they are so pissed and disgusted, they start killing people that disagree with them because they MUST be right!!!!

Of course, what people fear is that this is just the beginning: today it’s soda, tomorrow it’s the guy standing behind you making you eat your broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch “PBS NewsHour” every day. What this ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis: if it’s too painful, it’s not a good law.  Making these analyses is something the government has the resources to do, just as now it sets automobile construction standards while considering both the need for affordability and the desire for safety

See, "The Government" ... you know, the folks that brought us BOcare, the TSA, the NSA, the Vietnam war, 17 trillion in debt, etc, etc, ... THEY ... THOSE PEOPLE, they are the ones that "have the resources"! Why? Well maybe because money stolen from some people buys "real smarts" ... or maybe giving a lot of people cushy but insanely boring  bureaucratic jobs somehow makes them "more qualified" than normal humans. Mill was clearly an idiot to think that what we needed was "a lot of attempts", and some mechanism that gave us feedback as to what worked.

I'm  an idiot ... I have doubts. I actually did like the book by Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, "Thinking Fast and Slow", but next to John Stuart Mill, they are about as profound as Reverend Moon next to Jesus. YES!!!! We have A LOT of "cognitive biases" ... and even WORSE problems ... we are mortal  human sinners!!!  The really sad part of it is that knowing that is like a guy whose parachute won't open in free fall -- he is totally understanding of his condition, but he is completely helpless to help himself. 

If he is in that situation because he and 100 other people fell out of a jet, the the author of the column would be the one proudly yelling, "Hey, you are all in free fall, and I have figured that out!!!!" 

Only since the real world lasts longer than free fall even from a jet, she wants to pass laws requiring that we all flap our arms!!



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Worshiping Entropy

Capitalism vs. Democracy - NYTimes.com:

As BO calls "inequality" the "defining problem of our time", and a new book has lefties nearly panting about the evils of "Capitalism", it seems time to take our eyes off our navels and glance around at a bit larger picture.

There are two primary forces in the universe. First -- creation, innovation, order, light, energy, LIFE, growth, existence, truth, purpose, Love. We Christians (and many others) give these the ultimate name of GOD.

The other primary force is called destruction, stasis, chaos, darkness, entropy, DEATH, decline, oblivion, lies, meaninglessness, hatred. The lord of these is sometimes known as "Satan".

Science has named these the 2nd law of thermodynamics - "the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy."

Humans always worship. For thousands of years we had "many gods", St Augustine in City of God spends a LONG time discussing the vast number of Roman and Greek Gods, and why only worshiping one God in through the person of Christ Jesus is far superior. "City of God" is one of the foundational works of Western Civilization, but today few even know of it. We have lost our moorings, but our basic nature is unchanged.

We DO "worship", but we currently often call it something else "belief, political ideology, opinion, science, etc".

Those that worship the first force believe that SOMETHING (God to me, maybe "the great random accident to you") defied "the not" and not only set in motion, but in some way sustains growth of which LIFE is just one aspect. GOD is the ultimate inequality, being supremely unequal to all else, but his power engenders infinite diversity of energy, intelligence, types, classes, and dimensions so great that the human mind can't approach imagining it all.

However, if you worship entropy, actual diversity with a difference is one of your most horrible enemies. You believe in a return to some sort of eternal sameness. Nullification, the end, death, meaninglessness become your goals. You strive to turn truth and light to "50" or ideally THOUSANDS of shades of gray, eventually arriving at total darkness. Very "fair", and very "peaceful", just like a tomb should be.

At the point of maximum entropy, all is equal, all is undifferentiated, all is at "peace". A very simple and easy to understand peace of negation,  as opposed to Gods Peace "the peace that passes all understanding", the peace of eternal life, light and bliss.

Democracy itself is a mechanism and an idea that says "everyone is the same", so it is therefore nihilistic in nature. Our nation was founded as a Democratic Republic in an attempt to prevent the corrosive effects of pure democracy, but like all corrosives, we continue to slide to "pure democracy" or "mob rule", one of the worst of the tyrannies.

Capitalism is much more like gravity than it is like democracy. Newton didn't invent gravity, he "discovered" it or more exactly, explained how it operates. Likewise, Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism, he just told us some things about how it works. Essentially, it is just competition -- which will go on by one means or another no matter what sort of system one attempts to set up. Set up a socialist system and the unions and other special interests compete to gain larger portions of the economic pie by the mechanisms of socialism.

Capitalism ... as in people exchanging goods and services in a competitive way to try to "get ahead" is going to go on. It can be somewhat "controlled", but not to the extent that democracy can. Democracy can be entirely cancelled, and has been many times in history ... though typically not by capitalism.

What is REALLY interesting in the article is the chart. I have no idea if it is factual or fanciful, but it gives one pause. For 1800 years capital returns 4.5-5%, then it's return plummets to 1% by 1913, then slowly starts to rise back to it's historic mean. Productivity meanwhile rises at an increasing rate for 1800 years, then flattens at the same time capital falls, then jumps for a mere 50ish years until being projected to fall back to 1820 levels by 2050.

Capitalism didn't show up in 1820, but the rise of increasingly bureaucratic governments, fiat currency, unions and other methods for large groups of people to increasingly vote themselves benefits from those more powerful governments did show up and grow on roughly that timetable.

So "who's zoomin who?"  Have we seen a giant increase in the power of "capitalists" in the past 100 years? or of large bureaucratic state governments, fiat currency, taxation, regulation and massive public debt?


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