Plus ça change

Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas (Times Online)

Wage gap

Every Feminist’s Nightmare? by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In The Politics of American Feminism (pp. 128–129) Professor Bennett paraphrases more than twenty reasons why men earn more than women, as discussed and documented in great detail in Why Men Earn More. Cumulatively, they go a long way towards explaining the "wage gap," although neither Bennett nor Farrell believes that wage discrimination by gender is completely nonexistent. The reasons, based on generalizations that are supported by voluminous statistics, are:

• Men go into technology and hard sciences more than women.
  
• Men are more likely to take hazardous jobs than women, and such jobs pay more than cushier and safer jobs.
  
• Men are more willing to expose themselves to inclement weather at work, and are compensated for it ("compensating differences" in the language of economics).
  
• Men tend to take more stressful jobs that are not "nine-to-five."
  Many women prefer personal fulfillment at work (child care professional, for example) to higher pay.
  
• Men are bigger risk takers than women, in general. Higher risk leads to higher reward.
  
• The worst working hours pay more, and men are more likely to work these hours than women.
  
• Dangerous jobs (coal mining) pay more and are more male dominated.
  
• Men tend to "update" their work qualifications more than women do.
  
• Men are more likely to work longer hours, and the pay gap widens for every hour past 40 per week.
  
• Women are more likely to have "gaps" in their careers, primarily because of child rearing and child care. Less experience means lower pay.
  
• Women are nine times more likely than men to drop out of work for "family reasons." Less seniority leads to lower pay.
  
• Men work more weeks per year than women.
  
• Men have half the absenteeism rate of women.
  
• Men are more willing to commute long distances to work.
  
• Men are more willing to relocate to undesirable locations for higher-paying jobs.
  
• Men are more willing to take jobs that require extensive travel.
  
• In the corporate world men are more likely to choose higher-paying fields such as finance and sales, whereas women are more prevalent in lower-paying fields such as human resources and public relations.
  
• When men and women have the same job title, male responsibilities tend to be greater.
  
• Men are more likely to work by commission; women are more likely to seek job security. The former has more earning potential.
  
• Women place greater value on flexibility, a humane work environment, and having time for children and family than men do.

Democracy, unlimited government at work

Chávez gana el referéndum que le permite la reelección indefinida (La Vanguardia):

Hugo Chávez podrá perpetuarse en el poder. Había redoblado la apuesta sin escatimar recursos y la ganó. Logró allanar el camino hacia su reelección indefinida al aprobarse la enmienda de tres artículos de la Constitución. El presidente venezolano ganó el referéndum con amplio margen que le permitirá en 2013 volver a ser candidato por otros seis años. En el primer boletín del Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), con el 94 por ciento de las actas escrutadas, el sí a la reforma constitucional obtuvo el 54, 36% de los votos, mientras que el no que propugnaba la oposición obtuvo un porcentaje de 45,63%.

A parable: The Nation That Lost Its Jobs, But Got Them Back

The Nation That Lost Its Jobs, But Got Them Back by Gene Callahan:

Once upon a time, there were two hippies, Jerry and Sarah. Tired of the rat race of modern life, they found a deserted valley in a remote region of the world. They moved there, with their four children. They declared that the area was now the independent kingdom of Lost Valley and seceded from the surrounding nation. Amazingly, it let them go.

....

thoughtcrime map

Map of anti-gay donors in EuroSoc:

This is a Google Maps mash-up giving the name, profession and employer of San Francisco residents who contributed to the campaign to ban gay marriage in the state of California.

class struggle

Savers Are Britain’s New Underclass (Spectator):

The financial crisis, it would be easy to assume, ought to be springtime for revolutionary socialists. Instead, it has opened up a new crack in society. The real social and political battle in Britain is no longer between rich and poor, between flat cap and top hat; it is between financial roundheads and financial cavaliers. In the former camp we have savers, homeowners who have foregone holidays to reduce their mortgages, conservative businessmen, people who rent because they were unable or unwilling to borrow large sums at the height of the property boom. In the latter camp we have overmortgaged homeowners, buy-to-let investors, bankers who still have a job, estate agents, most large retailers, property developers and, it would seem, the Socialist Worker.

The Insolvency of the Fed

The Insolvency of the Fed

Since the crisis broke out, the Fed has continuously weakened the quality of the dollar by weakening its balance sheet. In fact, the assets the Federal Reserve holds have deteriorated tremendously. These assets back the liability side of the balance sheet, which mainly represents the monetary base of the dollar. The assets of the Fed, thereby, hold up the value of the dollar. At the end of the day, it is these assets that the Fed can use to defend the dollar's value externally and internally.

the quality of the balance sheet of the Fed is deteriorating

clearning up the house

Banks Should Raise Prices in a Recession (Bob Murphy)

After working on these issues for my book, it suddenly became obvious to me: the high rates of the 1920–1921 depression had certainly been painful, but they had cleaned the rot out of the structure of production very thoroughly. The US money supply and prices had roughly doubled during World War I, and the record-high discount rate starting in June 1920 was a pressure washer on the malinvestments that had festered during the war boom.

Going into 1923, the capital structure in the United States was a lean, mean, producing machine. In conjunction with Andrew Mellon's incredible tax cuts, the Roaring Twenties were arguably the most prosperous period in American history. It wasn't merely that the average person got richer. No, his life changed in the 1920s. Many families acquired electricity and cars for the first time during this decade.

Stimulus will mean inflation

Why 'Stimulus' Will Mean Inflation (WSJ):

Inflation is the product of the demand for money as well as of the supply. And if the Fed finances federal deficits in a moribund economy, it can create more money than the economy can use. The result is "stagflation," a term coined to describe the 1970s experience. As the global economy slows and Congress relies more on the Fed to finance a huge deficit, there is a very real danger of a return of stagflation. I wonder why no one in Congress or the Obama administration has thought of that as a potential consequence of their stimulus package.

How Government Prolonged the Depression

How Government Prolonged the Depression (WSJ):

The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.

So what stopped a blockbuster recovery from ever starting? The New Deal. .... New Deal policies .... violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

Climate Orthodoxy dynamics

From Climatic Heresy: 3 (BoingBoing):



Climatic Heresy: 1 | Climatic Heresy: 2 | Climatic Heresy: 3

buy American, destroy jobs

"Buy American" plan could cost U.S. jobs: study

"Buy American" provisions under consideration in Congress as part of a huge economic stimulus bill could create only 1,000 new steel industry jobs and might cost as many as 65,000 across a number of sectors, a new study said on Tuesday.

chilling davos

Czech president attacks Al Gore's climate campaign (Reuters):

.... "I'm very sorry that some people like Al Gore are not ready to listen to the competing theories. I do listen to them.

"Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. Al Gore is an important person in this movement."

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, he said that he was more worried about the reaction to the perceived dangers than the consequences.

"I'm afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world," he said.

"I'm more afraid of the consequences of the crisis than the crisis itself."

monetary inflation hockey stick

From GaryNorth.com

The Inconvenient Debt

Glenn Beck: The Inconvenient Debt: A Detailed Look at the Latest Monetary Base Figures

tradewarmongering

Out of Gaps In Treaties, First Salvos Of Trade War:

In 1930, Congress fired the first shot in a protectionist battle that prolonged and deepened the Great Depression. After passing a bill aimed at saving American jobs by effectively barring 20,000 imported goods, including French dresses and Argentine butter, other nations retaliated by raising their own barriers on U.S. products, effectively bringing global commerce to a halt.

[Now] In the United States, a move to greatly expand Buy American provisions as part of the $819 billion fiscal stimulus package has generated shock waves in other countries, with Canadian and European officials in particular rising up in protest. The provision, passed by the House on Wednesday, would mostly bar foreign steel and iron from the infrastructure projects laid out in the stimulus package. A Senate version still being considered goes further, requiring, with few exceptions, that all stimulus-funded projects use only American-made equipment and goods.

Now more than never Hazlitt is meaningful:

The effect of a tariff, therefore, is to change the structure of American production. It changes the number of occupations, the kind of occupations, and the relative size of one industry as compared with another. It makes the industries in which we are comparatively inefficient larger, and the industries in which we are comparatively efficient smaller. Its net effect, therefore, is to reduce American efficiency, as well as to reduce efficiency in the countries with which we would otherwise have traded more largely.

criminal

Following the post UN Human Rights Council,

1948 to 2008: The State of Human Rights at the United Nations (UN Watch):

The council is dominated today by an alliance of repressive regimes, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, that has acted systematically to undermine and erode core principles and effective mechanisms created by the generation of Eleanor Roosevelt and those that followed.

Banned UN Speech: Human Rights Nightmare (by Hillel Neuer)

Faced with compelling reports from around the world of torture, persecution, and violence against women, what has the Council pronounced, and what has it decided?

Nothing. Its response has been silence. Its response has been indifference. Its response has been criminal.

[AA] it doesn't stop here: Gadhafi's son creating Mideast human-rights body

---

[AA] Bottomline:
- the world at large is run by governments which fall short of upholding basic human rights
- Ben Franklin once said "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."
- democratic international institutions will inevitably empower the wolves that want to guard the sheep

Turning the Economy over to Politicians

Turning the Economy over to Politicians (David Boaz):

...Even if regulators are as smart as Leonardo da Vinci and as incorruptible as Mother Teresa, they can never have as much knowledge as the decentralized, competitive market process, so planned economies and planned industries fall further and further behind free-market systems.
But in reality, even if they're smart, they're not incorruptible. Political influence always comes into play. What we're seeing with the bailout funds will also happen with the stimulus money.

Government planners claim to be able to aggregate all the available information and make informed decisions for the whole society. But market economies clearly produce far more economic growth than planned economies. It isn't just the United States versus the Soviet Union or East Germany versus West Germany. Consider the customer service and technological advances you get from FedEx versus the post office, or Microsoft and Apple versus the DMV.

If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then the stimulus bill may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we're taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers. That's not a recipe for recovery.

the greatest scam in history

The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam from John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel:

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government to punish the citizens for living the good life that fossil fuels provide for us?

Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation's bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

Some Basic Economics of Public Policy

Some Basic Economics of Public Policy by Peter Boettke:

.... a lot of individuals have been claiming that economics as a scientific discipline has been rocked by our current crisis, both due to our failure to "predict" it and our inability to "fix" it with a consensus on the right public policy. And anyone not deeply read in the history of our discipline, or who received their university education in economics in the second half of the 20th century can be excused for such a reading of the situation ....

But what if the problems are not the dead ideologies, but instead a live political pragmaticism that has forgotten the basic ideology that made possible the great growth of the wealth of nations and provides the foundation for Western civilization? Namely, private property (as Hume put it: a system of property, contract and consent), freedom of trade, and social cooperation under an international division of labor. Government rather than unleashed must be constrained; and constrained in such a binding way that it is not possible for elected officials to pursue the natural proclivities to provide privileges to political favorites (concentrating benefits and dispersing costs).