Congratulations, AGDers

Thanks to the Mises economics blog, more than 800 people took the final exam, but the following list is comprised of the 55 individuals who were more or less engaged in the study and passed the final with a score of 18 or better. The first six individuals listed scored a perfect 25/25 and may henceforth claim their status as Grand AGDers. Well done, everyone!

Zeno
jSinSaTx
David
NaSultainne
cyn.ical
Drifter
Euthyphro
Sarah
Don Corleone
Rantor
Sgt Gideon's Dad
Ann CScdn$
JK
Something Feral
Rusty
DL Carrol
Scott
HG
Roundtine
Salt
Anthony
Dallas
A Wiser Man Than I
Ian
Phil Mann
Scott G
Cunning Dove
Reader
Triton
Richard
Dr. J
jimmcopp
10S
lloyd
gene L
Lurker
DanG
druidhouse
freestater
Markku
Phi
Skimmed It
Elusive Wapiti
RustyO
Hugh Jazz
Jack
NotSure
Bikerdad
Brad
RL
ROC
Mike
Amiga
Giraffe
Allen

And of course, Guest. If you took your test as Guest, that's absolutely fine, but that's also how your accomplishment will be recognized on the blog. I think it was a very successful study, overall, although I wasn't nearly as involved in the discussions as I should have been. Unfortunately, I've been a bit busy of late. I think I may have come up with a solution for that in the next study, which will begin sometime in March, but we'll have to see. Please note that I still intend to delineate some of my specific differences with the points Rothbard made in AGD in a future post.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the Voxiversity has officially gotten out of control. I recently received word from a reliable source that one of our intrepid AGDers actually convinced his wife to give their new boy the middle name "Rothbard".

Comments ()

An Austrian perspective on IP

The Mises economics blog views intellectual property as a modern form of mercantilism:

It was thought in the middle ages that most all products required monopoly production. The salt producer would enter into an agreement with the ruler. The ruler would promises a monopoly in exchange for a share of the revenue. It was thought that this would guarantee access to a valuable commodity. How can anyone make a buck without a guarantee that his hard work would be compensated?

Well, it took time but eventually people realized that competition and markets actually do provide, as implausible as it may seem. As the centuries moved on, markets became ever freer, and we no longer believe that the king must confer a special status on any producer. They still do it, of course, but mostly for open reasons of political patronage.

And yet in this one area of "intellectual property," all the old mercantilist myths survive. People still believe that a state grant of monopoly privilege is necessary for the market to work.

To me, the most damning point about the wrongness of intellectual property is the fact that the quality of literary and theatrical output was much higher prior to the IP era. I think Jeffrey Tucker is correct to point to historical monopolies as a means of clarifying the relevant issues, as government-protected intellectual property markets show much the same defects that monopoly theory would cause one to expect to see in any commodity market in which legal monopolies were granted.

Comments ()

Let's pretend

The reason for the recent rally:

The Dow is heading up, and it's not because Senatorial opposition to the stimulus is weakening. It started with the news yesterday that the Administration is on the verge of getting one huge thing right and will announce a suspension of certain mark-to-market rules on Monday. This will instantly reduce the risk for financial firms with bad assets on their books from future paper losses that could adversely affect their regulatory solvency.

So, if the financial authorities agree to pretend that the assets held by financial firms are worth more today than anyone is actually willing to pay for them because at some point in the distant future they are expected to be worth more, then investors can pretend that equities across the board are worth more today as well. Taking this logic further, if we all agree to pretend that half the people who aren't working are actually employed, then the market should absolutely skyrocket!

I'm feeling more confident already. The animal spirits are unleashed. Make way for the Great Bull of 2009!

UPDATE - I don't know about you, but I am feeling downright stimulated: Amid stunning new job losses and yet another bank failure, key senators and the White House reached tentative agreement Friday night on an economic stimulus measure at the heart of President Barack Obama's recovery plan. Two officials said the emerging agreement was for a bill with a $780 billion price tag, but there was no immediate confirmation.

Comments ()

A lesson in productivity

The obvious economic consequences of this labor trend appear to escape this NYT writer:

With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history. The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.

The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

Here's another interesting fact. Those disappearing male jobs in manufacturing and construction tend to produce wealth. Jobs in education and health care are less sensitive to economic ups and downs for the simple reason that they are de facto government jobs, which produce no wealth. If you get sick and I work very hard to get you back on your feet, nothing new has been produced. We're just back at the status quo we were at before you fell ill. Health care is a great thing, but it is a net wealth consumer, not a wealth producer, as the budget of California should suffice to show. And the panoply of Womyn's Studies and Art History majors, to say nothing of the high school graduates who can't pass a simple history exam, demonstrate the worthlessness of most modern American education.

But the trend does suggest a plausible answer to the question that John Derbyshire once posed. What follows in the sequence Farm - Factory - Office? Hunter-gatherer! The economic model of women engaged in economically non-productive labor while men sit around and do nothing is not exactly a new one. I believe it's quite popular in Africa, as a matter of fact.

Comments ()

Compensation caps work

The insanely greedy behavior of UK bankers demonstrates that capping executive compensation will keep companies off the government dole:

Banks dependent on taxpayer support are planning to rush out hundreds of millions of pounds in bonuses to senior bankers and traders before a threatened crackdown. As ministers prepared to curb excessive remuneration, it emerged that Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group were poised to follow Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) by paying bonuses within weeks.

None of this is going to help bring about economic recovery, I'd just as soon see the banks allowed to fail and their overpaid executives sent to the People's Republic of China where they could assemble children's toys. They'd certainly do far less damage in the future that way.

Comments ()

Government competence

Remember, the people who struck this deal are largely the same folks upon whom the salvation of 500 million jobs per month is depending:

A government watchdog group says the federal government overpaid for stocks and other assets from financial institutions under its $700 billion rescue program. The chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds told the Senate Banking committee Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion.

Well, at least we know where that 18.4 billion in bank bonuses came from.

Comments ()

Karaoke challenge

The Responsible Puppet throws down the gauntlet:

List the song or songs that you would perform best in a karaoke situation. Note: The songs should be somewhat mainstream.

Extra points for:

- A list of more than one song.

- Songs that you are a bit embarrassed to know that well, or that might surprise others.

- Mentioning how much preparation you would require (i.e – Would require a half an hour to learn the notes/word, would require no time, but you would need the lyrics in front of you, would require no time and you would not need the lyrics.)

With the caveat that I'm not exactly up on most popular music from any era except perhaps the mid-1980s, my list, for which I would not need the lyrics, is as follows:

1. Fuck Her Gently - Tenacious D. I can't stand campfire guitar music, so I learned all the lyrics to this just in case I ever found myself trapped in another Bible study singalong situation. Also, it's beyond awesome.

2. Down with the Sickness - Disturbed. This is the only one I've actually sung at a karaoke bar. It brought down a house quite obviously more accustomed to serious karaoke practitioners singing Whitney Houston and Dan Fogelberg. Okay, perhaps "left it wide-eyed and shell-shocked" might be a better description. The White Buffalo and Big Chilly can testify; they were there.

3. Orpheus - David Sylvian. One of my all-time favorite songs, although there are two low notes that I'd have to be a bit lucky to hit properly.

4. The Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler. I'm totally kidding. I'm not really sure what song this is, as I tend to confuse it with that "turn around bright eyes" one. Assuming, of course, that they are different songs. They are, aren't they? Actually this.

5. Save a Prayer - Duran Duran. I sang this one at a concert a long, long time ago. It went down rather well, especially with the young ladies, but then, as you can see, I did have that sweet Nick Rhodes hair going at the time.

Comments ()

A primer on state capitalism

This is an excellent post on political economy that is well worth reading, even if "corporatism" or "faux-financialism" might be more accurate terms for the collapsing system of "state capitalism" it describes.

The current state and the current banking sector require one another; neither can exist without the other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.... It is therefore no surprise that the loudest advocates for the effective nationalization of the finance industry are to be found on Wall Street; at this point, failing financiers welcome any government actions that will socialize their risks. But such actions that socialize "losses while keeping the profits in private hands" are a hallmark of fascist and neofascist economies. They are just another manifestation of "Horwitz's First Law of Political Economy": "no one hates capitalism more than capitalists."

The extent to which belief in this fraudulent form of "capitalism" spreads can be seen in the way that some "conservatives" can be seen on Fox and other networks complaining about the incipient executive compensation caps, as if there is anything at all free market about the government-created, government-regulated, government-funded entities that will be affected by the regulation.

The caps are a minor issue, of course. The much larger problem is the fact that the entire infrastructure built around central finance and debt-back money is inherently flawed and looking increasingly likely to collapse. History will show that it wasn't ultimately any more sustainable than Soviet Communism, to name one failed political economy of similar duration.

Comments ()

Homeschool or die

Sometimes, the choice is literal:

A 10-year-old boy died after he was found hanging from a hook in a bathroom at his suburban Chicago school, and his mother said Wednesday that school officials haven't given her an explanation for what they described as an accident. Aquan Lewis, a fifth-grader at Oakton Elementary, was found unresponsive and hanging from a hook in a bathroom at about 3 p.m. Tuesday. He was pronounced dead Wednesday morning at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

The fact that the school and the police are playing coy suggests that the boy's death, while unintentional, was probably caused by the actions of one or more of his fellow students.

Comments ()

Jail the police

The problem isn't that the police occasionally make mistakes. The problem is that the police are insulated from every being held responsible for those mistakes no matter how egregious they are:

At the end of a New Year's Eve traffic stop on Interstate 94 in St. Paul, State Patrol Sgt. Carrie Rindal rammed Salter's 2001 Toyota Sienna van, causing $1,500 damage to his vehicle, and arrested him at gunpoint while his three children, ages 2, 3 and 6, sat in the van. His wife had to pick up the kids as he was taken to jail.

Rindal said Salter was attempting to flee. He said he was merely looking for a safe place to pull over. The Ramsey County attorney's office declined to charge Salter after reviewing the evidence, including a video of the stop.

NWA was right. Police in the USA are little more than a gang armed with guns and badges, roaming the streets demanding "respect" from the public as they collect the protection money known as "fines". Rindal should be immediately removed from the force for her poor judgment and incompetence as well as her demonstrated predilection for turning a routine traffic stop into a potentially lethal situation.

Comments ()

The dumbest and dullest

Lest you wonder why I am supremely confident that the USA is doomed:

"Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs."
- Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House

Where, oh where, would we be if those brave advocates of women's suffrage hadn't unlocked the vast reservoirs of governing talent being kept on the sidelines thanks to the Patriarchy's oppression of the fair sex? Macroeconomics is bogus enough, but even if you subscribe to one of the Keynesian, Neo-Keynesian, or Monetarist myths, you have to be at least a little dubious about the success of any model which relies on correct application by individuals so vastly ignorant of the relevant statistical factors.

Comments ()

Not the ideal cap

Banking executives deserve a cap in the ass more than a cap on their compensation packages, but better the latter than the fascistic Bush approach of private black and public red:

The Obama administration is expected to impose a cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive large amounts of bailout money, according to people familiar with the plan. Executives would also be prohibited from receiving any bonuses above their base pay, except for normal stock dividends....

Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms. “It would be really tough to get people to staff” companies that are forced to impose these limits, he said. “I don’t think this will work.”

Obama is already shaping up to be a better president than George W. Bush, which is very faint praise indeed. It is beyond ludicrous to argue that it will be tough to staff companies for only $500k per year. Considering what a historically horrific job was done by the massively overpaid banking executives of the very recent past and present, there's absolutely no empirical reason supporting the idea that massive compensation has any connection whatsoever to positive results.

And for those idiots who would claim that compensation caps are somehow anti-capitalistic, please note that since government regulates nearly every other aspect of the American financial system, there's no logical reason it shouldn't regulate executive pay as well. Many corporate executives have demanded socialism in the form of a government bailout, and so it's satisfying to see that they're getting it good and hard.

My only criticism is that the $500k cap is too high. There's no reason not to knock those salaries back to $174,000, the current Congressional salary. After all, an executive at a bailed-out corp is little more than a government employee now.

Comments ()

The devastation of marijuana

Andrew Stuttaford reminds us of how the Michael Phelps scandal highlights the debilitating effects of the most evil drug ever developed by Man:

I merely note that this broken wreck of a man's failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone's health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

I despise the drug-war and I despise its idiot supporters even more. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the continued existence of the ludicrously ineffective drug laws, much less the many violations of human liberty their enforcement is used to excuse.

Anti-drug conservatives have to be among the dumbest and most illogical individuals in the nation, since the idea of forcibly preventing a man from making a decision that might lead to his eventual harm should be completely anathema to conservatives on both philosophical and practical grounds.

Comments ()

The joys of immigration

The Middle East comes to Minnesota:

On January 5, representatives of Hamas and Fatah rallied on the steps of the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul. Their purpose was to condemn Israel, and an Israeli flag was burned.... How did Minnesota get to the point where its state capitol can become an outpost of a terrorist organization from the Middle East? Until a few years ago, I wouldn't have believed it possible.

How did it happen? It's not exactly rocket science, this is exactly what one had to expect when large-scale immigration from non-Western cultures was encouraged. The immigration argument has always depended upon one vital question: will immigrants adapt to American norms or will they alter American norms? The answer, as has been made abundantly clear everywhere from St. Paul to Stockholm, is the latter.

Now that the global economic crisis has made it clear that remaking the world in the form of the West through democracy and economic abundance is not viable, there are only two possibilities that remain. One is the continued transformation of the West into the Third World. The other is deportations on the same scale as the preceding migrations. Nations that choose the latter will survive and prosper, nations that choose the former will survive in the form of West Bangladesh or North Mexico.

Comments ()

Fame-dropping

The Word of the Day for February 02, 2009 is:
cyberpunk • \SY-ber-punk\ • noun

*1 : science fiction dealing with future urban societies dominated by computer technology

2 : an opportunistic computer hacker

Example Sentence: Cyberpunk -- with its androids and cyborgs and human-electronic networks -- almost turns reading into a computer game.

In science fiction circles, "cyberpunk" is a genre that often features countercultural antiheroes trapped in a dehumanizing high-tech future. Its roots extend back to the technical fiction of the 1940s and '50s, but it was years before it matured. The word "cyberpunk" was coined by writer Bruce Bethke, who wrote a story with that title in 1980. He created the term by combining "cybernetics," the science of replacing human functions with computerized ones, and "punk," the raucous music and nihilistic sensibility that became a youth culture in the 1970s and '80s. Not until the 1984 publication of William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer, however, did "cyberpunk" really take off as a term or a genre.

Ah, fame....

Comments ()

The cycle of uncreative destruction

The poli-demographic cycle at work in California:

How does one explain how California is broke, tens of billions of dollars in aggregate debt, despite having among the highest sales and income taxes in the nation?

We are naturally rich beyond belief—timber, oil, agriculture, a long sea-coast, wonderful weather, mountains, sea, and valleys—and inherited lucrative industries in tourism, computers and software, defense and great universities. Our grandparents left us a once wonderful freeway network, a tripartite higher education system, ports, airports, dams and canals.

So what went wrong, and why are tens of thousands of Californians leaving the state with bachelor degrees and above, while tens of thousands enter without high-school diplomas?

The answer, as VDH knows perfectly well, is simple. Ideology matters. Left-wing ideology is intrinsically parasitic, and once its depredations sufficiently weaken its host, both the parasite and the host are doomed. California is appears to be reaching that point, and the entire United States of America is not far behind it. Unfortunately for the residents of other states, many of the individuals who passively permitted this transformation - and in some cases actively encouraged it - have relocated and are now spreading their ideological filth in their new environs.

Comments ()

WND: It will get worse

Recover is not right around the corner:

As George Bush did with the creation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Herbert Hoover oversaw the founding of an unaccountable organization making secret loans to banks and other failing institutions, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. As President Barack Obama has done with his "stimulus" program of massive federal spending, Hoover convinced Congress to increase federal spending 30 percent in 1931 alone. In relative terms, this failed spending package was larger than Obama's incredible $775 billion "stimulus" plan, which would only amount to a 25 percent increase even if all of the spending were to take place in 2009.

But one of the more striking things [chronicled in America's Great Depression] was the way in which the politicians and professional economists almost uniformly expected recovery to take place in 1931, and their panic when their expectations were dashed. Depression set in despite a resort to extreme measures that are all too familiar to the modern observer. Interest rates were cut to historic lows. Millions of dollars were loaned to the states to finance a vast series of public works and stave off unemployment. Taxes were increased at both the state and federal levels, and the Federal Reserve made use of every tool at its disposal to prop up failing banks.

On a related note, this WSJ article by two economists is timely and informative, if nothing new to the AGDers.

Comments ()

America's Great Depression - Final Exam

Here it is. And may the Force be with you. Regardless of how well or poorly you happen to do, I hope you've learned something substantive from this economic study.

Comments ()

Super Bowl XLIII

I'd like to see the Cardinals win. I'm a fan of both Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, and they've been underdogs since they were the second team in the Second City. Nevertheless, I just don't see them beating a Steelers team that has a competent offense and a punishing defense. That's been the model of success over the last decade or two, and the history of the Super Bowl is the history of high-powered offenses flaming out.

If you want to talk Super Bowl, this would be the place.

Comments ()

No Entrance

The Original Cyberpunk shuts the door to The Ranting Room with a familiar bang:

"So," I said at last. "To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?"

Nixon seemed momentarily startled to notice me there, and then recovered quickly and offered up a small smile. "Farewell visit? After all, this is how The Ranting Room began: with you, channeling for me." He smiled again, weakly this time, and shrugged. "Word gets around. So when I heard that you were retiring—"

"I am not retiring," I protested. "I'm just reordering my priorities. There's the new blog—"

"You're retiring," he said. "Or at least retiring as the creator and chief writer of The Ranting Room. You're getting onto that big old helicopter, throwing one last great big 'V' to the crowd, and riding off into the sunset.

I considered The Ranting Room to be one of the Internet's best resources for would-be writers. Here's hoping that The Friday Challenge will turn out to be similarly useful. As for the Chinese Curse of the coming years revealed by the saturnine shade, all I can say is that I feel humbly grateful to be blessed with such a morbidly dark sense of humor.

Comments ()