Author: VD

Republicans plot betrayal

The incoming House Majority Leader is considering whether he can get away with keeping Ron Paul out of the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy in order to protect the Federal Reserve from any uncomfortable oversight:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.

If this happens, it will be a strong indication that the Tea Party is either going to split in two or split from the Republican Party.  And this should tell you all you need to know about whether the House Republicans are going to govern any differently than they did the last time they were in power.

That’s why she’s the frontrunner for 2012

Mike Potemra posts an email from Claire Berlinski:

Palin is probably the only GOP candidate Obama could beat right now. She runs, 90-year-olds who have never dreamt of voting in their lives will register for the first time to vote against her. And I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t hate her, as some think. I just cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would look at her and think, “I trust her to hold the most powerful office in America at a time of uniquely grave national peril.” It’s mind-boggling.

It’s not mind-boggling, it’s ludicrous. Not the idea of Palin winning the Republican nomination, but the idea that the opinion of a Jewish woman living in Paris, whose family connection to America is but a single generation, is even remotely relevant to the probable primary voting behavior of American Christians living in Iowa, Florida, Texas, and Ohio. And since the “uniquely grave national peril” comes from the Federal Reserve, not a few third world goathumpers who haven’t managed to do so much as take out a single Christmas tree or lemonade stand in nine years, Palin will almost surely continue to become more popular because she is the only Republican politician besides Ron Paul who has been speaking out against Bernanke’s futile attempts to keep the insolvent banks afloat.

I am not a Palin fan myself; I’m a libertarian and Ron Paul is the only Republican for whom I would vote. But Palin has the political starpower and common sense synchronicity with popular opinion that the other candidates completely lack. I mean, Newt Gingrich? Trig Palin has a better chance of being elected president in 2012 than that fat little troll does. John Bolton? Mitt Romney couldn’t even beat the corpse of John McCain. The only Republican who looks capable of beating Palin for the nomination right now is the New Jersey governor, Christie. That’s why I expect to see the moderate elite fire up a Draft Christie campaign soon.

So much for inflation

Apparently QE III is in the cards:

In an effort to thwart counterfeiting, the US Government has implemented a $100 bill design so difficult to print even the U.S. Treasury cannot print them. The government needs to burn $110 billion in flawed $100 bills, more than 10% of all existing cash. The cost of printing the flawed bills was a mere $120 million.

If inflation is derived from the money supply, then burning 10% of the the entire currency stock should cause prices to fall, right? Given the current M2 figure of $8,767 billion, this bonfire of the Franklins should result in an immediate 1.3% reduction in the rate of inflation.

Mailvox: the daughter of the Devil and other emails

SF presents a succinct case:

Two wrongs don’t make a right, you fool.

That may be true, but the more salient point is that one right does. Bill helpfully illustrates the importance of owning a dictionary, or at least a passing familiarity with the English language:

Back in the real world, this was known as treason and the perpetrator would tried and hung. That is the way that true Americans feel about the betrayal of their country. These are also the ones that have fought and served their country, something, more than likely unknown to the likes of you and your kind. Sad that people have died defending the rights of traitors!

It is sad that Julian Assange should have so treasonously betrayed all those Americans who died defending his rights when the British invaded Australia… or something. Important rights like the freedom of speech, which that traitor should have known better than to exercise! Seriously, what is it with these conservatives who can’t seem to figure out that you cannot commit treason against a country to which you owe no allegiance?

GL, on the other hand, quite liked the column:

I purposefully read Barbara Simpsons article before yours and my mind was going off like it was Chinese New Year. I wanted so much to e-mail her and either yell in her face to shut her stupid illogical lying mouth or conversely to quietly tell her how wrong she was on so many levels. Fortunately I read your article before I did and now my mind is perfectly at ease. You said what I would have wanted to say if only I had been articulate, smart and cruel enough to say it.

And then there was this masterpiece of reason from JT:

I usually disagree with just about everything you say and usually just toss off your doffus opinions as probable doobie influence, but this time I so vehemently disagree I have to comment. You sit behind your PC in, no doubt, your cushy chair in your very cushy home, just like that little weasel you think is a hero, and make comments that are so unreal I can smell the pot. Join the military, put yourself in danger—not just the danger of getting sores on your butt by sitting too long in one position behind your PC screen—real danger—people shooting at you, people lobbing grenades at you, people hiding behind women and children and firing at you and you may have some kind of credibility.

But since you have never done anything to put yourself in that kind of danger, as my son has done by serving on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have no idea how disgusting your hero worship of this little piece of vermin is. You are as disgusting as the Wikileaks Weasel. I used to think that libertarians were just as dangerous as liberals. I’ve now had to change my mind. You’re even more dangerous.

To which I responded: “Julian Assange is not putting anyone in any danger that George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not already put them. The fact that the truth may be dangerous does not justify the lie. You talk about others being disgusting, but you are daughter to the Devil, the Father of Lies.”

I am dangerous, Ice…man.

Voxiversity 5.2: Inflation and Keynesian Economics

This should be an interesting discussion. The conclusion will initially strike some as a priori insane, but I encourage everyone to consider the empirical evidence before issuing a diagnosis. I may need to revisit this one after the critics have shared their presumably constructive input, so I look forward to hearing everyone’s take on it.

In case you’re wondering why these esoteric and pedantic debates over definitions are of interest to me or why they are important, consider this recent interview with Ben Bernanke. The relevant statement is highlighted in bold.

Pelley: Some people think the $600 billion is a terrible idea.

Bernanke: Well, I know some people think that but what they are doing is they’re looking at some of the risks and uncertainties with doing this policy action but what I think they’re not doing is looking at the risk of not acting.

Pelley: Many people believe that could be highly inflationary. That it’s a dangerous thing to try.

Bernanke: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We’ve looked at it very, very carefully. We’ve analyzed it every which way. One myth that’s out there is that what we’re doing is printing money. We’re not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we’re doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that’s what we’re gonna do.”

It should be clear that the Fed Chairman does not define inflation in any of the Keynesian manners described in this video. But is his definition correct? That is the $600 billion question.

WND column

Wikileaks is Freedom in Action

I write not to condemn Julian Assange, but to praise him. More than that, I write to accuse those so-called conservatives who have waxed hysterical in their contemptible fulminations against Assange and his organization, Wikileaks, of being ideological frauds, enemies of democracy and false friends of human liberty.

One of the favorite accusations made by the totalitarian bootlickers who condemn Assange’s free speech is that by making information available to the public about the actions of certain individuals that were recorded by other individuals, he has blood on his hands due to some mysterious transitive property that no one has yet managed to rationally explain. And the idea that an Australian citizen can be a traitor to the United States of America is simply absurd. These are abuses of logic so severe that it is a wonder the corpses of Aristotle, Descartes and Gödel do not spin right out of their graves and tear those making these ridiculous arguments limb-from-limb in righteous zombie-philosopher retribution.

ADDENDUM: For an example of incoherent conservative insanity on the subject, read my WND colleague Barbara Simpson’s call to execute the Australian for committing “treason, with a capital ‘T'” against the United States.

VPFL Week 12

95 Bane Sidhe (8-4-0)
36 Winston Reverends (4-8-0)

89 Moundsview Meerkats (3-8-1)
32 Valders Quixotes (8-4-0)

75 Greenfield Grizzlies (6-5-1)
72 Judean Rhyneauxs (6-6-0)

49 RR Redbeards (5-6-1)
46 Blackmouth Banksters (7-5-0)

68 MS Swamp Spartans (6-5-1)
43 Meigs Marauders (5-7-0)

The Meerkats may be out of it for the season, but that doesn’t mean they can’t skeletonize a frontrunner. The league-leading Quixotes were shredded like a cow in the Amazon by the Piranha of the Serengeti last week, but the Meerkats remained six points shy of the scoring the rarely seen First in Points, Last in the League award, just behind the suddenly fearsome Grizzlies who have ridden the Sanchize to win four straight and move into playoff position.

Looks like a bang-up finish with six teams battling for four spots.

Let the women work

Calculated Risk presents a chart showing that the percentage of men aged 25-54 participating in the labor force declined to a record low of 88.8% in November.  And that was BEFORE the release of the new World of Warcraft expansion.  The chart goes back to 1948 and shows that the idea women first entered the workforce en masse after WWII or in the 1970s simply isn’t true; about one-third of women have always had to work.  The increase in the percentage of women participating in the workforce is predominantly the result of young women who previously got married and had children while being supported by a husband now working instead of or in addition to having a family.  The chart is also a little misleading in that it only measures to age 54.  One of the chief impacts of more women entering the workforce is that men over the age of 60, who had previously been much more inclined to work, exited the workforce en masse thanks to the establishment of Social Security and Medicare.

So, as I have often said, the primary benefit to society from employing young women is to pay for old men collecting retirement.  In return for which the societal costs include declining marriage rates, skyrocketing illegitimacy rates, lower average wages for both men and women, reduced productivity, and demographic decline.  This would not appear to be either a rational or sustainable policy for any nation, especially considering that the first attempted solution, importing third-world workers to replace the missing children, has not worked out well for any nation that has adopted it.  The choice is as stark as it is simple.  Either abandon the notion of sexual equality and return to the traditional model where 70% of women are occupied with raising families or experience complete societal collapse.

On a tangential note, I saw this in the comment’s at CR’s place.  I don’t see it as a positive indicator: A friend picked up a hitch-hiker in the National Park last week and gave him a ride, and it turned out he was a marine that had done 3 tours in the sandbox, but apparently our military is getting picky about who they allow to re-up, and he told my friend, “I hope something happens in Korea, so I can go back to work.”  It is a time-honored fact of history that when men cannot find jobs, the rulers of society attempt to keep them occupied killing people somewhere else.

I chuckled, I did

The Washington Post issues another call for an opponent to run against Obama in the Democratic primary. To, you know, “save the Obama presidency”. Right.

But there is a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration’s policies. Such a candidacy would be pooh-poohed by the media, but if it gathered enough popular support – as is likely given the level of alienation among many who were the backbone of Obama’s 2008 success – this campaign would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate. Far from weakening his chances for reelection, this kind of progressive primary challenge could save Obama if he moves in the desired direction. And if he holds firm to his current track, he’s a goner anyway.

Seriously, I don’t see how you can look at what has quite clearly in the process of happening over the last six months and not realize that Obama is going to either drop out or get kicked out by the Democrats. No one, least of all the Democratic elders, are in fear of the reaction of the 11% of black voters which has nowhere else to turn and also has one of the lowest turnout rates in the electorate.

Low hurdles

I was bemused when I checked Channel Vox this morning preparatory to uploading the next video in the inflation series and saw that it had won a YouTube award. It appears Voxiversity was #3 Most Subscribed Channel in Italia this week. Of course, I would have needed 360x more to have reached the same ranking in the USA. Clearly the next video should be entitled Victoria’s Secret Economics: Alessandra Ambrosio Explains Inflation.

But since I’m on the subject, I should mention there is a slight change of plans with regards to the 5.2 video. I am extremely loathe to make a case that depends upon anyone accepting my assertions undemonstrated, so the second video will not concern the credit-money definition of inflation as I’d originally planned, but will instead demonstrate the inutility of the four – yes, four – primary Keynesian definitions of inflation. The third video will examine the Monetarist definition, and only then, once the case against the various mainstream definitions is concluded, will I explain and defend my contention that the correct definition of inflation is an increase in the money supply plus outstanding debt.

Anyhow, I’m planning to do the recording tonight and upload it sometime this weekend, in case you’re interested.