Author: VD

Then there’s no need to vote ever again:

THE SECOND referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will be held in the autumn, Minister for European Affairs Dick Roche said yesterday. He added that as part of the process of steering its way out of recession Ireland needed to secure its position within the European Union.

Speaking in Berlin to the German Council on Foreign Relations, the Minister said he wanted to deliver the message that Ireland was coming to grips with its problems and taking decisive action to bring the Government’s finances under control, ensure the health of the banking system and improve competitiveness.

“Part of this determined effort to steer Ireland out of recession involves securing our position within the European Union by dealing decisively with the implications of last year’s referendum result and drawing the necessary lessons from it,” said Mr Roche.

The Irish would have to be insane to approve the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty in this second go-round. The EU is the cause of their current difficulties; every boom has its bust. One hopes that the Irish are smart enough to beware of Eurocrats waving financial incentives under their noses, but in hard times, desperate people often do foolish things.

Contrary to the news announced on April 9, I was informed today that The Irrational Atheist will not be published in the UK after all. I’m sure you will all be astonished to know that an individual on the pub board of the Christian publishing house concerned felt very strongly that my controversial views on equality rendered the book unpublishable. Because, after all, it’s women’s rights that are really at the true heart of Christianity and only nice, polite people should disagree with Christopher Hitchens. So long as, you know, he doesn’t mind.

Ironically, a very similar thing happened at the publishing house that first pursued and then rejected Spiting Their Pretty Faces: Why No One Wants to Marry Thirty-Something Women when a single, forty-something woman on the pub board took great exception to the subject matter. Can’t imagine why. But that’s not ironic, you say? Well, perhaps you might agree once you understand that this happened at the same publishing house that is publishing my forthcoming book this fall. The commissar, she is gone.

I suppose I would probably be more disappointed if I hadn’t just signed a contract to write a screenplay yesterday. I guess if you can’t make it in the hyper-competitive world of Christian publishing, there’s always Hollywood.

It doesn’t come as a massive surprise to learn that the billions in government money to Chrysler have already vaporized:

Buried in the Chrysler filings was the revelation that US government investments in Chrysler will not be paid back, though the government will probably take an 8% equity interest in Chrysler: Chrysler LLC will not repay U.S. taxpayers more than $7 billion in bailout money it received earlier this year and as part of its bankruptcy filing.

This revelation was buried within Chrysler’s bankruptcy filings last week and confirmed by the Obama administration Tuesday. The filings included a list of business assumptions from one of the company’s key financial advisors in the bankruptcy case. Some of the main assumptions listed by Robert Manzo of Capstone Advisory Group were that the Treasury would forgive a $4 billion bridge loan given to Chrysler in the closing days of the Bush administration, a $300 million fee on that loan, and the $3.2 billion in financing approved last week by the Obama administration to fund Chrysler’s operations during bankruptcy.

Only $7.5 billion for an 8 percent share of a bankrupt company owned by the United Auto Workers in a dying industry? Yeah, these financial whizzes are going to do a bang-up job “fixing” the economy. And just in case you weren’t convinced that the economy is doomed…

“Mindful of his predecessor, Barack Obama seems to be trying harder to make sure he hears all sides. On the night of April 27, for instance, the president invited to the White House some of his administration’s sharpest critics on the economy, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz. Over a roast-beef dinner, Obama listened and questioned while Krugman and Stiglitz, both Nobel Prize winners, pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the banking system.”

Summers: “Do you think we ought to give Citi and BOA two trillion apiece or three trillion to recapitalize?”

Krugman: “More, more! Spend more!”

Summers: “How much more?”

Krugman: “Um, fiver?”

Stiglitz: “My bearded little buddy is right. Increasing banker bonuses will reduce the wage sluggishness effect, so the more you give them, the less sluggish they’ll be and the more loans they’ll make, thus jump-starting the economy. It is science.”

Obama: “Um, ah, ha ha ha ha ha!”

Summer: “Ignore him, he’s just a little punch-drunk after celebrating the Cinco de Cuatro. Fiver it is.”

Setting aside the fact that Krugman’s sharp “criticism” of Obama is that he hasn’t been quite as stupendously wonderful as Krugman believes he has the potential to be, the idea that the architects of the Chrysler deal should more aggressively intervene in any enterprise more complicated than a lemonade stand is risible. In fact, I expect that if Obama, Geithner, and Summers ever did run a lemonade stand, they’d somehow manage to drive away half the customers while poisoning the other half.

While I don’t agree with Melzer’s historical prescription – just have a look at Japan’s total credit market debt to figure out why – Jonah Goldberg brings our attention to a legitimate “appeal to my own authority” slap-down of an economist who likes nothing better than to do the same:

After I published a piece in the New York Times op-ed page warning of future inflation (see: “Inflation Nation“), Paul Krugman claimed to offer me a “history lesson” on his Times blog (see his post: “A History Lesson for Alan [sic] Meltzer“).

In the piece I argued that no country with rapid money growth, a large budget deficit, and an expected depreciation of the exchange rate has ever experienced deflation, always inflation. He claims Japan’s “lost decade” as a counterexample. It is not. I am very familiar with Japan during this period—I served as honorary adviser to the Bank of Japan and met often with the then Governor Hayami. He opposed using monetary expansion, and I did not convince him that he was making a mistake. In the midst of the deflation, he raised the interest rate to avoid “sloppy” money markets. That was the wrong thing to do as several of us told the Bank of Japan at the time.

When Governor Fukui replaced Governor Hayami, he carried out the policy that I had urged Governor Hayami to follow. He bought long-term bonds. The deflation ended, contrary to the advice of Professor Krugman, who claimed at the time that monetary policy was in a “liquidity trap” and useless.

The amusing thing about Paul Krugman isn’t that he’s so reliably wrong. It’s that he so readily forgets how reliably wrong he was.

The empirical nonexistence of the myth called “progress” is becoming more and more apparent, even to the mainstream media:

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?

Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.

Eagleton is on the right track, but he is logically incorrect to say that the idea of progress is a myth because it is blind to what is done in its name. It is a myth because it cannot reasonably be shown to exist in any material manner. Name a substantive, non-technological metric which supports your belief in progress that does not consist solely of the possession of more knowledge – which is all but inevitable over time – and I can probably demonstrate that any perceived progress is an illusion. In many cases, in fact, it’s not hard to show that any change toward the popularly assumed “objective” has been retrograde.

On a side note, the comments are worth reading if one happens to require more evidence of the typical New York Times-reading atheist’s ignorance of religion, history, logic, and Christopher Hitchens’s debating debacles. Dark Ages! War! Galileo! And Dickie D’s got a science degree!

I actually agree with aspects of his broad diagnosis of the Wall Street problem:

Wall Street is not going to play as dominant a role in the economy as regulations reduce “some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that had become so common,” President Barack Obama says. The changes in the role of Wall Street and the huge profits that came from that risk-taking could mean other adjustments as well, Obama said in an interview in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

“That means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy,” he said. “I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design…. I think it’s important to understand that some of that wealth was illusory in the first place,” he said.”

Where Obama goes awry is that his plan is to attack the symptoms and not the disease. So long as the paper money system exists, the easiest and fastest way to obtain more of it is to play paper games. And some of the policies he is contemplating are certifiably insane, such as his plan to attack tax havens and overseas profits. As the British are learning, all that does is cause your best entrepreneurs to leave the country entirely. Preventing companies from writing off domestic expenses for overseas profits isn’t going to reduce the incentive for U.S. companies to base part of their operations in other countries, it’s going to increase their incentive to move ALL of their operations elsewhere.

It’s also amusing how the US media inevitably mentions places like the Cayman Islands in articles like these, when the real problem is that in comparison with US corporate rates, about half the world, including many European countries, look like tax havens.

I find this sort of thing to be rather funny. It appears that Vox Popoli is rated the #7 Christian Libertarian blog while failing to rank among the top 100 libertarian blogs and websites.

The fact that an Obama suppporter and $700 billion banking bailout cheerleader such as Megan McCardle is on the Top 100 list while neither Ilana Mercer nor I are tends to illustrate the intrinsic problem with this sort of thing. While the Mises Institute is entirely appropriate, when did the conservative Heritage Foundation become libertarian? Given the peculiar definition of libertarian apparently in use there, I’m only surprised that Bill Maher isn’t topping the list.

Europe Closes Early

Years ago, I worked for an American technology company that derived about half its revenue from European customers. It used to amuse me how halfway through every August, the executives would start to panic because their sales were falling short of the projections which invariably failed to account for this month-long, continent-wide break. The executives would breathe a sigh of relief when business activity returned to normal in September, and they would completely forget anything had ever happened by December when they calculated the sales projections for the following year. Eventually, the second week of August would roll around, and the whole process would begin again. But when Europe closes, it’s usually just for the month of August.

For dinner:

8x Ritz crackers
8x slices of Parmesan Reggiano
1x Champion Nutrition protein shake, chocolate
1x bottle of Italian merlot

And you probably think I’m kidding….