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WND debuts Voxic Shock

Thanks to Vidad and Markku, I was able to offer the idea of a weekly podcast to Joseph Farah and Mr. Farah was more than willing to give it a try.  If Voxic Shock is of sufficient interest to WND readers, it will be appearing on Thursdays in addition to my Monday column.  Some work still remains to be done, as I don’t have the proper equipment yet and so was using my Logitech gaming headset in lieu of a proper microphone and so forth.  But those who have heard the old Voxonomics podcasts will definitely hear the difference that having an audio professional doing the editing makes.

For the inaugural Voxic Shock podcast, I interviewed economist Ian Fletcher.  We discussed David Ricardo, Adam Smith, the limits of the theory of comparative advantage, and the seemingly ironic concept of creating American jobs and growing the economy through the use of trade barriers.  So tune in and feel free to leave your comments here after you’ve listened to it.  I’ve already recorded next week’s interview with Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker and as those who read the Ticker can probably imagine, it’s a lively one.

However, Voxic Shock is not going to be an economics-only podcast.  I’ve contacted Herman Cain to see if he’s interested in being interviewed – no response yet – and having heard rumors that Mighty Cthulhu might be throwing his tentacles into the presidential ring again, I’ve been trying to locate his campaign manager.  Unfortunately, the only contact I had for him appears to have been devoured in 2008.  I’m also going to be talking to one of my favorite living historians, John Julius Norwich.  If there is anyone in particular you are interested in hearing interviewed for future podcasts, please go ahead and email me your suggestions, preferably with contact information.

UPDATE: WND is working on a RSS feed and direct download link. The next cast will be Friday, June 17th. In the meantime, here is an alternative Voxic Shock feed.

Who the hell is Edie Falco?

Wait a minute. If I understand the situation correctly, an actress is complaining that people take the opinions of celebrities who are not actresses seriously?

Do you think our society’s hunger for fame has gotten out of control, like it’s worse than it was in the late sixties, when the play takes place?

I don’t really know if the hunger for it has changed, but our obsession for it seems to have changed. I’m not so good at commenting in any meaningful way about these things, but celebrities are now like our royalty, you know what I mean? Most of them haven’t really done anything to earn where they are, which is what’s so troubling. There’s an obsession with famous people who, oftentimes, are not worthy of a million people knowing who they are and what they think.

So it’s safe to say you don’t watch much reality TV.

No, not a big fan. Like, forgive me, I don’t know if you’re friends with her — but who the hell is Kim Kardashian? Like, who are these people and why are they famous and why are they advertising things and being asked their opinions about things? I just don’t understand what these people did to be in a position of having everyone ask their opinions about stuff. I mean, if there’s something about her personality or something that she’s accomplished or her philosophy on something — but beyond that I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s actually frightening.

I have never seen anything that Kim Kardashian has done, but I do know she is the Armenian with the grotesque posterior who went out with Reggie Bush and Miles Austin. Not the sort of thing that would incline me to think much of her opinion on comparative advantage or the latest Z.1 report, but at least I’ve heard of her. The only Falco I know sang “Rock Me Amadeus” back in the 80s… and frankly, I have never thought about what he might think about anything either.

The debt police

It’s interesting to see how the education sector is one that is leading the move towards debt-based totalitarianism. Student loans are about the only loans that aren’t discharged by bankruptcy, and I tend to doubt that the Department of Education’s SWAT teams (!?!) are going to be invading any homes over unpaid credit card debts:

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said. Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn. “He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said….

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the city of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright’s search warrant. The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in S.W.A.T for his wife’s defaulted student loans.

This raises numerous questions:

1. Why is the U.S. Department of Education permitted to issue warrants or call SWAT teams?

2. Why would the SWAT team assault an individual who is not responsible for the debts?

3. Upon which specific date was America pronounced dead?

If this doesn’t convince you that the U.S. Constitution is dead, America is dead, and we are watching the galvanic twitchings of a corpse, I don’t know what will. Personally, I’m rather looking forward to the first press conference by the Department of Education explaining why they accidentally killed an old woman who never went to college over the unpaid student loans of some clueless wonder with a useless college degree.

Of course, the youfs are so utterly stupid that even events like this won’t slow down the rate at which they are applying for student loans. Because an education is the best investment anyone can possibly make….

Pearls from a national treasure

There are few men in history who have attained the zen-like indifference to public opinion of the great Prince Philip of England. The Independent thoughtfully provided us with ninety of his bon mots, one to celebrate each of his ninety years. My ten favorites:

“You managed not to get eaten then?” To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?” Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

“It’s a vast waste of space.” Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

“If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

“Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?” To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

“Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant.” At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

“Do you still throw spears at each other?” Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

“Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don’t you have a slogan: ‘Kill a cat and save a bird?'” On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

“Reichskanzler.” Prince Philip used Hitler’s title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

“I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit.” Said to a woman solicitor.

It was already a sham

The mainstream media errantly assumes that Hillary Clinton’s girlfriend’s silence about her sham-husband’s internet hijinks means that she is upset:

This raises the question one must ask of many a Good Wife — did Huma simply look the other way, unwilling to know what was going on in Anthony’s underpants? It was clear yesterday from her staunch refusal to play along with the sham that is her marriage that Huma, unlike her husband, is in no mood to lie about the state of her union.

Some women accept their husbands’ quirky habits. Mine likes to watch football. Weiner gets his jollies sexting with women, including one to whom he wrote he had a “ridiculous bulge in my shorts now. wanna see?” But being publicly outed as a woman scorned, whether it be online, in the flesh or on the phone, is too much to take. See ya, lover.

Washington has become the new Hollywood, beards and all.

Employment and depression

One thing that most people probably don’t realize is that in the pre-Samuelsonian era, depressions were generally viewed in terms of the supply and demand for labor rather than a via a money metric of consumption. One of the more remarkable things for a young economics student reading Keynes’s General Theory today is discovering how it reads more like an Austrian logic-based text than a modern macroeconomics statistical digest. Today, the employment level doesn’t even factor into the modern determination of whether the economy is growing or not. Hence the new economic oxymoron of “a jobless recovery”.

But by the older perspective, it is obvious that the USA is still in the same depression that it was in 2008. Consider the following labor report:

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Moreover, another little known fact is that the unemployment numbers provided for the Great Depression on an ex post facto basis by post-WWII economists were overstated because the BLS economist responsible, one Stanley Lebergott, counted many government workers as being unemployed. Michael Darby corrected for this and came up with the following numbers:

Year L D
1929 3.2% 3.2%
1930 8.7% 8.7%
1931 15.9% 15.3%
1932 23.6% 22.9%
1933 24.9% 20.6%
1934 21.7% 16.0%
1935 20.1% 14.2%
1936 16.9% 9.9%
1937 14.3% 9.1%
1938 19.0% 12.5%
1939 17.2% 11.3%
1940 14.6% 9.5%

Note that by this corrected measure, even the woefully misleading U3 unemployment measure is presently at the same level as 1937, and worse than 1930. At 15.8, the more relevant U6 measure is worse than 1931 and every year except 1932 and 1933, the absolute nadir of the Great Depression. It may be worth noting that adding the current 20.3 million government workers to the ranks of the unemployed, as per Lebergott, would increase the current U3 rate to 22.3 percent and the U6 rate to 29 percent, which exceeds even Lebergott’s calculation for 1933.

Given the slide in housing prices, the unemployment rates, and the length of joblessness, two things should be readily apparent. First, the economic contraction has not ended. Second, the GDP figures notwithstanding, it is a larger scale event than the Great Depression.

Readership and other trivialities

Being an armchair economist, I often find it interesting to look beyond the obvious numbers given the way they are so often misleading. For example, a few years ago, I used to be the third most-read WND columnist behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ann was head-and-torso beyond everyone else, and while I occasionally gave Pat a run for his money, his readership was usually ahead of mine by a decent margin. It’s been a while since I last looked into the matter, and since I no longer have direct access to their servers – I prefer to email my columns in so I didn’t bother to ask for it after one of the occasional structural reconfigurations – I began by looking at the Facebook Likes that are now attached to each column.

Unsurprisingly, by this metric, Ann Coulter is still the queen of WND. Here are the Likes for her last four columns compared to a few other selected writers, in order of average Likes.

232.0: Ann Coulter (253, 75, 243, 357)
75.5: Chuck Norris (39, 169, 60, 34)
41.5: Vox Day (60, 40, 40, 26)
35.0: Thomas Sowell (34, 36, 52, 18)
22.0: Ilana Mercer (15, 11, 56, 6)
13.5: John Stossel (19, 5, 19, 11)
10.0: Chrissy Satterfield (29, 11, 0, 0)
9.8: Pat Buchanan (18, 9, 1, 11)

From this, one would quite reasonably conclude that Ann’s columns are much more read than anyone else’s, something on the order of five times more than mine. Chuck’s average is high, but it’s bumped up significantly by one outlier of a column entitled “The Self-Destructing Republican Party”, which went over extremely well with Republicans terrified that their leadership is going to blow their opportunity to knock off Obama. In looking at the actual readers of those same columns for Buchanan, Coulter, and Day – which I requested and cannot directly divulge, but suffice it to say they are in excess of my blog numbers – my WND readership is now 60.7 percent of Miss Coulter’s, which is up more than 10 percentage points from several years ago if I recall correctly.

What I found both interesting and slightly depressing is the fact that Chatterfield’s columns are now more liked, on average, than Pat Buchanan’s. This tends to suggest that WND readers have become more partisan and less partial to intellectual weight as their numbers have grown. While Mr. Buchanan’s readership numbers have not actually declined over time, they have declined in a relative manner as my WND readership is now 122.9 percent larger than his. Of course, it must be kept in mind that although his columns were available elsewhere before, it is entirely possible that many of his biggest fans do not read him at WND, but prefer to read him at The American Conservative instead.

It’s also worth noting that the difference in the size of the Like gap and the readership gap between Coulter and myself tends to indicate that while many WND readers are willing to read my column, they don’t like them all that much. Which makes an amount of sense, given that WND’s conservative Republican readership are likely to hold opinions that are more in line with hers than with my radical libertarian iconoclasm.

Regardless, because I am unwilling to cede primacy of position to Miss Coulter, however much she merits it, (or however little she values it), I intend to resort to cheatingnew tactics. Now, I like to think that I am unusually good at interviews because I am apparently one of the very few interviewers who makes a habit of a) reading the book or the relevant information beforehand and b) letting the interviewee talk as much as he likes in answer to my questions. However, I have done very few interviews in the last year because it is a tedious and lengthy task to transcribe them.

The solution being entirely obvious, I’m pleased to say there will soon be a second weekly Vox Day contribution appearing on WorldNetDaily. The initial subjects will include economist Ian Fletcher, Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker, and the eminent historian John Julius Norwich, among others. I am also in the process of putting together a Joel Rosenberg retrospective which will feature several notable science fiction and fantasy authors.

Warning: naked congressman ahead!

Weinergate expands:

BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com have reported throughout the morning about the emergence of new details in the Weinergate saga, after a young woman came forward with new information that tends to undermine severely the theory that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was the victim of a “prank” or a “hack.”

Weiner’s wife Huma could not be reached for comment, as she was fully occupied with her duties servicingserving Secretary of State Clinton.

The amorphous Official Story

This belated announcement demonstrates why you should never, ever, pay much credence to official government statements about major events:

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.

The nuclear group’s new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.

THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. DO NOT PANIC! THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. ALL THE REACTORS ARE STABLE… okay, well, there was maybe a meltdown. Um, three, actually, if you insist on being precise.

A fallacious free trade argument

Mark Perry omits a key factor in attempting to defend international free trade:

Bottom Line: To argue against free trade among countries, one would also have to object to free trade among American states, counties, cities and individuals, see my edits below of Fletcher’s article that hopefully make this point.

That simply is not the case. In fact, Perry misses a vital point, which is that in order to argue FOR free trade among countries, one has to accept a similar free flow of labor between countries as presently exists between American states, counties, and cities. And how sizeable is that free flow?

In 2009, 4.7 million Americans moved from one state to another. Keep in mind that the entire American employed labor force is only 140 million. If we conservatively divide the number of domestic migrants by the average household size of 2.6, we’re looking at 1.8 million workers, 1.3 percent of all American workers, who moved intrastate.

This suggests that if the world were to adopt international free trade, more than a million Americans would need to move to China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and Canada in order to find employment on an annual basis. It would be necessary to know the amount of intrastate trade vesus international trade to provide a precise estimate of how many Americans would need to emigrate every year, (53% of them to China), under a free trade regime, but I find it unlikely that many Americans are likely to prove supportive of a trade system that would require them to move to places like India and Bangladesh as freely as it now forces residents of Detroit and Minneapolis to move to Scottsdale and Naples.

Being an American expatriate myself, I know much better than most that it is possible to change one’s international residence. And due to my extensive, long-term international experience, I can say that I find this particular aspect of the free trade argument to be naive to the point of absurdity. Most American expats to even first-world European countries don’t last two years due to the significant language and cultural differences. The concept is a complete non-starter and therefore the equivalence is false.