Government efficiency

$2 million per job:

DPW has received $70.65 million and created or retained 45.46 jobs, though they are expected to create 238 jobs overall (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works). LADOT has been awarded $40.8 million and created or retained 9 jobs, though they are expected to create 26 jobs overall. Overall, the Departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds out of the $594 million the City has been awarded so far and created or retained 54.46 jobs.

I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million in ARRA funds.

At that price, one wonders what these jobs involve. NFL quarterbacking? Jobs programs don’t work. They’d be better off just cutting a direct check to people.

Mailvox: defending free trade

EJ takes exception to my previous post critiquing Ricardian comparative advantage:

I have to disagree with you regarding free trade.

You write: “This example assumes that there is something that the old man can do that is of value to the young man. But that’s not necessarily true. What if instead of 2 people, there are 20 and all the old man can usefully do is gather 5 coconuts a day when two young girls with no other useful skills can gather 100, more than the castaway society needs, in the same time? Yes, total production will increase +5, but so what? No one is going to give him anything for his worthless coconuts because there is already a coconut glut thanks to the highly productive young girls. Austrian-savvy individuals should be able to see the seeds of an Austrian critique of Ricardo here.”

Your example fails to take into account that there are always other needs to be satisfied, needs which require other goods beside coconuts. Either the old man or the young girls can, for instance, gather berries, help build a hut, etc. Ricardo is right in that, by shifting the old man’s production into that which he does comparatively best, society benefits. The only time this isn’t true is if every need has already been satisfied and there is absolutely no other task that the old man can do. Your assumption strikes me as an unwarranted; it is certainly not true that all needs have been met in the world we live in.

Ricardo’s discovery has astounding consequences for libertarians. I’ve noticed in your writings that your libertarianism seems to stem from an understanding that men is fallen, and that, therefore, it makes little sense to allow a fallen man to lord it over his fellow creatures. This was largely my take, too, but thanks to Voxiversity, I’ve been reading my Rothbard. Since voluntary exchange benefits both parties, free trade between two people is a good which should be extended as far and wide as possible.

This is not to say tariffs are always wrong. As Ilana Mercer pointed out in last week’s column, a revenue tariff on all goods would be a reasonable way to fund a minimal state. But free trade itself remains sound.

There are two significant errors here that render EJ’s criticism invalid. The first flaw is this erroneous simplification. “The only time this isn’t true is if every need has already been satisfied and there is absolutely no other task that the old man can do.”

The proper formulation would have been as follows: “It isn’t true whenever there is no other need that the old man is not only capable of satisfying, but willing to satisfy in return for the compensation that he is offered in return.” It is irrelevant to argue that all needs have not been met in the world; the old man on his desert island has no ability to meet the needs of a hungry child in Somalia and the meager compensation he is offered for collecting sea shells may be insufficient to move him to collect them.

Furthermore, there may be no demand for the services he can supply. The bankruptcy of Say’s Law can be seen in the way the old man’s ability to donate sperm to his nubile female castaways in no way creates any demand for the product. In much the same way, the international market for American workers whose only skills concern filling out paperwork for regulatory compliance and creating Powerpoint demonstrations is extremely limited.

The second and much more serious error is in the statement that “voluntary exchange benefits both parties”. This is both logically and empirically false because it posits a non-existent human rationalism without temporal limits. While it is true that value is subjective, thereby allowing the possibility to defend totally irrational actions as at least nominally rational, this still doesn’t avoid the problem of how the subjective values that the Misean acting man assigns are necessarily momentary in nature. What the acting man defines as a beneficial exchange at one moment he may very well not define as beneficial in the very next moment for a wide variety of reasons. And it is this fatal flaw in the logical foundation that causes the entire edifice in support of free trade to collapse.

Eat, pray, die

Best stick to the cats, ladies

A British grandmother was strangled and beaten to death by her Tunisian boyfriend, an inquest heard today. Pauline Richardson, 64, had travelled with a friend to the resort of Port El Kantaoui in Tunisia in June 2008. She was due to fly back on June 29 and on that day visited Qabeel Jabir Al-Wardani, who was then in his 20s. Mrs Richardson missed her flight home and her body was discovered the next day.

There is a tremendous black comedy waiting to be written regarding the growing practice of post-menopausal women desperately chasing sex in the third world. The absurd thing is that they’re uniformly convinced the young con artists who prey upon them have fallen in love with them and genuinely wish to pursue a committed romantic relationship with them, presumably because of their superior if wrinkled white skins. Between the instaslut behavior of the 15-19 year-old on an airplane crowd – only a recent divorcee in her thirties is easier – and this geriatric imperial cougarism, one wonders if it is women’s suffrage or women’s travel that is the worse idea. It is customary to scoff at the Victorians who insisted that women travel with a guardian of some sort, but this sort of thing reminds one that such societal customs usually arise from necessity.

Never be nice

I’m totally serious, men.  Never, ever be nice to a woman to whom you are not related by blood or are not married.  Be polite, gracious, and civil, by all means, just as you would to but don’t ever be nice in search of female approval or make the mistake of thinking that they have a mindset that is anything but completely alien to your own.  They can not only rationalize anything that they perceive to be in their own interest, but will quite readily resort to the use of third party force to do so.  Roissy provides an informative example of this.
 

45 minutes per day

That’s all the time it took to allow a supposedly dyslexic girl to not only keep pace with her public-schooled peers, but make up all the ground she’d lost while in school.

I was assessed by my local home education division within the council and was surprised to discover I had to spend only 45 minutes a day teaching Georgia to give her the same level of attention as a full day in a class of 35 pupils.

Of course, the irony is that after having homeschooled her daughter long enough to make sure she had caught up, the mother promptly stuck her back in school again. I don’t recommend limiting homeschool to only 45 minutes a day, but given that pace, consider how fast even children of average intelligence can advance simply by spending three hours a day on their academic education.

RINO rage

Lest one think for even a fraction of one second that the professional Republican class, also known as “the Republican leadership”, has any genuine commitment to any ideological principles beyond maintaining its own power and influence:

Party fractures on full display, Republican aides told Fox News Tuesday that O’Donnell would not be getting national fundraising support. State party leaders had warned that O’Donnell cannot compete against Democrat Chris Coons and vigorously backed Castle, a nine-term congressman and former governor…. Party leaders no doubt were looking at midterm polls that showed Castle leading Coons in November but O’Donnell trailing. The seat could be critical for Republicans hoping to gain control of the Senate. They need to pick up 10 seats to do so.

The point, which both the Republican establishment and a significant portion of the conservative media either does not understand after the eight-year Bush administration debacle or simply will not accept, is that it doesn’t matter if your party is in power if the representatives of that party are not ideologically reliable. If elected Republicans are simply going to behave like Democrats Lite in office, there is no reason for conservatives to elect them. None.

Lenin was correct in ascertaining that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. The conservative movement is in much stronger shape due to Barack Obama-Soetoro-Sobarkah’s election that it would have been if the RINO McCain had been elected; McCain would have moved things about 50 percent as far to the left as Obama has, but would have ensured that more Democrats were elected to the House and Senate this fall rather than the incipient Democratic drubbing that is in the making. The reason they would rather lose to a Democrat than see a genuinely conservative Republican get elected is because the former doesn’t threaten their long-term dominance over the party.

There are two flaws with the pragmatic approach. First, its analysis is always static and fails to recognize that the electorate responds to political dynamism. Second, it is an inept strategy that by its very nature prevents reaching the nominal objectives.

As the Instapundit reader commented: “It’s not enough, seemingly, to vote these people out. We have to stomp on them for them to get the message.”

2010 is gone

2010 is gone for Democrats. “He cannot save 2010,” the big-time Democrat is saying of Barack Obama. “It is gone. He must now concentrate on saving 2012. But the biggest fear of some of those close to him is that he might not really want to go on in 2012, that he might not really care.”

I chortled a bit. You may recall that I have predicted three things here a while back. House lost. Senate lost. Obama doesn’t even make it to the general election in 2012. Suddenly, all three are looking a little less crazy then they were back then.

Mailvox: praxeology and free trade

S asks about reconciling trade barriers with distrust of government:

as always, great work with the blog. I’m a big fan of your writing on economics, especially when applying Austrian theory to show how badly Keynesians misunderstand the subject. As such, I was hoping to ask you for some clarification regarding free trade. I read your book, The Return of the Great Depression, and found your comments on free trade rather interesting. (It’s been 9 months since I read the book so I apologise if I misrepresent any of your arguments.)

If I understand what you write correctly, it seems that the paradigm of comparative advantage espoused by Ricardo and his intellectual descendants doesn’t really make sense because of what you characterise as “the n-body problem”. In other words comparative advantage might work when dealing with two isolated counterparties, but what works for two entities does not necessarily work for three or more because of the exponentially increasing complexities introduced by additional trading entities. On this basis, you argue that a policy of unrestricted free trade doesn’t make any sense from a theoretical or practical perspective.

Here’s my question: given that the conclusions of praxeology generally argue that government intervention is a bad idea, how can this be consistent with a policy of government intervention in trade using tariffs to support specific industries or the general economy?

I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. The articles at Mises.org generally reference Ricardo’s theory to support their arguments even though Ricardo wasn’t an Austrian theorist. Then there’s this article which makes a lot of interesting points in favour of protectionism, even though it’s written by a guy who is a Keynesian (as far as I can tell). What are your thoughts on the “correct” policy regarding trade?

There are three ways to consider the problem. We can look at it logically, we can look at it empirically, and we can look at it historically. The Ricardian position fails by all three metrics, in part because there is an inherent fallacy in your observed dichotomy. To observe that government is always inefficient and to mistrust its application of power is not synonymous with saying that there is absolutely no role for national governments. Libertarian minarchy is neither anarchy nor the U.S. Constitution, but I think it is worthwhile to note that protecting the borders and funding itself through tariffs are two of the very few genuine powers that the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government.

It is a very odd and perverted form of American conservatism that supports democracy-building on the other side of the globe, but argues against American industry-protecting import duties.

But that’s a tangent. Getting back to the logical angle, the Ricardian notion of comparative advantage completely fails because it is too focused on the TOTAL production rather than the nation-specific production or the effects on a nation of being forced to exchange its manufacturing from one set of goods to another. But the biggest problem is that because it relies on a labor theory of value, it fails to take demand, much less the limits of demand, into account. Furthermore, being a pre-industrial concept, comaprative advantage simply does not envision that a nation could possibly have nothing to physically produce that is considered worthy of trade. Consider the Wikipedia example.

Two men live alone on an isolated island. To survive they must undertake a few basic economic activities like water carrying, fishing, cooking and shelter construction and maintenance. The first man is young, strong, and educated. He is also faster, better, and more productive at everything. He has an absolute advantage in all activities. The second man is old, weak, and uneducated. He has an absolute disadvantage in all economic activities. In some activities the difference between the two is great; in others it is small.

Despite the fact that the younger man has absolute advantage in all activities, it is not in the interest of either of them to work in isolation since they both can benefit from specialization and exchange. If the two men divide the work according to comparative advantage then the young man will specialize in tasks at which he is most productive, while the older man will concentrate on tasks where his productivity is only a little less than that of the young man. Such an arrangement will increase total production for a given amount of labor supplied by both men and it will benefit both of them.

This example assumes that there is something that the old man can do that is of value to the young man. But that’s not necessarily true. What if instead of 2 people, there are 20 and all the old man can usefully do is gather 5 coconuts a day when two young girls with no other useful skills can gather 100, more than the castaway society needs, in the same time? Yes, total production will increase +5, but so what? No one is going to give him anything for his worthless coconuts because there is already a coconut glut thanks to the highly productive young girls. Austrian-savvy individuals should be able to see the seeds of an Austrian critique of Ricardo here.

Anyhow, that’s just a superficial first pass at the intrinsic logical flaw of Ricardian comparative advantage. More on the empirical and historical flaws as well as the government question in future posts.

VPFL Week One

78 RR Redbeards (1-0)
48 Moundsview Meerkats (0-1)

61 Blackmouth Banksters (1-0)
51 MS Swamp Spartans (0-1)

75 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-0)
44 Valders Quixotes (0-1)

72 Winston Reverends (1-0)
47 Meigs Marauders (0-1)

55 Judean Rhyneauxs (1-0)
48 Bane Sidhe (0-1)

This week’s lesson: don’t leave an RB with 29 points on the bench.

Governed by a ghost

Apropos of yesterday’s discussion of the inimical effects of immigration, Dinesh D’Souza shows that Obama’s driving motivation is neither socialism nor traditional Democratic progressivism, but rather African anti-colonialism:

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father’s influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His “granny” Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather’s other wives) told Newsweek, “I look at him and I see all the same things–he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son.”

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey–a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright….

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

The Obama presidency, too, is strongly indicative of where America stands in Glubb’s theory of imperial lifecycles. In much the same way that the later Roman emperors were not Romans in the sense that Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, Gaius Marius, or Gaius Octavius Thurinus were, Mr. Soetoro-Soebarkah is not an American in the same sense that past presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Bill Clinton were. None of Barack Hussein Obama’s predecessors identified with foreign cultures or ambitions, much less were motivated by them and none of them were steeped in expressly anti-American ideologies from their childhood.