If you’ve been following the news at all, you have probably heard your fair share of Obama PropagandaRama. One such item on the ObamAgenda is the Cash for Clunkers scheme, where the government puts up the funds for a $4500 credit toward the purchase of a new car if someone brings in a “clunker” to the dealership. The objective, so the Obamanauts say, is to put more fuel efficient cars on the road AND save the auto industry in America.
Bollocks. What a massive load of bollocks. If you think that paying someone to destroy wealth is beneficial to anyone except the payee (and anyone else sitting on the gravy train along the way), you need to seriously reevaluate whether you should be forming opinions on economic issues at all.
Read more…
I was actually turking, working on Amazon’s Requester’s “Ask a Question” task when this article popped up: Restore Economic Confidence by Robbing Banks by Spencer Green. The article draws a parallel between our current economic crisis and the 60s bank robbing duo Bonnie & Clyde, suggesting that a new brand of “populist criminals stand up for all of us.”
The interesting thing about this article is that I can’t tell whether it’s a parody of Keynesianism, or it’s someone with a Keynesian viewpoint simply being facetious but still oblivious to the absurdities of his position. Reading it like a libertarian, I see good satire (which is basically true of any statist piece read as a consistent libertarian; it’s either something someone really written or really good satire of the nonsense people believe). Reading it as a real statist piece, it makes my stomach turn.
It’s posted under “Comedy News,” so I’m really thinking it’s satire, but I don’t know. Someone advise me?
Apparently, Hawaii’s hailed “universal child health care” initiative has been, well, uninitiated.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081017/ap_on_he_me/child_health_hawaii
HONOLULU – Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.
Gov. Linda Lingle’s administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.
“People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free,” said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. “I don’t believe that was the intent of the program.”
…
Basically, this is an illustration of why mixed economies don’t work effectively. If the government guarantees a good or service of certain value to those who don’t have it, it will be exploited. More broadly, any entitlement system will be exploited because it’s simply economically stupid to do otherwise. If you can foist the cost of anything you need onto someone else and you don’t notice or have no moral qualms about the force involved, why wouldn’t you?
Read more…
From time to time an author or thinker will create a work, often in the Utopian genre, which lays out a detailed design of an ideal society. Fourier’s phalanestères are one example: they are described as the structure of a social unit, all the way down to the number of inhabitants and to the shape of the actual buildings that house them.
The general problem with these plans is that they lack generality over time and space. They fail the test of universality. The following will be my random walk through some of the problems with rationalist institutional construction and the subsequent problems of central planning.
Read more…