Cynicism

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
--George Bernard Shaw,

Wizer's Definitive but Still Cranky Election Observation

With five weeks to go before the most important election in 32 years, we have it boiled down to this:

1. The blue candidate believes at his core that all things are possible through government, but does not believe that the message is a winner.
2. The red candidate believes that many things are possible and best handled through the private sector, but he also does not believe that his message is a winner.

So, the messages are all crafted to hide something, or to craftily change the subject. During an election season, the mainstream press must report every day on what the candidates say. Therefore, the news is always off-topic. Without the core messages being communicated, the election will turn on who has the better golf game. Heaven help us.

Chart of the Day #13

This is one of the reasons I think the number is more than 47%. (From Townhall.com blog)

Chart of the Day #12

Spot the trend.

Chart of the Day #11

Pesky Demographics...

I'm a 53%er?

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it. -- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831
This week it was revealed that at a closed-door fundraiser in May, Romney told wealthy supporters that he could not hope to win the votes of the 47 percent of Americans who, he said, do not pay federal income taxes.  -- ABC News blog


I'll be honest...I thought the number was higher. I was just telling a friend and co-worker that 51% of the people will certainly vote for more free money. I still think they will, but Romney thinks he has a fighting chance with about 4% of those people. That's about the most optimistic sentiment I have heard in a while. Okay, so 47% it is.

I think it makes a good discussion point, because every time Mother Jones or one of her minions brings it up, it will remind people how close we are to the tipping point.

Blogging the blogs

I have not been commenting much about the election, for a couple of reasons:

1.) Certain bloggers do a much better job at framing the issues and putting them in context than I do. Walter Russell Mead is one of them.
2.) When the choices were between no discernable plan, and a horrible plan, there isn't much constructive I could think of saying.

I saw this Tom Woods speech from a Libertarian gathering in Dallas, wherein he suggests that it is important to carry the torch of liberty through our blogs, and that, in the face of the dilemma that someone's always going to outblog you, he said simply 1) to blog about what you are reading.

So, in that vein, I now blog about 2) Walter Russell Mead's article following the announcement of Paul Ryan as presumed VP nominee for the R party.

I think he frames the election going forward pretty well. It is a relatively deep red vs. deep blue, now.
Before, Romney had no plan other than not being Obama. Paul Ryan is "instant plan". Just add water. The most important thing Romney accomplished was to facilitate the debate over big government vs. small. It's already more than many of us had hoped for this election cycle.

We can leave aside the obvious shortcomings of Ryan's plan (willing to live with 3% deficits forever, voted for TARP), and recognize that there actually may be someone in politics with a functioning calculator, and hopefully a big eraser. That can be counted as a victory as far as I'm concerned, and a step away from the brink.

A game of Keep Away (maybe for keeps)

Do you remember the game of Keep Away? Where two kids stand 10-20 ft apart, and throw the ball to each other at the exclusion of everyone else? Depending on the relative skills, it is possible that the kids in the middle will never get their hands on the ball. Such games should end quickly, because it's no fun for the people who can't get the ball.

In an article today in the Wall Street Journal, Laffer and Scudder raise the point that the target revenue the government is aiming for by jumping the fiscal cliff is about 500 billion dollars. That is a static figure, which amounts to a 3% increase in tax. But as Jack Kemp said "When you tax something, you get less of it". That means lower income overall, and a reduction in growth of the economy. This magic 500 bil looks like a big deal. But it is out of reach. The 500 billion that the taxocrats want to abscond with is unlikely to materialize.

The people (or corporations if you don't mind) with that kind of income are going to transfer it out of the country before it is even made; effectively playing Keep Away with the money. This is money that will benefit other citizens, other governments. Not ours.

This is a game of Keep Away that is being played too close to the cliff.

Fighting the Liberty Fighters

"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." — Milton Friedman

To be against the free market requires several huge leaps of non-faith.

To be against the free market one has to believe that people are not the best shepherds of their own fate, that some anointed individual in a distant piece of earth has a better idea, or even the first thought of a more constructive use for another person's resources.

To be against the free market means to oppose a person's freedom to pursue and to benefit from the fruits of his labor. The opposers are not freedom fighters. They are bondage fighters who want to see everyone shackled by a yoke of declining productivity.

To be against the free market is to deny human nature.  It is to adopt a shallow understanding of economics (hello Keynesians) and to ignore the obvious truths in it.

Those against the free market have little or no understanding of the nature of human dignity, drive, and desire.  People with no incentive to produce anything of value produce nothing of value.

The defining principle of the contra-free-market crowd is to disincentivise production. They do this by attempting to convince enough people that they have a right to someone else's lunch. And that it is somehow morally acceptable for people to think this way. It is a dibilitating lie.

And, like clockwork, every four years, we gather in the precinct rooms to prove that at least half the populace believe this lie.

Any surviving ethic will have to be consistent with human nature. So, from here, I believe the best personal strategy is to invest in the things that are in line with basic human nature. We want to be free to pursue happiness. We want everybody to have the same opportunity, to share and celebrate that freedom.


Ultimately, there can be no personal freedom without economic freedom. Economic freedom is not something government can give you. it is something you have to protect for yourself.


To my readers: Invest in freedom. Embrace those things that both harness and nurture the human spirit. Do not invest in any person, place, or thing that denies the human spirit. Protect the free market and protect freedom.

Simple Economics

..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light. -- Henry Hazlitt

Economics as a field of study is often misunderstood. So much misunderstood that it is often blamed for our sad economic condition.  This is a little like blaming the scale for the failure of a diet. The core of economics describes with brutal precision the nature of an economy. People trade labor for goods, just as they did at the beginning of history. It is happening on an ever increasing scale, and the more people interacting with an economy, the more complexity we have.

People tend to dismiss economics as being abstract, almost a philosophy rather than a science. It's not surprising that many would reach that conclusion. You can hear the words "if economics was a real science, our economy would be steadily improving, like medical science". If economic science and medical science were practiced equally well, we would still be in the blood-letting phase.

The other difference that occurs to me is that bacteria behave rationally.  My argument here is not to advocate for economics as science, but for economics as a fundamental aspect of human nature. And every time we ignore core human nature, there is bad trouble.

"I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior." — Milton Friedman 

Economics is misunderstood. Consider that government sometimes creates false impressions of economic conditions, for the purpose of manipulating public sentiment. for example, Austerity and Stimulus. Austerity we understand as low government spending, and Stimulus has come to mean high government spending. In Europe right now, there is discussion about reversing the course of austerity, and going to stimulus instead.

The fallacy in this argument is that real austerity, and austerity as it is practiced in, say, Greece are not the same thing. Further, real stimulus, and stimulus as practiced in, say,  shovel ready form, are also not the same thing. In fact, the two "economic" approaches are probably not much different in execution. The political party in charge makes sure it's friends are taken care of whatever the new scheme is called.

But real economics offers real solutions. Real austerity takes the size of government down to the point where the economy can sustain itself without borrowing. Simple, right? Easy to define. Easy to visualize. Easy to achieve. Mountains of data show that the amount of federal revenue that can be created is no more than about 19% of GDP. It is an immutable law. So, we should tune our government to exist on that number. If we want to grow the government we should accomplish it by growing the economy.

So, rather than trying to parse what everybody means by austerity, stimulus, and voodoo economics, we should start looking at simple, real economics.