What academia means by “diversity” is people of all colors and all sexual preferences chanting their master’s words in unison.
Steve Sailer found an interesting paper on admissions policy. Read the rest of this entry »
“Diversity”
July 20th, 2010If you are not at the government’s table, you are on the government’s menu
July 20th, 2010While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.
This is an administration that almost employs more Goldman Sachs officials in financial and regulatory positions than Goldman Sachs itself does. One of the first acts of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to hire a BP executive to serve as a deputy administrator for land and minerals management. And now they’ve just hired to implement the new healthcare law someone who was just recently in charge of the lobbying and government activities of the nation’s largest private insurer.
If someone genuinely opposed big business, he would opposed all government regulation and all taxes.
The ruling class
July 18th, 2010Roissy links to an insightful article on the growing divide between rulers and ruled
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
It is in the nature of government to grow, and so it swallows up everything. The parasite eventually destroys the host. Government has seized upon a multitude of justifications, the most recent justification being the welfare state, the coming justification being saving the earth. Insolvency approaches. Trees do not grow to the sky. That which cannot continue, will stop.
The left is astroturf, it is the voice of the state. But we have already reached the point where persuading people to vote for more government, or interpreting their vote as a vote for more government no matter how they vote has become ineffectual, depriving the left of any reason for existence, depriving democracy itself of the reason for its existence.
The death of science
July 14th, 2010“Scientists” complain that the government is interfering in “science” by denying them regulatory authority over other people’s economic activity.
Nasa’s primary goal is to make Muslims feel good about Muslim science. Read the rest of this entry »
The politics of Hit-Girl
July 13th, 2010The politics of Hit-Girl
For a long time the left has controlled the gates for movies, books, and comics, in part because of the government control of television. Lately, however, I have been seeing more and more politically incorrect stuff.
As you probably figured out if you watched the movie Kick Ass, Hit-Girl is a conservative, what with being home schooled and all
It is a great movie.
In the comic book, her politics is more overtly conservative than in the movie, not that she is pacifist hippie in the movie. Here are some political scenes from the comics: Read the rest of this entry »
Real GDP growth
July 12th, 2010GDP is an ill defined quantity, for it counts cars produced, official credit ratings produced, and regulators producing regulation. With the best will in the world, it is hard to say how it is changing, and lately we have been seeing some pretty bad will. Attempting to calculate GDP is worse than adding apples to oranges, it is adding apples to moonbeams.
Supposedly GDP is growing, and growing fast – despite the fact that everyone is feeling poorer, and private sector jobs are declining. An amazing productivity increase, largely reflecting amazing productivity improvements by government and quasi governmental employees.
So let us look for a different measure: Taxable retail sales. Which are stagnant or down. Population keeps growing, but they are buying less stuff, in part because they are being taxed more.
“ethics”
July 10th, 2010The Washington post complains about unethical science in China.
Zhao is turning his attention to a topic Western researchers have shied away from because of ethical worries: Zhao plans to study the genes of 1,000 of his best-performing classmates at a top high school in Beijing and compare them, he said, “with 1,000 normal kids.”
Politically incorrect science is “unethical”
Today western science is stagnant for the same reasons as it was stagnant from 1293 to 1648 – because it has been subordinated to religion.
Financial Reform
July 8th, 2010TheMoneyIllusion nicely summarizes the financial reform legislation
I can’t see how it addressed ANY of the major causes of the 2008 fiasco. But easily the most inexcusable aspect of the bill was that it didn’t even address Fannie and Freddie. People excuse that on the basis that there is a lot of political support for F&F. But if you can’t reform them right after a $165 billion taxpayer bailout, when will they be unpopular enough that we can address their flaws? …
And no ban on sub-prime mortgages? I thought that was the cause of the crisis.
He misses, however, the biggest failure of the financial reform legislation - that the NRSROs are still in business, rather than in jail.
The government has decided to not reform the NRSROs – because any reform, we are quite truthfully told, would put them out of business.
In other words, their business is completely dependent on corruption and gross improprieties that have cost the taxpayer a trillion, possibly trillions.
Indeed, the regulations that Lawrence White complains about look very much as if they were passed to keep the NRSROs in
business.
As Lawrence White tells us (from behind a paywall):
By means of the high ratings that they awarded to subprime mortgage-backed bonds, the three major rating agencies—Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch—played a central role in the current financial crisis. Without these ratings, it is doubtful that subprime mortgages would have been issued in such huge amounts, since a major reason for the subprime lending boom was investor demand for high-rated bonds—much of it generated by regulations that made such bonds mandatory for large institutional investors. And it is even less likely that such bonds would have become concentrated on the balance sheets of the banks, for which they were rewarded by capital regulations that tilted toward high-rated securities. Why, then, were the agencies excessively optimistic in their ratings of subprime mortgage-backed securities? A combination of their fee structure, the complexity of the bonds that they were rating, insufficient historical data, some carelessness, and market pressures proved to be a potent brew. This combination was enabled, however, by seven decades of financial regulation that, beginning in the 1930s, had conferred the force of law upon these agencies’ judgments about the creditworthiness of bonds and that, since 1975, had protected the three agencies from competition.
Palin still in charge
July 7th, 2010So far, when the Republican establishment has endorsed a republican in a primary, and Palin has endorsed a different candidate, Palin’s candidate wins. Looks like Republican party activists listen to Palin, and rank and file republicans listen to party activists. The next test of Palin’s power is Lisa Murkowski against Joe Miller. The party establishment are not only way to the left of the party base, they are also incompetent, corrupt, politically clumsy, and astonishingly stupid, the kind of stupid that only years of teaching in an elite university can induce.
Green Jobs
July 5th, 2010Abengoa SA was offered a $1.45 billion loan guarantee by the U.S. Department of Energy to build a 250-megawatt solar plant in Arizona, and Abound Solar Manufacturing was offered a $400 million loan guarantee toward two plants where thin-solar panels will be manufactured.
The guarantees through the Recovery Act and other measures are expected by the awardees to create more than 5,000 jobs, according to a statement from the White House.
Government guaranteed loans usually wind up being repaid by the government. It is just a way of keeping expenditures off today’s books. So this works out as $370 000 per job.
But in fact the impact on jobs, and green energy, will probably be negative, as the firms that actually create jobs are less well connected, and will know better than to attempt to compete with a business that has such government favor.