Jim’s Blog

Our Sick State:

I don’t quite know what you’d call these rituals, but the term “private health-care system” doesn’t seem the most obvious fit. Indeed, as in so many other areas of American life — the Fannie-Freddied mortgage market, the six-figure college education — the main purpose of these dysfunctional labyrinths ever more disconnected from any genuinely free market seems to be to discredit the very concept of a “private” system and thus soften up the electorate for statist fixes.

…

In free, functioning societies, it ought to be easy to buy a bottle of pills. The fact that it isn’t is one reason why America has a real bad headache.

…

if you price your time, even if you price it at kind of minimum wage, the amount of time it takes, this is my problem, that everywhere you look now, you’re seeing a remorseless transfer of time, and time is money, of time and money from the productive class to the kind of bureaucratic sclerosis class.

In a previous post of mine, I observe that the US health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. Obama is not socializing it. He is making it more socialist than it was.

The stimulus is finally taking effect.  As Zimbabwe and the Wiemar Republic demonstrate, one thing that governments armed with the ability to print fiat money really can do is stimulate.

From 2009 May to 2011 November total business sales in dollars rose twenty six percent, ten percent a year, which to me, though not to Bernanke, looks like good reason to scream panic and hit the brakes, to raise real interest rates to at least normal levels, and arguably higher. Read the rest of this entry »

Bernanke pledges to keep interest rates low for at least the next two years – meaning real interest are several percent negative.  Large negative interest rates rapidly lead to economic crisis.

“The low level of inflation is a validation,” Bernanke said. “There are some who were very concerned that our balance-sheet policies and the like would lead to high inflation. There’s certainly no sign of that yet.”

Really?  Sales have gone up ten percent in nominal value, which only makes sense if the real rate of inflation is seven to ten percent.  The US economy is on fire, and Bernanke pledges to continue throwing gasoline on the flames. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the US census, estimated monthly sales have gone up ten percent in dollars between 2010 November and 2011 November.  Have living standards gone up?  Clearly living standards are falling.  Total physical volume of goods shipped by rail has been falling over the past year, consistent with the general experience of falling living standards.  Can anyone explain what is going on?  This looks to me like slightly worse than ten percent year on year inflation, which is the inflation rate at which a significant risk of panicked flight from paper money sets in.  Am I misreading these numbers in some silly way?

There is a lot of ruin in a nation.  I have been predicting that we will probably not see hyperinflationary collapse for several years.  I find this data surprising and confusing. Either we are booming, or we are inflating, and it does not feel like we are booming.

Google has recently been nailed in two more scandals: cold calling ignorant Kenyans with a scam offer and scary lies about Google’s competitor, and vandalizing open source maps which competes with Google Maps.

While Google is wonderfully politically correct, and would never dream of suggesting that black people are stupid, the scam service they are selling in Kenya is predicated on the assumption that black people are stupid.
Read the rest of this entry »

The BLS is arguably understating inflation and unemployment. Read the rest of this entry »