Worshippers of the Obamessiah start to wake up

April 3rd, 2009

The New York Times almost gets it right:

Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism

What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other.

Close but no banana.

It is crony capitalism, which at its more socialist extreme is fascism, the corporate state, where business and the citizen are subjugated to the state, to the benefit of the rulers and favored businessmen. Not just any business is going to get is losses socialized and its gains privatized. Obama is coming down like a ton of bricks on certain businesses, but not, however, other businesses.

Good thing we did not elect McCain – then fascism would have had bipartisan support.

And talking of fascism, here is something where fascism is plainer to see.

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Government pisses away the entire GDP in five months

April 2nd, 2009

Bloomberg reports that since November, the government has spent, loaned, or guaranteed 12.8 trillion, an amount very close to one year’s GDP – one year of everyone’s income, or $42,105 for every man, woman, and child in America.

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Smashing capitalism

April 1st, 2009

President Barack Hussein Obama tells us:

Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it has ever been. Because starting today, the United States will stand behind your warranty.

This reads like something out of “Atlas Shrugged”.

I predict fifty percent inflation or so over the next three or four years – and that is if we eventually turn back from this course, or at least stop walking along it.  If, on the other hand, this goes on, with the government taking responsibility for one thing after another, as each intervention creates a crisis bigger than the last crisis, leading to more interventions, then I predict hyperinflation and widespread inability or unwillingness of government to provide order and protect property. Obama is not going to get under your car and fix it, and as the government takes on an ever growing multitude of tasks it is incapable of performing, its performance in its area of core competence (hurting people and breaking things) will deteriorate.

This crisis did not start with Obama, it did not even start with Bush.

During the final years of the Clinton presidency, Clinton greatly strengthened the CRA, which was glowingly reported by the newspapers

More than $1 Trillion Invested through CRA

Lenders and community organizations have negotiated $1.09 trillion in CRA dollars from 1992 to 2000.

A more accurate report of the same facts would be

Politicians shovel one trillion dollars of off budget money to irresponsible and improvident members of narrowly targeted voting blocks, for which taxpayers are going to wind up on the hook

Government regulation winds up as off budget handouts to voting blocks (in this case mostly Hispanics) and well connected insiders (in this case some elements in Wall Street).  Crisis ensues as the bill comes due. To maintain the superficial appearance of normality, there is a drastic increase in intervention, but the synthetic normality is a mere facade, like putting makeup on a corpse.

We now have trillions of dollars of capital flowing away from well managed businesses, to businesses with implicit or explicit government guarantees – businesses that will rapidly lose that money – a huge increase in the already huge off budget expenses of government, in addition to the huge and rapidly growing on budget deficit.  Unacknowledged off budget government expenditures far exceed government’s ability to tax.  They will not necessarily exceed government’s ability to borrow – yet.

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Geithner’s plan explained

April 1st, 2009

President Barack Hussein Obama tells us:

Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it has ever been. Because starting today, the United States will stand behind your warranty.

This reads like something out of “Atlas Shrugged”.

I predict disturbing inflation or so over the next three or four years – and that is if we eventually turn back from this course, or at least stop walking along it.  If, on the other hand, this goes on, with the government taking responsibility for one thing after another, as each intervention creates a crisis bigger than the last crisis, leading to more interventions, then I predict hyperinflation and widespread inability or unwillingness of government to provide order and protect property. Obama is not going to get under your car and fix it, and as the government takes on an ever growing multitude of tasks it is incapable of performing, its performance in its area of core competence (hurting people and breaking things) will deteriorate.

This crisis did not start with Obama, it did not even start with Bush.

During the final years of the Clinton presidency, Clinton greatly strengthened the CRA, which was glowingly reported by the newspapers

More than $1 Trillion Invested through CRA

Lenders and community organizations have negotiated $1.09 trillion in CRA dollars from 1992 to 2000.

A more accurate report of the same facts would be

Politicians shovel one trillion dollars of off budget money to irresponsible and improvident members of narrowly targeted voting blocks, for which taxpayers are going to wind up on on the hook

Government regulation winds up as off budget handouts to voting blocks (in this case mostly Hispanics) and well connected insiders (in this case some elements in Wall Street).  Crisis ensues as the bill comes due. To maintain the superficial appearance of normality, there is a drastic increase in intervention, but the synthetic normality is a mere facade, like putting makeup on a corpse.

We now have trillions of dollars of capital flowing away from well managed businesses, to businesses with implicit or explicit government guarantees – businesses that will rapidly lose that money – a huge increase in the already huge off budget expenses of government, in addition to the huge and rapidly growing on budget deficit.  Unacknowledged off budget government expenditures far exceed government’s ability to tax.  They will not necessarily exceed government’s ability to borrow – yet.

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The crisis explained

March 28th, 2009

I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble”

Nope. They were not speculating.

The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was the bank’s problem.

So the people who bought houses were taking no risk, since mostly they bought them with 100% loans, had no credit rating and no assets to lose.

So were the banks making the loans taking a risk?

No, because it was not the bank’s problem, because the loans were for the most part guaranteed by Freddy, or Fannie, or AIG – all of which had implicit government guarantees, and all of which had an AAA rating.

So why did AIG and the rest have an AAA rating?

AIG and the rest were issuing naked puts greatly exceeding their total capitalization, which pretty much guaranteed that sooner or later they would go broke in a big way. So why AAA?

Moody’s, who issued the ratings, was tweaked on this, and replied that it was unthinkable that the government would allow these institutions to fail. So it was not true that nobody knew what was happening. All the insiders knew what was happening, the regulators knew what was happening: they knew that businesses were taking big risks for big money in the expectation that if they won, they won, and if they lost, the government would take care of them. It was government policy. People have been complaining about this for years.

The fundamental cause of this crisis is government regulation: Governments cannot be trusted with money. They think only of short term political gain, so dispense money to the loudest pressure group, in this case those represented by ACORN, rather than to people who are likely to repay it with interest. In this case, the regulators decided that “traditional” standards of credit worthiness were racist and discriminatory, because too many Jews, and not enough Blacks, met “traditional” standards.

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Racefail 09 explained

March 18th, 2009

Constantinople drew my attention to “This way lies fascism” which explains the conflict of which  Racefail 09 is part.

The left claims authority to convict people for thought crimes committed in other people’s dreams.  The hearer can find an offensive meaning without concern for authorial intent, and the author is guilty regardless of his intended meaning.  This leads to conflict, Racefail 09 being part of that conflict.

Under Racefail 09 rules, you have no obligation to understand other people’s intended meaning, and if you cannot follow what they say, and so confabulate up an offensive meaning, you are superior, you win, they are inferior, and they lose.

The smart, and those fluent in words, often express themselves in ways that are subtle, which the stupid and ignorant find hard to follow. Reading words that are hard to follow, they feel offended.  Racefail 09 rules guarantee that if they feel offended, their offense must be justified.

Thus Racefail 09 rules tend to be popular with the stupid and incoherent, and unpopular with the clever and those good with words.  Since the reader has sole authority to decide the writers meaning, and the writer is at fault if the reader decides on an offensive meaning, Racefail 09  is a pretty good deal for people who have trouble following other people’s words.

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The problems with Laissez Faire sexuality

March 17th, 2009

In traditional society, women were strongly encouraged to refrain from sex before marriage, and marry responsible men with good jobs who were able and willing to support a family.

Today, women are encouraged to follow their hormones, which tends to result in them have offspring with a long succession of sexy males who disappear, often into jail or dying violently, and who often rough them up and steal their money before leaving.

Bryan Caplan correctly argues that the non traditional family does not necessarily harm children, because the low conventional success rate of children from such families may well reflect them behaving like their fathers, who have a different standard of what constitutes success, and may well be very successful by that standard – more chicks banged, less time wasted from nine to five, and more enemies maimed.  Further, women who choose to have a non traditional family presumably prefer it – there can be little doubt that the sex is hotter the badder the boy.

Now this is a good deal for alpha males, and lots of women argue it is a good deal for women, but it has a sizable externality, in that it encourages male behavior that causes problems for other men, and produces children that cause problems for other people.  Bastards are bastards. The production of bastards creates large external costs.  Encouraging fidelity, chastity, and female preference for responsible mates, even though their hormones tend to cry out for demon lovers, reduces other people’s costs – in traditional society the costs to fathers, uncles, and brothers of grown women, in modern society the cost of the welfare state, in all societies the cost of crime.

The welfare state reduces the costs of hormonal female behavior to parents of those females, since the cost of bastardy is externalized to the rest of society to a greater extent, and thus reduces the incentive of parents to inculcate their daughters with traditional values and deprecate the natural behavior of females – the natural inclination of women being more towards the demon lover.  Women can be socialized, pressured, and monitored into fidelity to males that materially support them and help raise their kids, but it takes a firm hand and a watchful eye.  While Islamic society takes this to extremes, the other extreme, total neglect of this problem, has costs also.

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Why Racefail 09 hates John Scalzi

March 15th, 2009

John Scalzi said he wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with the racefail 09 debate, and would ban anyone who brings the debate to his blog.

This non statement, and non communication, caused intense outrage, resulting in massive attack on John Scalzi, since all good leftists have to enthusiastically agree with the correct line, and failure to join the chant about the badness of various people under attack is itself a great and terrible sin.

One of the posters on his blog explains why Scalzi is now under attack:

the reason you [John Scalzi] drew ire is your inability to follow proper protocol:

  1. Acknowledge that you’re wrong, and guilty on all counts of whatever the other party accuses you, and
  2. agree with the accuser on just how very, very wrong you are/were, while knowing that any level of self-debasement isn’t going to be enough to placate them.

Clearly, the only thing that would begin to set things right would be your ritual suicide, hurling yourself into a bonfire fueled by everything you’ve ever written on- or offline. Don’t forget to put it on YouTube, accompanied by a ten-page manifesto on the magnitude of your wrongness, and the corresponding rightness of the accuser.

In response, Scalzi apologized profusely, and proceeded piously to post a lot of politically correct piety about race in literature, indirectly demonizing all his friends, allies, and supporters, without, however, directly addressing the debate concerning the sinfulness of various actual writers and bloggers.

Come on.  That is not good enough.  In your repentance, you need to directly condemn as many people as possible.

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Racefail 09

March 11th, 2009

Hear the sound of the left ceasing to be the smart party, and becoming the stupid party:

On the Livejournal science fiction blogs, there is, or recently was, a passionate debate called  Racefail 09, wherein lots of bloggers accuse other bloggers of being racists.

Those accused of racism are those that are very left wing and very politically correct – they are those least likely to be guilty, most likely to be devastated by the accusation, and least able to defend themselves against the accusations because any defense would itself be politically incorrect. No one is accusing the likes of John Ringo. Instead the accused are people who are constitutionally incapable of calling a spade a spade. The accused are people who are normally clever with words and therefore can normally lacerate, devastate, and dismiss critics with ease – but are paralyzed by politically correctness from defending themselves against this accusation.

Therefore, the accusations are not motivated by concerns about race, rather, “racism” is merely the standard accusation that left wingers make these days, especially against each other.

None of those making these charges are the brightest bulb in the batch. They are all from the shallow end of the gene pool, the wrong edge of the bell curve.

So this looks to me not like anti racists going after racists, or even people of color going after whites, but more like the stupid people going after the smart people. “Racist” is these days merely an epithet that stupid people use a lot, much like “fascist” used to be.

And when that epithet is hurled, all the good leftwingers must dutifully join in, explaining that they were never friends of so and so, just as in 1928, there was a sudden dearth of Trotskyists, and in 1956, an equally sudden dearth of Stalinists.

A long predicted consequence of political correctness is finally coming to pass. Forbid thought, and soon your movement will be governed by those unable to think.

The Khmer Rouge, a party of very smart people, proceeded to execute all the smart people. America’s left cannot execute all the smart people – yet. But it can cast them out of its ranks.

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The crisis has barely begun

March 8th, 2009

“Naked capitalism” explains what has happened, and observes that the Bush-Obama policies caused it, are causing it, and are likely to cause a lot more of it.

Government guarantees will be abused – and the broader the guarantees, and more chaotic the situation the more they will be abused.  The solution is that existing guarantees must be reduced, and existing government initiatives curtailed or at least allowed to expire.   Extensive state intervention is extremely difficult to do right, easy to do badly, and the arrogant interventionists lack the necessary humility to do it right.

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