Jim's Blog

The racial problem is that stupid people can vote, that incentives for good behavior are weak or nonexistent, and that some people are unresponsive to incentives.  Stop voting, ensure that everyone has good incentives, and then the problem is reduced those people unresponsive to incentives, a markedly smaller problem.

Nations with slightly higher IQ are markedly wealthier than nations with lower IQ, but individuals with markedly higher IQ are not markedly wealthier than individuals with markedly lower IQ.

The difference between nations is well approximated if we suppose that people with an IQ above 105 all have roughly comparable productivity, and are responsible for producing almost everything, and people with IQ below 105 have negligible productivity, and are all parasites.  But individual wages do not fit this picture. Obviously a low IQ person who is working for a living in private enterprise must be producing value at least equal to his wages.

Moving from a nation with low average IQ to a nation with high average IQ substantially benefits the migrant.  No one wants to move in the other direction.

This only makes sense if people with high average IQ produce large benefits to those around them, and people with low average IQ produce large costs to those around them, negative externalities.  Read the rest of this entry »

As usual, good reactionary stuff.

You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?

Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.

Supposedly, the Federal Reserve has mountain of gold, seven thousand tonnes stashed in various places in the US.  By an astonishing coincidence, it owes banks in other nations seven thousand tonnes of gold.

The Fed owes the German government fifteen hundred tonnes of gold.  Germany asked for its gold back.  The  Fed did not want to give it.  So Germany asked for three hundred tonnes of gold back.  The fed agreed, in principle, to return three hundred tonnes of Germany’s gold – over seven years.

Why so long?

This only makes sense is the fed has considerably less than three hundred tonnes left and they hope to quietly purchase three hundred tonnes over the next  seven years using freshly printed money.  Stalling is going to create fear.  If the fed is stalling, it can only be because it has absolutely no alternative but to stall.

Recall the bank run scene in “It’s a wonderful life”.  Imagine if the bankers had said, “No problem, we have your money, but, alas, due to postal delays and that our clerks a bit slow counting it is going to take seven years.”