Detailed Abstractions

Not content with just blaming his political opponents for causing the Arizona terrorist attack, Paul Krugman also seeks to show us how his morals are better than his oponents as well.

In usual fashion of course, his framework is built on faulty assumptions, each which help his argument out a great deal, but all of which prove the fallacy of his thinking (full article here via NY Times):

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

Well, we can stop here, because the New Deal did not magically arrive at a philisohpical moral imperative which has been around for centuries.  Sorry Mr. Krugman, but morals are actually shared by most humans and this one is included regardless of your self-serving ability to not see it.

No, this novel concept didn’t begin in the 1930′s.  Most of us probably know or have heard the axiom, when much is given, much is expected.  Or this one, the idea that a rich person’s trip to Heaven is analogous to threading a camel through the eye of a needle (historically this meant using smaller entrances to walled cities, not actually a needle and thread).

But no matter, as for Mr. Krugman, the New Deal is the beginning of it all….. So where to go from here?  How about a false dichotomy (article cont’d):

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft…

Notice the word play here in these back to back statements.  He sets up the framework as side A against side B, and while he doesn’t actually state that side B believes the less fortunate should fend for themselves, the implication in the setup is that this is the case.

Moving to his point however, (more…)

Ahhh… the NY Times – telling us how great it is to die in Rwanda of a heart attack with health insurance, than to survive a heart attack in the US without (via Cato here).  The premise from the NY Times is a Rwandan official who is just besides themselves when they met an American college student who doesn’t have health insurance.  Cato wonders what they are thinking when:

…[In Rwanda] Dialysis is “generally unavailable.”  As are many treatments for cancer, strokes, and heart attacks, making those ailments “death sentences” more often than in advanced nations.  Life expectancy at birth is 58 years, compared to 78 years in the United States.  Rwandan children are 15 times more likely to die before their first birthday (7 vs. 107 deaths per 1,000 live births) and 25 times more likely to die before turning five (8 vs. 196 deaths per 1,000 live births) than U.S.-born children.  (If you want to meet some Rwandan kids struggling to make it to age 5, read my friend’s blog, Life of a Thousand Hills.)  And yet, the saddest thing is a healthy-but-uninsured American college student…..

But the NY Times isn’t alone in their idiocy (as usual).  Via Reason.com (here), they wonder how a floating grocery store can possibly be a bad thing?

Nestle has put together a floating supermarket barge, and on Friday it sailed the product-laden boatmarket (superboat? grocerybarge?) into brave new Amazonian emerging markets…

My first reaction: Neat!…

Apparently that reaction is not shared by all. At Alternet, Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, calls this an “especially disgusting news item” about which “writing about it is the only way I know to release my outrage. My version of screaming from the rooftop.”…

Yes, apparently many pundits from around the world are working tirelessly to keep all the options they have out of the hands of lesser people… for their own good of course.  As reason writer Ms. Mangu-Ward summed it up:

…Nestle is sending its boat into the hinterlands precisely because those hinterlands are now full of people who might be able to swing the purchase of the occasional chocolate bar, something well outside the scope of their financial lives just a few years ago. Hardly the sort of thing that makes me want to take to the rooftops–or the Internet–to express my outrage….

Arlen Specter….you remember, the guy who was going to lose his Senate seat so changed parties from Republicans to Democrats…. only to be soundly defeated in the primary?  Well, if you care, you can see an example of the last, desperate gasp of a man losing all of his power (via Politico here).

Good news on the medical front.  Via Bloomberg, Stem Cells From Own Eyes Restore Vision to Blinded Patients, Study Shows:

Patients blinded in one or both eyes by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted, according to a report by Italian researchers at a scientific meeting….

Ah… Howard Dean once again proves that his sporadic brilliance and clarity on certain subjects will always be over shadowed by blind party loyalty.  Via Politico (here):

Howard Dean on Wednesday took the New York Times to task for running a “hatchet job” story on Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal misstating his service in Vietnam without acknowledging that the information came from a GOP campaign…

What do we know?  Mr. Blumenthal has deliberately stated publicly about those times when he served “in Vietnam” on a number of occasions.  We know it’s untrue, because he’s backed off and changed served in to served “during Vietnam”:

Blumenthal apologized for misstating his service “on occasion” during a press conference Tuesday.

But for Mr. Dean:

“Let’s be fair about this. This is a New York Times gotcha story planted by the opposition,” said Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “It was planned by the opposition. The New York Times did not acknowledge that in their front page article.”

Dean urged Connecticut voters to “listen to Blumenthal’s side” of the story before judging his candidacy.

Yep – kill the messenger, then use guilt by association, but ignore the simple truth that a man in a job which has a core component of deliberate communications deliberately misled people to believe he was something he wasn’t.

It’s sad really Mr. Blumenthal doesn’t think enough about his life – sad to think of his family having to deal with this humiliation as well.  Sad Mr. Dean still doesn’t get it.

According to many reports from recent “economist” we are on are way.  Starting with the “Sage” Warren Buffet (here via Calculated Risk) arguing that supply has dropped below demand, which effectively will balance out the system:

…Our country has wisely selected the third option, which means that within a year or so residential housing problems should largely be behind us…

The NY Times  (here):

After a plunge lasting three years, houses have finally become cheap enough to lure buyers. That, in turn, is stabilizing prices, generating hope that the real estate market is beginning to recover….

& Our trusted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake (here via CNBC):

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers Tuesday he expects the downtroddenU.S. housing sector to improve by the end of the year, a senator who participated in the closed-door meeting said….

At first, this might seem like some sort of an agreement, however there is one stark difference.  Mr. Buffet spoke in February 2010, the NY Times piece is from July 2009, & Mr. Bernake spoke in February 2008.

The timing of the statements is instructive, as each was based upon changes in supply and demand.  The problem all had in their given time frames appears to be the same – you simply can’t count on economic activity trending when the growth was due to temporary incentives from the federal government.

As with Cash-for-Clunkers (here), Cash-for-Appliances (here), and recent tax breaks and money for lending, Cash-for-Homes will fail as well.  A temporary relief program will only provide temporary relief and is already showing signs of weakness.  From WaPo (here):

…Even as the housing market shows signs of improvement, including in new data released Tuesday, economists warn that it could take up to a decade for many homeowners to regain equity in their homes, while some people in the hardest-hit regions of the country may not see a recovery during their lifetime. …

CNBC (here):

The recent slump in housing is making some analysts uneasy about a recovery that many thought sustainable just a couple months ago and comes at a time when the Federal Reserve is nearing the end of a critical, year-long program to support the mortgage market….

& Time (here):

For a while there, it seemed the housing market had made the turn to recovery. Housing sales were up in nearly every month in 2009. But today it looks like real estate is headed back down again…

Delaying the inevitable will just make the pain worse.

In an effort to make sure Paul Krugman isn’t the most incoherent economics writer working for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman comes out with an oped yesterday titled Our One-Party Democracy.

You see, in Mr. Friedman’s world, the only party working towards effective reform is the Democrats, therefore democracy has failed:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Not hard for him maybe, but for those who like freedom, we only see the worst example of governance ever conceived… except for all the others.

Why stop there?  According to Mr. Friedman, the real problem here is that the US isn’t more like China:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages…

I’m pretty sure even the leadership in China just laughed out loud at being called  enlightened – they are probably laughing just as hard as I am confused in trying to figure out how Mr. Friedman could come to such a conclusion.

After all, China is a country that continues to jail dissidents, persecute the religious, deny access to a free press, ignore basic contracts rights, and many, many other anti-freedom atrocities, all of which are well documented and easy to find.

Just a couple years ago, in 2007, multiple reports held that Chinese officials had displaced (read: kicked out without recourse or compensation) 1.5 million Chinese nationals to make room for the Olympic Village.

Surely Mr. Friedman understands this, so why go to such lengths as to spot light China for being enlightened?  Well, to Mr. Friedman, it seems obvious that with all of China’s current evils, they don’t rank with the evils being perpetrated on US society  right now by Republicans.  Thanks to Mr. Friedman, the Republican’s evil nature has been identified and it is startling.  Yes, the Republicans have dared to oppose Mr. Friedman’s Mr. Obama’s legislation:

…The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste….

What should we do when people dare to demonstrate such blatant use of their individual rights by going against the One True Way?  Well go to one-party autocracy:

…The only way for us to match them [China] is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy….

…Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business….

I know when trying to follow such flawless logic, sometimes we lose the forest for the trees, so for those playing the Analogy home game:

In the past 200 years, the United States, with a fairly free economy, slowly became and then maintained economic dominance in almost all areas, while China, Russia, and other controlled economies have done much worse.  Recent history is different with China, India, Russia, and others becoming emerging economies, but only as they progressed towards market reforms and away from command economies.

To Mr. Friedman however, little things like historical evidence and current human rights’ abuses aren’t part of the equation.  The only part of the equation seems to be “China is doing things I like, the US isn’t, therefore the US is bad and China is good.”

The most amazing thing is how he isn’t even trying to hide his desire to control your lives.  Without a hint of irony, he is telling you directly he’d prefer that those who disagree not be given rights to control the government,  while those who agree with him should be shown the keys to the kingdom.

Yes, like all worthless dictators before him and all totalitarian idiots who will come after him, Mr. Friedman is more than willing to give up your rights in search of his goals.