The Economist's Cookbook

So for some unknown reason I walked by a radio that was blaring the infamous windbag known as Sean Hannity. He was busying himself with his "analysis" of economics. I was struck by this:

He was referring to the Keynesian (Pronounced like Kanesian) model of economics as the "Ken"sian model. Now I understand that most people have no idea who John Maynard Keynes was, or what his ideas were. I understand that most people may not know how to pronounce his name.

For the love of god, if you're going to TRY and act like you have ANY clue what the hell you're talking about, at LEAST get the guy's name right.

This goes for most of the pundits out there: Both on the left and the right. Olberman, O'Reilly, Rush, Matthews, all of you. STOP. Stop playing in the economic sandbox like any of us care what you think or what you say. You all are not qualified to do anything more than mouth breath.

So please, all of you, have a nice hot cup of SHUT THE HELL UP!

Thank you and have a nice day.

...and the results are fairly typical. Dodge the question. Babble incoherently. Make up facts. etc.


Here is what upsets me. These people are just as blind and unwilling to reason as many of the "Freepers" that inhabit the Tea Party movement. "What we need are everyone to have a good community/neighborhood school". Ah yes, where you can funnel 60+% of your funding into administrative costs rather than into actually teaching kids knowledge. In fact, this union leader has advocated for banning private schools. Let's see ... Yup, you're a tyrant.

There is nothing redeeming about these people's point of view. It's all talking points, ignore the question/data and keep sticking it to the private sector.

These people will keep smoking that pipe until this whole house of cards collapses around them.

See here is what I don't understand, if you look at the history of Marijuana and you learn WHY it was banned, there should be no problem legalizing/de-criminalizing it. My own mother has had cancer... twice. So this one is near and dear to me. She almost didn't survive her first encounter and was extremely ill due to the treatments.

Medical Cannabis is a wonder drug basically. The fact of the matter is that too many people shriek about how EVVVVVIIIILLLL it is, or how those that smoke pot are wastrels and no good people that are not worthy of relief from pain or other symptoms that Medical Cannabis can treat. I don't smoke pot, but by god, if I had severe pain issues I'd rather smoke pot than take any of the myriad of opiate derivative drugs out on the market for pain management.

These people are the same damn breed of Prohibitionists that we had running around the US in the 1920s and 30s. They should be treated with the same mockery and scorn.

There are no, repeat zero reasons for banning this for medical use as proscribed by a physician.
(Personally I think there are no reasons to to ban it period, but hey, I'm just a crazy liberty nut, what do I know?)

I remember back when this guy was running his campaign. The fervor he inspired was down right scary. The blind fanaticism for reasons that no one seem to explain to beyond the idea of "It's historic" and "He's younger, and understands 'our' generation better." The simple fact of the matter is that "He's not Bush" is probably the correct answer. And while I hated Bush with a passion, the Bamster has managed to kindle a fire of Dantean proportions. The rage is still there but has been slowly subverted by disgust and depression.

Yes the song is supposed to refer to GW Bush. but I find it strangely fitting.

So Dr. Chris Coyne is teaching at GMU this semester and was kind enough to post up his syllabus at Coordination Problem.

There has been a lot of hubub over the so-called "Gender Gap" between the payscales of women and men in the workplace in both the US and in some countries in Western Europe. In a culture where it is anything but PC to assume that there are differences between the sexes, there are some interesting notations to be made. Ironically one of which is a rather insightful comment from someone that I completely disagree with on many issues: Peter Singer. Yeah, the guy that basically jump-started the animal liberation movement. But in writing about the differences in pay scale between men and women. He makes a very interesting observation:

While Darwinian thought has no impact on the priority we give to equality as a moral or political ideal, it gives us grounds for believing that since men and women play different roles in reproduction, they may also differ in their inclinations or temperaments, in ways that best promote the reproductive prospects of each sex. Since women are limited in the number of children they can have, they are likely to be selective in their choice of mate. Men, on the other hand, are limited in the number of children they can have only by the number of women they can have sex with. If achieving high status increases access to women, then we can expect men to have a stronger drive for status than women. This means that we cannot use the fact that there is a disproportionately large number of men in high status positions in business and politics as a reason for concluding that there has been discrimination against women. For example, the fact that there are fewer women chief executives of major corporations than men may be due to men being more willing to subordinate their personal lives and other interests to their career goals, and biological differences between men and women may be a factor in that greater readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of getting to the top.1

It would seem that Singer makes an interesting evolutionary argument for the difference between men and women. I'm not saying here's right, but it did get the wheels turning a bit. I do respect him for not falling into the typical feminist argument of "THERE ARE NO DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEXES!" line that I have heard from people and has actually been espoused by feminist philosophers. To throw a bit of libertarian economics into Singer's argument (which I'm sure would give him a stroke as the guy is a raging socialist and "social justice" advocate): It would seem that, if we accept Singer's argument that males face an evolutionary incentive given our background and genetic programming, we should expect them to have a higher drive to succeed as it increases their potential mate pool. And this isn't that far-fetched given that we know that women in general highly value the stability and ability to provide in a mate.

There is also another reason that I've seen advanced by several Economists with some interesting data to back up their statement that: Women make less during their child-bearing years because companies are discounting the value of their labor inputs because the chances are very good that these women are going to want to have children. As a result they are basically lost to the company for at least 12 months. There's not exactly a temp service for a VP of Plant Operations. I can't seem to find the study right off the top of the net, so if someone has a link to the actual paper I'd appreciate you sharing it. What they noted was that this so-called "gender gap" seems to disappear in post-menopausal women ... I found that, extremely interesting. Yes yes, Correlation is not Causation. That doesn't mean it doens't bear more investigation.

1 Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 17-18.

"When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."?

VH over at Vulcan's Hammer said something that made me wonder about the psychological nature of the legislative beast.

Shall we take a moment to look at the composition of our houses of Congress?

• 214 members (182 Representatives and 33 Senators) list their occupation as public service/politics
• 225 (168 Representatives and 57 Senators) list law [www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40086.pdf]
• 201 (175 Representatives and 27 Senators) list business
• 94 (78 Representatives and 16 Senators) list education

[via Wiki]
Now there is obviously overlap in this because we know that there are not 133 Senators. We can however conjecture that of the upper house there are at least 60-70% that are in the "politics/law" area.

I'd like to find a more in depth study of this, but this is good enough for a rough estimate.

If I may modify the famous saying at the top of the post:
"When all you've got is experience in law/politics every problem looks like it can be solved with a law."

We are all prone to do this: I tend to see economics as a primary driving force behind actions and think that markets can solve 99-100% of the worlds problems. We are all looking at things through some sort of colored tint based on what we study, learn, appreciate, and understand. Psychologists see personality types, sociologists see group dynamics and traits, economists see cost/benefit and incentives, etc. and so on; we're all guilty of it to a certain degree.

Perhaps that's the problem with Congress and politicians in general. Their view of things is that problems are to be solved with laws, coercion, and force. That is simply how they see things. Not that such a state excuses their actions, but it makes sense and would seem to fulfill Occam's Razor nicely.

I wonder who in Congress has a Masters or PhD in Economics. I know that as far as I can tell, the most economically astute person in Congress is actually an MD (Thanks Dr. Paul!).

Yes economists disagree about many things. the fight between the Neo-Classicists, Austrians, Monetarists, and Keynesians has been going on for a long long time but at least they hold some sort of understanding of the underlying principles.

These people are making policy without any understanding of the basic and underlying principles. That would be like putting me in charge of a five star restaurant's menu. I like food. I even like to dabble in the kitchen a bit, but I sure as hell don't know enough to construct the menu for a high class establishment.

Congress is meddling in things they don't understand. They are sticking wrenches in a moving engine in an unlit room. If you keep monkeying with the engine, you're gonna break it.

Do you really wanna be sticking a wrench in something like this? I don't.

For those of you that are not aware of the existence of what some people call the "Three Percent" movement. They are, for lack of a better description, quasi-revolutionary. I wouldn't say fully, because while they may preach "keep your rifle ready and your powder dry", they aren't out looking to start assassinating public officials or waging open war against the government. Yet.

And I think that they serve a very good purpose. They are a fountain of information regarding gun laws, the abuse of police powers, and trying to gauge where politicians lie on certain issues. And , God forbid, a shooting war did start in this country between government agents and armed citizens, I'd probably be supporting them however I could. Politically speaking, they are either libertarians or "conservative republicans" (I still don't really understand what this means).

But there is another side to the 3% guys and gals that ... concerns me. In fact it is a concern that largely mirrors my concern with "libertarian" groups in general. While most of the "Threepers" I've come into contact with have been passionate, intelligent people. There are a few ... "moonbats" that exist.

Now those of you that are reading this that consider yourselves part of the 3% crowd, please hear me out.

I very much enjoy some of the financial and economic discussions. The work on gun rights and political activism for the Second Amendment is priceless. But get the raving loons out of your group! I don't mind people talking about how much the government sucks, I don't mind the discussion about rights. What I mind is people who:

• Go flying off the hilt about the New World Order and all this other random conspiracy crap, that is a COMPLETE violation of Occam's Razor.

• While I don't object to people holding their religious values. I'm frankly sick and tired hearing that "The END TIMES are nigh!" No one cares, people have been screaming that for ... millennia. I do mean millennia, since the early 100s AD certain Christian groups have been calling for the end times, you haven't gotten it right yet. Please stop treating the most confusing book in the Bible like you understand prophecy, no one's gotten it right yet.
  

I have seen several examples of BOTH of these points of view on blogs that are backing or sympathetic to the movement. (Hell, I'M sympathetic to the movement).

But this presents us with a problem. It's a problem that libertarians have struggled with: how do you get these people out of the party when one of your founding tenants is "free association"? The libertarians have their share of UFO chasing, NWO fighting, tinfoil hat wearing, conspiracy nut cases. And frankly it hurts the movement. It hurts the movement a lot because morons like that end up on TV and the American people go "What the hell? I don't want to be part of this group!"

So I pose the question to the Three Percenters: What are you all going to do? Please keep in mind that I'll back most of you. In fact, I do my best to try and provide a bit more economic education to some of the other blogs that support the 3% movement. But you all still have some kinks to work out. Please consider this constructive criticism.

So I've finally decided to blog about this because the Rampant ignorance is simply overpowering. Discussions I've had regarding this topic have sprung up on several forums and message boards over the net and as a result I will be using some of this snippets to make my case why not only is the AZ bill a bad idea, the entire Federal Immigration system needs to be trashed and overhauled.

So let's start The_Chef's Talley of the ways that Illegal Immigration doesn't matter.

1.) America was founded upon an idea of free choice. Tragically we've become a society of command and control. This country was built by people from every background. Nearly every group of immigrants that first came to these shores worked in jobs that were demeaning or generally undesirable to the current residents of American soil. I cite as examples the influx of Asians that were instrumental in the development of West Coast Railways, Blacks forcibly brought to America as Slaves, Latinos who helped to build the Southwest and actually helped Texas win her independence from Mexico and Santa Ana.

The majority of immigrants after the 1840s did not hop over a border or an ocean and suddenly smash their way into the upper crust of society. It took generations of work, sacrifice, and effort for all sorts of certain racial and national groups to work together. As a result our policy should be "Come, come build yourself and your family a better life." Right now we have a policy of "Get The Fuck Out! (Unless you're related to a citizen or have a PhD in a useful field)"

So what does it take to become a Legal US Citizen? Funny you should ask:
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/918/immigration764383.jpg
Yep a huge freaking flowchart about the Immigration process. Courtesy of Reason Magazine.

2.) I've heard the argument from some people that these "illegals" are putting our social programs under additional strain and are hurting the "American Taxpayer". Well congratulations, you have just made an excellent argument against re-distributive public policy. Ya see, when you promise to give free shit to people, more people will want to take advantage of such a system.

Welfare, Social-Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. are nothing more than incentive programs. We may not want to call them that, but let's quickly review:
Welfare: Provides a subsidy to be poor/below X wage bracket. When you subsidize or incentivize a certain behavior you are bound to get more of it. If you deny this premise, you clearly need to pick up Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson before trying to digest anything else I have to say.
Social-Security: Creates an incentive to spend rather than save. If the Government is going to pay you $X upon retirement, then to maintain a similar standard of living you would not save $X during your labor years. This lack of saving is actually incentivized as well by a Federal Monetary Policy of massive inflation of currency that destroys Savings and harms both the poor and the old people because the prices of goods goes up, while the limited amount of income stays either stagnant or "sticky".
Medicare/Medicaid: Oh these two fraud and promissory programs are really a debacle. With the rising costs of health care which have largely been due to the actions of the Federal Government, the AMA, and the heavy restriction of medical care and the bureaucracy surrounding it, we are literally just going to hand out cash to people for being ill.

Now I'm not saying that we should let people die, but the simple fact of the matter is that there has never to my knowledge been a federal government program that comes in under budget, shrinks with time, or creates less red tape. We have helped to incentivize the over-use of medical facilities and procedures, being poor, and not saving. People over-consume a good when the costs are defrayed and it doesn't come out of their pocket.

These programs are quite literally going to bankrupt this nation. And I do mean that literally. Our sainted Government has promised tens of trillions of dollars to fund these programs.

So if the "illegals" take advantage of our political leader's decision to put a gun in the face of the American people and take their money to hand out to others, then the problem is the collectivized redistribution of resources, NOT the illegals who are hopping the border to work and maybe get a handout. It's not their fault we've created incentives to take advantage of us. IT'S US! WE ARE AT FAULT!

3.) Many of the arguments I hear from Right Wingers amount to two things:

I.) "They took our jerb.... they teeekk errrr jerrrrrrbbb.. teeeyy tttteeekkkkk errrrrrr jerrbbbbbbbb." This assumes that the jobs "belong" to someone other than the company. They own the job, they can fill it as they please. If they want to put a goddamn giant squid in charge of their Marketing Department that is their business to do so. I don't care if they hire some Mexican to cut lawns, or someone from Nicaragua to pick lettuce, it is THE COMPANY'S job slot to fill.

II.) "But ... But ... But they are breaking a LAW!" Well in many states so are you if you're getting a blowjob, having anal sex, modifying your car illegally, not declaring your online purchases on your taxes so that you have to pay sales tax (This can be a felony by the way), if you own "prohibited" firearms in states like Illinois, Cali, or if you ever carry a firearm in a state where it is not legal to do so. LAWS do not decide whether something is morally right or wrong. They determine what politicians have determined to punish. It is "illegal" to do all sorts of things that the government has no business in. So FUCK OFF! The legality of an issue is completely irrelevant to the issue.

4.) Markets want to clear. This is very simple Micro/Intro to economics and I find that this argument goes completely over the heads of most people because the majority of people are economic morons. I'm not saying this to demean them per se, I'm saying this because the VAST majority of Americans don't get it, and they don't want to.

We know that labor markets are constantly shifting. There are not a static number of jobs. Jobs are constantly created and destroyed. A great example is the shift in labor from NE steel mills to the Dakotas for jobs in rare metal and mineral mining/processing.

5.) As part of this discussion one of the guys I was intellectually fencing with hit me with this:

So it's OK for a company to reap the rewards of existing in an economy such as the one in the US, where there is need for it's services and people can afford to pay it for it's service, all the while paying wages that would be expected in a much poorer nation? This is unethical to me, and if you can explain why it's not, I'm all ears.

Wages are a function of supply and demand. The idea of working for X wage is/should be the determination of the worker and the market for labor.

In other words:

If person X is willing to work for Y wage, and voluntarily contracts to trade labor for wage at that
rate I don't care. If person X is told "You're working for Y wage and you can't say no and you can't leave the company" by his employer then I have a problem with it. Contracting at the point of a gun is not a contract, it's coercion.

Normally when it comes to wage, you get what you pay for, the better the wage/benefits, the better the workers you can attract. (No this is not a universal, I'm making a generalization, but one that I feel can be backed up by piles of both anecdotal examples, economic principles, and mountains of data).

Even if he's right, and it IS unethical ... how do you plan on fixing the problem? Minimum wage laws? Those create unemployment in the poorest segments of society and price workers out of the market.

The way I see it is that by instituting market reforms across the board and allowing the chips to fall where they may you get better outcomes. Take the medical industry, yes it's expensive, but he majority of groundbreaking research is done in the US, as a result, in order to recoup those losses, the price has to go up a marginal amount.

6.) The biggest kicker of all:
The US has over 70 TRILLION dollars($70,000,000,000,000) in unfunded liabilities and Government Debt/Debt Interest and you are worried about some poor Latinos jumping the border?! Good GOD! You should be more worried about the US currency/economy collapsing and hyperinflation!

If you understood the implications of those debts and liabilities you should be out there calling for the lynchings of 99% of both the Executive and Legislative branches of Gov't!

But no, you're complaining about roughly 10 million people who want to stop eating dirt and give their kids a better life. Yeah you're a real American Hero...
-------------------------------------------------
Keep in mind that I'm talking about very broad and very radical reforms to the status quo. But this country was founded as a series of colonies where people could basically do what they wanted. I don't see why people have to be controlled. Come to the border, bring some sort of ID, we make sure you don't walk in with a nuke or a vial of small pox, and BAM in a month or so, you're a US citizen. That's what the reform needs to be like.

So in a discussion on an automotive forum about the AZ bill that's gotten so much brouhaha someone pulled out a link to these guys: http://www.aim.org/

The article was lambasting the birth of children of "illegals" in this country.

Their "data", which is more of just rough estimates and napkin math (Not that there is anything WRONG with napkin math), suggest that the "cost to America" of all the babies born to "illegal" mothers is $6 Billion USD.

So I ran some rough napkin math of my own:
US GDP = $14,600,000,000,000 (14.6 trillion)
Illegal Babies = $6,000,000,000 (Allegedly! there are no data sets included in the article as to the actual cost. So in reality they are simply making assumptions that may or may not be supported by any sort of actual economic data. The numbers are all vague and variable.)

So aside form the fact that the data set is nonexistent, and the "cost of this is so fucking high ZOMG!" hmmmmm.
6/14,600 = 0.0004% of GDP...

Cry me a river. And THAT number assumes that their claim of data is actually RIGHT!

And while I know this is an ad hominem attack I can't help but point this out: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/hedge-...ld-revolution/

Their moron Editor Cliff Kincaid clearly has NO CLUE how Hedge Funds work. And essentially claims that they are profiting off of misery and encouraging economic collapse in Europe and America. Yeah this guy on the right. He clearly doesn't understand the signaling mechanism that Short Selling provides in the market, nor does he support a truly free market if he wants to get rid of Shorting. I bet he is willing to scream over the housing price/derivative/whatever debacle but does he know that the people that saw it coming first were the short sellers that signaled the market that prices were severely inflated? Bubbles pop and often the short sellers are the ones who see it coming.

Personally, I find this aim.org site about as intellectually relevant as Sean Hannity. That is to say: It's not. I don't know who these people are and how they got here ... but ... crawl back to your Republican supporters and leave the actual policy analysis to people that 1.) actually care about the concept of Liberty and 2.) have a clue what economics is.

These are the enemies on the Right. We have plenty of enemies on both sides of the party line. These people are just indicative of the typical chest thumping, wrap themselves in the flag, bullshit shoveling, fear mongering Right Wing stereotype.

Okay so I know that a small sample is unscientific but just bear with me okay? I think that this article kind of explains why I find the Tea Party people rather irrelevant.

Washington Post article. Now lets look at a few things here:

Although united in their hostility to big government, the protesters were ideologically varied. At one end of the spectrum, a purist libertarian wanted to abolish public schools. At the other, a 24-year-old Internet marketing company owner with a spiked mohawk hairstyle strongly opposed the health-care bill but noted, "I love Medicare. That takes care of my grandparents."

Ah ... okay. So the medicare industry (for that's now truly what it is inside the government) is okay because it "takes care of old people". Listen i am not some coldhearted evil genius who is trying to exterminate old people from the face of the earth. BUT THIS IS PART OF THE PROBLEM! Especially given this statement from the article:

I found that I agreed heartily with the tea partiers on what is perhaps their single biggest concern: that America's swelling government debt seriously threatens our long-term prosperity.

So wait ... the Tea Party people are all up in arms about government debt. Which contrary to Joe Biden is a bigger "fucking deal" than any sort of Healthcare reform is. We're in the tunnel and the light at the end of it is probably a bullet train. But no matter, we have to make sure everyone keeps getting their handouts because it makes so-and-so feel good.

Another perhaps?

"We are going toward bankruptcy," Cressy said. "We are on the road to be Greece and California."

Nevertheless, he said he supported the initial bank bailouts, despite their high cost, because they were necessary to stabilize the financial system.

The only conceivable response is this:


























Or this wonderful gem trying to sideline those of us that actually support massive government cuts to FIX THE PROBLEM:

Some participants had far-out views. I heard proposals to repeal the progressive income tax, abolish the Federal Reserve Board and privatize the U.S. Postal Service.

Oh right ... because those ideas are SO FAR OUT THERE! Maybe for a small minded non-economically educated person! The only solution is to shrink entitlement programs and military spending. The only way to do those things is to make people unhappy.

We ... are in deep trouble and the Tea Partiers, while I share their frustration, are not the saviors of America. They more resemble one of those angry mobs from South Park going "RabbleRabbleRabbleRabbleRabbleRabbleRabble!"

What can it do? What is its purpose?

This post by Dr. Pete Boettke over at The Austrian Economists. I will quote some passages for you all.

Hayek argued in the early 1930s that the fate of the economist was to be called upon to address questions of pressing political concern only to have his advice discounted as soon as it was uttered. Why? Because economics as a discipline puts parameters on people's utopias. It gives us primarily "negative" knowledge --- we live in a scarce world, there is no such thing as a free lunch, we cannot assume what it is we hope to prove, ought cannot presuppose can, and can doesn't mean we ought, etc. In the 1980s, Hayek wrote that: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design."

But ... the politicians do not want to be told what they can and cannot design society to be. They have their views of the perfect state, their utopias. These people will cajole, wheedle, coerce, and kill those that oppose their idealized society. More Boettke:

No answer has yet been given as to why President Bush's bailout package didn't work while his stimulus package will. In fact, when pushed on that question President Obama really just said, we might even need to spend more down the road when this doesn't give us the result we want. And the claim is just that confidence has to be restored to the market and only government can do that.

Ah to steal a term from David Codrea over at War on Guns. The government are the "ONLY ONES" who can save us from this quagmire of capitalism. This is ... for lack of a better term ... bullshit. The government couldn't find its collective (and collectivist) ass with both hands and a map.

I'll summarize what Dr. Boettke thinks are the current problems and why the market is showing that investors are EXTREMELY skittish right now:

1. "[G]overnment action has produced an uncertain investment environment."
2. "The rules of ownership and control are unclear, or clear but counter-productive for individual initiative"
3. "[M]onetary policy guided by the rhetoric of fighting inflation, but fearing deflation has been so loose that long term inflation that threatens the viability of the dollar should be a real concern to investors."
4. "[F]iscal policy which is so out of control that US public debt will bankrupt the future generations with an astronomical tax burden and/or a monetization that will destroy the currency through hyper-inflation."

Boettke:

...you fail to consider the fiscal arguments of a James Buchanan, the monetary and capital theories of F. A. Hayek, the comparative institutional analysis of law and politics in Ronald Coase, and the monetary and fiscal policy arguments of Milton Friedman. Each of these gentlemen, President Obama, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.

But it doesn't stop with just failing to understand or to read the arguments of these intellectual titans. Oh no, you've used your political views of equality and pseudo-Marxist view of ethics and morals to completely discount the very men that have given you a path to SOLVING THE DAMN PROBLEM!
Boettke:

A really radical notion of hope and change might be to get government out of the business of attempting to manage the economy, stop demanding of economics results that it as a discipline cannot produce, and lets depoliticize political economy.

Bravo Dr. Boettke! Ask the politcal class if they'd like a side salad with their entree of Whup-Ass.

So it funny to watch all of the squabbling and hand wringing about how awful free markets are in the wake of this global financial swamp we've dropped ourselves in. Here is an op-ed from the New York Times (Yes yes, I know always a bastion of free market and libertarian thought) which is trying to use this crisis to suggest that isolationism is a way to protect against the global market place tanking your local marketplace.

Hmmm well technically this guy is right. If a country doesn't globalize or throws up large barriers to foreign investment, then there is a buffer to protect a state from fluctuations in the global economy. But is this a beneficial thing? Protectionist countries usually have a much lower growth rate for small businesses because they will limit the amount of foreign investment, which shrinks up the market for loanable funds or it directly shrinks the possibility for Foreign Direct Investment. Closing down those cash flows harms businesses and entrepreneurs.

The other problem with this loon's article is statements like this:

In contrast, the countries that opened the most to the international capital markets, and that sought to bring in business with relatively lax regulations, now are suffering the most. Iceland was the wonder economy of the world; now it is broke.

Iceland is broke because the banks SERIOUSLY over-leveraged themselves and lets face it, lots of banks got into investments that they have NO business being involved in. When an institution piles itself in risk and then fails, why is anyone surprised? So the Globalization is not the problem, the malinvestment by banks is the problem not the lack of "regulatory framework".

But the world might be in better shape now if more countries had chosen that route[financial autarchy], and thus been more insulated from the credit storm that has left companies and countries around the world fearful that they will be unable to obtain needed financing.

Right, If countries had chosen autarchy, then companies would sure as hell be fearful that they would be unable to attain the needed financing. If you shrink up a market, goods become more scarce. This goes for a market for investment just like it does a market for apples. This is not ROCKET SCIENCE PEOPLE!

Oh a chart, I like charts. Pictures tell cool stories.

This kind of idiocy will bury this country and it's views like Floyd Norris' (yeah the guy who wrote the article) that will drive this economy into the ground and begin to dig. Closing our borders to capital is NOT how you prevent or even mitigate a financial mess like we have on our hands.

Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek put it this way:

But the Times should be consistent and have, say, one of its medical reporters write about the upside to suicide. Suicide's practitioners, after all, inoculate themselves against all future illnesses.

Bingo!
[Hat Tip to Cafe Hayek]

Yes yes, I'm sure everyone is tired of hearing about it, but it needs to be clearly stated. This bill passed by the circus that is the US House of Rep. is nothing more than a spending spree for political contributors, special interest groups, etc. etc.

According the Congressional Budget Office (forgive me I can't find the actual CBO link), the interest accrued for the stimulus bill will be 347 billion over the next 10 years.

So let me get this straight.

The bill is ~800 Billion USD.

The interest is 347 Billion USD over 10 years.

Who thought this was a good investment? Keynesian theory is junk to begin with and suddenly we want to give this another go? This isn't even good Keynesian theory because none of the jobs "created" are sustainable. So Pelosi, and all of congress, take note: STOP RAPING THE AMERICAN PUBLIC!

How about you assholes in congress stop borrowing money you don't have, Cut all taxes AND spending by 60%, stop destroying the money supply by printing cash willy nilly, and LEAVE US THE HELL ALONE.

I found this on youtube. Though I'm not sure that the Game Theorists are "right wing" I would suggest that they were rather Libertarian, especially the likes of James Buchanan, arguably the king of public choice theory.

Watch from about 0:22 - 7:14 for bits on the influence of Public Choice Economics