Thoughts on the Republican Debates for ’12
Santorum doesn’t get air time because he’s bad for ratings.
They mostly argue with each other about who is the most Republican.
Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan is a marketer’s idea, not a policy-maker’s idea.
Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman are outsiders.
Gingrich tries to present an air of superiority, but doesn’t have enough substance to back it up.
Bachmann is a cheerleader for herself.
Debt Ceiling Effect on Discretionary Spending (and other numbers)
1% 2% 3% 4
Joseph Stiglitz has a piece in Vanity Fair that’s interesting:
In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
My impression of this claim may be wrong, but when I hear things like this I usually understand it to mean that taxes on the upper income/wealth groups are too low, and on the lower income groups too high, and that when the government fixes that America will have stopped or reversed inequality. The problem with that is that wages and compensation are still largely determined by the interaction between employers and job-seekers. I’m pretty sure Stiglitz and other inequality wolf-criers still believe that wages should be determined by that market (perhaps with a union-shaped asterisk), and not some other allocation method.
The Limits of Knowledge and Obama Campaign vs Administration
There have been two really good posts about the Bradley Manning affair. One from Megan McArdle, the other from Ezra Klein.
McArdle puts a great quote of Daniel Ellsberg, an advisor to Defense secretary McNamara, admonishing Kissinger just before Kissinger became National Security advisor. Then she says,
Not only does the president hear about threats we don’t, but he’s the guy who gets in trouble if any of these threats come off. The combination of heightened threat-alertness, and personal risk aversion, makes him willing to do bad things to avert the potential threat. And since the president knows that he’s a good person, and the people around him are basically good people, he’s willing to trust them with power that no institution should have.
Klein asks the question, What would the Obama campaign think of the administration, and he points out a couple of things the campaign said with respect to the resignation of PJ Crowley,
The Obama campaign was only three years ago, but it had strong opinions on this sort of thing. “To lead the world, we must lead by example,” Candidate Obama said in October of 2007. “We must be willing to acknowledge our failings, not just trumpet our victories. And when I’m President, we’ll reject torture – without exception or equivocation.” But now we find there is both exception and equivocation — and the administration is purging those within its ranks who publicly say it should be otherwise. This is a moment in which both those who serve in the administration and those who support it need to ask whether the Obama administration is keeping sight of its values now that it holds power. The tradeoff between security and moral purity is always more difficult for a president than a candidate, but as we saw in the Bush administration, the pendulum can swing too far towards security, in a way that does little to make us safer and erodes who we are. Crowley’s firing is a sign that that may be happening to the Obama administration.
I think this is similar to the bank bailouts in a lot of ways -
In an ideal world the banks should pay for the mistakes they made, and should not get any special treatment from the government. But the people on the inside back in the fall of 2008 say that things were on the verge of collapse without the bailouts, and that a lot of innocent people would suffer the consequences of the mistakes of just a few people.
In the case of security the people on the inside have a lot more information, and I’m sure they would say that without this or that extreme measure there would be a disaster. I’ve read just that from a few ex Bush 2 administration officials, a number of disastrous situations were averted. The information is not available to us regular folks. In an ideal world there would be no torture, but the insiders can and have made the same case – “Well if you knew what I know” and the related, “It affects so many other innocent people that extreme measures are called for”.
In each case both political parties are guilty once they’re in power. I think the major lesson is that the insiders will on net draw more power and control to themselves, and the real divide in this (and every) country is not left/right, but rather insider/outsider.
US Competitive Advantage
Because labor costs more in the US relative to most other countries, our competitive advantage is in innovation, entrepreneurship; established sectors, jobs, have lower value because they can be systemized, detailed and described to death so that they can be fulfilled by unskilled labor trained after hiring for that specific task; new jobs that are still developing and filling out require skilled, perhaps intelligent, labor, and these have higher value. New technologies are more highly valued. The US can send established jobs elsewhere, and the resulting surplus labor, high value, skilled labor, inherently pushes for innovation in the same way that the US pulls in immigrants to perform basic services that aren’t worth the time of even moderate income Americans.
Information, Knowledge, Power
Information is any idea or data, known or unknown, that exists. Information is in books, in physical properties, anywhere.
Knowledge is information that is known by people. They read the book, see the physical properties, theorize.
Power is information known by somebody and used for effect in the world. Information known by someone and not used is powerless and does no good or ill.
For maximum effectiveness, find out where the information is, how to get the largest amount into people’s minds, to become knowledge, so that as much information as possible can be acted on. This brings about the most change in the world. If information is used by a single person, that person will bring their own interests to fruition. If it’s used by the everyone then the benefits will go to the everyone.
Capital
Capital Builds On Itself:
- Improving education produces citizens who are better able to further improve education.
- A factory can build machines and vehicles to build more factories, more quickly.
How to let capital do it’s job:
1. Don’t impede investment (all private, foreign and domestic)
2. Don’t impede capital formation, by private groups/firms
– Open economy to any group formation
3. Don’t impede human capital growth
– Allow school choice
– Allow different types of post primary(secondary?) education
